Historical Crap

I personally have always liked modding, although as I've gotten older, I've become more realistic in my goals and what-have-you. Also more persistent. Originally, it was mostly mucking around with INI files for Red Alert and RA2, or liero (loads of fun), and then it was with tibed and generals (I use notepad for everything now).

This is the first mod where I've had a defined plan and everything written down. However, it has incorporated a decent amount of ideas from previous ideas I've had floating about my head.

Probably the most prevalent and recent is a Red Alert mod for C&C3, which I started thinking about after they released the mod SDK for C&C3. It was not going to be Red Alert, but in 3D, but more like Red Alert retold with a different playstyle and from a different perspective.

It would have told the story based on the Allied victory being inevitable, and have attempted to link Red Alert and Command and Conquer that way. Playing as the Soviets would have had you fighting a losing war, holding out in various scenarios etc. You'd find that Kane leaked plans for some sort of EMP weapon to Nicola Tesla, and you'd have to hold out etc. As the allies, you'd make various pushes into Soviet territory, and eventually do various peace-keeping operations after the war as Nod rises to power.

The gameplay would have substantially different from C&C3 or the original Red Alert. Both teams economies would have been derived from their control of civlian villages all over the place, rather much like the Rush resource mechanic currently in place.

Each team required power (facilitated by mobile generators) to run their turrets and RADAR.

All buildings for each team would be mobile, except for defence structures. The buildings would be dropped in via a cargo plane. This mechanic can currently be seen with the Stealth team. The Allies would be able to camouflage their buildings so that a soviet force may just ignore them. Alternately, the soviets could garrison one squad inside each of their structures, allowing them to be a little more defencive.

All defence structures would also be dropped in via cargo plane, tesla-coils rather violently so. The player would take their completed structure and order it in, with a rather similar interface to the standard C&C scheme.

Ordering in troops would be similarly facilitated. All of your production structures would have an exit waypoint, which could be deployed near any other production structure. A cargo plane would drop your troops off there. This was supposed to be a different take on the traditional Red Alert and C&C idea of "More production structures make production faster", as all your troops would end up at one place four times as fast if you have four times as many production structures, even if they're in different places.

Rather than the traditional idea of superweapons, the soviets would have mobile V2 rocket launchers and the allies would have howitzers. Both would be strategic level weapons that must be deployed before firing, and have a long reload time.

Something I did think about a lot, but eventually dropped, was the idea of logistics. Tanks would carry around 60 or so shells, V2s would carry one shot etc, and you've have to drive your stuff back to a supply depot, where little dudes would run out with ammunition and a wrench (for repairs, obviously).

Little dudes with wrenches notwithstanding, the aesthetic of the mod would have been a lot darker than Red Alert or any of its successors. Soviet tanks would be dark and belch smoke everywhere, Allied tanks would be cleaner, although similarly coloured, and the only bright things would be explosions and fires (from the inevitable firebombings).

The tech tree I thought about a bit. It could have gone two routes. One was via a global timer (set by the host of any game). After 15 minutes, you could get tech 2. After 30 minutes, tech 3 etc. This would mean that tech rushing would have no meaning, and really the only thing you could do was be more efficient with your early units so you'd have funds for later ones (or go for an all out rush).

The other tech would be a global kill amount, also set by the host. Say, after $15000 of units had been destroyed, the game would progress to the next tech level. This would also be good to more efficient players, and worse to less efficient ones. Obviously, in larger battles, the kill limit would increase.

Anyway, if you've read the rest of the blog, you can see where various things ended up from that mod.

In its infancy, when I first proposed the idea and talked to a couple of people about it, things were quite different from the way they currently are.

Stealth was originally going to use its basic anti-infantry infantry to deploy teleportation beacons anywhere on the map, which has sort of evolved into the Rush constructor mechanic, which enables what I like to call a cockroach strategy. The cockroach strategy is initiated when a player loses or is losing a base, so abandons the original base and quickly sets up another one elsewhere.

Rush was going to be able to construct weak sustainable economy structures which would each produce 1 power, and also be able to build a generic be-all-end-all turret (kinda like the gattling turret) that took up one power. Hence, one resource generator, one turret. This was replaced by the more different capture civilian buildings and get money, as well as being more conductive to rushing, and making them strategically seperate from turtle and stealth. Base defence is now afforded by units (as is stealth detection).

Anyway, that's all I can remember for now. There are obviously a lot more things, but currently they're not coming to me at the moment, and I'm out of time.

Next week: Hopefully some concept art and maybe even renders, as well as a status report.