I think they improved Dreadnoughts since beta. They can hit Apoc tanks with great accuracy without having to compensate for movement. Maybe the rockets have a SLIIIGHT curve towards the target. Tracking. I dunno. Whatever it is, I like it. I always win games by sneaking 2 or 3 Dreads behind their base. GG. Nobody I've faced went sea yet.
Westwood/EALA/Whoever if they have a weakness in their games its that:
#1 There always seems to be a critical flaw in the balance.
#2 Online multiplayer system is balls.
I loved RA2, but Allies dominated the sea because of dolphins and carriers. And you would wait 5mins for a 2v2 to load only to have a person get dropped while loading 75% of the time. (And Yuri's Revenge was an abortion)
CNC1 had the recon bike spam dominating GDI easily. Tiberian Sun the GDI Titans roflstomped Nod bad, etc.
So I really hope Japan isn't the "Yuri side" (oh the sweet pun) as far as balance is concerned.
Westwood/EALA/Whoever if they have a weakness in their games its that:
#1 There always seems to be a critical flaw in the balance.
#2 Online multiplayer system is balls.
I loved RA2, but Allies dominated the sea because of dolphins and carriers. And you would wait 5mins for a 2v2 to load only to have a person get dropped while loading 75% of the time. (And Yuri's Revenge was an abortion)
CNC1 had the recon bike spam dominating GDI easily. Tiberian Sun the GDI Titans roflstomped Nod bad, etc.
So I really hope Japan isn't the "Yuri side" (oh the sweet pun) as far as balance is concerned.
It's years on, though. All RTS games have balance issues; even Total War had some massively flawed units at launch, that's what patching is for. C&C3 had major problems with Mammoth Tank spamming; then Kane's Wrath had Mechapede spamming - both were patched out, so I don't see the issue. As for balance, really, there's no Yuri Faction. Each has particular strengths and weaknesses in battle.
The Soviets have the best brute force land units. Massive tanks, good tier 1 and tier 2 tanks, and generally by far the best land units in the game. They're second best in the sea. Airforce is seriously lacking, though. The kirov can do serious damage but is often too slow and expensive to be an option. The Soviet build method matches their "get up and running quickly and steamroll 'em" attitude - you pick a building, place it instantly, and then it 'builds up' quickly, but is vunerable while it's building.
Allies have the best airforce. Boy, their airforce is something to be reckoned with for sure. It will rape you up the ass. Their land forces are a bit lacking, but the second best aspect of them. The problem the Allies have on land is that all their units do quite a bit of damage but have low health and often require heavy air support to keep them alive. It's all well and good having units that can zap huge tanks dead in one or two shots from miles away, but they're incredibly vunerable from the air and if those tanks get close it's game over.
The allies sea is kind of similar to the Soviet air - the early units really aren't that much worth bothering with (might as well use the early amphibious units from a land-based war factory) but they do have some high tier late game sea units that are powerful. Unfortunately the best one is the aircraft carrier... which is useless on its own, but sends out planes to attack. So again, that's kind of an air unit. Allied build method is the same as old C&C games - timer ticks down, then when it's ready you place and can instantly use.
The Japanese are the most interesting to explain. Most powerful is Sea - after all, to control the pacific, they needed an immense navy. Japanese sea is something to be reckoned with, and many empire players tend to move their MCV to sea early in the game as it's easier to defend. Their second most powerful? It's complicated. The Japanese have no airfield - they build ground units and some of them can 'transform' - for example, the Mecha Tengu on the ground is an anti-infantry mech with a gattling gun. It's tier 1, and it's great from protecting yourself from infantry rush.
The secondary function turns it into the Jet Tengu - an air superiority fighter - your only one - which is great at taking down any air coming at you, but being tier 1 is weak against the allied fighters. The key problem is you can't afford to build enough to designate jobs, and so you're constantly using micro to switch jobs with it, trying to cover all angles with a few units. The Japanese only have three air units - two armour, one infantry (the infantry is like a gundam) - but they're extremely effective when managed well.
Even their base turrets are like this. There's a single type of gattling gun turret. For anti air, it's secondary function transforms it into an AA gun. Your choice if you build enough to cover both options or scout better so you can get early warning of that airstrike and transform your turrets in time. Build method is interesting - Japanese send out pods. They can build anywhere on the map, but the pod is weak and expensive. Once the pod deploys it takes time to build up to activation - so you can't just run a turret into the enemy base.
Even if you know all this, it should demonstrate a very clever design strategy in RA3 that is a bit like Halo's 'golden triangle' of Guns, Melee, Grenades in that it greats simple gameplay based on hard counters that can become very deep. There are one or two unit balance issues, I'd say, but nothing like what there was in C&C3 or RA2 because of this.
There's sometimes the illusion of it, I guess. You'll see allied players on the official boards complaining that Shogun battleships are overpowered often, to be honest - but the answer to those guys is simple - if you went toe to toe against a decent Japanese navy in a match with an allied navy, you're a bloody idiot. I as a Japanese player find myself either fleeing to the sea to regroup and attack from the air or deploying my air-to-ground units the second I see Soviet Apoc tanks riding over the hill. I don't stand and fight them, it'd be suicide. There are ground units that work against Apocs, but the soviets tech up quicker and when that first wave comes I often don't have them yet.
RA3 is just that kind of game. You have to choose the gameplay style you like - massive armies or distanced attacks until they're weak or parking on their shore and shelling them until you can send forces to mop up. You then have to really play that faction to it's strengths. In C&C3 the factions were all fairly good at everything. Not so here, and it works better.
I'm making the progress I set out to. It took me about 7 tries to beat the easy AI in a skirmish, by an infantry zerging. Today I beat the easy AI in a normal, zergless, build and attack match, took about 15 minutes or so.
Watching a replay of TheBog beat me down has been tremendously helpful.
Aaand, there's my Red Alert 3 download finished. It was fun to think about one thing for twenty consecutive minutes! I'm sure you can see yourselves out...?
:...:
It means his Red Alert 3 download is done so he's not gonna be able to work for the rest of the day.
Yeah... EA's DD sucks. People bitch about the DRM thing but for me their shitty DD setup is a bigger issue. I just went to Walmart and bought a physical disk.
I went to Wal Mart to do that this morning. They didn't have a pc game section :x
The Super Walmart I occasionally hit had moved theirs, and apparently the best place for a sequel to an acclaimed franchise is hidden on the bottom shelf, but mine did have it!
McAfee 8.5i was blocking irc communication. To allow it through,
Right Click Virus Scan > VirusScan Console > Right Click Access Protection > Properties > Prevent IRC Communication > Edit > Processes to Exclude > enter ra3_1.3.game > then OK out
McAfee 8.5i was blocking irc communication. To allow it through,
Right Click Virus Scan > VirusScan Console > Right Click Access Protection > Properties > Prevent IRC Communication > Edit > Processes to Exclude > enter ra3_1.3.game > then OK out
now weverything works great
IRC? That's super weird. How did you ever figure that out?
Regardless, congrats. See you on the front lines, comrade!
The online service is horrible. I prefer hamachi to if if you know who your playing with/setting up a game for your friends. Today I was disconnected from RE3 online 20+ times in a row before I got into a damn game (with Joolander).
It'll improve. I should imagine it's just struggling right now getting overloaded with people. All we do when we wanna play online is meet in an obscure lobby that's always empty..
It's a router thing. Router users are fucked, as far as I know. You have to open 10 ports, I believe. I don't remember which ones, or how to do it. I'm no tech guru.
My firewall is being a pain.. and i cant seem to patch right now. So im stuck on 1.00 for the time being
You don't have to use the autopatcher, you can download them from the Red Alert website. They're all really small files.
Also for those having connectivity issues, there's a post on the RA3 official forms telling you what ports to open. Here's a stickied post with patch download links and port forwarding information:
The Soviet "Magnet the fuck out of some tanks so they fly up into the sky" power can choke on a dick.
So I'm building up a stockpile of tanks while mocroing at the frontlines. 12 Hammers built and ready, sat in my base. No, wait, 2 tanks sat in my base. The rest are on their way to Mars or some shit. Fuck!
Man alive, I just went to Amazon to order this, the game has received an average user rating of 2/5. I checked the reviews and basically a ton of people are refusing to buy it because of the DRM.
Not that it's going to stop me, but I do hope they forget this securom nonsense soon.
Rami on
Steam / Xbox Live: WSDX NNID: W-S-D-X 3DS FC: 2637-9461-8549
Man alive, I just went to Amazon to order this, the game has received an average user rating of 2/5. I checked the reviews and basically a ton of people are refusing to buy it because of the DRM.
Not that it's going to stop me, but I do hope they forget this securom nonsense soon.
Not likely I'm afraid, EA have pretty much made the install limits standard for all their releases now. I guess they figure it helps put a stop to the second-hand market. Goodness knows it sure ain't stopping piracy.
And unfortunately that adds me to the list of people not buying the game as a result. I can at least understand using DRM when it has an effect on piracy and perhaps if they offer some additional benefit to the paying consumer. This measure, by it's very design, doesn't have any additional effect on stopping piracy and yet places increased limits and restrictions on the people actually paying for the game. It's stupid and it's not a trend I'm really keen to support. The unfortunate problem is that my money doesn't mean much as long as the game sells a million anyway, so they're just going to keep on doing it.
I hate to think what they've got planned for the next round of DRM when they finally say that these restrictions haven't done anything for them.
Posts
#1 There always seems to be a critical flaw in the balance.
#2 Online multiplayer system is balls.
I loved RA2, but Allies dominated the sea because of dolphins and carriers. And you would wait 5mins for a 2v2 to load only to have a person get dropped while loading 75% of the time. (And Yuri's Revenge was an abortion)
CNC1 had the recon bike spam dominating GDI easily. Tiberian Sun the GDI Titans roflstomped Nod bad, etc.
So I really hope Japan isn't the "Yuri side" (oh the sweet pun) as far as balance is concerned.
It's years on, though. All RTS games have balance issues; even Total War had some massively flawed units at launch, that's what patching is for. C&C3 had major problems with Mammoth Tank spamming; then Kane's Wrath had Mechapede spamming - both were patched out, so I don't see the issue. As for balance, really, there's no Yuri Faction. Each has particular strengths and weaknesses in battle.
The Soviets have the best brute force land units. Massive tanks, good tier 1 and tier 2 tanks, and generally by far the best land units in the game. They're second best in the sea. Airforce is seriously lacking, though. The kirov can do serious damage but is often too slow and expensive to be an option. The Soviet build method matches their "get up and running quickly and steamroll 'em" attitude - you pick a building, place it instantly, and then it 'builds up' quickly, but is vunerable while it's building.
Allies have the best airforce. Boy, their airforce is something to be reckoned with for sure. It will rape you up the ass. Their land forces are a bit lacking, but the second best aspect of them. The problem the Allies have on land is that all their units do quite a bit of damage but have low health and often require heavy air support to keep them alive. It's all well and good having units that can zap huge tanks dead in one or two shots from miles away, but they're incredibly vunerable from the air and if those tanks get close it's game over.
The allies sea is kind of similar to the Soviet air - the early units really aren't that much worth bothering with (might as well use the early amphibious units from a land-based war factory) but they do have some high tier late game sea units that are powerful. Unfortunately the best one is the aircraft carrier... which is useless on its own, but sends out planes to attack. So again, that's kind of an air unit. Allied build method is the same as old C&C games - timer ticks down, then when it's ready you place and can instantly use.
The Japanese are the most interesting to explain. Most powerful is Sea - after all, to control the pacific, they needed an immense navy. Japanese sea is something to be reckoned with, and many empire players tend to move their MCV to sea early in the game as it's easier to defend. Their second most powerful? It's complicated. The Japanese have no airfield - they build ground units and some of them can 'transform' - for example, the Mecha Tengu on the ground is an anti-infantry mech with a gattling gun. It's tier 1, and it's great from protecting yourself from infantry rush.
The secondary function turns it into the Jet Tengu - an air superiority fighter - your only one - which is great at taking down any air coming at you, but being tier 1 is weak against the allied fighters. The key problem is you can't afford to build enough to designate jobs, and so you're constantly using micro to switch jobs with it, trying to cover all angles with a few units. The Japanese only have three air units - two armour, one infantry (the infantry is like a gundam) - but they're extremely effective when managed well.
Even their base turrets are like this. There's a single type of gattling gun turret. For anti air, it's secondary function transforms it into an AA gun. Your choice if you build enough to cover both options or scout better so you can get early warning of that airstrike and transform your turrets in time. Build method is interesting - Japanese send out pods. They can build anywhere on the map, but the pod is weak and expensive. Once the pod deploys it takes time to build up to activation - so you can't just run a turret into the enemy base.
Even if you know all this, it should demonstrate a very clever design strategy in RA3 that is a bit like Halo's 'golden triangle' of Guns, Melee, Grenades in that it greats simple gameplay based on hard counters that can become very deep. There are one or two unit balance issues, I'd say, but nothing like what there was in C&C3 or RA2 because of this.
There's sometimes the illusion of it, I guess. You'll see allied players on the official boards complaining that Shogun battleships are overpowered often, to be honest - but the answer to those guys is simple - if you went toe to toe against a decent Japanese navy in a match with an allied navy, you're a bloody idiot. I as a Japanese player find myself either fleeing to the sea to regroup and attack from the air or deploying my air-to-ground units the second I see Soviet Apoc tanks riding over the hill. I don't stand and fight them, it'd be suicide. There are ground units that work against Apocs, but the soviets tech up quicker and when that first wave comes I often don't have them yet.
RA3 is just that kind of game. You have to choose the gameplay style you like - massive armies or distanced attacks until they're weak or parking on their shore and shelling them until you can send forces to mop up. You then have to really play that faction to it's strengths. In C&C3 the factions were all fairly good at everything. Not so here, and it works better.
XBL/PSN/Steam: APZonerunner
grim and frostbitten kingdoms. goozex referral. steam.
Watching a replay of TheBog beat me down has been tremendously helpful.
grim and frostbitten kingdoms. goozex referral. steam.
It means his Red Alert 3 download is done so he's not gonna be able to work for the rest of the day.
Oh snap, quoted before you could edit it :P
Poor guy though, he got the DD.
The Super Walmart I occasionally hit had moved theirs, and apparently the best place for a sequel to an acclaimed franchise is hidden on the bottom shelf, but mine did have it!
heres how i did it
McAfee 8.5i was blocking irc communication. To allow it through,
Right Click Virus Scan > VirusScan Console > Right Click Access Protection > Properties > Prevent IRC Communication > Edit > Processes to Exclude > enter ra3_1.3.game > then OK out
now weverything works great
IRC? That's super weird. How did you ever figure that out?
Regardless, congrats. See you on the front lines, comrade!
looked it up with google and found the answer on the cnc forums
This is great - sounds just like one of my favorite RTSs of all time due to it's complex simplicity - Battle for Middle Earth.
Gamertag(SSF4/MW2)StokedAidzzzSC2 ID Stoked.655
Uploaded SC2 Replays
XBL/PSN/Steam: APZonerunner
Gamertag(SSF4/MW2)StokedAidzzzSC2 ID Stoked.655
Uploaded SC2 Replays
Gamertag(SSF4/MW2)StokedAidzzzSC2 ID Stoked.655
Uploaded SC2 Replays
XBL/PSN/Steam: APZonerunner
Tonight, I will play this ...after I get back from an Age of Empires II LAN. Sweet.
Oh. And another win for the mighty Dreadnought.
You don't have to use the autopatcher, you can download them from the Red Alert website. They're all really small files.
Also for those having connectivity issues, there's a post on the RA3 official forms telling you what ports to open. Here's a stickied post with patch download links and port forwarding information:
http://forums.commandandconquer.com/jforum/posts/list/190.page
I'm doomed.
So far I've counted one appearance during the Allied campaign (of all places).
She pretty much just stands there and looks menacing.
|Xbox Live Tag: Omeks
|PSN Tag: Omeks_R7
|Rock Band: Profile|DLC Collection
She'll punch you in the head.
So I'm building up a stockpile of tanks while mocroing at the frontlines. 12 Hammers built and ready, sat in my base. No, wait, 2 tanks sat in my base. The rest are on their way to Mars or some shit. Fuck!
Conversely I found the superpowers to be a bit weak looking, but I have my settings quite low.
Not that it's going to stop me, but I do hope they forget this securom nonsense soon.
Not likely I'm afraid, EA have pretty much made the install limits standard for all their releases now. I guess they figure it helps put a stop to the second-hand market. Goodness knows it sure ain't stopping piracy.
And unfortunately that adds me to the list of people not buying the game as a result. I can at least understand using DRM when it has an effect on piracy and perhaps if they offer some additional benefit to the paying consumer. This measure, by it's very design, doesn't have any additional effect on stopping piracy and yet places increased limits and restrictions on the people actually paying for the game. It's stupid and it's not a trend I'm really keen to support. The unfortunate problem is that my money doesn't mean much as long as the game sells a million anyway, so they're just going to keep on doing it.
I hate to think what they've got planned for the next round of DRM when they finally say that these restrictions haven't done anything for them.