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OpenRa is a bit different, from what I got told, some units have different stats or behaviours on the bullets which are not the same as in dune 2000. I am going to say, modding in dune 2000 is difficulty because if anything there is way too much stuff, it may takes time, efford and reading testing a lot, but on 2025, the amount of stuff that you can do on dune 2000 is insanelly big. To put you on perpsective. The original game (and the older editors by extent) had a total of 21 events. These events are your usuall "reinforcements" "mission win", "show message", "play music" and so on. AT the time at this writing, we are around 250 events. This new events can "make the player to swap control with a different side (so you are controlling the Atreides base and units, and 10 minutes later you control the Harkonnen base and units while the Atreides now use a generic AI to keep producing while you are not controlling it). You can spawn structures, so you can make a terrain that has no base, make the player moves away, and suddenly that base out of nowhere appears. You can make that every single unit produced is cloacked, so sthealed tanks or sthealed harversters (no mod required, you no need to mod the units themselves). You can make that the player cannot select an specific unit or structure, you can make that even if you click on the repair icon, the structure stop being repaired on his own. You can make that an unit is always selected and you cannot deselect. You can make the screen to focus on 1 specific area, blocking the player for moving the screen when the mouse is on the edges. <--- you can make a whole cutscene where the player has 1 unit that will move on their own (as you are not allowed to select it), while the camera won´t move away so you won´t miss the cutscene. You can alter the layout of the map midway! like, putting 5 cliffts on an area, telling the player to use a siege tank and shoot at them, and you may see explosions and those cliffs transforming into actually walkable terrain. You can trigger an "orbital attack" by making stuff to rain out of nowhere, you can make that the player, depending on which position on the map you click, you get the reinforcements on that specific coordinates (withouth moving or attacking anything prior to that, it is just based on where the mouse is on which part of the map and clicking into "nothing"). You can make events to trigger based on the difficulty played, so you can have a reinforcements for the player dropping 20 units on easy, 10 on normal, and not a single unit on hard, you can make that if you play on hard the cost and speed production for the player is the same as normal, so a combat tank may still cost 700 on easy, normal and hard. You can force the enemy AI to produce stuff with events not by their own chose, or even block an entire queue by making the player unable to produce a MCV even if you click. As soon as you click and queue bar starts, it will stop on their own. You can make messages to appears on the top, bottom, left, right... on the screen, you can make them to show different colors, not always red, or show like on the other C&C where letters appears one by one instead all at once... add your own custom voice lines withouth almost any limit... You can alter which units appears on the starport, and how fast or slow those stocks changes, or just being able to raise the stocks of the quad faster than anything there, or justr straigh swap every unit on the starport and put infantry, trooper, sardaukar, fremen... to order. (this also no mod is required, just events on the regular editor). Like this: (on this mission, every 5 minutes the units on the starport swaps back and forth, so for 5 minutes you can order devastators and missile tanks, on the next 5 minutes you can order siege and deviators) And this is the only tip of the iceberg man, this is only a part that you can do. Right now, in 2025, our imagination (and patiente to actually pull of that) is the onyl limit on what we can do know. I have been modding dune 2000 for 10 years, and the amount of stuff added in this last 2-3 years is way way more than everything that came prior to that. I am going to show this small clip of a cutscene that triggers only when the player perform what it is the main objetive. This is a nod to the Mammoth tank presentation on Tiberian Sun, where you see the enemy testing the unit against multiple things. Here, since this is also a new structure, I wanted to give players full context of the strenfg of the turret. The trikes that move in position are AI controlled and they move on their own on those specific positions, to also showcase the range of this said turret and the accuracy: https://www.youtube.com/clip/UgkxT7Kf9L6afh63Jy5OU-SiqymN6f-nyStN I will only add that there is a discord focused on modding, and although we are not too many, there will always be at least 1 or 2 of us that can help you with any modification you can think of or need help if you want to join to learn more about it. And finally, if you have the chance, play Summers solstice, that campaign is the peak of modding, adding new units, new structures, new visuals, new voice lines... so many new cool things, including a hero unit that can transform into different units, from a tanky to make it easier to survive, or a high damage one to help you finish enemies. Play this and you will find how this specific custom campaign could be the "dune 2000 lost unreleased sequel".

oh, of course! thanks to the various ways the macro is simplified (repeat queue, B hotkey, etc), the tech tree can and should be more complex I've seen the various testers and the players who have checked the debut mission out so far take wildly varied approaches to the macro game. I anticipate you'll see those problem areas I described while the tech tree is in its unfinished state when you eventually get the chance to give this debut mission a shot, but it's hopefully also much more interesting than vanilla d2k's handling of upgrades and teching up, even at this juncture eh, that's not too difficult, if ya ask me... if a mission is meant to spotlight a certain kind of unit, and those units are already balanced with certain roles in mind, then we already know where that role shines. the mission just needs adjustment to emphasize that role. frankly, the tougher part is getting a player to realize "this unit is imba on this mission" because everybody just spams Troopers, Quads and Combat Tanks. xD before yelling at me for locking Rocket Turrets behind T3 because they're OP and very much desired on hard mode. ...maybe with a new faction in play we'll see players pick up what I'm laying down more often, ya know? lol not that I want to make that unit the only viable answer on its associated mission or whatever. that's the other tough part. Starcraft 2 leaned a bit too heavily into that, in some places. some very one-note missions that wind up feeling like a glorified tutorial. I get the sentiment that campaigns may be meant to lead the player onto the ladder or something, but for those who want only to enjoy the campaign, I've gotta take special care in gearing a mission towards a certain kind of unit so all the other stuff the player has been picking up still applies. better experience that way regarding the multiplayer thing: that's unfortunately nothing more than theory until they get access to the new features we've got in single-player that make stuff like this new faction's units possible. I hear they're making good progress on it, but who knows when they'll formally wrap that up. the theory can be important for making a satisfying balance in single-player, but it ultimately only applies to single-player even if we do wind up with some overpowered stuff though, uhh... I mean, RA2 is unbalanced as hell and still very popular just cuz its wacky roster of units is so much fun. so, while balance is absolutely a consideration as you can see from... all of the above, and all to follow, it does actually take a backseat to fun factor and rule-of-cool. cool / fun new thing comes first, attempt to balance cool / fun thing comes second that's a good approach. I went a bit of a different direction with maps like S02V1 back in SS... that was balanced as a 'skillgate mission,' a tougher mission that appears early on just to ask the player, "hey, are you comfortable with the difficulty level? if not, turn it down. if so, carry on." that sort of thing takes players off-guard, but helps shape their experience in the rest of the campaign in a more positive light. or so that's the intent. it worked out well for a lot of players who, after butting heads with S02V1, started experimenting more on the later maps and discovering subtleties to the submods that really helped them survive in ways they may not have found if not for S02V1 frontloading some pain in their faces I had spotlighty missions too. like, S06V2 very much so encourages the use of stuff like Siege Tanks or Duelist Tanks. it was more about missions like S02V1 though, strategically raising or lowering the difficulty level to gauge or tamper with the player's expectations, or for story reasons doing things a bit more traditionally in some respects this time around, I don't think there will be maps like that where the enemy has high/end tech early on, like on S02V1. specifically because it involves a new faction and players are 100% not going to be familiar with it from vanilla. I'll thus probably be doing it that way, spotlighting units as they become available through subtle mission design tricks to encourage the player to try them out in favorable conditions and understand those favorable conditions. smoother difficulty curve. strategically-placed difficulty spikes can do a campaign favors, but they're not for every campaign

Have you any thoughts on a tech tree? How will it progress? Sorry to say, the techtree needs to be balanced as well. And this might be the hardest job. Since you introduce a player to a new unit. The mission might depend on that particular unit. And the multiplayer techtree should be balanced as well. I think, the latter is even more important than the single player campaign. Because a new unit might actually be over powered for its first job. Just for the fun of it It is how I introduced some of my units in the past. "o my, we don't have enough resources for dealing with the bunkers. Let's get 1 artillery unit, we know it is expensive, but that attack range of 13 is more than enough to protect it from wandering survivors".

thanks very much!! ah, I don't like to restrict the player too much even on missions with pure defense objectives, I've gotta account for if the player's gonna be aggressive and attack the enemy and stuff. quite a few players have been taken off guard on S02V1 by trying to beat up the high-tech enemy lol there are some exceptions, of course. like, S02V2 was designed to introduce hero units in a controlled environment, to teach the player to sacrifice ANYTHING to keep them alive, and show their strength without the macro game in the picture. that was only for like... 22.5k ticks or something? and I don't think we'll need missions like that in the next series. no hero units so yeah, defense-oriented missions, sure, but I gotta spice it up if it's pure defense, somehow xD ah yeah, and the Wings of Liberty campaign had that one with the supernova and the banshees and all that. terran buildings being able to pick up and wander the map was integral to that one. fun concept, very memorable it took the forefront in that mission though, whereas the natural progression of wandering the map for resources is, uhh... more of an encouraged course of action than a necessity. an underlying gameplay mechanic supporting the main gameplay loop, the focus remains on defeating the enemy. less, uhh... distinct, but hopefully more fun to be had with more flexibility on more missions. less linearity and stuff damn, mate. aye, I've lost some missions too. dang computers perhaps what I refer to as gimmicks are what you're referring to here as secondary objectives ^^ I would classify the end stage of S06V2 as being its secondary objective. the production goals on SBON2 are secondary objectives. perhaps 'xyz hero unit must survive' is more of a secondary objective than a gimmick even if it's all primary though, missions can remain interesting with a strong enough gameplay loop. I've replayed Halo: CE lots of times just because its gameplay loop is so well-conceived, despite its repetition in mission layout and stuff aye, that's the plan ^^ actually, that was chiefly what I was looking for in Kipp's test run of the variables example map in the thread I linked in the last post! he had to expand a bit to support his offensive, but wasn't overwhelmed by the enemy before he could do that. target hard mode balance achieved! and now I've got the data to go off of for future missions' designs. a factor in helping to balance this debut mission, despite it being very different from that variables example map didn't mean it was perfect from the get-go though. not that that was my fault... during this process, we discovered the AI on hard mode in d2k gets a x.75 modifier on its unit build rate, which was enough to screw up my calculations without an AI parameter-adjusting event using the index number of the assigned variable as opposed to the variable's stored value too. that also happened. what a headache xD after those problems were accounted for though, the theoretical balance I had been aiming for worked out perfectly. the testers reported it was quite manageable! thank goodness Klofkac really went all the way with enabling us mappers to do stuff ^^ impossible to overstate the meaning of his contributions aye. the variables example map was more dramatic on this front, allowing the player to start in the top right, bottom left or bottom right corners, so you'd get three very different ways to approach the rest of the map. this debut mission already introduces lotsa new units, not to mention the new environment, so the three start locations here just change the order in which you get the units you're meant to start with. the player gets an MCV at the same place on the debut mission no matter which start location was chosen oh, yeah well, time will tell about the Keravnos. it's probably in a pretty good spot for an MBT, but some other units may need adjustment. the Diakotn for one feels weak, but with its low cost and some other stuff, maybe that's just fine. I already made some other adjustments, like to its armor type