Sfon

From my experience, the AI gets money somewhere besides harvesting. Even if it has no way to get money and seems to have run dry, it will still sometimes go on short repair and unit sprees. No units being made, no repairs allowing you to easily destroy its buildings, no possible way to harvest, then bam it makes some units and repairs things for a little while before running dry again. I assume it is given a bunch of free credits occasionally. Delaying/destroying its ability to harvest does have a significant effect if its stockpiles run low. IMO not worth doing unless a good opportunity comes up or you control most of the map such that it is easy to do.

As I said before: there is one for each house. In other words, they are house specific. On my sound card, it is easy to figure out which is which by listening to the MT-32 versions of the midis both in the game using Dosbox and outside of the game. The reason is on the MT-32 versions the three defeat tunes all sound noticeably different. The versions of the midis that sound good on modern soundcards (and are thus the versions used by D2TM etc.) are not the MT-32 versions. On these versions of the midis, only the Atreides defeat tune sounds noticeably different when played on my sound card. When I extracted and converted to .mid the Dune 2 midis for my own collection, they came out with each midi file holding more than one tune. In the file where the defeat tunes were, the Ordos defeat tune was first, then the Harkonnen one, and last the Atreides one. At least that is how the MT-32 versions were, I'm just assuming the other versions of the midis have them in the same order. If anyone wants to know, I used Winripper to extract them.

Right about the victory tunes, but wrong about having only one defeat tune. It has three: one for each house. The three defeat tunes all sound a lot alike, though, and depending on which versions you are listening to some may sound exactly alike. When I say "versions" I do not mean versions of Dune 2. The PC version of Dune 2 has at least three versions of every song. My guess is these are for different sound cards.

I have a feature in mind too: saving or pausing. Either one will do. I strongly dislike having to start a mission over because I had to go answer the door. --Edit-- When you win a mission in D2TM, it doesn't play the proper victory music. Each house has their own seperate victory music. Is it that you are having trouble finding the Ordos victory music? I extracted and cleaned up the Dune 2 midis for my own use some time ago, and I am pretty sure I remember the Ordos victory music being in a different location than the Atriedes and Harkonnen ones. Also, it sounds quite different, which makes it even harder to find. I had to listen to it in-game and compare it to what I extracted in order to find and label it correctly.

And what would be the benefit of buying fremen with water, exactly? This would basically break the Atreides palace ability, and add what? Just another type of trooper? The ideas I've seen so far in this thread just sound like they would complicate things and bring D2TM further away from the original for no good reason. If gameplay is to be changed around, it should be for something that has a real benefit, and not someting that just looks cool in a list of game features. This is especially true for replacing power with water, which will need time to implement and change the gameplay from something that works to something that just sounds cool in a feature list. As for windtraps not providing power: they DO provide power in Dune 2. Dune 2 is to my knowledge only roughly based on the novels, something that I think was a great idea because it allowed the freedom to make a great game with minimal creative restrictions.

If by "quick moving" you mean giving orders on the automap, honestly I don't think it is very important anymore. In the original Dune 2 it made things much easier if you wanted to give orders to a whole bunch of units to attack something building sized or move to a general area, but now with the ability to select more than one unit at once it isn't as much of a hassle to just move the view there since you only need to do it once. Just about the only time I really miss it in D2TM is when I want to send many units in different directions from the base to explore.

Considering that 90% of the time I want to drag the view around when I click on the map, and for me right clicking is harder especially with draging, I do not like this idea. Personally I think force move/attack should be used for giving orders on the radar screen.

If someone else wants to check things out, to for example see if their version of Dune 2 is different or whatever, here is what I did: 1: Backup scenario.pak. 2: Open it in wordpad or something, and do a search for every line that says "Brain=Human". Next to that line each time it shows up is "Credits=" then a number value, like "Credits=1500". Change it to "Credits=-100". Do this for every scenerio for each house except for the early ones where you have a quota to fill. 3: Load the game and start a new scenerio. If it locks up or something, your text editer might have corrupted the file. Try using another one (I used wordpad that comes with windows). If it works, you should now have more credits than you'll ever need in the scenerios you edited. This makes testing the build order in different scenerios much faster.

Dune 2 Tech Tree ========== New Available Structures Each Mission 1: Concrete Slab, Windtrap, Outpost 2: Outpost, Spice Silos, Barracks(Atreides/Ordos), Light Factory(Atreides/Ordos), WOR(Harkonnen) 3: Light Factory(Harkonnen) 4: Heavy Factory, Large Concrete Slab, Wall 5: High Tech Factory, Repair Facility, Turret, WOR(Ordos) 6: Starport, Rocket Turret 7: House of IX 8: Palace 9: None --- New Available Units Each Mission Note: This list only includes units you can build. This means it does not include free harvesters, units available at the starport, etc. 1: None 2: Soldier(Atreides/Ordos), Infantry(Atreides/Ordos), Trooper(Harkonnen), Trike(Atreides), Raider Trike(Ordos) 3: Quad 4: Combat Tank, Harvester, MCV, Trooper(Ordos), Troopers (Harkonnen) 5: Carryall, Rocket Launcher(Atreides/Harkonnen), Trooper(Ordos) 6: Siege Tank(Atreides/Harkonnen), Troopers(Ordos) 7: Ornithopter(Atreides/Ordos), Sonic Tank(Atreides), Siege Tank(ordos), Deviator(Ordos), Devastator(Harkonnen) 8: Fremen(Atreides), Saboteur(Ordos), Death Hand(Harkonnen) 9: None ========== Structure Requirements No requirments: Concrete Slab Windtrap Large concrete Slab: Upgrade 1 Windtrap is required for: Refinery Outpost Refinery is required for: Light Factory Spice Silos Starport Outpost is required for: Heavy Factory High Tech Factory Repair Facility Wall Turret Rocket Turret: Upgrade 2 Barracks (Atreides/Ordos) WOR (Harkonnen) Barracks is required for: WOR (Ordos) Light Factory is required for: Heavy Factory High Tech Factory Repair Facility Starport is required for: House of IX Palace ========== Unit Requirments Barracks (Atreides/Ordos) Soldier Infantry: Upgrade WOR (Ordos/Harkonnen) Trooper Troopers: Upgrade Light Factory Trike (Atreides) Raider Trike (Ordos) Quad (Harkonnen) Quad: Upgrade (Atreides/Ordos) Heavy Factory Combat Tank Harvester MCV: Upgrade 1 Rocket Launcher: Upgrade 2 (Atreides/Harkonnen) Siege Tank: Upgrade 2 (ordos) Siege Tank: Upgrade 3 (Atreides/Harkonnen) Sonic Tank: House of IX* (Atreides) Deviator: House of IX* (Ordos) Devastator: House of IX* (Harkonnen) High Tech Factory Carryall Ornithopter: Upgrade and House of IX** (Atreides/Ordos) *No upgrades are needed to access the Sonic Tank, Deviator, or Devastator. The can be built in the heavy factory as soon as the House of IX is built. **The Ornithopter requires both an upgrade and the house of IX. You can either build the House of IX first or make the upgrade first, there is no restriction on the order you must do them. ============================== I ran through the game seeing what needed what and when. I might have missed some stuff, especially if anything else requires more than one different structure to be built before hand like some of the factories do. I posted this in a new topic rather than pm it or something so everyone could see it and hopefully spot any mistakes. Now it is time for bed X_X

In responce to gatling gun for troopers: In the original, troopers fired bullets at close range. This the sort if thing you were talking about? To the rest: Soldiers and troopers are very powerful now. Remember, though, that the ability to run them over seems to be planned. This will hopefully balance that out. Yes, it is a weakness that Atreides doesn't have great foot units, but remember the other houses have disadvantages too. I played the Atreides for a number of missions in this version, and didn't find this to be a much of a problem. The infantry are great against troopers and are fine as they are.

This bug was also in Demo 2. Sometimes the AI's harvester will simply stop. This causes it to run out of spice and basically become a sitting duck. I assume this is because the pathfinding fails to find a way for the harvester to get back, as my own units also stop when their pathfinding fails. This happens a lot in one of the Atreides mission 3s. I think it is the middle one. In it, the enemy buildings form a sort of crescent around a patch of spice, and it is there where its harvester gets stuck. My suggestion is this: Either time how long it takes for each of the AI's harvesters to get back, or simply run through and check for stopped harvesters, or something to signal when one of the AI's harvesters has stopped functioning. Then have a carryall come and deliver it to the refinery. If the AI has no carryalls, one could come and do it then leave the map when its job is done. --Edit-- The right shift and ctrl keys do not seem to work with commands for assigning group numbers, adding to selected units, etc. Do you need help with this? I still have the original manual for the game and have no problem with playing through it to test what needs what. The inaccuracies I've noticed so far: In the original, the radar outpost was available as soon as mission #2. Also, you only needed a windtrap before it could be built. It was actually the third thing I always built in the original game upon starting a mission. Ordos were able to build troopers in the original. They just needed to build an infanty factory before they could build the WOR, the same way a light factory must be built before a heavy factory. In the original, the house of IX made available the house special unit in the heavy factory. You did not need to upgrade the heavy factory at all in order to produce them.

I understand the desire to make deviators not stink, but this sounds completely broken. Think of it this way: they can eliminate any unit with only one hit *and* give you one of each unit it destoys. A bunch of deviators working together would basically be invincible and could eliminate any threat of enemy units in seconds. True, any group of units can be powerful, but nothing even close to being this powerful. Also, wouldn't it break the new unit vs. unit balancing? With deviators like this, you'd only need other types of units for damaging buildings. You wouldn't even need other types of units for close range fighting, as long as you keep your deviators a bit spread out and thus they cannot be attacking without being in the right range of at least one other deviator. IMO this could be solved by not letting them take over units so easily. There could be only a 25% chance of converting upon hit, they might only be able to convert heavily damaged units, or there might be a set number of hits of gas needed to convert a unit. Another good idea would be to have units which are more expensive or rare, such as house specials, be harder to convert than cheap common units. Even if deviators only convert an average of 1 or 2 units before they die, they will still be very powerful since the units they convert are permanent.

Things are looking great in demo 2. Dune 2 was my favorite PC game in its day, and I still enjoy playing it. Its simplicity compaired to other RTS games with their complex build trees and such gives it a charm I still cannot resist. Looking in the controls document, I didn't see anything for pausing the game. Also, the text during mission briefings and such could stand to be quite a bit bigger. Neither of those those things are a big deal, though if it is not too much trouble to add/fix them in demo 3 it would be nice ;D