Zaxx

Yup, KKND plays like that too and the last missions are pretty bonkers. I still have KKND 2 on my bucket list, I'm curious how difficult that one will be.

Yep but Dune 2K is weird in a way that defense is really-really good, like the whole "defender's advantage" thing is just maxed out here even compared to classic C&C. That's why the game can keep you under pressure and just expect you to survive but that can lead to insanely grindy missions too. When it comes to the 3 final missions and in some cases even the penultimate missions "winning" the map took me around 45 minutes meaning that after 45 minutes I got into a position where the AI couldn't recover from. Aaaand then it took me at least another 45 minutes to finish the job by fully cleaning up those huge maps. I think that I've played the last Harkonnen mission for more than 2 hours at the close to default game speed of 90. So less might have been more but I have to say that out of TD, RA1 and Dune 2K I enjoy the macro here the most. I grew up on AoE's fairly complex food economy so I always found the whole harvesting thing a bit too simple but Dune 2K knows how to complicate it a bit and that's really cool. First, you have to look out for worms and even though that's RNG it adds some excitement to an otherwise boring thing... and honestly I couldn't care less about RNG in a game where the balance is a bit out of whack anyway. Secondly carryalls are great because they speed up the late game but also because it's actually a strategic choice to go for more harvs or carryalls. I found it a really bad idea to start making carryalls when you still have spice fields close to your refineries because harvesters tend to just not move even to the closest fields by themselves and instead usually just wait for a carryall = your harvesting will become slower. On the other hand carryalls are great for the late game once you've exhausted your closer fields. Also: the Starport does this weird thing where it can actually reward you for stockpiling money since you can just order units in bulk. No other RTS really does that and that's really freaking nice. So uh yeah, I think that Dune 2K has the best macro out of all these games (Emperor is similar but it simplified it which is like... why the heck would you simplify something that was already simple? :D). Yeah that's kind of an issue in SC as in we just got so good at playing StarCraft thanks to SC being a landmark game that the original campaigns and even BW can't really offer a challenge. SC2's Mass Recall mod is pretty good at remedying that though of course that one plays more like SC2. Anyway there is one very serious flaw in Dune 2K: I never got to control any sardaukars (or maybe there was one Hark map?) so is there a custom campaign where I can get excited by being able to train sardaukars and then cry when turns out that they are terrible because they get squished by tanks?

Yeah but I'm not talking about the esports aspect, rather just the mission design and how the AI is scripted. Truth be told I'm hard on A5 mainly because if the weird issue with the enemy base didn't exist then it would just might be one of the best missions in the game. Conceptually I really like it, the whole "capture a Starport in the time limit to get your MCV" is a good intro instead of the usual skirmish stuff. The map layout itself is nice too, as you've said there is plenty of room to use the unique features of the game like the terrain types that are only traversable by infantry. And you know, even if we go by the logic of "it's a game from 98, dude" it's kind of hard to ignore that D2K's shortcomings most likely come from the fact that it's a Dune II remake. StarCraft had far better mission design, Brood War was even better than that and those games are from 1998 too. Hell WarCraft 2's expansion pack Beyond the Dark Portal already had better mission design than D2K and that game is from 1996. Age of Empires 1 from 1997 feels dated in a somewhat similar fashion as D2K but even that game had the occasional banger of a mission like Holy Man (the first map of the Babylonian campaign) that could use the admittedly very simple enemy AI as its strenght. On top of that D2K's scripted attacks can work well too, for example there is another mission (A6 or A7) where you get "betrayed" by the Truthsayer and the Emperor. On your first go you will most likely get squished because it's a somewhat unexpectedly big drop of enemies but it's also very easy to realize the problem and how to adjust your build order to solve it. So they knew how to do it well but if I had to guess the game was somewhat rushed so mistakes were made. Hell according to the credits they had only one map designer, that's insane if true and if it is true then that one guy did a stellar job overall. I don't know if you played that one but some of the campaign reminds me of KKND in its jank. That's not a huge insult because KKND is a fun game (and in some ways it's a lot more broken than D2K is), it just falls short of its inspiration (C&C).

Yep, I figured that out but it's still so strange. Like when it comes to playing RTS what is the thing that you do in basically every single one of these games right from the get go? Scouting! But in this mission if you scout the enemy base and your unit happens to not die in the process then the entire map will attack you. I kept trying the same thing on other maps after experiencing this and what always happens is that they follow you for a bit and then turn back. On A5 they turn back too... right at the point where your base is about to start so they'll just aggro at something anyway and won't actually go back to base. Seems like a bug or maybe the map is just too small. And yeah once you figure this stuff out then it's easy to cheese but it doesn't feel like normal gameplay because well, it's not that.

Yeah, I'm kind of noticing that since when it comes to the supposedly "easy" Atreides campaign I'm having my third go at the 5th mission because for some reason the Harkonnen base just attacks with all of its units and decimates me before I'm even close to being ready to attack. Lol: That's only the army that's remaining after they totally destroyed mine btw. The Harkonnen base is very close to the route that leads to the starport that you have to capture so my guess is that there is some invisible line that triggers the AI and if you ever want to reinforce the starport with vehicles then you will go past that line. And of course I passed that line because there is a surprise attack from "Mercenaries" (meaning a third faction that's not even on the map because oh boy we love bad game design in D2K) so I tried to bring some tanks over there. So yeah honestly some of these missions were designed by idiots so it's no wonder if there are wild differences in difficulty between option A and B sometimes. I started with Harkonnen and Ordos because I remembered the Atreides campaign being shit and hard, guess this map is to blame for that memory. Edit: I messed around with this mission a bit more because it was just hard to believe how borked it is... but yep, it really does seem to be borked. The way I see it the design intention might have been to attack the front of the base to attract every enemy unit while you capture the barracks from the back entrance to the enemy base, they just executed it really badly. But hey, at least they give you a lot of spice to harvest so just making a ton of units and not attacking until you're ready is a viable fallback, it's just really jank.

Yep, variety can certainly have its downsides and especially in old C&C those commando missions where you don't have a base have aged terribly. On the other hand there are games where that works fine and it adds a lot of variety if designed well, for example AoE 2 has a lot of missions that feel very unique because the more advanced scripting lets the devs do weird, experimental stuff. And overall I don't think that D2k is monotonous but the maps have a skirmish feel to them and that does have an effect on the pacing sadly. Things like having an ally or an early starport can add some novelty to that but at the end of the day literally all the maps have the same mid to late game.

Oh okay, that makes sense. The problem with that though is that who would make something like Edric O? The Ixians for example wouldn't make that kind of dude, they are making mechanical stuff, not cyborgs. The Tleilaxu on the other hand are making gholas, artificial spice and twisted mentats (who were replaced by gholas once those became more advanced I guess though in D2k the Harkonnen mentat is referred to as a ghola so maybe here those are one and the same) so weird "almost thinking machine but not really because there's man plugged into it please don't nuke us" thing kind of doesn't make sense. As for replacing the Ordos with the Ixians or the Bene Tleilax I remembered that D2K could be from before Brian Herbert's expanded Dune books and that's where those two (especially the Ixians) became more interesting. Like if a game like this would be made today then I'm pretty sure that the devs would do something like House Vernius instead of the Ordos but 1998? Nope, House Vernius did not even exist. The funny thing though is that I've already played through the Ordos campaign and the whole "this cyborg dude's eyes have turned blue from spice addiction and he's starting to become some crazed untsable Kwisatz Haderach" story element was really fun. So the original stuff that the devs came up with compared to Dune II works really well and more of that might have been awesome. Btw. I found the Ordos campaign to be a lot more fair than the Harkonnen one, even the last mission I got on my first try simply because having an allied base is a really good distraction for the enemy AI. Yeah, I agree with that (also with what CM said about it), sadly Emperor's campaign is just not very good but the faction design is stellar.

Yeah, same here. Kids don't read manuals I guess. Speaking of commands, hotkeys and whatnot one thing that I never quite understood was the guard command. It seems to function pretty optimally as an "attack move without the move" command but I never actually tested its efficiency and I mostly just use guard when I feel like it. Hm? You mean people didn't know that you can repair by using an engineer or I just don't understand what you mean. This will be kind of unrelated but speaking of that I never understood why Westwood / Intelligent Games did only half the job with the Dune 2 remake. Dune 2000 isn't super faithful to the original game, even on top of the slight differences in tech and balancing you get things like the Ordos being a totally different type of people. Like they are completely redesigned, in Dune 2 they seem like merchants / smugglers while in Dune 2K they have this weird cyborg look to them to the point that you start questioning why didn't they just replace them with the Ixians or Richese. So they could have just gone the extra mile and make a game where the 3 factions really play differently from one another, they could have spiced up the campaign with non-base building missions, more tile sets etc. But they didn't and as a result Dune 2k was received badly by the critics of the time simply because strictly on a feature and variety level Red Alert was a much better game. Emperor was more innovative but I think that by that game people just weren't interested (and tbh Emperor's primitive 3D graphics along with the janky dynamic campaigns didn't help either).

I didn't mean pointless as "building upgrades have no point in the game" but rather that it shouldn't exist in the game as a feature and that its benefits should have been put elsewhere. For example prerequisite for the rocket turret could be the high-tech factory and that would fit the usual C&C base progression path better. The same goes for all the other stuff that I called pointless or useless, for example I don't think that the minimap is useless, just that you should get it by default without building anything like in any other RTS except for C&C. And I know how to play C&C, you don't have to explain basic things like tanks squishing units or how to use the scatter command with infantry and that kind of stuff. Damn, I was thinking that they might be the easiest since they have those uber mammoth tanks. Guess what is true for RA1 (where the soviet campaign is absolutely the easiest because the soviets are just OP) is not always true for Dune 2K. I've already checked out and played through a few custom maps so while I surealy won't play 70 custom campaigns I'll dabble in a few for sure. I am doing a playthrough of most of these games in order - well, kind of - though so eventually I'll go to Emperor, then TS, RA2 etc.

Yeah I think I got that but somehow survived. What's even worse though is that whenever you touch one of the AI's harvs it instantly sends all of its army for you, sometimes you don't even notice that you hit a harv, just see the avalanche of troops lol. When it comes to H8 the solution I eventually came up with was just capturing the factory quickly to get that faction off my arse and then I walled myself off with rocket turrets because that seemed to be a good counter against the "imma convert your shit for a bit" Ordos tanks and the saboteurs. After that it was possible to build up and slowly take out the two bases. And yeah I figured out that only the wind traps suffer from a lack of concrete but the thing is that my other buildings are too vulnerable to airstrikes with half HP so I can't really decide if I'm being smart or dumb by not putting down concrete. Overall what I'm struggling with the most is absolutely getting the harvesting going well, it's kind of insane how much you have to invest into it until the spice truly starts flowing. I had a try at the last Harkonnen mission (the one with the prebuilt base which might have been a bad choice since the refinery is at a really bad spot with a lot of travel time for the harv) and I basically spent 30 minutes just trying to get going. I never really managed that because while rocket turrets are good for base defense and even seem essential against these attacks the AI targets your harvesters if they run across them. So balancing turrets, units and harvesters might be the trick there and seems like you're just supposed to be a sitting duck until you figure that out. What's a good army composition for the campaign btw? So far it seemed to me that tanks + missile tanks are fine but I can't really figure out the early game. There was one map where I just dropped down 3 light factories and massed quads and those seem pretty good against some of the heavier units like siege tanks but I don't really know if I'm on the right track there. Is it even optimal to start with lighter troops and tansition into heavy units or should I just try making tanks in a panic?

Okay so this is me: https://hard-drive.net/hd/video-games/man-revisiting-game-immediately-remembers-why-he-never-finished-it/ Honestly the balance is just terrible here. A few things: - Yeah I still have no idea how to detect the saboteur, it seems to be random and I just keep losing buildings. Not giving you a clear option to just detect stuff (like the science vessel in SC1) was a giant mistake. And yeah, saboteurs keep crashing the game so for now I've stopped playing. - Building concrete for buildings is tedious and pointless. - Upgrading buildings is a pointless feature that shouldn't exist because the game puts tech upgrades behind the build order anyway. Especially the conyard upgrade is the dumbest thing ever. - There is no real option to defend against airstrikes which really sucks because the AI just throws them at you early on in campaign missions. - Locking access to the minimap behind a building that serves no purpose other than to give you the minimap and to unlock acces to other buildings is downright idiotic. The minimap shouldn't be "tech" in an RTS, it's a basic feature of the game that is essential in overseeing what you're doing and in getting basic information. -I have no idea why "normal" difficulty is horrible in this game when both C&C 1 and RA1 were perfectly playable on their respective normal settings. Who is hard designed for then? - Kind of the same point as the last one but the campaigns do a terrible job of gradually increasing mission difficulty. There are basically two types of missions here: piss easy and impossible with the first 6 missions falling into the piss easy category and the last 3 into the "jesus christ I'll tear my hair out if I have to play one more minute of this" category. Not even the admittedbly dreadful mission disks of C&C 1 and RA1 were this bad. There are things that I absolutely love like the atmosphere, the music, the charming looking sprites and even some gameplay ideas (mainly the carryalls and the starport) but sadly this game plays like a weird, rushed mess that was made a by a "B team" that had little idea of what they were doing. That makes me sad but yeah, I guess it's no surprise that I didn't play much of this as a kid and instead just went back to RA1 and later Tiberian Sun.

Lol where does the saboteur get in in this situation? Wut? (Yeah uh the obvious piece of concrete is where my conyard used to be.) Westwood were like "yeah the engineer wasn't broken enough in C&C 1 how about we make them invisible and give the player no obvious ways to detect them". Save scumming it is.

Okay I will just stop you right there and say that I have no idea of what the optimal eco is, I don't even remember what all the units are good for exactly. For example I'm at the 8th mission of the Harkonnen campaign now and for now I have absolutely no idea on how to beat it on normal difficulty so that's my "skill level". My last attempt was amazing though, I thought everything was going fine and then my conyard exploded out of nowhere. Are there invisible units in this game that blow up your shit? How to detect them? I don't remember that stuff at all. Should I read a manual? Any good resource for strats and stuff? And well generally what bugs me is that I really don't like the classic Westwood mission design where seemingly the devs only idea on how to make a challenging map was to put you on the backfoot, swarm you with enemy AI and then expect you to enjoy the trial and error of excruciatingly defending with low tier units against whatever the hell they programmed in to attack you. That's pretty much the general gameplay of Dune 2K though so I'm mostly playing for the atmosphere and definitely not the dated and overly frustrating gameplay. Like you just put down your conyard, you're just starting to make basic light vehicles and then the ordos tank that converts your units turns up while I'm 30 minutes away of even thinking about having Harkonnen mammoth tanks, thank you Westwood but I have a strong suspicion on why your company didn't last.

That's cool because when it comes to most games I usually don't really look into custom stuff as I always assume that it's made for people who mastered the game and I rarely dedicate that much time to just one game. I can play any Doom wad but that's because I've been playing Doom and FPS for 20+ years. When it comes to C&C and Dune 2000 I somehow always found Dune 2000 to be harder than C&C 1 and RA1 so I think I only finished the campaigns once. Other times I usually just tap out when you get those crappy missions where the game gives you a bad spot for a base and then swarms you with higher tier units before you could build up properly. Like now I'm doing the Harkonnen campaign and there's a mission where there is an infantry ramp to the back of your base and it's just incredibly annoying. That's when I usually just set up a nice skirmish and just enjoy the game with a fair setting instead of getting frustrated. And well, these games are old so hotkeys aren't really there, you can't set up rally points, the pathfinding is bad, there are no unit production queues, no waypoints, no attack move (though I remember D2K having something for that, I dunno) and even the control grouping is a bit lacking (can't seem to be a way to add units to a selection or a control group so you constantly have to repeat the box select). So there is only a certain amount of pain I can take before I go back to AoE 2 DE or SC2 because of the quality of life features.

Oh yeah, I'm already discovering some crazy stuff... will there be orcs? I know that D2K is a Dune II remake so it was never part of the game's scope but I always thought that the game should have featured more map tilesets, at least for Caladan, Geidi Prime and whatever the Ordos homeworld is (since they were not in the books my knowledge on Ordos is spotty lol). And there are also some custom maps based off the book there where right in the first one the Gom Jabbar scene is reinterpreted as a battle lol. For now I will stick to the original campaigns though since I haven't played this game properly in ages. The custom launcher stuff I like too which is surprising because I never liked how the Gruntmods Edition did things. This is much smoother, fits the original game's style more and is very straightforward. I will hop on that Discord for those fixes, thanks for mentioning them. The game seems very stable for now even without that though (didn't encounter stealth units yet), much better than the last time I tried. Was a bitch to set up because of that ini bug but it's been top notch since.