Article Type: Community Report
Article Date: August 07, 2001
As I was wandering through the web researching an article, the fact that Red Alert 2's newest patch had been realeased caught my eye, so I decided to take look at what's been going on these days.
Background
To those of you not familiar with the premise behind Red Alert 2, let me elaborate: The Command & Conquer (C&C) series is based upon a sort of alien invasion concerning Tiberium. C&C: Red Alert is based upon an altered history of the world. In Red Alert 1, the brilliant physicist Albert Einstein takes the knowledge of history acquired in 1946 and combines it with the theory of relativity to project himself back into 1933, when Adolf Hitler is still just a minor player on the world scene.
Einstien eliminates Hitler, hoping to avoid the mayhem of WWII. When he returns to 1946, he is confronted with an unfettered Josef Stalin who has taken the opportunity to take over Europe. The new Great War again leaves Europe in shambles, but the now docile Soviet Union leaves a less Evil Empire-like country to contend with, or does it? Premiere Romanov, the puppet leader, is no more when his forces, backed by "Yuri," confront the United States head on. The Cold War this isn't!
Add-ons
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Premiere Romanov and Yuri.  |
There have been many add-ons created for this whole series, from the original C&C up through Red Alert 2. Company created add-ons such as Counterstrike and The Aftermath for the original Red Alert, to the upcoming Yuri's Revenge. These usually added a few new units, some multi-player maps, and a dozen or so single player missions.
Fan flavored add-on's usually deal with editing the rules.ini file, which dates back to the earliest inceptions of the series. Others have taken a different approach and found interesting things in the inner workings. The big one, in my mind, would be Deezire. The lengths and breadths of this add-on are massive. His most current, as of this writing, is version 6.8.
Almost all areas of game play are affected, from the additions to the tool bar, to the mood music, to the current tweaking of the AI. The addition of many units to both sides, including power-up crates that can hold miniature versions of vehicles from any of the preceding chapters, and building enhancements make this a whole new RTS! Most of these enhancements were created with multiplayer use in mind. Thankfully, the skirmish modes also have the added features. Actually, one of my favorite features is the multiple game types that can be utilized in MP/Skirmish.
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| Ten new types of engagements! |
The best of these, IMHO, is the Global Dominance option. It allows all allied nations, from either side, to have all the resources available to their respective allies. For instance, if you play the USA, you will be able to build the regular Harriers, but also the S. Korean Black Eagle. With the capturing of a tech building airfield, the option to build A-10 Warthog napalm droppers becomes available. You can even use a spy to commandeer a bus to transport your troops in. The list just goes on and on! Actually, the RedMe.doc (no, that's not a typo) file that comes with it elaborates the details of these enhancements for twenty-five pages.
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| Tanks and appropriated vehicles move in. |
If you have Red Alert 2, or will be getting it in the future, you really must have this add-on, it's that good.
Map Editing
Another individual who has toiled away through most of the CNC series is Matthias Wagner. Early on, folks rummaged through the mission files to make their own missions, and then made maps to run these missions on. This gentleman from Germany started to work on a GUI-based map editor back in the Tiberian Sun Days of 1997. It just kept getting better and better with each Westwood release.
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| Map editing at its finest |
So much so, in fact, that Westwood came to some agreement with Mr. Wagner, and is their officially released map editor for the public. I can see why they adopted it as their own, as it has the capability to alter missions, the terrain, and even create campaigns. Deezire had a hand in this one also, as he wrote the “Event,” “Trigger” and “Action” information. Get it yourself and have a go. Available from the official Westwood site.
I, personnally, have only dabbled with it and made little progress of consequence. There is one person I know of that has mastered the map/mission creation process. BattleStar over at RA(2)-Den has entire packs of his beautifully rendered maps available. They not only flow well, they also have numerous surprises and many touches that are just plain nice to experience. Some of the most professional maps I've seen, and as this column usually points out, all for free!
There are innummerable maps and mods out there, and folks have already started gearing toward the next installment in the series, Yuri's Revenge, due out in late September. To help you in your perusing, check out the links in the Resources section below so you can find the add-ons to fit your personal tastes.
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| Tanya plays tourist in Moscow. |
