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The Red Alert 3 beta was recently opened up to anyone with a fileplanet account (and then promptly shut down... sorry :x), so I've gotten a chance to tinker with the game.
Overall, I'm very impressed and I've only played about 10 games (balance wise I have no idea where the heck the game stands since there's like 50k plus testers and most of them are new, but the core of the game is good and so it can be balanced with time if it isn't).
The basic balance concept of the game is that each faction has one thing that it is strong at, so... going by which they're strongest at:
Soviet:
Ground
Air
Navy
Allies:
Air
Navy
Ground
Rising Sun:
Navy
Ground
Air
This might sound potentially imbalanced since naval forces usually get the shaft, but you can build most buildings on the sea. And a few ground units (most notably the Tsunami Tank) can take to the seas. And there are resource points at sea, making it so obtaining sea superiority can be huge. On the flip side, some naval units can get on land (Allied destroyers... believe it or not) but move much more slowly.
The Rising Sun faction is particularly flexible. The Allies and Soviets have to build their stuff next to a MCV or crane. The Rising Sun has these little deployable drones that build extremely quickly, but then can be deployed anywhere (the deploy time is longer than the build time... it takes an additional 10 seconds or so once you've placed your structure), either land or sea. This allows for a lot more flexibility than is usually granted in C&C. This allows the Rising Sun to fast expand immediately if they want to and set up a forward naval base, or whatever.
Resources have been reworked. You need an ore refinery right next to a resource node. Your ore miner goes the mine, mines, and comes back. Near as I can tell, ore mines never deplete (and it doesn't take longer and longer to get more ore because the physical distance is static).
You end up with a lot more resources than you would previously. However, teching is really expensive (for instance, to unlock a final docks upgrade you need to invest in 3000 in a tech lab and then another 2000 or so to actually upgrade the dock, not to mention previous dock upgrades). On top of that, units are pretty expensive as well. The end result is you generally want 4-5 resource nodes, minimum (and the maps they've put out so far have it so you generally start fighting over resource nodes right around the time you hit 4-5).
There's no need to invest in unit upgrades. Every unit comes built in with a single ability. The last C&C game I played was Generals, I did feel like there was an overwhelming number of upgrades one had to get in that game and a lot of them were felt like they should have been on the units to begin with, so maybe this is a step forward. Given how expensive teching it is, it's almost like they did that so you had to pay a price to get to the unit, but once you're there you don't have to waste any more economy on it.
Unit abilities range from next to useless (a lot of allied units have an ability that increases their defenses and gets enemy units to focus fire on them... near as I can tell, all it does is make your units die faster and automicros for your enemy -.-... strangely the Tsunami version of this seems to be a lot better) to pretty useful (the Rising Sun in particular has a lot of ship to ship abilities that makes stuff blow up reallly quickly).
Also making a return are general abilities, but instead of unlocking them from pure battle experience, they also seem to unlock with time. This means you have at least two of them fairly early. There's also 15 abilities per faction, some of which are upgrades of others (most have a bombing ability that has 3-5 upgrades). There's enough unique ones to make them interesting and three different branches to take. You can have a max of 8 abilities I believe. They're always useful.
On the whole I love the game. I have a few things against it... chiefly visual clarity. A pet peeve of mine is in every C&C game the infantry seem to get smaller and smaller. This one doesn't seem to be much different. Secondly, it uses Gamespy. Getting into a game made by someone is pretty much impossible, so I can only play random matches.
Other than that, the game has a lot of promise. I'm a huge fan of the Rising Sun.
 
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mind posting some SS or are you not allowed. How about tell us about the game pace and the system requirement
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I'm grateful that you've taken the time to write this, because RA3 is one of the very few upcoming games I am extremely interested in. Sounds good to me so far.. except for Gamespy. Fuck.
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a friend of mine played it and he's been saying that the Asian is overpowered as shit
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ah so the game taking a realistic path
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On August 24 2008 06:49 anotak wrote:
a friend of mine played it and he's been saying that the Asian is overpowered as shit
Eh... I they're strong, but they're not overpowering (although it's hard to tell so far). It's like Zerg, they can fast expand everywhere and get a huge economic advantage and ream you, but it's probably your fault if you let that happen without slowing them down. There's a lot of options when it comes to messing with fast expands.
The pacing... that's a tough one. I'd say it can be quite fast, but it can also be more like Starcraft where there's a build up stage where either side could do something funny if they wanted to, but usually choose not to. On the other hand there's a lot of units that can run around the map and help you get an advantage early if you choose. For instance terror drones move realllly fast. We're talking across the map in maybe 30 seconds. And they swim. That's the Soviet way of shutting down fast expos with no defense.
Also: attack bears seem to lose to attack dogs at the moment. I have no idea. ~_~
I can take screenshots, since there's no NDA, but probably not today. Maybe tomorrow... but if you search around for them, you can find them since there's like 50k people plus in the beta at this point (which is why it's hard to tell how balanced it is... I've run into like one or two guys who have had any idea what they were doing, and I try to help the clueless newbs by giving basic advice and letting them live longer than they otherwise would to test out stuff. Only one seemed to take any interest in my advice though ;.; ).
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If anyone wants to play a few rounds and are in the beta, toss me a pm. I can probably get you in touch with the best/better players for empire/allies quickly.
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Really? I've been in the beta for 2 weeks now and I must say this game is moderate. I've played 20 to 30 games and am somewhat impressed. First of all the "special powers" tick me off. It ticked me off in CnC3 and it still ticks me off now even when it's changed drastically. Second of all, Yuriko is just plain sick. She can kill anything in the game and the other commandos cannot even be compared to her destructive power. The game play is painfully slow at times and at other times it's just too quick. I've learned the hard way that the person who controls the sea is most likely to win the game. The japs have both autobots and decepticons, and that gives them a very flexible army which IMO the other 2 factions cannot compete with. Submarines are very powerful. They cannot be hit while they are underwater so they can pick their encounters and not worry about air or land units at all (unless they are amphibian too). I'd also like to bitch a little about stationary defences and artillery too, but I'm just too tired to post why now. (2 am ... i need to get some sleep)
Don't get me wrong, there are fun parts of the game too, like unit abilities, battles, need of scouting and expanding etc.
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I'm not too concerned about balance at this point, because the way beta has been conducted (ie, get Kane's Wrath and you're guranteed a beta key) and then the free giveaway on Fileplanet has caused absolute chaos. I'm not precisely sure when the beta started, but it seems like it didn't run with a closed userbase nearly long enough. They probably care more about hyping the game up than the balance in the short term, so it seems.
But it's got a ton of potential. Starcraft had terrible balance when it came out, but the core mechanics were good and so balance could be made better over time (with an expansion, granted).
General abilities are fine: they are strong, but they rarely turn the tide of the battle because they unlock over time so the balance between them is rarely way out of line with what the other player has. Used by themselves they're pretty weak.
I think submarines are fairly balanced. I wouldn't be surprised if some air units could reveal them either, but I'm not sure because I haven't had enough time to test that. And if that's not the case, they might make it the case.
I agree the pacing can be wonky, but I don't think it's any slower than Starcraft at any point. You aren't microing scvs or anything, but you could be scouting around, garrisoning buildings, etc, etc. The Rising Sun in particular always has something to do due to their base building mechanic.
I like that navies matter, but I haven't had enough experience with airpower vs seapower to figure out which usually comes out on top (my guess is air power can sway their building habits enough so your navy can win, or they just neglect anti air too much and it's game over). I did overexpand against another Rising Sun player, and he overwhelmed me with airpower before I had a navy. I was a bit annoyed. :p
Also, they might be overpowering the Rising Sun a bit because they want people to play them so they can balance them well. Everyone knows the Soviets still have Konev blimps and Mammoth tanks, and the Allies have destroyers, carriers, etc. You have to make the new faction attractive at first to draw people in... they've done a very good job at that.
I know when Blizzard first put out the Frozen Throne Beta, the Warden, the Blood Mage, and the Sea Witch were all hideously overpowered such that they could overwhelm entire armies even at level 1. People paid a lot of attention to them after that (and they were nerfed repeatedly to compensate ;p).
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I found the beta to be heaps fun and enjoyable. One thing that does annoy me though is the excessive amount of abilities, since every unit has some special ability. It'd be better if these "microing" abilities were more concentrated and more useful among a few units. But nonetheless, its got great potential. Can't wait for it when it comes out.
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I played like 3 games and I liked it.
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i played red alert 2 , but just campaign
it was pretty entertaining lol
i mind control yooooh [:
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is awesome32274 Posts
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I tried to take a few and some of the effects didn't show up so it didn't look all that good. Not sure why. Also the game doesn't make it all that easy to take and save screenshots...
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OK yeah maybe you're right. It might be a little bit too early to bitch about the balance ;p but those things gave me some frustration in the game and I just had to get it all out xD.
To the guys that want screen shots. Let's do it like this: You tell us what you want screen shots of and we will try to provide them, hmm?
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I have played some more games, here are my updated impressions:
I finally got to use the Allies anti-air fighter (the Apollo Fighter) because I ran into a competent Rising Sun player. It has a pretty big range and it hovers so you can don't have to return it to the airbase until you need more ammo. I think it beat like 5 or 6 Tengus (which have an antiaircraft air form and a ground form which is anti-infantry... to put this in perspective an Apollo aircraft costs like 1000 ore and the Tengu is 800), partially because the Tengus don't seem to autotarget the Apollo because its range is so huge. Tengus are the early game Rising Sun harassment unit of choice, since they are very fast while in aircraft form, so you can lift off, move to where you want, then get back on the ground. Very annoying to deal with, and they're cheap.
With that being said, I'll describe my Allies vs Rising Sun game. The Rising Sun guy's early strategy was to proxy a barracks next to the hospital in the middle of the map... there's two oil derricks not far from there, and a lot of buildings to garrison infantry in so this is a good choice. I prefer to build mine a bit more south because there's a very centralish building I like to garrison because it's a strong position.
From there he set out to deny me from taking the oil derricks while taking them, while I did the same. I killed an engineer an some random infantry with my 4 dogs, and he managed to kill an engineer of mine all of my dogs because I got sloppy.  At some point I took an early third expansion (or tried to), and he managed to kill off my crane that I had placed there so I could build with Tengus he had jetted over (I blew two up with bombers, but he had a lot more). He had also stopped some attempts of mine to kill his oil derricks with some infantry.
At this point his strategy was clear: keep me on a low economy by forcing me to live off the two main base ore mines and then just overwhelm me. He faltered and got greedy and tried to kill me in my base, partially because he probably wanted to stop the bombers from turning the tide of the game. He failed miserably since once bomber can blow up a Tengu, and I had like 8-10 Javelin soldiers as well. From there I used my bombers (and surgical strike, a general skill that you get, it does a fair bit of a damage in a very small area) to blow up the oil derricks closest to me, and ran away from the nearest Tengus trying to hunt them down. I flew over some garrisoned buildings which had Javelins to deal with the Tengus.
From there I bombed the other oil derricks, at which point he had put more Tengus in place resulting in a loss of a few bombers. I built an Apollo Fighter which would end up getting a ton of kills on his own throughout the game (and I don't think it ever died) and used it to escort my bombers. I cleared the center of his barracks and garrison, then moved in a bunch of guardian tanks and javelin soldiers to take out the derricks. I killed the derricks, and moved my ground army to kill his expansion further east, then check the sea based expansion much closer to our bases with my bombers. I blew that up shortly afterward. And then to I blew up a refinery in his main base with my bombers and another surgical strike.
So after all of that work, we were roughly even in economy. He had mass expanded to try to push his advantage, and I had denied it and punished him on top of that. I started expanding myself and managed to get up to 6 mining bases at maximum, but he took out all but 1-2 before the end. It ended being a seesaw with him trying to expand and my bombers hounding him, then him deciding it'd be best to just mass up. I tried to attack his main with a large ground force and it got annihilated by King Oni's (basically walking robots that eat armor and can smash into them too). He tried to win by massing a ground army and then navy, but eventually lost due to my better use of combined arms and my superior economy.
He never really managed to stop my bombers- partially because the Japanese anti-air is a bit lacking. They have a ground attack chopper that doubles as ground anti-air in its other form, but its ground attack chopper form is way better. It can be blown up by one bomber (I think), so it's not the best anti-air. He did focus enough of navy to stop me from rebuilding extra bombers, but I had more ore to spend on a navy and overwhelmed him.
The allied navy is a weird hodge podge of units. Dolphins for ship to ship, the hydrofoil for anti-air and ship weapon disabling (this is really strong), and the carrier for stomping anything else. I tried to use destroyers against the Rising Sun navy, but they got chewed to pieces. As mentioned in my first post, destroyers have a black hole armor that draw fire to it, but it's armor sucks so it just dies faster. The Allies can stand toe to toe with the Japanese if ready for them, but if not it seems like the Rising Sun have a huge edge because they can just build Naginata Cruisers and Yuri minisubs for ship to ship and just torpedo and suicide their way ahead (strangely my opponent built zero minisubs). Rising Sun individual ships are quite strong, Allied ones are weak by themselves. I almost lost to the initial wave of Shogun battleships, but I had enough bombers and dolphins to just barely hold on. The Japanese have a Sea-Wing for anti-air, but it's easy to target and kill them with dolphins. The hydrofoil is really versatile and keeps the masses of Japanese air away and also disables Japanese capital ship weapons (they can still run, and the hydrofoil can only do one or the other). If my opponent had not rushed to battleships and had gotten minisubs, his battleships would have been far more effective.
After his initial naval push, I pushed back blew up most of his base with carriers while taking out his navy and air force as it tried to push me back. He did end up killing 1 of my 3 initial carriers, and I retreated the remaining ones back home to repair. But the next time I came back he had almost nothing to stop me.
In summary: I really like the Allies. They have what I would call a global tech tree. You advance to tier 2 and in all your buildings in your main base, tier 2 unlocks simultaneously. This gives the Allies a lot of flexibility, which they need because their ground units tend to be weaker than both the Japanese and the Soviets, and their navy is weaker than the Japanese navy. The air force is the Allies trump card that holds everything together, and it's good at doing it. But it's not very good by itself, so you need to diversify.
I'm not a huge fan of the Soviets, but that's another story. 
Also, here's the official units page that EA has (partial, they're releasing them over time).
http://www.ea.com/redalert/factions.jsp
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nice update, thanks a lot
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iNcontroL
USA29055 Posts
nice writeup but yeah SS's would be appreciated. I played these games solely because my friend always buys them and the single player is pretty fun. I could never take the game seriously like I do SC though.
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On August 29 2008 02:47 {88}iNcontroL wrote:
nice writeup but yeah SS's would be appreciated. I played these games solely because my friend always buys them and the single player is pretty fun. I could never take the game seriously like I do SC though.
I'll probably try to get some tomorrow. I know I said that last time, but between Gamespy and severe game instability due to bugs (some of which were just patched recently :p) I stopped playing because it wasn't worth the frustration. I've also been a bit busy. :d
But the few games I've played since then haven't dropped or hung midway through. I have a pretty good grasp of where the factions stand now, so I can focus on trying to get some good screenshots.
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iNcontroL
USA29055 Posts
ty dude 
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EPT
