Just got through the GDI commando mission. Same as it always was, but the “optional” follow-up mission made for a pretty interesting story on the mission select window. Apparently it expects you not to blow up the airfield, so even if you do you’ll unlock the mission where you didn’t destroy the airfield in the “mission select” menu. The next mission won’t unlock, even though you can skip right to it, until you beat that commando follow-up one. I also found out how brutally difficult that one is if you don’t destroy the Hand of Nod with the commando, lol.
I’m enjoying going through each potential map choice in the campaign. Feels much less disjointed than what I remember without knowing what the other mission was. Glad they dropped the whole branching mission idea in later games.
I definitely remember that, even though it was a worse game overall by a longshot, TD did have the better music. The remastered version has a great soundtrack and the new songs are cool too. I guess I’ll see what RA is like when I get to it.
Anyone still playing this? Got back into it after a five month hiatus, with the goal of getting the "complete all TD missions on hardest difficulty" award. Without sandbags as well since that's just lame.
As of now, finished all permutations of all GDI and Nod campaign missions, and the GDI half of Covert Ops. That leaves Nod Covert Ops (moderately difficult), console (easy), and funpark (never played; people say it's difficult). Nod is largely easier because flame tanks and obelisks provide offensive and defensive power that GDI can't really match. And although this isn't new to the remaster, I have to say that the difficulty in this game at the hard level isn't a "fun" difficult, it's just mean-spirited. AI cheats so hard that you have little chance of winning in a straight fight. The fact that this game still retains some of the crash-prone nature of the original is annoying too (I can lose my save files to the game randomly deciding to die on certain levels).
What ends up happening is every level you have to find some way to cheese it. What convoluted path you can take an APC on to do an engineer rush and disable their production, where the harvesters are badly enough defended that you can just snipe them all, when their base has a narrow choke that you can just wait until it causes a traffic jam (harvesters can't get in, units can't get out), and so on. Try to play it straight and they get some absurd multiplier of cash on every harvester load, units are super beefy, base defenses rebuild instantly in places where they shouldn't be able to build units, etc. Different paths on any given mission make the mission either a lot harder or easier based on whether or not it does give you a golden opportunity for cheesing like this.
This mission, the last GDI Covert Ops one, is the one that takes the cake so far, though. Couldn't beat it without using speedrun strats on corner MCVs:
I also recall that was my experience of the game when I played it while young. The maps are puzzles where you have to reload to find the solution, more than tests of skills. Though the clearest memory is playing multiplayer and the map being so badly designed that the person that realised you had to micro the harvester manually won.
Well, after finishing Covert Ops, it didn't take much more effort to finish up the game, and finally get the achievement for having done so:
Funpark was... not that hard, even though I've never played it back in the day. After you figured out how to lure velociraptors and that every other unit is too slow to matter, there wasn't much challenge to it. The last mission, where you play as the dinosaurs, was fun though. Without the dinosaurs having any production it didn't take much to just bleed them dry and win with macro. Overall the Red Alert ant missions provide a much more meaningful challenge.
All 81 Tiberian Dawn missions down on hardest difficulty. Will probably burn through the Red Alert campaign too, but by virtue of being better designed that game is a lot easier to beat (fewer dumb things / game crashes means there's a much cleaner path to victory). This one took some doing.