C&C Unit Missions; Devrules

Playing Tiberian Sun mod Twisted Insurrection and Red Alert 2 mod Mental Omega (For clarity: I played the last version that could be played with freely available downloads. It's been years since I lost my CDs and I'm hesitant to buy Command & Conquer the First Decade or the like. Especially since Origin is a terrible service) was an interesting contrast in a few different ways.

The big one is it got me realizing that not everyone who plays Command and Conquer games actually grasps implicit design rules; Twisted Insurrection is pretty faithful overall to how Tiberian Sun comports itself, once you account for 'fan-made mod instead of professional product from people who'd already made similar games previously'. Mental Omega... is not.

A specific design rule that Mental Omega violates, which is a huge design fail to be violating, is...

Unit Missions: Counters Guide

In the official Command and Conquer games, unit missions -the missions where you don't have a base, don't have resources, can't replace or choose your troops- are designed as a kind of puzzle mission. You have a limited set of tools to pull off some task, and it's up to you to figure out how the game intends for this to be possible.

These missions are fun and interesting, and often some of the most memorable ones in the series. Even Tiberium Wars, which I don't have a particular high opinion of overall, has pretty consistently solid unit missions.

They also never force the player to go directly against unit counters.

The C&C counter system is a bit odd to describe: each unit has a defensive type (Infantry, Vehicle, Aircraft, Building, and in the Red Alert games Naval is basically a secondary tag in practice), and then its offenses are defined in their effectiveness against such defensive categories. Your basic rifle soldier is an anti-infantry infantry. Your basic rocket soldiers is an anti-vehicle-and-air infantry. The rifle infantry beats rocket infantry because rocket infantry are bad against infantry and rifle infantry are good against infantry. And so on.

This leads to hard counters, soft counters, and ambiguous interactions. Red Alert 2's Rocketeers are an aerial infantry unit that performs best against infantry; Flak Troopers are a ground infantry that performs well against infantry and air units. Which one wins? (The answer is that Flak Troopers win more and more clearly as numbers scale up, due to their anti-air splash damage)

Unit missions in official Command & Conquer games generally expect you to only send units against units they hard-counter. Commandos get to snipe enemy infantry and vaporize buildings -but you're not expected to throw them against anti-infantry base defenses, or against vehicles, not even vehicles that are bad against infantry, because Commandos are nearly worthless against vehicles. The only real caveat to this is that you're allowed and occasionally even expected to indirectly break counters, such as by having a Commando circle around and detonate some explosive barrels that will chain-explode to wipe out some vehicles that were in your way. Outside the original Command & Conquer's somewhat unrefined setup (There's problems from, for example, Commandos being worn down as they destroy buildings because the buildings spawn infantry when destroyed and the Commando is right there to be immediately shot at), the only time an official Command & Conquer game kind-of-directly expects you to go against counters is... not even an expectation, but instead an option in one Soviet mission in Red Alert 2 where you can mind control a Sniper through a wall. (Normally Snipers hard-counter mind control units in Red Alert 2, one-shotting them from well outside their control range) And it really is just an option; that particular mission has several interesting ways of completing the mission, most of which cleave to this design rule.

Twisted Insurrection holds to roughly this basic model. If your force is anti-infantry infantry, you're expected to go around base defenses, avoid vehicles, and torch your way through infantry groups. The closest thing to an exception is, as with the official games, that you might blow up some vehicles or buildings by setting off some explosives, that kind of thing. Simple, smart, easy to get started on solving the puzzle that is the mission.

Mental Omega is either utterly oblivious to this rule or is actively spiting it.

The developers have a Youtube channel, and part of what they do is have videos of them beating their own missions -some of which outright say the mapmaker did the given video. I had to repeatedly consult these videos to figure out how to solve unit missions in Mental Omega -which was frustrating, given how many missions in Mental Omega either are or start out as unit missions!- because they repeatedly and insistently forced the player to go against the counter system. There's one mission in particular that was just galling, because it turned out the mapmaker expected you to use Rocketeers (Air infantry that are bad at fighting vehicles) to kill Flak Traks (Ground vehicle that murders air and infantry en mass and outranges Rockeeters) if you wanted to be able to complete the mission. In part by relying on the fact that the Rocketeers are passively regenerating health and so you can pop in, do some damage, flee out over water or something to regenerate, and repeat until they're dead.

There's a few different layers here.

For starters, unit missions having the player go with the flow is a good way of teaching the counter system implicitly. In conjunction with the game allowing you to indirectly break counters, the game can even directly signal that you're expected to lose a fight if you start it; if a unit you don't recognize is placed to be blown up by explosive barrels, then probably your forces are all ill-suited to fighting that unit.

Then there's the point that trial and error becomes a learning experience in a fairly straightforward sense. If you send a unit in to kill an enemy, and it dies, that was probably a mistake and you should reload or restart and try something different... in Twisted Insurrection and the official games. In Mental Omega, you may simply have failed to do some micromanagement nonsense the developers expect you to employ without ever bothering to educate you on its existence. In fact, that's probably the answer. How are you supposed to figure this out on your own? I honestly doubt the developers gave any thought to that question at all. And if they did give it some thought... then why did they make their mod's missions so contrary to learnability?

And then when players already know roughly how a Command & Conquer game works, solving the puzzle of a unit mission, though less important as far as educating the player on how core mechanics work, remains interesting in its own right. If you can't figure out how your current tools can solve the problem in front of you, you can already tell that either you can get more units somehow or that the problem in front of you is meant to be bypassed or something that some exploring and thought can discover.

... again, unless you're playing Mental Omega, in which case the reason you can't solve the mission is because it's designed to be contrary to this design rule.

Prior to playing Mental Omega, it had honestly never occurred to me that someone might be significantly familiar with the Command & Conquer games, and yet either completely fail to internalize this design rule or decide to strike against it.

This is the easiest-to-articulate example, but this kind of thing runs all throughout the design of the respective mods: Twisted Insurrection understands that it is a game, and should be learnable and beatable by real people who haven't read the devs' minds or obsessive-compulsively played the base game until they've memorized all the counter-intuitive behavior and how to use it to strike against the base game's clear intentions. Mental Omega seems to view its primary priority as being 'hard', with no comprehension of what constitutes 'hard' other than making the game unreasonable; it's not that the game really expects a certain level of skill or efficiency on your part. It just... tries to make it so that there's one right way to play a given mission and then goes out of its way to obfuscate what that one right way is -this even applies to base missions, if a bit more subtle a manner.

I suppose I should at least be grateful it got me realizing I should make a post about these super-obvious design rules, just in case 'failed to internalize these Good Design Rules' is more widespread a condition than I realize.

Mostly, it means Twisted Insurrection is a really good mod, period, and Mental Omega is a really technically impressive mod with godawful single-player design.

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