nariac

I tried doing that and it didn't work for me. The problem I encountered was that pre-placed gunboats will never follow waypoints, but can fire - while reinforced gunboats do follow waypoints but can't fire. This then meant that I couldn't "hide" gunboats at the side of the map with a looping waypoint, to "free" them later with Destroy Team, because they would resist any attempt to assign them to a team in the first place. I believe that gunboats reinforced by chinook, hovercraft, etc WILL follow waypoints, just like infantry reinforced by chinook do for AI attacks for example, but I have not yet tested it. If it works, it'll be a way to have reinforced gunboats which do shoot and do follow waypoints, which would be really cool for mission making.

That artillery shoots at your infantry and Humvees when you make a move to destroy the gun turrets on the south bank. it's always shot at my stuff when I've moved out from the landing zone. Not sure why it didn't shoot you! It's hard to strike the balance between too easy, too hard, or just brutally impossible. When making this mission I wanted to try to encourage the player not to turtle up too much, but also not to rush too hard. Striking a middle ground between these two strats might be the best way forwards. The faster you can get the gunboats to arrive, the easier it'll be, because they do a lot of damage to Nod and distract them. It may also be worth investing in Orcas to defend your base, since AGTs alone suffer against the things Nod sends ... however Nod will respond by calling in their own air support if you do go the helicopter route! That's my favourite strat to secure my location, anyway. I figure it's worth starting an air war because my helis will be more useful for me that Nod's are to them.

Oh, that would work too! Although the player might be confused if they see four chinooks flying straight across the map from east to west ... they might think they were blocking an LZ and have missed out on some commandos or something. I've made another version anyway, but that was only to make Nod seem more intelligent. They'll send new Artillery and MRLS vehicles to the beach to try to attack the gunboats instead of just taking it like a bitch.

In this case it's a civilian being reinforced into a tiny inaccessible and unseeable area for each gunboat that arrives, triggered when the boat sails over a celltrigger. Usually I'd be worried in case that messes up the "all destroyed = lose" trigger - although I'm 90% sure you still lose if you only have civilians on the map, but in this case since you only "get" the civilians after you get the gunboats, and the nature of the mission means Nod can't kill the gunboats, I figured that if the players does lose everything they'll assume they haven't lost because the boats are still there, and not because "OMG I MUST HAVE INVISIBLE CIVILIANS!"

Well, needing to switch it up AND adhere to my strict set of rules, I think I'll actually flip it around. You must expand your Nod defenses fast enough to defeat the fast approaching GDI "armada" or so the idea is right now. These concepts usually change about 20 times before I complete them. Of course, that's 2 or 3 missions down the road. Right now, I'm beginning the "defend your island from swarms of ORCAs and hovercraft" mission... But thanks for the groundbreaking work! You know, just for you, I went ahead and found a way to add a "Reinforcements" alert for the Multi 5 gunboats when they turn up. Now not even minor complaints survive! (And to be fair the lack of an alert bugged me as well.)

Sharing is caring! You're more than welcome to use anything I find. I'm guessing you're going to use it to remake the original "gunboats go up a river and get zapped by an obelisk" campaign mission in a more awesome form? Looking forwards to seeing it.

Intriguing ... I could use a semi-intelligent Ai Airstrike! I've sent you a PM about it though, seems I'll need your wizardry to get it to work for me, if you'd be so kind!

Hope you like it, Matt! I must confess I used a disgusting method to make the gunboats work. Maybe even ... revolting. But since the player can never see it ... it's fine, right? Do remember to download version 3 though, the win trigger was broken in v.2. Although you can still play the mission fine, the lack of "Mission Accomplished" makes me sadface.

Hey guys, another mission for you. Matt did ask for me to "keep 'em coming" so I will! I managed to work out how to have reinforced gunboats which shoot (yes, you read that correctly!), so of course I then had to come up with a mission to showcase this. And so, voila, Cry Me A River was born! It was originally called Crimea River, which I thought was exceptionally clever, but then I worried it might offend someone so I remade it. Anyway, I hope you enjoy it, and I'll look forwards to seeing a slew of awesome naval missions from you guys! Hopefully. Cry Me A River Our spy plane has found a Nod R&D facility well hidden in an African river valley. We're not sure what they're researching, and we need to find out, therefore it is imperative that you capture the Tech Centre. The base is exceptionally well fortified, but the river that Nod is using as coolant for their power stations is the weakness. Destroy the turrets defending it, and our gunboats will tear the heart out of the base. Changelog: The mission was far too hard, so made some adjustments Discovered CCMap has a charming habit of breaking the win trigger every time the mission is edited - fixed Added a "Reinforcements have arrived" alert for the gunboats Nod now actively tries to counter the gunboats by replacing shore artillery units and adding MRLS to defend the power plants River_v.5.zip

Woo!

Guilty as charged I'm afraid, Jacko. People correctly complained that my early missions, while looking nice, were too easy. So I tried to make the more recent ones harder ... but it's a difficult balance to strike in many ways. Too hard will just be frustrating. In this mission I coded a couple of sneak attacks by artillery in, as you noticed. One to attack the base power as Matt mentioned, and another to assault the tech centre from above as happened to you. The reasoning behind these are that it would be a reward for players who are keeping an eye on the radar, or who have scouted carefully and are watching enemy units leaving their bases while holding their own positions. When I put some of these evil sneaky things in, I do try to make sure there's ways the player can counter them. That way the player can be tested, but feel satisfied when they overcome the problem on the second try, or counter it in advance. It's also nice for the player - I think anyway - if they see the computer doing things which give the illusion of intelligence. Such as sneak attacks of this nature, since it's what a player themselves would do. And thanks Matt, glad you beat it and enjoyed it. But you're right about the briefing, these days I'm finding the character limit allowed for briefings to be very tight, as my missions became more complicated. I still want the briefings to be comprehensible and not a laundry list of bullet point objectives! But it's getting hard to squeeze all the info in, in a coherent way. Another problem with missions becoming more complex, is players will find more inventive ways to break them. Like in this mission, I had to add loss triggers to each of the bio research labs, which are removed a second before each one gets hit by the nuke, just to stop a sneaky player force firing on each of them to win easily. P.S - Really reeeeeeally miss the Red Alert in-game mission timer, so useful for many of my missions for a player to see a time constraint...

What would a mission be without sneak attacks? Glad you like it.

Hello folks, another mission for you to sink your teeth into! This is another hybrid mission, beginning with base reclamation, and then becoming a "king of the hill" style scenario where you have to hold a distant objective. Once you venture out and secure the missile silo control structure, you'll then have to defend it until each missile has been hacked into and redirected back at its launcher. Only once all four silos have been destroyed will you win, however if you take too long, you risk the missiles hitting their targets which will result in a mission failure! Return to Sender The Brotherhood has reactivated a Soviet-era missile silo in the Siberian wastelands, and launched four missiles! Nod's positions are heavily fortified, and the weather and terrain are preventing us from moving heavy armour in to support you, but perhaps we can cause the complex to destroy itself. Use what you can find, capture the missile control centre and hold it until we can redirect the missiles back at the launch silos! Be swift, but wary. We don't know what other Soviet tech Nod has uncovered. Changelog: Added another loss trigger for the player in the form of all destroyed, meaning if they lose everything before they capture the tech centre they'll still lose the mission. RTS_v.2.zip

You can use Built It to trigger an event where discovering a building of yours under the shroud will fire the trigger. However, I want to make a mission where discovering your own tech centre starts an event, but the list of Built It entries from Nyergud's manual is incomplete. With the "Built it" action, this is the structure ID. Here is the list of structure ID's for the normal buildings that can be built. Choose from: TMPL = 20 PROC = 7 PYLE = 15 EYE = 21 SILO = 8 HAND = 19 WEAP = 0 HPAD = 9 FIX = 17 GTWR = 1 HQ = 4 SBAG = 60 (*) ATWR = 2 SAM = 10 CYCL = 61 (*) OBLI = 3 AFLD = 11 BRIK = 62 (*) GUN = 5 NUKE = 12 BARB = 63 (*) FACT = 6 NUK2 = 13 WOOD = 64 (*) (*) : I haven't tested these...but the numbers are right. My question is, does anyone know what the Built It ID number is for the Tech Centre? Looking at the list, it seems the structures are from 0 to 21, with 14, 16 and 18 missing. I assume these are for Hospital, Biolab and Tech Centre, but if anyone knows for sure that would be handy! EDIT After some testing, it seems HOSP (Hospital) is 14, 16 appears to be nothing, BIO (Biolab) is 18, and MISS (Tech Centre) is 22

Handy stuff, thanks. I'd run into one of those issues myself as it happens. In Retaliation, if you're not careful, Nod can capture your weapons factory. I wanted there to be a punishment for letting this happen, in that Nod will build med tanks and attack you with them, but, no dice. Eventually I had it that if Nod captures the weapons factory they get a one time reinforcement of 2 mammoth tanks to represent "stolen" tech.

Well, that sucks. I wanted to have four nukes land at the same time, guess that's going to be impossible. I'll just have to stagger them again, but that looks less awesome

Test map included. Even with a Temple given to all houses, and a trigger to give them a nuke at game time units 3, only BadGuy fires a missile. I also tried playing this map as BadGuy to see if GoodGuy could launch a nuke, seems not either. Does anyone know why this is, or a way around it? scg100ea.BIN scg100ea.INI

I'm 99% sure I did try using force move. It's my go-to solution for dealing with that sort of issue, but maybe because of the gimmicky nature of tricking the AI into deploying an MCV with the weird Rescue command, it just wouldn't play ball with me here. Although now I think of it, it MIGHT have worked, but there was also another issue I needed to concurrently solve. That is, even if the MCV doesn't panic-deploy, on being attacked it will try to "attack" back. It'll chase your tanks, or try to squish your infantry. While that was a bit better than the panic deploy problem, it still meant a clever player could lure the MCV away from the convoy and kill it. In that case, the issue where it skips to the last order was actually beneficial, since it would do a 3-point turn and race away back down the road. And the road has GDI guards. Much better than the silly MCV chasing your men into a dark forest ...

You're on the right track, as always. Indeed, the celltriggers aren't for the stealth. They're the triggers which govern the movement of the convoy, so in fact they're all triggered by the computer GDI units rather than the player's Nod forces. The reason there's so many is that I needed to come up with a cunning plan to get around some problems with the deploying MCV trick, mainly, that if it gets attacked by anything it will instantly skip to its last teamtype instruction - which is to deploy - and do that on the spot. Not handy for a convoy assault mission as you can guess! Although it could be worked into the mission as the driver hitting the "oh shit deploy" button, I decided I really didn't want that to happen, because a clever human player would be able to exploit that, trigger the MCV deploy, and kill it easily after its escorts drive on. So as you can see from the .ini file, the MCV convoy is not just a series of waypoint commands and a deploy at the end, but in fact broken up into several stages, each of which is actually a looped patrol. And each of these patrols clips into a line of celltriggers which start the next patrol. And each patrol also has a steadily increasing U1 number. I know you can see where this is going ... This means that when the MCV is attacked, it will still skip to the last queued instruction in its current teamtype. But this is no longer deploy, but simply another waypoint. The practical effect is, that when the MCV is attacked, it will appear to try to take evasive action and lure the player into chasing it ... straight into the teeth of its escorts. Basically using a "flaw" in the teamtype logic to simulate intelligence. Only the very last stage of the convoy teamtypes has the "rescue" instruction, and that teamtype is only activated when the MCV convoy has re-entered safe territory, so the player cannot trigger it with a last minute attack on the MCV. In addition, the GDI computer player has a BuiltIt trigger which destroys trigger XXXX when a construction yard is built. And trigger XXXX is if you destroy the MCV, you win the mission. On the subject of BuiltIt, there was also another fun trick I used in this mission which I didn't know was possible: the BuiltIt trigger also fires if you discover the appropriate building from beneath the shroud, not just if you actively build it. Previously I used to ring shrouded bases with celltriggers to get the same effect, but it was never reliable enough. In fact Westwood themselves do this with that Covert Ops mission where you start with 4 rocket men and a flame tank in the desert, and have to capture a chinook and fly to your ruined base, can't remember what it was called though, they ringed your base with celltriggers, but sometimes you could trigger them before discovering your base - or discover the base without stepping on the triggers. BuiltIt makes this timing much more reliable, for say, starting production with a BuiltIt trigger tied to the player building a Construction Yard - which will fire when the player discovers their base

Thanks, that means a lot. ^_^

Hello everyone. Got another mission for you, and this one took a while to make. So much testing ... This is a hybrid mission, beginning with stealth tank adventures, leading into a convoy interception mission. There's also a twist. If the convoy escapes, you don't fail, but it'll build up a base and GDI will come gunning for you! And they have pretty big guns. This mission has a variation on the deploying MCV trick, where you have quite some time to explore the map before the convoy arrives so you can plan out where you're going to attack it from. What was Briefly Yours is now Mine GDI has pushed us out of this region, and we have learned that an armoured convoy is en route with an MCV. With their primary force lured away by a feigned retreat, now is the perfect time to stage an ambush and counterattack. Rally what is left of our forces, and intercept the MCV before it can reach its destination and deploy. If you fail, you must find a way to destroy GDI's presence entirely. Changelog: Changed the build order of the GDI base structures Tightened up the convoy so it doesn't end up being too dispersed Greatly increased variety and triggers for GDI attacks Briefly_Yours_v.3.zip

Observing them is fine in their little village, but when some goody-two-shoes GDI decide to inadvertently spread them all over the country, well, could be in pandemic territory! Scorched earth is the only way.

It's mission time! You know how you guys really love hard Nod missions? Well you do now, and here's a hard one to keep the challenge level high. You'll be relieved to know that you don't need to besiege a GDI fortress vomiting out endless Mammoth Tanks though! There's hard, and then there's ... that. In this mission you'll be playing the nefariously sneaky Nod in a holdout scenario. But you don't need to hold your base, you instead need to defend several mountain passes, through which GDI is trying to evacuate civilians. Silly GDI don't realise the Brotherhood has seeded the village with Tiberium to observe its effects, and so you must ensure no infected civilians manage to escape. No Mercy We recently seeded a local village with Tiberium to observe its effects on human physiology. GDI, squeamish as ever, has discovered our project and is preparing to evacuate the civilians from the area through the mountain passes. We have already secured these, and you must ensure no civilians escape. Be advised, there may be another route we have not yet discovered. The GDI presence is a secondary target - the mission will be complete when all the evacuees have been killed. No Mercy.zip

Hello people, another mission from me. This time you get to play as Nod, assaulting a strong GDI fortress, but with the usual nasty twist - you'll need to try to move your forces through canyons to launch attacks. If GDI spots you on the high ground, they'll call in airstrikes on your head! Eagle's Eyrie Our operations in Central Africa have hit a roadblock in the form of a heavily defended GDI Airbase in the province. You will need to move in and take it down. Raze everything to the ground, but focus on their communication centres. Be wary, GDI air support in this region is exceptional. Make use of the canyons to hide your forces. You will need to use both stealth and guile to have any hope of success. Eagles_Eyrie_v.1.zip

Thanks for the feedback, guys! Although it's strange the stealth tanks behaved like that, Darkstar. I've checked the .ini and played it again, but whenever I play this map the stealths never go near the guard towers. They move between outlying tiberium patches and guard each one for 5 game units before moving on. When I play I can rely on an unwatched harvester being jumped by those invisible bastards. There is another stealth tank which does move between waypoints without stopping, but that one doesn't roam the middle, it curves around the side to attack your base from the top of the cliffs. Anyway, made some changes! - Nod attacks are more frequent and stronger - The northeast hospital gets attacked slightly more often - Tiberium fields slightly reduced in size - Starting forces reduced in size - Nod base redesigned, since the more frequent attacks needed more room to marshal because I noticed them getting stuck more