GDI - Return to Sender (Single Player)

[nariac]

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

Edited May 2, 2017 by nariac

[MattAttack]

good times.. So I started to play this and was doing a good job of keeping my head above water and amassing a column of tanks when suddenly I was outflanked and my base was incapacitated.  Seriously hilarious!  I've used that tactic in my own missions and I rofl'd when it was used against me.  Unfortunately the house is stirring so I'll have to complete this later.  Very nice mission and concept.  I'm formulating some minor criticisms but I'll save them for when I beat the mission.  Good job!

[nariac]

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

[MattAttack]

Very imaginative mission!  Nice mix of fairly relentless attacks and the map is beautiful.  I particularly like how units off the playable area move over celltriggers to progress the mission forward.  I understand the necessity of a delayed trigger probably more than anyone!! Very clever and I've actually used that on some missions before.  Lol, Nariac is probably the only one who has any idea what I'm talking about, but good job!!  It is kind of a bummer that the nukes can't launch simultaneously, though.  My only real criticism-- and maybe I'm just slow since it's spelled out in the briefing-- is that unless you reveal the tech center soon enough, you reach a point of no return where you know in like 200 time units or whatever you're going to lose and there's nothing you can do about it.  On my first real playthrough, I was building up a massive force in the northern base not having yet revealed the tech center and I kept losing for seemingly no reason.  Then I re-read the briefing and realized how serious the time constraints were and that I was just not paying attention.  But "keep 'em coming" because at least I care that there are new missions being posted here.

 

PS I also like the creative use of the concrete slabs; they look like they're half covered with snow

[Jacko]

Difficult mission

Cruel economy

Particularly frustrating when either:

A: Wandering tanks get marmalised by really close proximity obelisks

B: A group of artillery suddenly one-shot the tech centre

C: RNG on team generation gives you about 30 mixed units to deal with before you've finished capturing the teal base

 

Seems pretty well designed though, looks sleek and generally properly put together.

[nariac]

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...