Dawn of the Tiberium Age (DTA) is a stand-alone mod that combines Tiberian Dawn (C&C 95) and Red Alert. While classic mode gets as close to the original game-play and balance as possible, Enhanced mode provides improved game balance and a lot of fun new stuff. DTA features many customization options for Skirmish and multiplayer (where you can play as GDI, Nod, Allies and Soviet on over 200 maps), challenging original singleplayer missions, as well as co-op missions. Since this is a stand-alone mod, you don't require anything but the mod itself to be able to play: the original game is not required.
The DTA R&D labs have once again done the impossible.
This might look like a base built by a skilled human player who knows how to expand. But it is not. Instead, it is built by our new Advanced AI!
This AI expands through the map from one resource field to another. Once it has reached a resource field, it places a Refinery next to it, and then continues expanding to another one!
The AI also builds extra factories to bump up its unit production speed, depending on how many fields it has managed to expand to.
This makes the AI play far more competently on large maps with many resource fields, and makes matches vs the AI much more exciting and dynamic compared to the original TS engine AI which preferred sitting in its own corner for the whole match.
Thanks to this smarter AI expanding logic, we were also able to heavily cut the AI's cheats, while still having it be roughly as difficult as our old AI was! This opens the room for many human-like tactics to work against the AI, such as starving it by hunting down its harvesters!
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As a Skirmish / coop only player I always was quiet happy that the ai builds more "realistic" bases instead of spreading random buildings throughout the map. I personally would be more happy if the ai would still build their bases (and even use walls) and only expand to new Ressource fields by using the MCV. I strongly disagree with this kind of play style where you build the buildings all over the place since it destroys my immersion. I find the ai bases from the campaign missions ideal although they are scripted.
Nevertheless this new ai seems like a wonderful achievement for everyone who loves to play multiplayer and I'm very happy for them!
You can disable this new AI and still play with the old one, it is included as an option. You only won't be able to earn stars / score on maps if you have the new AI logic disabled.
We also mostly play Co-Op in our online community, and many players will find this more immersive in a way (some of our testers have already done). As it actually feels like you're battling a smart opponent instead of an AI that doesn't know how to play the game and needs massive discount bonuses to be able to fight back against skilled human players.
We would prefer for the AI to also expand with MCVs if distances between fields were too long to make building-crawling expansion viable, but unfortunately it'd be too technically complex to implement, at least in the near future.
Base Crawling just like the players do. This is how C&C is meant to be played.