Comments - Cobber

I managed to beat him on Hard yesterday playing as the Superweapons general.

How I did it was a combination of prioritising getting a couple of extra chinooks to fly to the supply zone to the north west and north to get some extra bundles of supplies early on in the match, then building the airfield over the war factory to get some commanches to deal with tomahawk missile mobile launchers specifically.

I focused then on building the strategy centre in amongst the civilian buildings to the south east of my starting location to make it harder for the AI to hit and destroy with powers, then building some supply drop zones in a dispersed way in and around those same buildings, all while building the naval cannons close behind the epm patriots batteries as quickly as possible, and also by accident finding that there is a cache of UN money supply crates in the very bottom right hand corner of the map that helped give me a financial boost to get a couple more drop zones quickly.

I used my own generals powers to take out his sole particle cannon and strategy centre as early as possible, which he failed to rebuild, and that helped immensely once they were both out of the battle.

Also I had a bit of luck involved in beating him, largely in terms of when the attack waves came at the start and about mid-way through, and I noticed that because his economy isn't as strong as I first thought with having only 1 supply drop zone and 1 oil derrick it would cause lulls in his attacks as he rebuilt his forces after a wave was destroyed, so when the lulls came it gave me the opportunity to rebuild defences that he'd managed to destroy, or replace dozers that were taken out while repairing during the previous attack wave/s.

It definitely took some trial and error to come up with this strategy, but it did work and should in theory work again when I do another attempt to test it, this time with the Laser general.

Couldn't have said it better myself, on hard it's beyond impossible to get a decent foothold to hold off the attacks, especially as you have no resources anywhere nearby your starting location (aside from the 1 supply dock) to use to supercharge your economy early on to give you even half a chance!

I note that at present the Boss Generals in both challenge and skirmish modes are effectively the vanilla ZH factions. My question is, are there any plans to make them the real Boss generals that they were intended to be in those modes sometime soon?

I personally would love to do a Generals challenge mode playthrough as USA General Ironside, packing all of the best USA units/defensive structures from the various USA generals like King Raptors etc, but I also understand fully that implementing such things takes time and effort, especially when it is only a small team developing the mod.

Finally, this mod is definitely a must have mod for me, as it really makes Zero Hour into a truly outstanding gameplay experience, so please keep up the great work!!!

I can confirm the Zone Trooper glitch/bug. From my observations and testing it always occurs after using the Jump Jets ability but seems to be based on where they launch from/land, and particularly if they launch from close to/land close to a ledge or other inaccessible feature that they can't walk over normally.

And yet another observation: playing on Normal difficulty the Firestorm mod specific edited NOD Washington DC mission, the mission where you first get access to flame tanks, I quickly got swarmed with strong GDI attacks, including Predator tanks (which is not something in the vanilla game from memory), and between the lack of starting resources relative to the number of attacking enemy units as opposed to my starting units, combined with not having access to Scorpion tanks to at least try to level the playing field, I found it almost impossible to adequately defend my base. I no doubt will learn to use a different (and effective) starting strategy, but it would be nice to have a bit more time or resources to prepare, so that its not like getting hit with a runaway freight train soon after I gain control of the game's mission cursor and functions.

Same thing happens in the vanilla GDI Sarajevo campaign mission, though it is obviously not the edited map specific for this mod, as you have not released the edited GDI missions yet, and again I will learn to manage that situation better, but all the same it makes for a very frustrating, and steep, learning curve for what is supposed to otherwise be the most balanced difficulty setting for the SP campaign mode. If those 2 missions could be a bit more measured in the speed with which the enemy swarms you at the start, that would be nice, or at least having a larger than 10,000 credit starting resource pool to build up some defensive strength to repel the attacks as an alternative instead of delaying the attacks starting times.

Correction, GDI engineers in the TW Advanced mod are able to repair buildings using that special ability but NOD Saboteurs do not have that special ability so therefore are NOT able to repair civilian buildings or those special 3 slot defensive bunkers.

Regardless, I still think this mod could benefit from introducing a similar mechanism, but it would be nice if it didn't involve having to use a special ability to do so but rather a change in the code (and cursor icon on a damaged building indicating that the Engineer class unit is going to repair it, not garrison in it) to allow the ability to occur automatically with a damaged building, like in RA2. However, I am not a coder so I do not know if this is even possible, and if it is whether it would be easy to implement or not.

Another observation is that in the Tiberium Wars Advanced mod, engineers are able to repair civilian buildings, thanks to that mod introducing a special (manually selectable) unit ability that you can then target onto a civilian building to get it repaired. I think this mod could benefit from introducing that feature too, particularly for the missions where you need to use bunkers and other garrisonable buildings to provide your infantry with cover so that they don't get slaughtered, particularly the bunkers which are obviously intended for use as defensive structures.

Continued from above...

As an interim solution to this inconsistency, can I suggest that instead of changing the prerequisite requirements for either of the GDI or NOD Tiberium Processing buildings, which would probably be quite time consuming and tedious to do, please consider increasing the Tiberium storage capacity of both GDI/NOD's silos and refineries to a higher reserve to compensate for when not being able to build those buildings? Particularly for if the NOD one can be built but not its GDI equivalent, so as to prevent me and anyone else playing as GDI form having to go out of our way to capture the NOD Con Yard in order to access their Processing Facility building. And any increase in the storage capacity of silos/refineries is pointless without an increase in the ability to harvest that greater amount, so also please look at making an increase to the re-spawn rate for Tiberium fields and Tiberium crystals to balance having a higher storage capacity (especially for when access to those advanced processing buildings is guaranteed, as the fields already get depleted fast with only 2-3 harvesters working on them at once but will likely be depleted faster still if there is no storage limit in play any longer) as otherwise, in my mind, it defeats the purpose of having an unlimited storage capacity, particularly as neither GDI/NOD can build the growth accelerator on Tiberium field cores like the Scrin can to increase the re-spawn rate that way.

4. The GDI missiles upgrade is not appearing to be accessible in the vanilla GDI campaign Cairo, Alexandria or even Croatia missions, even though the Tech Centre is buildable and most upgrades in the Tech Centre (like Railguns) apart from the missile upgrade and the sonic fencing upgrade are enabled, including the unusable Orca Sensor Pod upgrade as well as a duplication of the Pitbull Mortar upgrade, which is the exact same as the one in the Tank Armoury building. Maybe when I play the Sarajevo GDI mission this will no longer be the case, but in the missions I've just identified it is inaccessible even though it appears that its prerequisite requirements have all been met in those missions, namely building the Tech Centre building to gain access to the upgrade.

Other than these observations, I can confidently say that so far the AI is/was definitely building and using the full repertoire of ground units available to it in each mission I've played, and I anticipate that it will also do the same with the air units once I hit the Sarajevo mission in the vanilla GDI campaign. Again, overall I think that this mod is superior to both Tiberium Essence and Tiberium Wars Advanced in its unit/tech offerings and overall quality and polish state, so I want to commend you for that and say please keep up the fantastic work, as this mod has the potential, in my opinion, to become the best mod of all available mods for C&C3; Tiberium Wars on ModDB.

Some observations I've made when playing the current v1.55 of this mod, which so far in my opinion is a superior mod to both Tiberium Essence and Tiberium Wars Advanced in terms of its unit/tech offerings and overall quality and polish state:

1.
I had 2 Hammerheads/Sniper teams glitch out on me during the Alexandria mission of the vanilla GDI campaign, with the Hammerheads having landed and the Sniper teams having "entered" the Hammerheads (in that their icon was filling the Hammerhead's single passenger capacity slot indicating that they had loaded into the Hammerhead) but they were still partially visible on the ground, and neither them nor the Hammerheads would accept any sort of move order. The unload button was greyed out but the Hammerheads wouldn't lift off, because even though they had the icon indicating that the Sniper teams had loaded, they hadn't fully entered the Hammerheads that would normally trigger them to lift off again, and so the 2 Hammerheads as a result did not lift off.

2.
The NOD Shadow teams (again, in the vanilla GDI campaign Alexandria mission) spammed deploying the Spectre artillery beacons all over the place, but not in a logical or coherent manner. It is/was completely random, as far as I could see, and many of the beacons are being deployed in absolute no-man's land, causing absolutely no damage to be inflicted on my troops (which obviously was something I was relieved about) but also it seemed like they had next to no cooldown on being able to do it again; either that or NOD had a massive number of Shadow teams running around doing that, but it was appearing to be so randomly targeted that it was almost chaotic randomicity with which they did place the beacons.

3. The NOD advanced Tiberium Processing Facility is unlocked earlier than the mod's newly introduced GDI equivalent, making it desirable for me to capture their Con Yard specifically to gain access to that building so that I could get the unlimited Tiberium storage capacity perk that those buildings provide. I noticed this on both the vanilla GDI campaign Alexandria & Cairo missions, with testing confirming that the NOD building was able to be built on both missions, but not the GDI equivalent which was locked out for both of those missions because the NOD prerequisite buildings for it were fully buildable, whereas the GDI prerequisite of Space Command Uplink was not. That lack of access to the GDI Space Command Uplink prerequisite thereby prevented the GDI equivalent from being built, but it was appearing in the support structures tab, greyed out for the lack of the prerequisite building having been already built, but it was clearly visible as otherwise being buildable, like its NOD equivalent is/was.

Continued...

Something else that I have noticed is that the GDI Sniper teams do not seem like they fire out of buildings anymore, at least not out of GDI bunkers/dugouts from what I have seen so far anyway.

Correction, they do fire out of dugouts, but for some reason just not in the GDI Langley AFB mission nor whatever the name is of the Egyptian act mission where you destroy the NOD weapons research and production facilities, I.E. the mission before the Alexandria and Cairo missions that complete the Egypt part of the GDI campaign.

And I noticed further down in the comments, in a few different comments, that others have previously reported the same missing MCV problem, so at least it is safe to say I'm not the only one who has/had the problem, and not the only one to have reported it either.

In the GDI campaign's mission to liberate the White House, the Ox transport that in the vanilla game normally drops off the MCV after the Firehawk bombing run ends didn't drop it off when playing with this mod enabled (I'm using the current Beta 6 v1.8 version of the mod), making that mission impossible to successfully complete (on Normal difficulty, let alone Hard) without either using a trainer or somehow getting extremely lucky with the NOD unit movements.

Looks almost long enough to be an armed stretch hummer. Now THAT is one way of arriving in style, and anyone that criticises your choice in outfit or costume, were you to arrive this way, might just be 'barrelled' into rethinking their critique...

I know right!!! Such a great, and massively underrated game, that was way ahead of its time for its styling, game play and unique unit design/customisation capability!

Reminds me of playing Warzone 2100 and using the Cobra body, wheels traction and light cannon combination to create a medium/light highspeed "tank" to use in the earlier part of the game. Just in case anyone is wondering what I'm referring to, Warzone 2100 is of late 1990's/early 2000's vintage.

Pre-war T26 would be a better fit to compare this unit to. The T34 had a longer main gun barrel, chassis and the T34's turret was both a bit longer and rounder than this too.

Please disregard the question I asked previously, my game's install somehow had become corrupted although I have no idea how or why. I just did a full clean re-install of the game and everything seems to be working now as it should.

For installation is it simply a case of copy/paste for all of the files straight into the Zero Hour install folder, or do some of the mod's files need to be put into the Zero Hour data folder?

I'm trying to run the mod, and it appears to be loading up but then after a wee bit it just crashes without actually running, or reaching the main menu ingame. And all of this is happening without any error message popping up on screen, although I can hear the Windows error sound chime in the background after a wee bit.

I'm running the First Decade version on Windows 10, and have both GenPatcher & GenTool installed, which allows me to actually run the First Decade version on Windows 10 as it won't run without the GenPatcher patch for Windows 10 installed in the first place...

Very keen to play this mod, from looking at a short Youtube video of it it looks every bit as good as ZH Continue, the End of Days and Project Raptor in terms of what it improves and adds to the game.

I realised that just the other night, sorry for not being more careful in double-checking first before commenting.

Also, the laser focus crystal upgrade is not accessible in the strategy centre for the laser general, but all laser units (and the laser base defence turrets) for said general all list it as one of their upgrades.

This bug is also occurring for the same general against the same challenge opponent on the hard difficulty.

I've noticed that General Ironside (USA Comm in Chief General) only has generic USA equipment/units/buildings in both skirmish and the generals' challenge, whilst in the USA campaign mission 18 you have the best units and buildings (minus the EMP Patriot missile defence) from the 4 unique USA generals at your full disposal. Is this difference a bug, mistake or intentional difference? Or have I somehow miss-installed the mod, causing this to be the case? I'm using the full version, not patched update version of v2.52, with a clean install in a specifically set up folder for the mod.

Also, in that same mission, in the generals power selection screen, you can pick the power to have tomahawk cruise missile mobile launchers be built at promotion level 1, rather than without any promotion, but you don't actually have access to them in this mission, instead having the laser general's laser artillery unit instead. Also, in mission 17 you have at the mission start indicators that you'll have access to pathfinders and commanches, but you can't actually build any pathfinders as you don't have the promotion power available to access them, and there is no base aside from an abandoned barracks, with (very) limited funds available for the mission too.

Just a couple of discrepancies that I thought I should raise, otherwise its a fantastic mod, and one of only a few openly offering an active and working generals challenge mode too. Looking forward to the next version release, whenever that drops.

I recently had to upgrade my laptop as the old one's motherboard died. On the old laptop this mod was working perfectly fine, but it refuses to run on the new one. The old HP Omen17 w106-TX laptop had a NVIDIA GTX1070 6GB graphics card and DX12, with an Intel i7-5800HQ 2.4GHz 4 core processor, whilst the new ASUS A15 TUF laptop has a NVIDIA RTX 3070 8GB card and DX12, and an AMD Ryzen 7-5800H 3.2GHz 8 core processor, but even though both had/have DX12 as the standard DirectX the mod refuses to load and run on the new ASUS laptop.

My problem is that whenever I try to run this mod on the new laptop it is giving me an error message, claiming that DX8.1 isn't installed and it cannot detect that my video card meets the minimum game requirements, which is ironic given my new video card completely blows those requirements out of the sky, so to speak, and DX12 far exceeds the minimum DX8.1 requirement.

I have the GenPatch and GenTool tools and fixes installed, because my Operating System is Windows 10, and my vanilla ZH install is working perfectly fine, as well as my Destructive Forces v1.4 mod installation (which is installed in a completely separate folder to vanilla ZH), and even though I've definitely installed this mod correctly nothing I've tried so far to get it to run has worked. I am using the First Decade version of ZH, and I'm not installing anything to do with ZH or ZH mods on the laptop's default C Drive (SSD), but on my D Drive (HDD) instead.

Any solutions for why it is refusing to run on my new ASUS laptop, which whilst it has a higher grade processor and graphics card is otherwise virtually identical in function to the old Omen17 laptop that the mod happily ran on?

Couple more issues I've noticed; 1st issue is that the Orca Carryall has the image for the Firehawk Stratoboosters upgrade in its upgrade boxes in the top left-hand corner of its unit info/picture popup but no actual ability button to activate it; not that it needs that ability anyway. 2nd issue is that the Sniper Teams have an ability button to do a scanner sweep once scanner packs is researched but it is greyed out; I.E. it cannot be activated even if the upgrade has been researched. Finally I've now done 2 GDI campaign missions in which my Firehawks have not gained any levels of veterancy so it must be some sort of bug or something; possibly something to do with them no longer having a bombing ability perhaps? Oh and the outposts build radius is quite a bit smaller than the previous version of the mod; just wondering if that was done intentionally or not? Very good job otherwise, keep up the good work.

Also for some reason Engineer was unable to capture Mutant Outpost in GDI mission where you lay siege to Temple Prime; cursor would not change to the arrows showing it can be entered by engineer. And also found in all GDI missions so far that NOD SAM turrets hub was replaced by another turret sometimes and that the turrets were not connected to the hub by the wires or whatever they are I.E. could not take them all out at once like normal by only taking out the hub. That seems to be all that I've seen being unusual so far, will post if I find anything else. Great Work!!

In the GDI mission where you have to retake Cologne in Germany from the Scrin my Firehawks were not gaining any veterancy at all despite the fact that I must have taken down something like 10-15 devastator warships with just 1 Firehawk during the course of the mission. Another issue is the NOD infantry being visible on the map but somehow are still "stealthed" and therefore not auto-targetable by either units or base defences. I would like to add that it wasn't only Militia squads but also Black Hand squads and Militant Missile squads which appeared to be affected by the same issue.

Just a suggestion: is it possible that you could code the orcas to only fire their chaingun once upgraded with it at infantry. Its annoying as hell to have them fire their missiles at infantry when realistically all they need to turn them into mincemeat is their chaingun, not to mention it wastes the missiles which would be better to be used against vehicles/buildings. Just asking cause in TWA it was set up like that, it worked without a hitch (least it did when I last played that mod, which was ages ago now) and it made a big difference for anti-infantry firepower, particularly with dealing with Black Hand squads or Masterminds. If not I understand. On a different note can't wait till your next release with the new skins for the Mammoth Mk II etc.

I like to try and play a challenge in this mod but always seems to crash after I finish the first mission of a challenge no matter which General I choose. So my question is, is there something I can do to overcome this or is it something that is unable to be overcome for whatever relevant reason? I understand if its something that cannot be fixed but it'd be nice to know nonetheless. Always loved this mod, makes the skirmishes much more diverse and challenging than vanilla ZH.

Looks like the sort of thing that only a tactical nuke could deal with, unlikely that a human or AI player would have enough choppers to deal with this many T90's, at least not before they do significant damage anyway.

Ouch, wouldn't wanna be standing in the crosshairs then lol