Command & Conquer - Combined Arms mod for OpenRA

It's not as easy as it sounds.

This is something that would need to be implemented in the engine, so better to ask on the OpenRA Discord, or on their GitHub (it's been brought up many times though, and afaik no progress in 5+ years).

What difficulty are you playing on?

The Scrin attacks at the end of mission 1 scale with the number of units the player has, so it shouldn't matter too much how prepared you are (at least, less than it used to).

The selected unit tooltip should give you enough information re: how to handle the Scrin units; it tells you their armor type and the things they are strong against. Many non-Scrin units perform differently to their original counterparts too, so the learning curve isn't unique to playing vs Scrin.

You could also try playing the "Testing Grounds" skirmish map which gives you access to all units in the game and has a bunch of respawnable dummies to test against.

Thanks for the tips.

I was able to handle the surprise onslaught in Mission 1, since I had already built a sizable force and I had been fortifying my base to withstand the Soviet attacks, but Mission 2 starts on a timer and limited starting troops and resources. My first two attempts on Normal went horribly because I had to hurry and build a force to clear a path for incoming convoys, but I did not really understand what I was up against; the starting infantry and the Jeep did well enough against the Scrin guarding the first convoy's path, but then got wiped out by the Scrin troops stationed near the Oil Derrick.

I guess I will eventually figure it out on my own (I have already started doing Skirmishes as the Scrin against Easy AI to familiarise myself with its units and the ways they look), but I still feel like the campaign could have done a better job at teaching me out to deal with the Scrin. Even though the human units have been reworked, they still follow the C&C formula I have gotten used to, e.g. flamethrowers, machine guns and mortars are good against infantry, cannons are good against heavy armour, etc.

With the Scrin, however, it is not quite as intuitive. For example, one Scrin unit looks like a giant Baneling from StarCraft II - which, I know, came out after C&C3;, but again I have not played the latter - and even after glancing at its tooltip, I still cannot tell how to counter it: should I use Rocket Soldiers against it - which in C&C tend to be pretty effective against most tanks so long as you keep your distance - or do I need to send tanks to take it out? Then again, it seems to spit acid, which depending on the video game can be more effective against flesh or armour... These are the kinds of questions I have to ask myself on top of having to worry about racing against the clock.

I think simply playing the campaign on Easy difficulty will solve the difficulty issue (we have considered renaming Easy to Normal, Normal to Hard, and Hard to Brutal, so that it's closer to what people might expect from the difficulty of the original games).

The sudden introduction to playing vs Scrin is possibly something that can be improved, but by the same token there may be people who haven't played RA2, Tiberian Sun, Renegade, Generals, or even the original RA/TD, so there'll be people that similarly don't have any knowledge of units from those games. The fix would therefore be to add more missions so that units are introduced more gradually; which is something that's already being worked on - more missions will be added into the existing chapters (6 planned for the next release, alongside a new chapter). It's a lot of work though, so it's going to be something that'll gradually improve over time.

I actually think the Prologue missions do a fairly good job at introducing the basics of each human faction. Heck, even the first part of Mission 5 lets you take your time and experiment with the Allied tech tree, since the only thing you have to worry about is the regular Soviet attack wave. It has been a while since I played RA2 - I would love to replay it, but I do not know what to make of that EA Play subscription thing and I keep hearing rumours of an upcoming Remastered re-release - and I had forgotten all about units such as the Prism Tank, yet it was easy to understand how to make the most of it, since all I had to do is to park a bunch of them at the entrance of my base and watch how it fares against the different Soviet attackers. In Mission 6, I was much more reluctant to do that since I had to keep moving and I could not afford wasting time and resources in producing units that would turn inadequate for the task.

While it is true that the mission is much more manageable on Easy, I still came close to fail to clear out the path for the third convoy in time as I mistakenly tried attacking the Alien stronghold first and I lost many units - mostly Scout Tanks, as I was not sure Medium Tanks would be fast enough for the task and I was not feeling confident enough to gamble on Chrono Tanks - to that giant Scrin walker thing. Luckily, by then, I had managed to secure enough funds to replace my units in time, but still, that was a bit too close for comfort - although thankfully nowhere near as some of TD's worst missions...

I am glad to hear there are more missions in the works. Despite the issues that I mentioned, I love this game and I thank you for it!

Have you tried giving it a handicap?

Or if you want to delve into the yaml files, there's one under mods/ca/rules called default.yaml. In there if you find "ProductionTimeMultiplier@easybonus:", on the line below there's "Multiplier: 120", which means Easy AI's ground units take 20% extra time to produce. You could change this to a higher value to make it produce even more slowly, which will reduce the attack frequency accordingly.