Dawn of the Tiberium Age (DTA) is a stand-alone mod that combines and enhances Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert using a heavily customized Tiberian Sun engine. Featuring all 4 factions (GDI, Nod, Allies and Soviets) with extremely polished gameplay, DTA allows you to mix and match the factions as you'd like in tons of new multiplayer maps and challenge yourself in dozens of original missions.
You might've noticed that we released version 9.8 of DTA last weekend.
This is a relatively smaller patch, consisting mostly of balance and gameplay changes. They are, however, fairly important ones, and address several feedback items that our community has given to us over the last couple of versions. We'll go over the most significant of them and explain our motivations behind them.
Before that, however, let us mention we also added a bit of new content with this update: the "A Bridge Too Many" Co-Op mission, and the "The Ice Must Floe" multiplayer map. Grab some friends and go play them!
Starting with the gameplay changes, we reduced the damage green tiberium causes to infantry by 37.5%. Previously green tiberium dealt as much damage to infantry as in Tiberian Dawn, while our maps, including tiberium fields, are typically are much larger. This denied infantry use in tiberium-heavy maps a bit more than we, and our players, liked.
Not surprisingly, the advanced infantry, two of which we added in the previous update, didn't have their balance entirely perfect and they have been adjusted:
We also adjusted the balance of some of our aircraft. We likely aren't done with tweaking aircraft yet, but here is a "first batch" of balance changes as we continue to work on more of them.
And then, some individual unit changes:
We recently moved the Nod Cyborg epic to tier 3 (Research Facility) from tier 4 (Temple of Nod), alongside the Stealth APC. We felt this was good for making Nod's power progression more linear, but it also turned out to open the door to some really oppressive mid-game cheese attacks with Chem Warriors and the Cyborg in a Stealth APC, especially if the Nod player rushed for this combo. To balance it, we've moved the Stealth APC back behind the Temple.
Version 9.6 made the Chrono Tank actually powerful again, and now it truly works for multiple purposes, including epic fire-support and surprise cheese attacks on the enemy's base. It is powerful enough that we felt it no longer needed its anti-air weapon.
Talking about anti-air, we felt that Allies needed to spam a bit too many of these to achieve an effective mobile anti-air defense. It made them tedious to micromanage, especially because Allies depend relatively a lot on numbers even when it comes to regular ground forces. We shifted its power to be less spam-based by increasing its price and damage, so you need fewer of them for a decent AA cover.
Finally, this is not related to gameplay anymore, but we also remade the mission briefing screens to be higher in resolution and closer to those of the original games:
That covers most of the changes for version 9.8. Alongside these, we've also been doing a lot of work helping CCHyper get the Vinifera engine extension ready to be usable for the whole TS modding community, and continued work on the Covert Revolt campaign, still scheduled for next year.
As usual, you can download the build here on ModDB, or if you have DTA installed already, you can update through our client.
See you on the battlefield, commanders!
Announcing our new singleplayer campaign that we displayed a trailer of in our anniversary event.
Detailing some of the design choices in our latest update.
Major patch with a bit of everything: new maps, a co-op mission, gameplay and visual changes, bugfixes, engine improvements and a whole new map editor.
A new, powerful open-source map editor. Built to be familiar to existing mappers, it provides a lot of quality-of-life improvements and new features over...
This is the full version of Dawn of the Tiberium Age v9.8: all files necessary to play are included, so you also don't need to have the original game...
This installer will automatically download and install the latest version of Dawn of the Tiberium Age for you (the original games are not required).
This is the full version of Dawn of the Tiberium Age v9.7: all files necessary to play are included, so you also don't need to have the original game...
This is the full version of Dawn of the Tiberium Age v9.6: all files necessary to play are included, so you also don't need to have the original game...
This is the full version of Dawn of the Tiberium Age v9.5: all files necessary to play are included, so you also don't need to have the original game...
This is the full version of Dawn of the Tiberium Age v9.0: all files necessary to play are included, so you also don't need to have the original game...
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Hello devs, first let me thank you for the continued updates on this great mod /game. I just revisited it after some time ago and encountered that if I do an infiltration on an enemy's mcv building, then build their barracks and factory I'll get doubled troop icons in the building menu. Like two machine gunner tiles and even two advanced communications building tiles. It is very confusing and hard to distinguish why there's the clones and which one is built where. I would really appreciate if you could try to solve this in original Cnc manner. Like having the machine gunner as one single tile that is getti g built in the barracks I marked as main production. And having a different icon for GDI and Nod com centre. Is this possible? Or what was the original thought of having doubled tiles after infiltration of enemy buildings?
Hey,
The behaviour you're seeing is due to TS engine limitations. We're forced to have duplicates of some units, for example TD vs RA rocket infantry have different voice lines and weapon sounds even if stat-wise they were identical. When you own the related production facilities, you're able to build both (or up to 4 different Bazooka/Rocket Infantry).
We might be able to lessen sidebar the cameo spam with captured tech in the future with the Vinifera engine extension though.
My anti-malware seems to be marking the Vinifera engine the mod uses as malware.. is this a false positive or is this actual bad news?
Obviously a false-positive. Please report it to your anti-virus vendor as such.
Vinifera is easily picked up as a false-positive, because
1) it's a relatively "unknown" application, iow. not a popular software used by millions of people
2) Vinifera modifies code of the target process (Tiberian Sun) to achieve its effects, which is a similar technique that a lot of malware also use to hijack a system
Vinifera is an open-source project created with community collaboration. I haven't written most of the code myself (most of it is by CCHyper), but I've read through most of it and haven't seen anything suspicious. I've also made some contributions myself.
Official source: Github.com
DTA's current fork: Github.com
Excellent mod.
Now that DTA comes with a new, much improved map editor and all, I think it would be nice if you eventually add a thorough user manual to accompany the editor, both for multiplayer/skirmish maps and for missions. Most things can be figured out in some manner as it is, but a proper manual would make things so much better. Please consider it.
I can see how it'd be beneficial, but unfortunately we're stretched thin on developers.
If we create tutorials, they'll likely be video recordings, like the [4] Lakesides mapping video that we revealed the editor with.
Another possibility is that once I've managed to make the editor support terrain height and so Tiberian Sun, someone from the TS community outside of our stuff could make tutorials.
OK, thanks for the consideration. A few videos showing off a few key 'tricks' would indeed be useful, and the other possibility is something too. I do have most things figured out already (I've done experimentation in the past too), so I'll probably produce something eventually anyway.
If you have any questions, feel free to reach out! Either here on ModDB, or our forums, or if you want to get a response the fastest, then on our Discord.
Thank you! It won't be very soon, I'm dealing with something else right now, and there's no guarantee I'll commit to DTA map editing after all, but when and if the time comes if I have questions they'll probably appear in the forums.
And to close this with a small feature request with no pressure about time or anything, though you're probably planning to do it already: support in the editor for custom AI triggers, to enhance missions with AI attacks and the like similar to how you did for the 2nd tutorial mission.
Thanks again!
I'm indeed planning to do it at some point, but I don't know about the timeframe yet.
I'm also unsure about the interface, as I've personally found it much more convenient and efficient to create the AI triggers manually with Notepad++ rather than use any community-built tool for it. But I realize that having an user interface makes it more accessible for new mappers and AI scripters, so I'll still likely design and create something for it at some point.