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 next version of DTA will make limited use of the "Vinifera" engine extension in the form of a customized* build.
This engine extension has allowed me to write a Tiberian Dawn / Red Alert style area damage logic for our Nuke, which allows us to balance its damage much better and make it viable against more targets. In the next version of DTA, the Nuke will deal more damage against small buildings like base defenses, power plants and radars. Turtlers, beware!
However, we haven't increased the Nuke's damage against large buildings. It still takes about 80% of a refinery or war factory's health bar, but doesn't directly blow them up from a full HP state. We will have powerful tactical SWs, but we aren't going towards base-eliminating SWs like in RA2.
* Our customized build is unofficial from the standpoint of the official Vinifera developers (CCHyper) and so not endorsed by them. If you run into any issues with Vinifera in DTA or have questions about it, don't bother CCHyper with it, but contact me on the DTA Discord instead.
Official Vinifera source code: Github.com
Source code for our customized build: Github.com
Finally they will feel more akin to actual nukes (even if they were Davies Crocketts) rather than fat V2 shoved with some TNT
By the way, will turrets get armortype change, nukes get better against heavy armor in general, including tanks, or are just small building going to get hit much harder with new format of area damage?
Small buildings get hit much harder.
In our old implementation, made with invisible debris caused by the nuke explosion and the debris dealing damage, each cell in the area received a specific amount of damage. This made the nuke deal relatively a lot more damage against large buildings; a 4x3 refinery filling 12 cells got hit 12 times harder than a 1x1 turret.
Now with this new algorithm, every object in the area receives a specific amount of damage regardless of its size, so that 4x3 refinery and 1x1 turret receive an equal amount of damage.
As shown in the image, distance is still relevant, so a building that's far away receives less damage than a building directly in the center of the explosion. For multi-cell buildings like the refinery, the game looks up the closest building foundation cell to the explosion point and uses that cell for determining the distance to the nuke impact cell for the damage calculation.
Cool updates! I can hardly wait for the next patch.
Just a short question:
Will you change the damage rate of the Chrono Vortex and Ion Cannon as well?
We might also change the Chrono Vortex.
We don't have any plans to significantly change the Ion Cannon. It might get a small damage adjustment, but most likely nothing major.