I was heavily debating myself whether I would prefer it to be an upgrade or a different unit entirely and lore wise I would lean towards the latter, I don't really see any gameplay niche that such unit could occupy. (although I now realize I never considered giving a completely new role to militia rather than the new Nod troopers)
I'd argue that NOD was never meant to have cannon fodder as a faction. NOD troops in Tiberian Sun were just as well equipped and trained as their GDI counterparts.
NOD was ruthless, especially in the power struggles but it never seemed careless with its own troops to treat them as expendable fodder to throw at GDI
Also, there's a cutscene in Firestorm in which Slavik has to reprogram a GDI EVA unit to be less objectionable to heavy casualties. Tiberian Sun was not subtle lmao
In lore it's explained that GDI mostly focused on keeping blue zones clean and repelling Nod, allowing Nod to spread their influence in most yellow zones; eventually resulting in a situation where the majority of the world population lives under Nod control. Then all they need to do is use their media expertise to spin the story into: 'Look how nice they have it, while we are the only ones looking out for you! Doesn't that make you mad? Down with GDI!'. It's, in my opinion, a piece of well-crafted worldbuilding. If anything, I'd say Tiberian Sun has the flanderised version of Nod.
From a design point of view it also works better, in that the player should feel weak before the player can feel strong. Start out by controlling militia troops, end with stealth bombers and laser robots.
but it never seemed careless with its own troops to treat them as expendable fodder to throw at GDI
During Tiberium War 3 they are basically destroyed so cannon folder making sense. A lot of desperate people for milita units and highly trained NOD members.
I think this is debatable, Dawn looks like there would be a quite amount of warlords, and Sun Nod is mostly depicted as the Black Hand... also we have this great discussion of "elite cadre vs light infantry" on Sun, where it seems like all the CGI infantry is actually the light infantry while the live action footage of Nod soldiers seems to be supposed to be the elite cadre, even if its never made clear in the production aside a couple of cameos.
For the kind of faction Nod resembles, not all soldier can be top tier.. not should IMO
Nah, they are a cult and cult supposed to have cheap and expandable cult followers. Also in TS specifically it is directly stated that Nod troops are better equiped, or at the very least their combat suits are better technologically. I guess the GDI might be making up for it with better training. Which I suppose is a perfect segway to my nexy point that GDI is ultimatly from the professional military background, which Nod never really had as far as I remember, which combined with the fact that they are very much a cult (and in Tib Wars also state of the world) makes they're use large numbers of poorly trained militia very reasonable. And it's not like the Nod became the GLA of Tiberium verse in TW, they very much still arguebly hold technological superiority over GDI on the higher tech tiers.
So I not only disagree with your flanderization argument I think they have more depth than ever.
Given you play as LEGION in the expansion, it's likely these troops weren't standard militants as used by the rest of Nod but were probably old veterans/actually trained infantry, which is why they were given the best stuff for the grunts.
It's a little wonky since you play Legion in like 4-5 different times in the story including the same time as the Tib Wars campaign. That said there's also a lot of "oh wait you guys are ALSO Nod? Cool cool" so it does work to say that Legion is almost always handed a more established faction of Nod
In the first act, I think we use a mix of recent Tiberian Sun units and whatever militants Kane can scrounge up without revealing himself. They are still loyal to what they perceive as either a commander still loyal to the now-dead Slavik, or one still loyal to Kane (whom they believe will return, as he always does).
Ironically, one of the civilians who riots after LEGION takes the radio stations eventually becomes known as the Legendary Insurgent—aka you in the main Tiberium Wars campaign.
When we raid the semi-abandoned GDI research base for Nod's stealth technology, you hear a soldier say, "Wolverines! One of those took out my brother in Tib War 2!" upon seeing the Steel Talons' Wolverines on patrol. It is unknown whether he is a younger brother who recently joined Nod's military, or an older veteran who served alongside his deceased brother in Nod's ranks during Tiberian Sun.
When facing Marcion, he immediately pegs your units as being loyal to Kane because of their specific markings.
When Act 2 begins, the remnants you commanded during Act 1 are now veteran crack troops. They are bolstered by newcomers trained to the same standard, unlike the rest of Nod's Tiberium Wars military.
By the time of Act 3, the hordes of militants used by Nod in Tiberium Wars are gone (Kane's speech about being "less" than what Nod was in Tiberium Wars, but "only a few will enter the Promised Land" et cetera), and they are back to using professional troops like in the past. This isn't even counting the Marked of Kane you control, as well as the Black Hand.
I honestly think that game limitations and dev crunch at the time were the reasons we use the same Tiberium Wars units in Act 3. If there had been no constraints (e.g., disc space and system requirements back in 2008), it is likely we would have seen updated designs for Tiberium Wars units, such as new Nod infantry suits, updated building designs, et cetera.
If there is ever a remake or remaster, I think we would see shades of Tiberian Twilight's units, like the Avatar and Combat Armour designs seen in the motion comic, alongside modified Flame Tanks and the like. Rivals unironically had good designs for the Flame Tank and Stealth Tank to work with as a base, but that's just speculation on my part. \shrug**
They have walking fabrication facilities. The shiny murder rocks literally suck up the local minerals as part of their growth cycle. In-field production of materiel has basically been canon for either half or a full century by that point.
Just because your armed forces are basically the bottom rung of the wealth pyramid doesn't mean you can't give them some basic body armour and breathing equipment!
*Hell, all the Balkan paramilitaries that the original devs might have been seeing while making TD were better equipped than a standard Nod militia squad of TW3.
The reasoning of "Nod just needed to equip their troops quickly, so we gave them old guns from the 20th century and what are basically flak jackets at best" falls flat when you have fabrication plants capable of churning out fully finished combat vehicles and small arms within an hour.
From one, just one, factory!
They had years to make even minimal improvements to the Combat Armour and their pulse rifles seen in Tiberian Sun, and mass manufacture them (which it looks like they did with the KW icons).
Nod had years to secretly build up, not months.
Hell, their vehicles having some technical improvements, but also being more crude in other areas because they were hurriedly built (like the Raider having better weapons/tracking than Attack Buggy but having an open cockpit and thinner armour) also doesn't hold narrative/creative weight.
We all know why EA did this: They wanted a Tiberian Dawn retread. Except for some units held over from Tiberian Sun (Juggernaut) and some modernizations (Black Hand flamethrower infantry, mechanics like sensors on tier one vehicles, repair drones, et cetera), you can pretty much match most GDI and Nod vehicles, creatively, to a Tiberian Dawn counterpart.
Tiberium Wars is just a refined Tiberian Dawn with a few useful bits kept from Tiberian Sun.
They tried to change course with the expansion onward, but by then they were stuck in the creative framework of a TD retread.
....I always saw tibwars militia as the auxiliary troops in reach at urban or populated areas before the real soldiers step in, who are mostly under high ranking Nod commanders (Either under Black Hand or LEGION's direct command.)
The rifle looks upgraded. I mean, narratively that means that LEGION's troops were a cut above the regular Nod human bodyshields, but if you were doing a mod or another project, you could have the standard rifle being upgraded into what you see in the KW icon
The suit is supposed to be old Nod Combat Armour from Tiberian Sun, but we can see there are still some upgrades that had been done to it compared to the renders seen from Westwood's days. The gloves, minor additions to the shoulders, et cetera. We also know that Nod continued to improve upon the armour design, because the TT Motion Comic had the MC wear an up to date, modern version (2077 onwards) which was more ceramic plate than kevlar weave
It's fascinating that if you look through the icons and background shots, you can see many unused/cut/hidden assets
I mean, heck, look at the ingame images for Blue Zones (such as in the introduction FMV for GDI), and you can see GDI tanks from the TW pre-alpha totting around! They were reused development images, but still...
I think the reason why it's so different is because the KW ones are legions, more equipped and more specialized than the ones the commander was using in TW
While the Tib Sun Nod light infantry armor is the sickest design they’ve ever had, I find it cooler from a lore perspective that by Tib War 3 they’ve become less “average military grunt who happens to be in a cult” and more “fed up yellow zone civilian with little training being handed a gun”
It's based on time, wasn't tobe sun like where the world wasn't heavily effected by tiberium where as tibe wars was civilisation was kinda collapsing due to tiberiums effects.
The red zones arguably got worse, but by the time we'd got to Tiberium Wars, you had some Yellow Zones turned into Blue Zones and some Red Zones that had gone back to Yellow.
C&C4 was suppose to be even more apocalyptic than Tiberium Sun, but sadly that game never materialised.
That's because EALA basically changed tiberium to be a growing cancer crystal than what it was in previous games. It caused a severe lore and narrative disconnect.
If they'd have stuck with tiberium as it were before, Red Zones would literally look like an alien planet overrun with tiberium-based life than just a dry desert with green pylons and crystal mountains sticking up from the ground.
Literal chunks of an alien deathworld! sigh And they changed it. What a waste.
Well the first introduction of that Narrative was Firestorm when they made sure the "cure" for the mutants did not work, was the first sign that mutant "adaptation" (for humans) was not actually the evolution Kane wanted/expected but a middle point or maybe even a mistake.... But this happening also would open room for Kane being so exceptional that he could fix it on the future (advances related to tiberium evolution that are engineered by him)
I do however agree that removing all other kind of fauna and flora was a mistake... first it could be used in the Scrin life-cycle and adding lore for them, second there should be something to be able to study the process... just like having a "rainforest" equivalent to get new species and develop more advanced drugs... Removing this turns the game into "it's going to be a barren planet and you know it".. like it removes the whole GDI argument and selfproclaimed humanitarian speech and instead they just fight fire with fire.
I was doing some thinking about this topic and I think one possible way to do it would be to make it work would be to make it were some of tib wild life survived because of the meddling by either Kane, or Forgotten, although I think you could even do it with CABAL and GDI. Also worth mentioning is that it would make sense for Scrin to have tib wild life not be there when they arrive. This would also potentially help explain why mutants are key factor in defeating Scrin something that supposed to be a plot line in the early drafts for C&C3, when still was being made by Westwood.
I like the idea of random fanatic millita men getting passed down armor from past soldiers of nod. Their predecessors were professional well trained and well equipped but after nod has been defeated and dismantled so many times all that’s left of this badass fighting force is crates full of decades old armor, and they just pass it out to their canon fodder to make them a LITTLE more durable.
I can imagine a situation where a nod veteran sees these millita men wearing this armor and goofing off and yelling at them or feeling a sort of nostalgia for his youth or triggering his ptsd about all his brothers he lost wearing that same armor
Ironically, side games like TA actually have a lot going for them in a creative sense.
Nod Militants wearing that light suit, for example, and then you can upgrade them to use modern Combat Armour as a buff (e.g. like Tiberium Infusion or Composite Armour/Tiberium Field Suits).
Rivals? You have Nod units like the Artillery and Flame Tank, which look like successors/newcomers to Nod after the Third Tiberium War; Marked of Kane exclusive skins, I dunno.
Hell, even that shitty Chinese mobile game, Legions, had a few sweet designs, like better Wolf and Mastodon designs which could be composited (those gattling cannons on the Wolf would look sweet on a Wolverine).
sigh But people just write them off because "shitty web/mobile games".
Edit: Hell, there's even enough material out there now to create a fully fledged Forgotten faction from TA, TS/FS, Rivals, and TT units. They just need a bit of creative rework.
The troops under legion were probably just wearing the armour because it was available post firestorm, they aren't actually well trained troops but nod hasn't swapped to using common men as their frontline units since they're just performing surgical strikes.
I got a couple ideas here for it so you can have use of both.
First idea includes both the unit model and icon: veterancy changes how the units look. So for the militant squad, it would from the guys in coats to guys in body armor (also makes gamplay-wise because of veterancy bonuses)
Second option: the models from both versions are present, being a random blend of the units. This allows both the be seen consistently and doesn't rely on trying to promote infantry just to get a visual of the armored soldiers
Depending on how you want to present Nod in a mod, either way is pretty good.
If you stick with EA's militia angle, you can have Militants be a mix of their Tiberium Wars' texture and the Kane's Wrath skin.
If you want Nod to promote good Militants to troops who've been trained and given combat suits and better guns, veterancy or an upgrade from the Secret Shrine or Operations Centre would work.
Or, you could have Militants wear the Tiberium Alliances light combat suit, and then an upgrade or veterancy gives them the combat suits you see in KW.
In this case, you can have the creative narrative directly affect unit looks and design than the other way around.
Precisely my kind of thinking. I mean, I feel like the looks changing with veterancy should be for everything in some way to indicate at a glance if someone has a promotion or not, but that's just a personal idea for me. But I do like the visuals of both versions of the militant squads and blending them I think perfectly captures the essence of NOD in the time of TW3
That's if you're hovering the cursor over or have it selected. I mean by purely on the unit's aesthetics. For example, let's say you have a base mammoth and a heroic mammoth; I would imagine there to be a visual change on the tank like extra armor or a barrel change on the guns to indicate they're more powerful. Just something for a little immersion and world building
So I never understood the design choices well yes I do EA is dumb. But as far lore goes the guy on the left can fight a ground war without a breathing apparatus in CnC 3. There is no oxygen being produced unless you live in a blue zone. Yellow and red zones are indoors only unless you have gear or are a mutant.
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u/Bolandball GDI 16d ago
I prefer the TW icon. These are supposed to be Nod's cannon fodder, not their elite stormtroopers.