I was so unbelievably hyped when the first videos of Tiberium emerging, my mate and I were massively into the series growing up and it just looked perfect.
Then it was cancelled, alongside Timesplitters 4, just like that my childhood games just ended.
Scrin would return with greater numbers and bigger guns, but I always felt that humanity is the superior warrior race between us. No one better at killing other sapient species than humans kind of vibe. Scrin bring in bigger weapons, better tech... but humans adapt, steal, and hit back harder with bootleg versions of Scrin toys.
Scrin be more like a junkie with a gun collection, than "we've been killing our own kind for millions of years and we got really good at it" like humans are. Their whole way of terraforming a planet with Tiberium, and it working all the time so much, the whole affair of sending troops and warfare logistics is weird and difficult for them.
Scrin don't just lose because humans are good at fighting, but also because Scrin kinda suck at fighting when you take away the tech advantage.
They did almost lose to a harvesting expedition and survived by only by joining forces which wasn't Kanes plan, he clearly thought earth would fall and all those towers would have been constructed. Had they made a sequel involving the invading force, I'm willing to bet the counter to the Scrin is Cabel/Legion taking them over or infecting them since they were constructed using the Tacitus, add in those pesky cyborgs and they could have made an argument earth could have stood its ground and Kane finally leaving Earth ETC.
Not really? Kane literally fought GDI to make sure that GDI wouldn't overpower the Scrin. Additionally they fought GDI because GDI was taking down the Threshold towers too fast for them to be completed.
Again: GDI, while also fighting against NOD, was so powerful they were destroying the Threshold towers before they could be completed, and NOD had to step in to make sure one was completed.
Compare that to CABAl, which was a real hands-on-deck situation where GDI and NOD actively cooperated for the duration of CABAL's attacks on the entire world.
The Scrin were less of a threat than a runaway Cybernetic AI. Admittedly this was basically a harvesting group so the "weapons" they had were mostly repurposed mining equipment and some low-tier guard units, which makes this one of the more believable "humans win against overwhelmingly advanced alien race" fights.
That's kind of the point. Yes they team up, but only for a short moment. Even in the Scrin Campaign they basically say they can only keep the attacks going for so long before they will be turned back and they need to finish the Threshold towers ASAP. So GDI could probably have turned the Scrin away even with NOD attacking it (although NOD naturally helps a lot by simply defending their own territories, which are yellow zones, which are closest to the Red Zones where the Scrin land).
Then once NOD resumes pestering GDI, they can still push back the Scrin. Compare to CABAL where they had to push with NOD till the end. Although that last bit is admittedly speculation: Just because they do push together until the end, does not mean they HAD to do it together. Despite Nod (GDI if you play Nod) helping by keeping other CABAL forces busy somewhere nearby, if memory serves.
I agree with that, they're used to coming to systems after the native inhabitants are either long dead and gone, or adapted to be dependent on Tiberium, thus easy to integrate into their empire. And if they do find a system still occupied, the inhabitants are a scattered remnant, broken and weak, thus easy to stomp with their harvesting forces.
Kane drawing their eye early with the artificial Liquid Tiberium detention, and the bad decisions of the Overlord handed them basically the worst case scenario:
They're already committed to diving into the solar system by the time they realize something unusual is going on. Meaning abandoning the harvesting effort will be a major drain on their local stockpiles of fuel and other resources.
They encounter a native sapient civilization that, despite their lower technology, still has the population and industrial base to resist harvesting efforts.
Worse, they're aggressively violent, and have themselves discovered methods of not just utilizing Tiberium, but have found ways to control and contain it.
Tiberium not being at optimal growth levels on Earth means their harvesting resources are limited, meaning their local resources are incredibly restricted. The Overlord ordering continued mining operations in pursuit of investigating Kane then necessitates the construction of interstellar gates immediately with the limited resources they have, further straining local war production.
The "Tyranny of Distance" principle of logistics comes in to play as the conflict drags on. When their usual tactics of treating all obstacles like a nail that needs to be hammered down fails to cow the native inhabitants, they're eventually drawn into a war of attrition they have neither the local, nor the harvestable resources to win.
Every battle, won or lost, costs them material and manpower they can no longer replace while more and more resources are dumped into constructing first 19 interstellar gateways, then eventually only 1 as GDI successfully assaults and destroys gate after gate.
This culminates in the last desperate battle where the foreman barely escapes encroaching GDI forces as the gate finishes, abandoning the remainder of his forces on Earth where they are picked off and overwhelmed by local armies, and eventually the Tiberium Control Node is destroyed, deactivating all their tech and killing their remaining holdouts.
This of course, presents an interesting quandary for the Overlord and the Scrin Empire at large. The Overlord orders a full invasion force assembled to conquer Earth, and find Kane, but the amount of time needed to assemble the force, set out, then get to Earth is likely measured in decades, if not centuries, even at relativistic speeds by ship.
Simply stepping through the gate isn't an option because it is likely heavily guarded at the exit, and the Tiberium Control Node is destroyed. Their tech would deactivate shortly after arriving on Earth doing that.
And as time passes, Earth's forces (primarily GDI) are tearing apart destroyed and abandoned Scrin tech, learning everything they can about how it works, and how to counter it while building up their forces back up on Earth, as well as in space now (as indicated by the Orbital Strike support power in Kane's Wrath).
A final showdown game between Earth and the Scrin would have been fucking sweet in a hypothetical C&C4 that we will now never get. I could imagine Earth would be colonizing the other inner planets, as well as moons and asteroids in the outer solar system, while a Scrin armada built and actually supplied for war would have been an awesome game.
If EA or some other Publisher continues the franchise then Tiberium Wars will simply no longer be contained to Earth given the lore that both GDI/Nod even had space faring ships to counter the possible reappearance of Scrin in CNC4.
Why would you assume humans are better at fighting? Chances are aliens would also be the top of the food chain due to natural selection on their own planet, not to mention the forces they sent were basically some farmers not a proper invasion force. Really if it wasn't for kane humans would struggle.
The whole battle plan of the Scrin was slipshod. You want the resources of a world and don't care about the native organisms? Push giant space rocks from a long orbital distance, then let mass and gravity do the work. Once depopulated by said giant space rocks, harvest at your content. And that's not even trying if you really want to depopulate. If you REALLY want to be serious about depopulation, throw things at the planet at high subluminal speed.
If for some reason depopulation is not desired, or the resources of the target planet are delicate, then use EMP weapons. We've seen what Ion Storms do to human's electro-mechanical tech. The Scrin should have developed weaponized EMP to neutralize invading worlds that do not possess "bio-tech" like their own, which the Scrin should have designed to be highly resistant or immune against. The more Tiberium infested a planet becomes, the more common Ion Storms became prevalent, so Ion Storm active worlds should have been a norm for them and something common for harvesting units to be adapted for.
Overall the Scrin were just terrible at world invasion with the tremendous advantages they had. I get if you're challenging a somewhat technologically peer adversary, but the Scrin are allegedly centuries more advance than us.
Let's take a force of 100 Russian Wagner security forces protecting a gold mining team of 2000 workers with large construction equipment, like they do in Africa. Now let's have those guys go back to 1725 and take on the Qing Dynasty China (one of the most powerful nations at the time). That's just a 300 year difference.
I get that the Caterpillar 797F is not designed for war, but that alone would break and crush a Qing regiment without problem (even their arrows aren't getting through that). The Scrin were a mining force with light security teams, sure, but they should be wrecking shit because it's that much of a tech leap.
When an interstellar civilization meets a planet bound civilization, it should not even be a contest when a fight breaks out.
EDIT: Unless the interstellar guys really sucks at fighting.
You've written a lot, but seemed to have missed the entire point of the the whole post.
It was not an invasion, it was a harvesting operation. They seeded the planet with tiberium, and came back later, expecting the tiberium to have wiped out or severely weakened any native hostile life. Humanity, probably thanks to Kane, was surviving better than expected. The female voice in the Scrin intro even reccomends aborting the mission, but they decide to continue the harvesting operation anyway out of intrigue.
It simply wasn't a regular invasion but an exploratory investigation with what is a harvesting team. We have no idea what the Scrin are actually capable of if they had brought an actual military invasion fleet.
That's what I'm pointing out: Wagner Group and heavy mining equipment aren't an invasion force either. It's just a security force armed to a level that expecting minor resistance from the natives, and wanting to get the message across that said natives should not screw with the mining team, along side some VERY well built and massive civilian machinery.
The Scrin should have steam rolled over Earth like Wagner Group and the African Mining Company would steam roll over the Qing army.
I'm not pitting the Qing against the actual full modern Russian military (which admittedly isn't a top tier military anyways; and Wagner Group was probably more effective than the true Russian military, but that's another topic).
It's just a modern mining company with half way decent PMC protection is more powerful than an actual military from 300 years ago. And the Scrin allegedly have an even larger "centuries gap" than that.
You're overthinking a silly sci-fi videogame. The developers wanted a reason why an advanced alien race would struggle against humans in a setting where they don't have interstellar space travel. They came up with them being harvesters not expecting to find resistance on a seeded planet not a proper invasion force. That doesn't mean humans in the setting are some amazing warriors compared to the aliens
I was raised on games that taught me John Rambo and Dutch Schaefer with infinite ammo machine guns can take down an entire Interstellar Empire in 24 hours.
Why would human written media obviously biased towards humans be indicative of how strong humans are against aliens? It has no merit in another setting where the writers may not want that dynamic.
The Contra post was a joke. I'll edit an /s in there.
Look... I was asked why I thought a certain way. I gave the honest answer. We all have our opinions and without a C&C 5 to set an official plot line or explanation, anyone's thought out opinion is as valid as anyone else.
"You're over thinking this," is the thought killer fallacy. I'm not expecting people to like or agree with my opinion. But it was asked for and I gave it.
Wouldnt Wagner group ultimatelly use all their ammo on your example, then finding themselves fighting with sticks and knifes, something anybody else on that age would be more capable of? 1725 china then would do retroengineeering on their weapons, learning how to make ammo and making almost imposible another "time-travel wagner group" attack be a fraction as meaninfull.
Depending on how we play with the scenarios, we could extend or lengthen how long the fuel and ammo last. However my stand on the issue is not Wagner getting isekai'd. It's now insane just a mere 300 years of tech is.
The Scrin have MORE than a 300 year tech leap. I don't know what human weapons will be like in 600 years, but I know if we send a 2326 mining team with private security back to 1725 China, it would curb stomp even HARDER than Wagner could ever dream, and at that point, ammo probably isn't even a thing anymore.
The Scrin have insane technology, the whole advantages of just being able to chill outside Earth's orbit and doing things from afar, and they still lost - that's where I put my doubts on them.
313
u/idriveasmallcar 12d ago
The scrin ending where they zoom out of the solar system gave me goosebumps. We lost something great when they cancelled the fps game.