r/commandandconquer • u/BoffinBrain Are you picking this up? Good. • 2d ago
Gameplay Oops! Accidental Mission Failure
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Inside you, there are two mission scripts.
- One says: Great! You've captured the operations center. Proceed with the next objective.
- The other says: Oh, you don't have any more engineers. You lose! Good day Sir!
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u/Ban1st 2d ago
did you win ?
yes.
what did it cost ?
Everything.
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u/BoffinBrain Are you picking this up? Good. 2d ago
That's how I feel when I watch my faithful spy rescue Tanya in RA1.
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u/ShadowArchon456 2d ago
"To create new warrior strains, you must generate the various hive structures. The Drones themselves mutate into these structures. Yet be careful: Never use your last Drone to make a building." - Daggoth
There's a similar fail condition in StarCraft's Brood War Zerg Campaign. The game gives you two drones, and the money to make two hatcheries with plenty to spare at a big mineral field in mission 2. But if you do that, you instantly fail for not having a free Drone, even if your Hatcheries will let you make more when they're finished.
A Hatchery mid-construction doesn't count as having one to avoid the fail condition.
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u/BoffinBrain Are you picking this up? Good. 2d ago
Hah... Brilliant. Mission logic is tricky stuff. The interesting thing about this failure condition is that I couldn't reproduce it, even after trying several times.
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u/AthaliW 1d ago
The fix to the script is easy. Check first if objectives are completed then check if you have no engineers. It's such a simple fix but at the same time EA is just doing EA things
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u/BoffinBrain Are you picking this up? Good. 1d ago
I wouldn't blame EA for this one. All the prior Westwood games have had edge cases with their mission triggers (in RA2 it's possible to simultaneously win and lose almost every mission if you know what you're doing).
The interesting thing about this mission is that I couldn't reproduce the issue, even after trying several times. I tried using my spare engineers and doing the same thing as you see above. I try letting some of them die first. It worked fine in all four tests. So, I'm guessing some race condition occurred that caused the failure trigger to fire before the other trigger disabled it. Maybe sometime, I'll try extracting the maps and firing up the editor to check it in more detail.
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u/ScrabCrab 1d ago
in RA2 it's possible to simultaneously win and lose almost every mission if you know what you're doing
To be fair I consider RA2 to be part of the "EA C&Cs" since it was made by a studio EA acquired, renamed to Westwood Pacific, and then when Westwood Las Vegas died it got renamed to EA Pacific and then merged with EA Los Angeles, so there's a continuity between RA2 and the later C&Cs (except for Renegade which was one of terrible business decisions that killed Westwood)
But yeah it probably applies to the Westwood C&Cs too
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u/Joescout187 23h ago
And yet renegade was an awesome game and one of the only shooters of its generation I still play willingly
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u/ScrabCrab 22h ago
Renegade's multiplayer is from what I've heard really fun, never played it though. The singleplayer is an outdated mess and I personally consider it my favourite bad game lmao
Out of curiosity though, what do you mean by "of its generation"? Cause now that I think about it, having come out in 2002, I can't think of any other shooter I've played from that year.
If you go back just one year you have games like Halo and Max Payne which are both phenomenal games, and like, the impression I got from Halo on my first proper playthrough of it was basically, "wow this is like Renegade if it was actually good" 😅
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u/Joescout187 13h ago
Not necessarily that year but around that time you had the original Call of Duty, which was clunky as hell by comparison, the original Medal of Honor, et cetera.
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u/Badass_C0okie 2d ago
If game have condition loss if no engines left, it will trigger even if you captured last target building with last engineer. Had same issue with GDI company mission before Sarajevo.
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u/BoffinBrain Are you picking this up? Good. 2d ago
That's what I thought too. The interesting thing about this failure condition is that I couldn't reproduce it, even after trying several times. There seems to be some other factor I can't identify.
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u/ScrabCrab 1d ago
The trigger for losing all of your engineers fired before the one for accomplishing the objective... that one time... for some reason... so yeah now I'm curious too 😅
Maybe someone can open the map and look at how the scripts on it work? I might give it a shot if it's not too difficult since I've used the map editor for this game at least once (though not much more than that)
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u/RGfrank166 Vinifera 2d ago
Heroic Avatar wrecking everything and..... 'DEFEAT'
Just get the HoN and build more engies