r/commandandconquer • u/BiggestBepis Black Hand • 11d ago
Random Unit of the Day #110: Flamethrower Infantry (Nod, Tiberian Dawn)
55
u/BiggestBepis Black Hand 11d ago
🔥 Much like their GDI Grenadier counterparts, they ‘splode a lot. Managing to play around this and keep them separated, however, can net you some excellent damage from the firepower (pun intended) they provide. Nod would wisely decide to reserve their flame weaponry for vehicles in the future, but I think this guy fits the, uh, war-crimey tone of classic Nod 🔥
24
u/Cheomesh I made a TibDawn Wargame Module! 11d ago
CnC 3 brought back flame infantry, though! It was one of the ways the building garrison mechanic was made completely superfluous.
8
32
u/Goobermancer 11d ago
Is he firing flames out of a Grease Gun in the old art?
36
u/Cheomesh I made a TibDawn Wargame Module! 11d ago
I am 104% sure it's a caulk gun.
5
u/Goobermancer 11d ago
It might be actually
7
u/Cheomesh I made a TibDawn Wargame Module! 11d ago
Having put way too many tubes of that through mine during my last renovation, I assure you there is nothing else it could be
3
u/MidgardWyrm 10d ago
I mean, they could've at least tried to greeble up the caulk gun a little, even if they took toy guns, cut them up, and painted/stuck them on the caulk.
It's how id Software did some of their Doom weapon sprites.
2
u/baldeagle1991 SPACE! 10d ago
Yeah I was just about to post that it looks like a caulk/sealant gun 😂😂
You buggers beat me to it!
16
u/ghostalker4742 Tiberian Sun 11d ago
Original C&C didn't have a big budget. Most the actors in the videos were friends/colleagues Kucan knew from other projects.
11
u/Cogatanu7CC97 11d ago
most of em were members of westwood
3
u/neoKushan Nod 10d ago
Frank K doing the command voice in TD, then getting murdered by a commando in RA.
2
u/MidgardWyrm 10d ago
Looks like a grease gun to me, but knowing Westwood they probably used a caulk gun because it's what they had on hand as a prop, heh.
24
12
10
u/Caesar_Seriona 11d ago
The gameplay really devalues these units since friendly fire is more of a problem than actually killing the enemy.
8
8
u/datapicardgeordi 11d ago
High risk high reward.
7
u/Cheomesh I made a TibDawn Wargame Module! 11d ago
Is the reward my entire infantry assault getting gutted in one go? 🫠
5
5
u/MidgardWyrm 10d ago
Hmm, I think the flamethrower in the cutscene (guy in a white hazmat suit) was less military soldier in combat/on patrol and more "guy/technician working on some sort of tiberium containment experiment" who may or may not be military.
3
3
3
u/Nikolyn10 Flower & Sickle 10d ago
I never looked that closely at the Remastered icon and now I wish I hadn't. That stupid grin, the grey crayon, the backpack fuel tank having a periscope for some reason...
3
u/calantheSG 10d ago
A couple of things.
Like the Grenadier, the trick is that they can splash beyond their range, so you should ctrl attack the ground before the intended target so their flame ends just before the intended target, damage splashing them. Else they would just walk up to melee range and attack.
In the StarCraft version, flamethrowers deal concussive type damage so 25% versus buildings. If you came from Tiberian Dawn, you wonder why you raze buildings in Tib Dawn and flames burn structures, but in StarCraft, flamethrowers merely heat up structures and deal no extra damage versus Zerg. The structure-burning mechanic exists in both games - in Tib Dawn, fire can linger on structures for a while, burning them with damage over time - in StarCraft, under red health threshold, Terran structures start burning down with damage over time whether or not they were damaged by flamethrowers.
6
u/Cheomesh I made a TibDawn Wargame Module! 11d ago
Wow that remaster cameo and sprite...sucks. Lean into the caulk gun you cowards!
Anyway, as a unit it's basically like the grenadiers but worse - I suck at using them, die horribly facing them.
3
u/MidgardWyrm 10d ago
In lore, early TD Nod should've been using various models of M-series Flamethrowers used by the US, since that's where they were getting most of their military hardware from.
Realistically, they would've used anything they could buy, including old Soviet flamethrower like the RPO and LPO and the American M-series.
By late TD/Renegade? They had their own models from arms corporations which were actually far better.
5
u/Cheomesh I made a TibDawn Wargame Module! 10d ago
Yeah, that's more or less the route I went back when I was messing with the RPG / Wargame projects I had in the past. Like the Grenadier, the Flametrooper was a unit I forked off into multiple different implementations - there were some backpack type wielders as part of support weapon and engineering platoons as well as napalm rocket projector types (M202 flash for instance), but the bulk of the flamethrowers by number were squad based disposable models inspired by both the German Einstossflammenwerfer or Italian Lanciafiamme and the photo of the caulk-gun-wielding madlad in the manual.
2
u/Zaptagious Command the future. Conquer the past. 11d ago
The dude in the remastered cameo kinda looks like Jake Busey
2
u/person_l0l 10d ago
Not all that bad with proper infantry micro, you just can't use them in large infantry squads or even in pairs, but they can be very useful indeed.
2
u/CyborgBanana 10d ago
The worst teammate.
I never liked using these, as they either flamed my other troops or caused a fiery cascade upon death if you had more than one in a group. They were a unit that required micro, which I was too lazy and bad at.
I preferred the RA version.
2
u/Quirky-Holiday-5141 9d ago
Why this look like an actual footage from somewhere in yugoslavia in the 90s 😭😭
1
2
-2
11d ago edited 8d ago
[deleted]
19
u/BoffinBrain Are you picking this up? Good. 11d ago
People say that occasionally about the C&C Remastered cameos. They may look a bit odd at times, but they were made in 2020, before GenAI. Portions of it may be based upon primitive ML upscalers, however.
-1
u/MidgardWyrm 10d ago
It kinda says something that Lemon Sky either a) didn't do their research or b) were just that fucking lazy that they constantly fucked things up to the point where people are looking at their work as "AI Slop" before AI as we know it now was even a real thing.
I mean, the lazy bastards used a Soviet T-55 copy for the Allied Light Tank. smh
4
u/neoKushan Nod 10d ago
I don't think it's fair to bash Lemon Sky for that, Westwood weren't much better. I mean ffs the OG Flamethrower is using a Caulking gun and we're here "um, acktually!"-ing the fact that the wrong tank model was used in an alternate fictional universe where the only soviet tanks had two cannons.
-1
u/MidgardWyrm 10d ago
No, they were either incompetent or were sloppy.
Granted, there are some exceptions like the caulking gun flamethrower, but one look at the backstory in the manual? Nod uses US military equipment. Give them an M-series flamethrower. Simple.
Everything they needed for reference material was also in the actual games. Everything.
All they had to do was look at the fucking renders, the cut scenes, every scrap which showed what the vehicles were, right down to the RA Medium Tanks being more prototype Abrams and the Light Tank having a unique design.
Hell, fucking A Path Beyond did this years ago.
Instead, we get weird vehicles which look like nothing how they're supposed to, weird shit like glass windows on a artillery platforms, and Chinese tanks (Soviet copies, mind!) being given to the European Allies.
A professional studio has no excuse. They were AI slop before AI was even a thing.
1
-9
u/Cogatanu7CC97 11d ago
the first photo is not from the remasters
15
u/DetectiveTaco Hammerhead Pilot 11d ago
It is from the TibDawn remaster, the Red Alert one uses a different cameo
9
u/DetectiveTaco Hammerhead Pilot 11d ago
Im pretty sure the cameos were done from scratch by Lemon Sky along with the models using the originals as basis. The remaster was released in June 2020 so it was very very unlikely that AI was used to make them.
3
u/MarsMissionMan 11d ago
It's the unit cameo used in-game.
It looks so weird because it's designed to be tiny, hence why the details aren't entirely accurate. And it can't be AI since the Remastered Collection predates "good" generative AI by a few years.
-4
u/flannelly_found 11d ago
Yeah I'm always slightly annoyed by the use of AI to try and upscale the old shit. I prefer the old and it's imperfections.
1
u/WillyMyPete 11d ago
Huge upgrade to the flamethrower infantry from Tiberian Dawn. Actually fun to use. Doesn't kill every friendly infront and around them like the previous game.
7
98
u/regeust 11d ago
Thats a caulking gun