EA’s remaster of the Command & Conquer series has had a little patch with tweaks that have been suggested by the players. Here’s the full notes swiped from Reddit.
Fellow Command & Conquer fans,
Thank you for all your feedback over the past week regarding the top balance issues we’ve been discussing. In this post I’m going to break down our evaluation of the feedback, and outline other exciting changes coming to the next patch. Let’s get started.
First, our teams have been reading all the comments on the balance thread from last Friday, and based on those perspectives we’ve made some adjustments to the game. And to provide the community an early preview of these changes, we actually just updated the Beta Patch version on Steam with a first pass at those balance changes. Below are the key changes you’ll see in the new version:
The Nod Cargo Plane delivery time has been normalized
There was overwhelming support for this change in the thread. The time has been normalized to 4 seconds on Normal speed in this version, but we are likely going to increase this to 5 or 6 seconds based on our own playtesting. Please try this out in Skirmish or LAN and let us know how it feels. (Note, the plane will now sometimes spawn in the middle of the map to accommodate this behavior. We initially had it with the Cargo Plane speed increased, and just looked kinda ridiculous…)
The Weapons Factory health has been increased
There was also strong support for this change, with the suggested health numbers ranging quite broadly. We decided to start with a 30% health increase, and are looking for feedback if this feels meaningful enough to make the desired impact.
The Naval structures have been removed from the victory condition
There was unanimous support for this change, and this has now been implemented. The game should end if a player only has Naval structures remaining (Or only an MCV in a Transport).
To address the TD Engineer / APC issue, the APC now has the Repair Facility as a pre-requisite to build
This was the topic that garnered the most activity, and it was a healthy discussion in the thread. Based on our observations, over 50% of the community who commented voted in the direction of changing the APC to be attached to the Repair Facility. So we decided to go with that approach, and would be eager to hear how this changes the Engineer / APC rush dynamic. Obviously it won’t be as easy to judge this until it’s available in formal Quickmatch, but any early reactions to build order, etc. would be helpful.
Harvester improvements
In the June patch we made some changes to the Harvester logic, which caused some unintended ripple effects. We’ve aimed to address a few key items in this patch:
The docking priority should now be properly overridden with a docking command
The Harvester should no longer freeze for several seconds in this docking procedure
In Red Alert, the Harvester should better prioritize Gems if they’re in the an adjacent cell
Please try these new behaviors in Skirmish and let us know if the Harvester is getting closer to your expectations
AI in LAN Mode
Over the past week we’ve made improvements on getting AI to be compatible with LAN mode. If you’re able to try LAN with other players, please add some AI and let us know how it’s performing for you.
Of note, the first four bullets can be enabled / disabled via a new “Modern Balance” checkbox in the Rules section of Skirmish and Multiplayer game lobbies. This option will eventually be set to ON for Quickmatch. One caveat, in the Beta Patch there’s a bug where the “Modern Balance” changes don’t work with Custom Maps, which we’ll aim to fix for the official release.
Source: Reddit
