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88% Positive

Analyzed from 1327 words in the discussion.

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#game#play#openra#games#player#computer#players#always#red#scripts

Discussion (46 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

liendolucasabout 2 hours ago
If you play the original and then OpenRA you will be amazed how well OpenRA is balanced.

As an example, while in the original game using allied artillery against soviet tesla coils was a dead sentence in OpenRA is great to be able to fire well beyond its range forcing you to come out of the base to defend it.

They also added a ton of features which make the game truly enjoyable and fun to play.

Well done OpenRA team!

hypercube3339 minutes ago
Weird. I find the balance for player vs AI to be actually pretty horrible. AI can outrange artillery sight so you have no choice but to push forward always or micro manage units. I have a fork of OpenRA on my GitHub where I try to address this, along with pathfinding bugs, enabling Tiberian Sun and fixing bugs with that. I also updated it to cross platform .NET 10 and bumped the performance up about 6-10x fixing minor bugs. Debating if I'll roll any of the code over as pulls to the main project ever after I tried to fix a random bug before and they were not welcoming to me but that was like a decade ago.
liendolucas32 minutes ago
The comparison was against the original game. I haven't played on the computer since ages, but that was my impression the times I played it. I'm not deep into all the nuances of the game just that it was considerably better that the 1995 release.
mitthrowaway226 minutes ago
Link to your GitHub? I'd love to play the version with your improvements!
b11227 minutes ago
The load/save is what kills me. It's a great project, but having to wait 2 hours for a game to load, fans blaring on my laptop, makes it less playable.

For context, I love huge, massive maps with loads of players. OpenRA replays the entire game to restore, it doesn't have a save-current-state routine.

So 20 hours of massive map + 8 players means 2 hours of pegged CPU to reload the save.

Heartbreaking.

apitman21 minutes ago
> So 20 hours of massive map + 8 players means 2 hours of pegged CPU to reload the save.

It's super impressive this works at all.

abixbabout 2 hours ago
Tangential, but I got introduced to Red Alert C&C through various 'Hell March' videos by random fans of various militaries on YouTube. It's funny how it vibes with nearly every military you throw it over.
cogman10about 2 hours ago
I love using the RA OST for coding. The songs are fun and fast paced with low lyrics.

It helps that this is a childhood favorite game of mine.

OptionOfTabout 1 hour ago
Try the Doom ones.
JumpCrisscrossabout 1 hour ago
APC + flamethrowers was the new WTF in OpenRA, if I remember correctly.
dice33 minutes ago
We used to play RA on my friend's home network, which was thin net running IPX. The house rule was that if we'd collectively built enough units that the game started slowing down you had to attack. It was good times.
apitman18 minutes ago
When it worked, IPX LAN was maybe the peak UX in multiplayer gaming.

Moving everything to TCP/IP came with a lot of improvements, but we also lost important things. Reminds me of the move from Flash to HTML5.

patentlyzeabout 1 hour ago
OpenRA is awesome.

Whoever runs it, you're awesome!

The player base is only slightly lower than when I used to play RA2 on dial-up like 20 years ago.

I've boycotted EA ever since they ruined the franchise.

JumpCrisscrossabout 3 hours ago
Has anyone built better AIs for this?
egeozcanabout 2 hours ago
When I was a teen I was mostly writing RA2 custom map scripts and rules/units for my friends and watch them battle with my rules in internet cafes. When that was not possible, I was creating custom RA2 AIs, but it was very hard.

These days, I'm having incredible fun developing good old AI scripts with LLMs, for my own vibe-coded RTS game. Just choose all AI players here to make them battle each other: https://egeozcan.github.io/unnamed_rts/game/

I even let the LLM generate a tournament script to make AI scripts from different LLMs battle (headless): https://github.com/egeozcan/unnamed_rts/blob/main/src/script... GPT-5.5 leaves all in the dust currently. I cannot beat most in the game I set the rules myself :)

If you are like me, you can just make LLMs create your personal RTS game and also develop custom AIs. It's so much fun.

b11216 minutes ago
Huh. You know, I wonder. The API provided to AI scripts must have enough info for limited strategies, but I've never seen what's what. You have.

What are the possibilities for just giving Claude that each turn. Yes, insane over kill, but in a couple of years Claude level AI will run locally on laptops...

wahnfriedenabout 2 hours ago
Were you familiar with my modding site RA2Factory?
egeozcanabout 1 hour ago
Yes! I downloaded a lot of shps voxels and map packs from your site! I think it was the beginning of 2000s? Anyway, a very delayed thank you!
apitman13 minutes ago
I know you meant player AI, but now I'm imagining an RTS where every unit is running a small reasoning LLM.
logdahlabout 3 hours ago
I might suck but I found it really hard iirc :^(
dogma1138about 2 hours ago
AI in strategy games always cheats I haven’t seen a single game where the AI wasn’t built around cheating. Once you figure out how it cheats it’s usually a combination of resource multipliers, build time multipliers and not having a fog of war it becomes much essier to beat at any difficulty.
ben_wabout 2 hours ago
Not always.

For a lot of games it can be surprisingly easy to make an AI which beats the median player even when limited to just basic strategies, simply by not getting distracted by the gut feelings that humans have.

Even for more complex strategy games like say Starcraft II where that's not enough, there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStar_(software)

invaderabout 2 hours ago
Often, but not always.

I hate the term "AI" applied to games, since AI means so many things and usually implies something smart, "intelligent". But in reality, it is more like a "bot" or a "computer player". And the main goal is not to be super-smart, but to be plausible enough and provide an appropriate challenge to the human player.

There are some "fair" bots in games - like in my favorite turn-based Mechanized Assault and Exploration from the mid 90s. Computer players follow the same rules as the human ones - e.g., if something is not visible to the radar, the computer will not see it. The only "cheat" is the resource boost computer players can have on the higher difficulty settings, but it is totally optional. And as an experienced player, you always let the computer have it, since you want a challenge, and without that boost, it has no chance whatsoever.

9devabout 3 hours ago
Pitching in on this with a tangent - how good are LLMs with RTS games these days? As someone without friends into that genre, it’d be pretty cool to play eg. AoE II against a capable computer that play like a real human…
clatesabout 2 hours ago
Depends on what you mean, LLMs can probably _make_ pretty good AIs. It'll have all the AI scripts in the base game, including the three iterations (base, FE, DE) all the user generated ones ( including barbarian ) and then able to consume the language schema. Rig up a baby model that takes the matchup during loading and hot swaps one of your pregenerated AI scripts.

If you meant _playing_ raw based on LLM input - that's probably the wrong tool for the job. The latency for you to react to a mango shot is faster than a billion tok/s lol

HeavyStormabout 3 hours ago
It's improving but sota models are now too slow for a real time game. Training a specialized neural network would be more effecient.
singpolyma3about 2 hours ago
Does the project allow AI?
tremonabout 2 hours ago
Old-skool AI, aka cpu opponent.
dijitabout 2 hours ago
I just wish I still had the original games to use as content packs.

Every time I've tried to install this previously, this was my wall :(

tremonabout 2 hours ago
https://cnc-comm.com/red-alert/downloads/the-game

EA released CnC and Red Alert as free downloads twenty years ago.

ionwakeabout 2 hours ago
based, been playing this for months with my friend, over anything else.

EDIT> My fav setup is to join a free empty server , set up 2 teams, 2 AI and 1 human vs 2 AI and 1 human. And then play with my friend. Great fun. The AI adds a bit of a randomness to the games. Easy smooth quick interface. Just perfect for a quick free RTS game with a friend.

Havocabout 2 hours ago
Need to try this at some point. The other open RTS - beyondallreason - is really good too.
rizsyed1about 2 hours ago
This is such a great game. Incredibly well-balanced and thought through.
Tepixabout 2 hours ago
Has anyone turned it into a browser game?
tybntyabout 1 hour ago
One of the comments from that page mentions a browser port available at: https://openra-web-fe.azurewebsites.net/
patentlyzeabout 1 hour ago
I've been using AI to replicate it for browser play.

I'm able to get the mechanics down. But I can't get the graphics past RA1 level yet without killing the process power.

aktauabout 2 hours ago
Not sure about RA, but for RA2 see https://chronodivide.com/
geenatabout 2 hours ago
I wish they would release Tiberium Sun
patentlyzeabout 1 hour ago
It's so hard for me to choose between Tiberium sun and RA2. Both are in my top 5 games of all time.
guilhasabout 1 hour ago
Very entertaining campaign
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malux85about 1 hour ago
When I was a teenager, I lived on a farm and our neighbour's were another adult couple. He was late 40s and she was late 50s, her name was Jane.

Jane had an infectious laugh. She was always baking. She died her hair bright red. She drank too much wine. She didnt know much about the details of technology but she was intrigued by it, she read books and she volunteered to help as a teachers aide at the local primary school.

And Jane had a secret, she was one of the best Red Alert 2 players I had ever seen. We'd have matches over dialup and she would totally wreck me in such a short amount of time. I couldn't figure out a strategy to beat her, it was different every time.

I still have very vivid memories of Jane sitting in the corner of her farm house, big thick glasses on, glass of red wine, leading the comrades into war, and laughing as she bombed the allies into submission.

If you met Jane on the street you would never ever guess that under that farmer's wife persona, lurked a dangerous and cunning war strategist. Totally unexpected and utterly fabulous.

Love you Jane