Air superiority.
As it was custom at the time the sequel came out just one year later re-using most of the assets and without significant changes to the gameplay. They reshuffled the factions, made the new story and added some new functions. Usually sequels double down on the best things from the originals. This game doubled down on weird. It’s not as noticeable in the campaigns but in skirmish where you have access to all the units there’s a lot of overcomplication and clutter. Like the trash fake buildings that are pointless in skirmish and maybe usable in multiplayer. And the multiplayer is now directly tied to EA servers so when they will get bored and shut them down you wouldn’t be able to play this. And there will be no way to get the corresponding achievement. They did just kill-off Bad Company and almost killed Mirror’s Edge. While you still can play the multiplayer you can enjoy being dominated by people who play this game since 96.
The original balance (?) of counters is shaken up, with everything getting somewhat better at non-counter things. Rifles still disassemble tanks, and destroy rocketmen but everyone puts up a fight. The new minelayers are some MP toy, because the AI outright avoids the mines. If you leave it no choice it will get some damage, but AI tanks will just hover over a half of the minefield as if it’s nothing.
After the suicide APC+engineers raids of Command & Conquer the sequel went for the Dune 2 model where only damaged buildings can be captured. But instead doing that with cheap infantry you have to escort some costly dudes. And just like in Dune 2 you can’t just get all the enemy tech. Even after getting the construction yard you still have to separately capture a helipad, war factory and other building to have everything but magicks. Though, the AI often insta-sells everything before you have a chance to capture it.
The game has a solid unit limit. The battles are still pretty small due to the map size and the unit AI, but unlike Dune 2 i never hit the cap and unlike Age of Empires or Warcraft you have less than a ten of peasants instead of wasting half of your limit on a sustainable economy. So without tiberium what’s their excuse for harvesters? There is none. It’s just gold and crystals being on the surface. The whole point of tiberium was the ease of harvesting and this cold-war era game just ignored any semblance of lore to keep the field management mechanic created for Dune 2. Red Alert 3 ditched it for an over-simplified resource gathering and lost a separate element of the gameplay, but gained proper city fights and a better lore. The first game was still operating in small numbers like Warcrafts and Dune 2, this one kept the bottlenecked and slow production, but there’s enough resources to assemble a proper hi-end fighting force and to not be afraid to sustain losses. Losing 10 choppers in an air raid is not as scary as losing one tank in the first game.
Metal fences can’t stop tanks anymore and troops will actively attack walls, so you can’t trap the AI inside it’s body. But also it makes them pretty much useless. The walls are slow to produce and are easy to destroy, they are not this strong barrier from Age of Empires / Stronghold.
The non-symmetry between the factions is even bigger now.
Soviets got two planes in addition to a helicopter. Yaks suck, their guns are weak even vs infantry. They can’t hit anything because AI just sidesteps out of harm’s way. The rocket planes are pretty good. If you use an iron curtained choppa as a bait the MiGs can deal with the air defences. Even though, the enemy bases are filled with rocket troops, your anti-infantry choppa’s AI is so brain dead it’s worse than the artillery, FAU-2 and dragons / griffins from Warcraft 2 combined — they just sit in one place while being pelted and look at the enemy. And if the enemy moves the choppas have start to stare at them from scratch.
The submarines suck and you have no choice. Even with severe numeric domination you loose a half of them in a battle. By default they are passive as to not be spotted, but also it means they do not defend automatically and you need to babysit each one of them. They refuse to hold formation and refuse to move closer to attack.
The new dogs can melt infantry on the run, protect from the supporting troops like thieves, spies and engineers but are useless in attack due to low HP.
The soviets got GDI’s mammoth tanks and now they can shoot rockets at will, which makes them more formidable when playing as allies. They can’t solo a wall of turrets, they can be kited by a light tank, but what will you do against a ten of them? They even have weak anti-air missiles. Interestingly, soviets don’t have any other anti-infantry vehicles, so without mammoths you have to try and squish everyone manually. FAU-2 are extremely effective at destroying the doods if they can hit anything but they shoot once a year and have no HP.
Soviet flame towers are pretty but they are super weak and useless, they are not on par with pillboxes they can’t even deal with infantry. Rocketmen severely outrange them and so are all the tanks. I still remember how i tried to play this game in the childhood and creeped my towers into enemy’s territory replicating my AoE 2 strategies, and they couldn’t deal with anything so i lost. The tesla coils are just reskinned NOD obelisks, but who would say no to a new flavour of the same cool? 
Soviets have a lot of magicks. You can send a spy plane and then just drop paratroopers behind enemy lines. The parabombs sounds like a good thing too, but not even once i managed to hit anything with them. The plane comes from an unpredictable angle and drops the bombs somewhere else to not hit anything at all. With the AI’s strong AA defence you cannot target the middle of enemy’s base because the plane will be instantly shot down. Iron Curtain is alright it can be useful but it’s not as good as in the later games. It’s single-target and you can’t melt enemy infantry with it.
Allies have a lot of garbage infantry and garbage fake buildings cluttering the GUI. Why do you even have two types of the same pillboxes? The fog of war generator is annoying to humans, but AI outright ignores it and air-raids your base or drops nukes on you. Medics are good with expensive commandos, but they heal so extremely slow they are pointless with the infantry. It’s easier to just get new troops. Spies can give you pointless intel or a couple of magicks. Only sonar sounds useful but you can as well scan the waters manually with choppers and attack-ground when your pointer changes its shape. The satellite reveals the whole map after a count-down, but also if you loose the tech centre (and AI always targets it with nukes) your whole life goes dark. The chronosphere sends one sad unit somewhere on the map, temporarily. It’s peak pointless. If you could dump enemy mammoth tanks into the ocean, send a pack of your units, turn your cruiser into a Landkreuzer during the philadelphia experiment or at least assemble an attack force somewhere else with a faster cooldown it would be at least something. But as is this is a joke.
This game has a separate button in the remastered launcher — they didn’t try to merge them into one package. It was remastered into 4K, including the recreated DOS installation, but the pre-baked models still have rounds made of 15 polygons. The first game’s AI cutscene upscaling was rough, but in this newer game the upscaled cutscenes look outright embarrassing. After the all AI advances in the past years they should give it another go and patch-in a better modern result.
The remaster has modernized the GUI and the controls. I would like to play it the authentic way, but the unit AI is an ultimate dumbass with its real-time turns and bad non-predictive non-queuing pathfinding. I played on the hardest so i gave up and used the modern controls. The mission select list for the alternative routes is great.
The re-draws follow that brief moment of the calm+realistic art-style — Civilization 3, Heroes 3, Age of Empires 2. The mood is a little bit different and the new artists didn’t understand the originals sometimes — FAU-2 was based on distinctly flat iconic MAZ and ZIL army trucks carrying oversized rockets, the new one looks like Optimus prime carrying a normal-size big rocket, but it’s an alright job otherwise. Good thing that the artists used the Windows version as the template this time, so all the sprites are already aspect-corrected. The GUIs relating to bonus content are still screwed, though. The game offered me the native resolution for my current 4//3 screen, but instead it just run letterboxed, only the mission-end GUI was screwed up and stretched.
There is still no hotkeys for the speed controls. It’s a little bit less critical than in the first game, but it is still crucial.
The achievements track progression and playing on hard. Thankfully this time it doesn’t include duplicates, add-ons and secret missions. So i’ll try to play the rest on easy and see if it will be more varied and fun. Hard challenges demand optimal strategies with no variation. Like building an airfleet while defending and then bum-rushing the enemy’s yards, then production buildings. This person has a massive tank army, while i just used choppas and cruisers everywhere.
The music is still good but it has less character than in the first game.
So this game was supposed to be a prequel to the first one. And they significantly improved the storytelling. Instead of a collection of random videos, sometimes with lore, sometimes with characters, there’s now a proper plot, and the short renders try to match the missions. It’s an alternative history about the cold war turning into a hot war between the empire of evil and the shithole of evil because of Kane, who looks the same age as fifty years later.
The campaigns, again, lack some of the technologies, but mostly that only makes them better. Without the useless clutter you can think that this game is straight better than the first one. Even playing on hard without the walling, it was easier because the AI is cheating less blatantly and your units are a tiny bit more competent. The AI is less prone to squash all your infantry without a fighting chance. It still cheats and builds in places without owning any buildings, while gaining resources out of thin air. AI units have more HP and hit harder. AI harvesters regenerate very fast so you can’t take them down without a proper army.
There are fewer alternative maps which is good. It’s not a choice when you have to chose blindly. One way is often easier than the other. So you can save before the end of every mission and then spend time on reckon before deciding. Or just look it up on the internet because it’s not 96 anymore. The campaigns are designed in a way to compliment the weird factions. Soviets get maps to use more aircraft, the allies get more maps with usable navy. Even if it’s just a puddle to place a couple of cruisers.
The soviet campaign has only one hairy mission. In the 5A you are sent with your garbage submarines against an army of specialized submarine-destroyers. You are pretty soon out of money and the enemy is on another island. I rushed the yard with yaks, while using paratroopers to block the building site of AI’s refinery. I wasted all my money on the stupid submarines so i had only a small fleet of yaks and i spent like an hour reloading them to destroy the last 10 tanks AI had on the island. The map where the allies get cruisers is not super easy, but it’s manageable with strong micro and knowing the future after several failed attempts.
Without rocketmen and with allies using good helicopters soviets have a very big problem with anti-air defence. Your attacking army can be eaten while you are still on the move. You can protect the base with a lot of SAMs, but in the field the only choice is a lot of mammoths. With allies having good air defences you need to destroy their defence with combined arms. FAU-2s protected by mammoths are taking out ships, flak and rocket troops, and MiGs are taking care of production buildings and land-defences.
Many maps feature off-screen enemy reinforcements. With your submarines being so passive and the game having no stances they just ignore enemy transports and cruisers popping up in your backyard. I had to fortify the shorelines and save often to not to miss an attack.
Allies have several very hard missions in the beginning. I hope that people who don’t want the achievements are having fun on easy. In the mission 5C you have to use limited soviet tech against stronger soviets. Your flame towers are absolutely useless, the enemy eats all the resources it can get under the protection of a sizeable tank army. So yeah, once again in the fifth mission i had to get some yaks fast and then bum-rush the yard since soviets have no anti-air protection, and then waste a hour or two moping up the remaining tanks with planes on a map with no ore left. In the mission 7 soviets have a lot of angry tanks and hungry harvesters. While your submarines were shooting once a minute, the AI subs spew torpedoes like a machine gun. I managed to move a lot of destroyers to the bottleneck to spoil the enemy’s advance, build a lot of turrets and then slowly move forward after swiping the crumbs of resources the AI have left me.
Once you get your choppas, the rest of the campaign goes about the same. With soviets having only SAMs you just defend as hard as you can afford, waiting for the satellite, rush the yards, then clean out all the SAMs and production buildings. Rinse and repeat. The campaign has more timed and defence missions. There’s a couple of missions with persistent buildings. So if you know about that you can create an army of harvesters in the first one and then eat up everything in the second before AI even wakes up. There are a couple of indoors missions. The timers look scary, but on the slowest game speed it’s manageable. One of the timers is tied to the previous mission, so if you left yourself only two minutes you are screwed. If you look up the walkthrough and get the commando at the start instead of wandering around you can finish the map in 15 timer-minutes easily.
To stop the off-screen reinforcements with allies you can block the shorelines with cheap ships. Trying to destroy the transports on the go is useless, they pass you by with barely any damage. In the mission 12 soviets generate subs out of thin water. But even on hardest they are pretty passive so i put some cruisers to attack ground in the middle of the pond. If left unchecked the water can be fully infested with subs. I wonder can they occupy every square of the lake if you let them?
The allied ending is rather weak, especially compared to the soviet finale.
Inside my shell i milk and hate 