I remember playing Tiberian Dawn pre-patch when the Nod turrets were so OP, you'd never build units.

superior tanks and tank rushing almost always wins the game and in EVERY SINGLE C&C, there's always 1 side that has the best tanks. no prize guessing which sides.

C&C devs never bothered to balanced their factions unlike Blizzard. i'm fine with that since i don't play multiplayer, and the factions just feel more unique when they're unbalanced.

Not to mention that you could just block the AI with sandbags, the enemies would just line up next to the barrier and you had all the time you needed to collect resources and build up a force strong enough to destroy the enemy base. Trapping the enemy harvester was also fun. :P Actually I'm not sure they ever patched this out, I think this "tactic" didn't work at least since the Windows 95 version anymore, though. I certainly stopped doing that, mostly to make the game fun again, though. :P

True, I never played C&C for the multiplayer (although I did try it a bunch of times), that's what Warcraft and StarCraft were for. And in singleplayer I couldn't care less if one of the factions is more powerful than the other, only makes the experience more diverse. Okay, sure, StarCraft managed to have super diverse factions while also being super balanced but who cares... C&C is about fun. They just forgot about that when making Tiberian Sun and that's why it's the worst game in the series. :P

Btw, what I'll never understand is how much more polished and demanding Dune 2000 always seemed than most C&C games before and after. Dune 2000 seemed like this side project before Tiberian Sun which barely anyone noticed or cared about (also Emperor seems almost completely forgotten) but in many ways it seemed like a far more professional and solid game than the C&C games. It's certainly tougher. I've beaten every C&C game, most of them multiple times, but Dune 2000 just gets ridiculously challenging very soon.

Well, the AI's hugely exploitable, but I was just talking balance (like for multiplayer).

My favorite AI exploit was always that it selects first-found unit for airstrike/nuke/ion. So just toss a minigunner top row, leftmost you can get it in the map.

There was also early the "selling canceling" bug where you could sell building to get its free minigunners, then select the building and cancel the selling during the animation. (This was fixed.)

But yeah, turrets on release cost 3/5 the price of guard towers, and were far, far more useful.
Tougher's not always better. There are plenty of missions in the original C&C I couldn't beat without sandbag bug, or at least targetting exploit.

From the reviews I read at the time, Dune2000 got some flak, some intense flak actually, for not being innovative or fresh enough. It was basically dune 2, with it's mechanics updated to the level of the C&C titles. What made the situation even worse for the game was that, since the last rts game with that familiar set of Westwood rts mechanics, Red Alert, there had been some major heavy hitter RTS releases: Age of Empires, Total Annihilation, Earth 2140 and Starcraft. Perhaps it was seen as a fresh an exciting time for the RTS genre, and the reviewers at the time had less patience, than they otherwise would've had, for an otherwise solid game that chose to stick to its old guns instead of venturing into a new and different direction.

I feel kinda bad because I skipped Dune2000 due to the scathing reviews, and it was only last year, or perhaps the year before, that I finally managed to finish the game, and I thoroughly enjoyed it!

For RA1, my experience was that the Soviets had an advantage on small maps, while the Allies had an advantage on large maps. Those powerful base defenses didn't matter when you needed to cover so much ground to collect resources, and those faster and cheaper Allied tanks ran circles around the slow and ponderous Soviet ones. On small maps, though, Soviets had quite an edge with those better base defenses and better firepower.

As for RA2, I found the lack of a good artillery unit for the Soviets to be a big problem. On naval maps the dreadnaught worked well, but on land-only maps the V3 rocket and siege form of the siege copter were horrible and just didn't do their jobs well. Especially in the vs Yuri matchup, where mind control make rushing in with a bunch of tanks a suicide mission, this left you with precious few options.

Ty ty :) I also played as Atreides and had to struggle through some tough as nails levels to get to the end. I seem to recall that I relied a lot upon those long range missle tanks.

NO! Just no. Please!? Command and Conquer series is very good the way it currently is. Balance is bad. Balance is overrated. Balance is the enemy of the player and prevents them from having fun. Overpowered units had always been a ton of fun, like for example, the apocalypse tank in red alert 2. In 3, in which many things changed (for the worst), blame "balance", not only this unit lost the insane amounts of damage it could do before, but also got chopped down (reduced functionality, had the flying rocket secondary attack removed).

It's no problem, there are different factions and different units. One or two (or even all) being overpowered and imbalanced is no big deal; actually, it is pretty enjoyable, to say the least. I never understood nor liked people barking all the time for nerfing, balancing and removal of things.

Just learn to play the damn game, deal with it and find countermeasures. Having many overpowered units in the same game makes it easier finding a countermeasure strategy, instead of having many nerfed and balanced units in it, instead. Overpowered is no excuse. It is lame, boring and potentially dangerous for your game to get watered down, when pinpointed, actually.

I am an old C&C player. Not among the oldest ones, or day 1 ones, but still... I know i like very much the unbalanced and unbiased gameplay.

How was the Apocalypse Tank overpowered in RA2? The thing was slow as dirt and every faction had something that hard countered it. It was pretty good when combo'd with the Iron Curtain, but otherwise massing the faster and cheaper Rhinos was usually a better idea.

A lot of the time balance complaints are just whining. Other times, there are legitimate concerns. The Yuri vs Soviet matchup in RA2 was just plain bad because neither side had any real answers to the other's core units. There's also the big issue of useless units; the V3 rocket and Crazy Ivan were utter shit and didn't even do what they're supposed to do.

Strategy is a two-way street. Your opponent will be seeking to neutralize any counter-measures you might use.

Being powerful and being overpowered are two different things. Something can be obscenely powerful but still have counter-measures, but at the same time something that's actually not all that powerful might just happen to have no good counter-measures available.

If every unit has a counter-measure, then that's a strong indication that they are not, in fact, overpowered and are actually balanced.

I think you misunderstand. "Overpowered" means that there are no countermeasures, at least no effective ones.

I remember that a few tesla coils did the job for me most of the time in the first two C&C games while I always struggled like hell when playing the western side, even their most expensive tanks seemed underpowered at some point.

Yeah, because they have good infantry and poor machinery. They have nice tanks actually, but you need a healthy mix of them to do the job.

Sounds like you're specifically talking about Red Alert, the original game had no tesla coils or "western side".

Thanks for all the replies

@darthspudius:
Yes, Allied battleships (or cruisers?) was awesome. But on a water-free map, the Allies are screwed.

@morolf:
Oh yes, orca bombers was awesome (too). BTW, NOD's stealth tanks also have AA abilities - however, they have to uncloaked before they could attack, and they have low HP.

@F4LL0UT:
Speaking of difficulties. I've never played Dune 2000 (are on my to-do list), but my experience with the C&C games was, that the older was the most difficult, while the newer ones was quite easy. I can beat hard in RA2 without any mentionable troubles, while I have big troubles in the first C&C (remember the maps, where you have to conquer a base with a underpowered army, that are even split in two by a cliff?).

@mqstout:
"Tougher's not always better. There are plenty of missions in the original C&C I couldn't beat without sandbag bug, or at least targetting exploit."
Hmm, which bugs? I've not noticed those.

@KiNgBrAdLeY7:
I understand your arguments about fun in lack of balance. But IMO, a game could also be too unbalanced. RA1 is in someway one of those games. Allies only have speed, naval and explore as advantages. So on a water-free map, the Allies have to build tons and tons of tanks to beat the Soviets, because the Tesla Coils have longer range than any tanks (except from the Soviets own V2 rockets). Otherwise they have to make mass-helicopter attacks on power plants until they reach low power, and then begin the land attack.

Some mention Warcraft games as the best balanced. I understand the argument, but IMO Warcraft balance in a lame way. That fraction A's units are 100 % equivalent to fraction B's units, just 10 % weaker and 10 % cheaper, is a easy, but lame way to balance.
I think a smarter and better way to balance is done with a more creative idea than this.