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.
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.
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.
1995 was the original "Command and Conquer" not "Red Alert". In the original C&C the computer wouldn't attack sandbox walls which was basically godmode since you could just fence them off heh.
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.
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.
I have such fond memories of this game. Editing the .ini files was a delight - I distinctly remember giving Tanya (with her incredibly rapid-fire guns) cruiser shells and having basically the entire map blow up instantaneously.
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.
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.
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...
I'm really not sure about the timelines, but I can easily speak to the state of things for today: LLMs are very wasteful and slow for real-time decisions. The "thinking" ones have no chance and if you disable thinking, they really struggle with querying the context with the right calls. For the once in a moonshot scenarios that they have enough context and ample time to react, they are great!
Developing AI scripts, however? They are crazy good! I try to re-balance the game to give a little edge to the humans, then it takes a single iteration for your not-even-sota LLM to destroy me. I mean I'm not the fastest RTS player but for the lack of skill, I have the advantage of being the designer of the game :)
About the RA2 AI scripts: You can react to enemy faction, composition etc. but it's impossible to program it to pull back its tesla tanks when they are under threat from a bunch of rocketeers. Those things are hard-coded in the game engine. I think the only exception was the DeeZire mod which patched the game exe, if I'm not hallucinating.
It's already in the works. NDA but the studio I gig at, their Ai love to send NPCs off cliffs.
Because there is no collision between the sky and floor it determines that this is the quickest route. Even with zoning it does something you'll never think of.
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.
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.
There's a whole scene around making bots for Starcraft: Broodwar, using an API (BWAPI) that doesn't allow cheating. They're quite good now, better than most humans. But the top bots still can't beat a pro, or even a high ranked ladder player.
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.
Real-time strategy AI is absolutely AI in the standard Russell & Norvig sense of AI. There's nothing about the computer science concept of AI that implies "super-smart" or always trying to outsmart the player (rather than trying to be entertaining).
Continuously shifting the goalposts of what "AI" is is, of course, a well-known phenomenon, giving rise to what's called the AI effect or Tesler's theorem [1].
Maybe it is, given that the classical AI definition is so broad, it can mean almost anything. But for me, there's a fundamental difference between something that "tries to be intelligent" and something that "tries to appear to be intelligent".
That is why I prefer to call them "bots" or "computers" - just to separate them from a shifting mess of definitions of what "AI" actually means. It reminds me of "Destination Void" by Frank Herbert, where the main characters were trying to build artificial consciousness and were struggling to define what it actually means.
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…
Instead of driving the agent with an llm, it might work to use the agent to hard code heuristics, and use some kind of a simulation to benchmark its skills? Then feeding the results back to the agent so it can improve the heuristics?
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
Shoutout to one of my favorite OpenRA podcaster - watching the game is a lot less stressful than actually playing it: https://www.youtube.com/@CovertFlobert
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.
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.
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!
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.
Link to your GitHub? I'd love to play the version with your improvements!
https://github.com/hypercube33/OpenRA/
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.
1995 was the original "Command and Conquer" not "Red Alert". In the original C&C the computer wouldn't attack sandbox walls which was basically godmode since you could just fence them off heh.
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.
> 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.
Perhaps because their focus is on multiplayer, where saving and loading isn't as in demand as SP
Now, that is what I call taking the "Command Design Pattern" to heart!
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.
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.
Frank Klepacki is a legend of a musician.
Try the Doom ones.
I'll have to give them a shot, but admittedly the nostalgia is almost certainly a big reason I love the RA OST (and starcraft as well).
I didn't play enough doom to really love it in the same way.
Right, it's less about the nostalgia, and more about the tempo that I find really enjoying.
Man the Terran tracks are so incredible
It's the same backend, so it's a bit like a fun theme difference. I played Dune2 first, and like RA too.
They're talking about Doom, not Dune.
Heh, yes, right you are.
APC + flamethrowers was the new WTF in OpenRA, if I remember correctly.
If you play online and have a low rating of course buddy is gonna try this
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.
Same, breaks my heart they ruined this franchise. It does make me happy that someone loves red alert as much as me and has made OpenRA.
OpenRA is great, it feels like a better version of Red Alert 2.
The one thing I'm missing is C&C Generals and Zero Hour. Those were also really fun to play over LAN.
I didnt check what makes OpenRA special but theres open source efforts to „remaster“ generals and zero hour.
https://github.com/TheSuperHackers/GeneralsGameCode
A better version of Red Alert 2 is insanely high praise.
I have such fond memories of this game. Editing the .ini files was a delight - I distinctly remember giving Tanya (with her incredibly rapid-fire guns) cruiser shells and having basically the entire map blow up instantaneously.
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.
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.
So someone loves red alert like me awesome.
Has anyone built better AIs for this?
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.
Were you familiar with my modding site RA2Factory?
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!
You are awesome, thank you for being such a magical part of my childhood
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...
I'm really not sure about the timelines, but I can easily speak to the state of things for today: LLMs are very wasteful and slow for real-time decisions. The "thinking" ones have no chance and if you disable thinking, they really struggle with querying the context with the right calls. For the once in a moonshot scenarios that they have enough context and ample time to react, they are great!
Developing AI scripts, however? They are crazy good! I try to re-balance the game to give a little edge to the humans, then it takes a single iteration for your not-even-sota LLM to destroy me. I mean I'm not the fastest RTS player but for the lack of skill, I have the advantage of being the designer of the game :)
About the RA2 AI scripts: You can react to enemy faction, composition etc. but it's impossible to program it to pull back its tesla tanks when they are under threat from a bunch of rocketeers. Those things are hard-coded in the game engine. I think the only exception was the DeeZire mod which patched the game exe, if I'm not hallucinating.
I know you meant player AI, but now I'm imagining an RTS where every unit is running a small reasoning LLM.
It's already in the works. NDA but the studio I gig at, their Ai love to send NPCs off cliffs.
Because there is no collision between the sky and floor it determines that this is the quickest route. Even with zoning it does something you'll never think of.
Using LLMs as NPCs can be hilarious to watch.
I need to hear more. That or start my own NPC circus.
I might suck but I found it really hard iirc :^(
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.
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)
There's a whole scene around making bots for Starcraft: Broodwar, using an API (BWAPI) that doesn't allow cheating. They're quite good now, better than most humans. But the top bots still can't beat a pro, or even a high ranked ladder player.
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.
Real-time strategy AI is absolutely AI in the standard Russell & Norvig sense of AI. There's nothing about the computer science concept of AI that implies "super-smart" or always trying to outsmart the player (rather than trying to be entertaining).
Continuously shifting the goalposts of what "AI" is is, of course, a well-known phenomenon, giving rise to what's called the AI effect or Tesler's theorem [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_effect
Maybe it is, given that the classical AI definition is so broad, it can mean almost anything. But for me, there's a fundamental difference between something that "tries to be intelligent" and something that "tries to appear to be intelligent".
That is why I prefer to call them "bots" or "computers" - just to separate them from a shifting mess of definitions of what "AI" actually means. It reminds me of "Destination Void" by Frank Herbert, where the main characters were trying to build artificial consciousness and were struggling to define what it actually means.
Thanks for introducing me to the article! I’ve experienced this myself but didn’t know it had a name.
Does the project allow AI?
Old-skool AI, aka cpu opponent.
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…
Instead of driving the agent with an llm, it might work to use the agent to hard code heuristics, and use some kind of a simulation to benchmark its skills? Then feeding the results back to the agent so it can improve the heuristics?
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
It's improving but sota models are now too slow for a real time game. Training a specialized neural network would be more effecient.
Shoutout to one of my favorite OpenRA podcaster - watching the game is a lot less stressful than actually playing it: https://www.youtube.com/@CovertFlobert
Need to try this at some point. The other open RTS - beyondallreason - is really good too.
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 :(
https://cnc-comm.com/red-alert/downloads/the-game
EA released CnC and Red Alert as free downloads twenty years 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.
I wish they would release Tiberium Sun
It's so hard for me to choose between Tiberium sun and RA2. Both are in my top 5 games of all time.
This is such a great game. Incredibly well-balanced and thought through.
Has anyone turned it into a browser game?
One of the comments from that page mentions a browser port available at: https://openra-web-fe.azurewebsites.net/
Not sure about RA, but for RA2 see https://chronodivide.com/
Chrono Divide is insane. It is wild to see a single dev completely leapfrog every other team that spent years making RTS engines.
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.
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
wish there was OpenRA2 thats the one i been looking forward to
it's great
Very entertaining campaign