You get to listen to me rant for a few minutes! C&C3 gameplay online started extremely smooth and everything seemed fine, even while I was writing my initial review. Players were using their usual little tactics which were to be expected. But now things have been taken even further and it’s honestly now out of hand. Recently a new “strategy” has surfaced where you place a refinery and sell it once the harvester given is created. Then you place another and you’ve got yourself an instant harvester. Do this again and you have 4 harvesters.
So what are people doing? Abusing the refinery “strat – exploit” and whoring all the tiberium they possibly can. What do they do with this tiberium? They make nothing but tanks. Scrin, GDI, Nod, they all do the exact same flippin thing! They make tanks and more tanks. There’s no deviation in strategy, there’s no use of anything else but tanks. So you get a game of tanks cluster flucks which I guess is fun…sorta..not really.. and what’s the result? The team with the best tanks wins: GDI. GDI simply masses Mammoth tanks after massing predator tanks and then streamrolls your base. They can completely ignore your units and just destroy your buildings leaving you completely incapacitated and defeated.
How can this be fixed? Refinery’s need to be tied to their harvesters. If the refinery is sold the harvester is sold. Decrease the amount of tiberium returned to the refinery so that one 30 second trip from a harvester doesn’t pay off your entire investment. Fix the infantry! There has to be some way to make infantry beneficial in the game or what use are they? Rocket soldiers are great as long as your opponent doesn’t have anti infantry – OH WAIT – every race can make anti infantry TANKS in addition to their Anti-tank tanks. So what do you have? MORE incentive to make tanks.
What about air you ask? There’s a tank for that too! Anti-Air tanks take about 15 seconds to make. The result? Well everyone has 2 war factories and creates 2 AA in 30 seconds. The AA tanks are so strong they decimate any other you thought gave you an advantage. Don’t even get me started on the fact that Scrin tanks are effective against tanks and air. *eye roll*.
If the issues are not fixed soon then the only deciding factor in a multiplayer game will be who clicks the fastest.