Pros: It's C&C: Renegade, Cons: It's C&C: Renegade

[Aron Times]

tl;dr: Renegade X is better than Renegade but still has a lot of its glaring flaws. If you want this mod to succeed, the frustrating and stalematey gameplay elements need to be fixed.

Hello, my name is Aron Times. I've been playing C&C since 1997, when I discovered C&C: Red Alert. I was playing the Magic: The Gathering video game in a cybercafe when I noticed the A-Bomb icon on the monitor to my right. The guy next to my was playing Red Alert, and I've been a C&C fan ever since. Well, at least until Red Alert 3. Kane's Wrath was the last C&C game I played, as I was offended by their inclusion of a beta key for Red Alert 3 inside the Kane's Wrath box. That was an obvious sign that EA hadn't changed, and that the game would be abandoned soon after release.

Anyway, I came here because I was looking for an alternative to TF2 that wasn't Overwatch. I like Renegade X because it's essential an F2P Renegade, but I dislike Renegade X because while it is as fun as Renegade, it ported over a lot of the annoying and bad gameplay elements from that game as well.

Pros:

1. Movement is less erratic compared to Renegade. None of that silly sidestepping A D A D A D nonsense where people could sidestep instantly without having to slow down to change direction.

2. Guns seem more lethal than Renegade, which was the equivalent of padded sumo wrestling, except that the padded sumo wrestlers were as agile as Sanic. However, this might be because characters can't sidestep like a twitchy Sanic anymore.

3. Graphics are better. I could see heat shimmers and glass blowing in the wind and water flowing through streams. Very nice.

4. It's a streamlined version of C&C: Renegade that is available for free. It's essentially an F2P game.

5. I like the useable gun and missile batteries. I don't remember them being in Renegade, but I loved them in Battlefield 1942.

Cons:

1. Character models move very unnaturally. It's sometimes hard to tell where an enemy player is facing unless he's shooting at something.

2. There is a huge lack of newbie-friendly pop-up tips. I hadn't played Renegade in over 6 or 7 years, and I had forgotten what I was supposed to do when I spawned in the game world. I tried pressing E in front of the terminal, to no effect. I tried different buttons until I slammed my face into the terminal, at which point a pop-up message came up telling me to press E to buy stuff.

3. Repair spam is absolutely terrible. Repairing a target taking fire should reduce the heal rate, and repair beams shouldn't stack. I hated this in Renegade because it just stalled games without really affecting the outcome much. It promoted passive play (just camp the MCT and hold M1) instead of forcing you to react to the enemy (get the right mix of infantry and vehicles to take out the enemy.

4. There doesn't seem to be voice chat. Not sure if this is something you can add, but maybe you can use Steam's voice chat system? I apologize if that is a stupid suggestion as I really have no idea how you would add something like that, to say nothing of the difficulty of such an endeavor.

5. There seems to be no way to get extra ammo in the field, yet vehicles have unlimited ammo and unlimited health in the form of support engineers. This is something I never liked about Renegade, as repair spam can outlast anti-building infantry. Perhaps go the TF2 route and have each dead player drop a medium ammo box (restores half of your maximum ammo).

6. Map borders are unclear. I keep bumping into invisible walls that wreak havoc with suspension of disbelief. Maybe add really tall walls or cliffs or crevasses to dileneate map boundaries and impassible terrain.

7. We can't see our teammate's credit totals. Being able to do so woudl allow an engineer/technician/Hotwire to donate his money to another player so the latter can get a tank or an artillery piece or a chopper. These classes are better out of vehicles so they can repair them as they take damage anyway.

8. Despite what I said about the increased lethality, weapons still deal too little damage. It's either this or everyone has too much HP and armor. It's rather disappointing when I ambush someone as a Black Hand Infantry or as a Chem Warrior and still have them turn around and shoot back at me. These two classes were designed with stealth in mind, but the moment they start shooting, they paint a huge target marker on their heads.

I'd like to elaborate more on #8 because this is the one thing I hate most about Renegade: padded sumo wrestling. Renegade weapons deal very little damage compared to HP totals of both infantry and tanks. You can face each other and exchange fire, but you can last for quite some time before one of you goes down. Combine this with almost instant respawn, and you get the unholy combination of low-impact weaponry compared with low-impact deaths. You can't do much with your weapons, and when you die, it doesn't matter since you just respawn right away.

This can be especially frustrating when you're on the losing team. Picture the Brotherhood of Nod bearing down upon the GDI base. You're low on cash since your refinery is down and maybe your barracks and your war factory are also both down. You walk out from respawn and immediately get killed. Your respawn within 5 seconds and are mowed down right after walking into the burning remnants of your base. You respawn again and manage to last a minute, but it's futile because your weapons are worthless, and you die again, and respawn almost immediately.

It can also be frustrating for the winning team, at least those who want a challenge. Repeatedly killing rifle infantry as they exit their spawns is boring as hell. It gets even more boring when you factor in repair spam and mines, which extend the battle without changing the ultimate outcome. I guess what I'm trying to say is that the game is very boring and stalematey, and even after the stalemate is broken, it takes forever to finish off the losing team, and this feels horrible to people not used to it, including a few such as myself who have been dealing with it for years.

Anyway, that was a bit long, so I'll stop right here for now. All in all, I like the mod, but I cannot in good faith recommend it to my friends. It has too much of Renegade's design flaws in it despite all the good changes made by the mod team.

[Xtractor]

RenX is the Best Game evar ...Still in development..and I recommend it to all ..its fun ! <== my review

[Ryz]

7: you can see it, press V ingame

[Aron Times]

7: you can see it, press V ingame

Really? I did not know that. Thank you!

[Ryz]

YW

[yosh56]

6. All maps are slowly moving over to soft world boundaries

You can see this on Canyon right now.

[[TmX]Super-Kh]

welcome to world of renx yes we have heard most of what you stated alot before just make sure to report anything and even come up with solutions to problems and suggest them to devs,this is still in Beta phase so wait a little time for it to get better,visit it now and then, after all some are still truthful to command and conquer and still wish it to go on

[Aron Times]

Super-Kh":23sy4jnw]welcome to world of renx yes we have heard most of what you stated alot before just make sure to report anything and even come up with solutions to problems and suggest them to devs,this is still in Beta phase so wait a little time for it to get better,visit it now and then, after all some are still truthful to command and conquer and still wish it to go on

I agree. Performance and stability and bug fixes first. Balance should be last. It doesn't matter how balanced the game is if it crashed too often.

[SFJake]

Your #8 is the very definition of Renegade and its because every shooters are the opposite that I pretty much hate every shooters except Renegade.

I would absolutely despise Renegade if everything killed me that quickly, and in fact I always despised snipers for doing exactly that.

God damn, a shooter where you can actually react to things instead of instantly dying to everything. Fuck, we don't have enough of that. Everything out nowadays is a war of backstabbing pussy that looks like real war (and real war is fucking boring).

Mind you, I agree with the repair complaint in general. Repair was always broken in Renegade.

But I don't dislike some stalemates. I actually love games where the battlefield and the frontlines fluctuates. Sometimes its here for a while, sometimes its pushed farther. Its perfectly fine when it stays in one place for 5-10 minutes as both team tries to break the other's line. The idea at least, is something I love, even if Renegade does not pull it off perfectly and sometimes it feels too hop

I just disagree with you on your general opinion and it reminds me of most people that happened to dislike Renegade -> IE, they say "Renegade's flaws" where I say "Renegade's qualities".

[yosh56]

Honestly Renegade would be far far worse if you did die too fast. There definitely would be no real reason to buy a 1k character if a rifle soldier killed in ~5-10 hits to the body. That... and it would just make it even more of a world of tanks.

[XD_ERROR_XD]

Honestly Renegade would be far far worse if you did die too fast. There definitely would be no real reason to buy a 1k character if a rifle soldier killed in ~5-10 hits to the body. That... and it would just make it even more of a world of tanks.

World of Tanks? I think you're talking War Thunder here

[Aron Times]

Honestly Renegade would be far far worse if you did die too fast. There definitely would be no real reason to buy a 1k character if a rifle soldier killed in ~5-10 hits to the body. That... and it would just make it even more of a world of tanks.

Well, if Rifle Infantry can kill a 1k infantry in 5 to 10 hits, maybe the 1k infantry can kill the Rifle Infantry in 1 to 2 hits. The 1k infantry would still be worth it then; you just can't go bunny hopping in the open dodging bullets like there's no tomorrow.

Anyway, I loved the Renegade singleplayer campaign, where enemy infantry and vehicles would go down very quickly. I realize, in hindsight, that Havoc was an overpowered multiplayer unit by his HP and armor standards, but the fast-paced gameplay in singleplayer was sorely lacking in multiplayer. I was absolutely disappointed at how it took forever to kill anything in multiplayer, even at point blank range.

I did discover a trick to killing people quickly: aim for the head. Even though the head is a smaller target, with all the ammo Renegade weapons had, the bonus headshot damage would allow you to quickly take out enemy infantry (especially once you can predict how they move). IIRC, in rifle infantry duels, going for the head was way worth it because even if I only had 20% accuracy on headshots with my assault rifle, my bodyshotting enemy would need 100% accuracy to match my damage output.

Not sure if this made it to Ren-X, but I might give it a try.

[yosh56]

...........if you weren't aiming for the head to begin with, you were already doing it wrong.

[Schmitzenbergh]

I think the "problem" (I would call it gameplay) is that the focus in Renegade is on destroying the enemy teams base, not killing enemy players. Killing enemy players is part of the game, but only benefits to the ultimate goal: Destroying the enemy base.

If you are only focussing on killing enemy players to get kills, you are not playing the game the way it was meant to be... (Could be fun for a few matches though )

God damn, a shooter where you can actually react to things instead of instantly dying to everything. Fuck, we don't have enough of that. Everything out nowadays is a war of backstabbing pussy that looks like real war (and real war is fucking boring).

I completely agree SFJake! It's a game, not a superduper realistic war simulator

I also agree that some things in Renegade are broken, but that's what made the game interesting to play in my opinion

[Handepsilon]

I did discover a trick to killing people quickly: aim for the head.

You don't say?

If you're serious about it though, that's how all FPS games work. Aiming for the head is the most effective way to kill something, be it man, zombie, or whatever.

I'm pretty comfy with the damage personally. It's those one-hit kills that makes me cringe instead of a lengthy firefight. Besides, it doesn't last that long if you aim correctly.

Sadly if you're not good at aiming with a gun, those splashy explosives are not that great at killing people.

[RoundShades]

The problem isn't necessarily with headshot damage being too high or too low. It is actually about right, too high and Bananas will make nobody but Tokyio wana play, and too low will make fights too lengthy and not about aim as much as position.

Snipers is sort of a problem, their overall dps isn't that high but their instant kill damage can even end a point blank engagement 5x faster than any other weapon. Really, their headshots would still be rewarding if they weren't instakill, and their headshots wouldn't be instakill if they were 2.5x instead of 5x.

The rest of those problems, maybe engis aren't balanced for their role versus every other class being necessary after having a full-engi team (sniper aside, a full engi team is not a problem), but the game isn't that stalematey. I am glad you think it is an improvement over original Ren though.

[Aron Times]

I think the "problem" (I would call it gameplay) is that the focus in Renegade is on destroying the enemy teams base, not killing enemy players. Killing enemy players is part of the game, but only benefits to the ultimate goal: Destroying the enemy base.

If you are only focussing on killing enemy players to get kills, you are not playing the game the way it was meant to be... (Could be fun for a few matches though )

God damn, a shooter where you can actually react to things instead of instantly dying to everything. Fuck, we don't have enough of that. Everything out nowadays is a war of backstabbing pussy that looks like real war (and real war is fucking boring).

I completely agree SFJake! It's a game, not a superduper realistic war simulator

I also agree that some things in Renegade are broken, but that's what made the game interesting to play in my opinion

I am amused that you think I'm here to wrack up a killstreak like the stereotypical Halo/CoD player. I always try to accomplish the objectives in TF2 and DotA 2, the two main competitive games that I play. I actually raged for the first time in a very long time in DotA 2 earlier today because my team went off looking for kills instead of trying to destroy the enemy barracks. Had they not gone off and tried to pad their KDA ratio (kill/death/assist), we would've won the game then and there.

I have no problem with the objectives in Renegade. In fact, that's what drew me to the game, because you win not by wracking up kills, but by taking out the enemy base. I guess my main problem is Engineer repair spam, which really slows down the game. I guess my issue with the TTK (time to kill) in Renegade-X wouldn't be an issue if repair spam weren't a thing. Right now, the only way to overpower repair spam is to either bring really heavy firepower or assault the building and take out the Engineers, which is easier said than done due to the long TTK.

[Ap2000]

Well, if Rifle Infantry can kill a 1k infantry in 5 to 10 hits, maybe the 1k infantry can kill the Rifle Infantry in 1 to 2 hits.

No, that'd be a horrible game-breaking change..

It's exactly why I hate snipers so fucking much.

[Schmitzenbergh]

I think the "problem" (I would call it gameplay) is that the focus in Renegade is on destroying the enemy teams base, not killing enemy players. Killing enemy players is part of the game, but only benefits to the ultimate goal: Destroying the enemy base.

If you are only focussing on killing enemy players to get kills, you are not playing the game the way it was meant to be... (Could be fun for a few matches though )

God damn, a shooter where you can actually react to things instead of instantly dying to everything. Fuck, we don't have enough of that. Everything out nowadays is a war of backstabbing pussy that looks like real war (and real war is fucking boring).

I completely agree SFJake! It's a game, not a superduper realistic war simulator

I also agree that some things in Renegade are broken, but that's what made the game interesting to play in my opinion

I am amused that you think I'm here to wrack up a killstreak like the stereotypical Halo/CoD player. I always try to accomplish the objectives in TF2 and DotA 2, the two main competitive games that I play. I actually raged for the first time in a very long time in DotA 2 earlier today because my team went off looking for kills instead of trying to destroy the enemy barracks. Had they not gone off and tried to pad their KDA ratio (kill/death/assist), we would've won the game then and there.

I have no problem with the objectives in Renegade. In fact, that's what drew me to the game, because you win not by wracking up kills, but by taking out the enemy base. I guess my main problem is Engineer repair spam, which really slows down the game. I guess my issue with the TTK (time to kill) in Renegade-X wouldn't be an issue if repair spam weren't a thing. Right now, the only way to overpower repair spam is to either bring really heavy firepower or assault the building and take out the Engineers, which is easier said than done due to the long TTK.

The "you" in this message is not the you as in "Aron Times", but the you as in "Players who go for kills". I'm not attacking your playstyle, heck I don't even know if I've ever played with you This was more a message to the players that do go for killstreaks.

I agree repair spam is slowing down the game, the building armour mechanic is part of the solution so buildings get permanent damage.

I don't know the answer to the problem, but I'm not denying there is a problem.

[RoundShades]

Right now, the only way to overpower repair spam is to either bring really heavy firepower or assault the building and take out the Engineers, which is easier said than done due to the long TTK.

All this has been discussed before, and while it is actually getting better, it is still something discussed every day.

However, TTK is not the problem, TTK is already 2x faster than old ren. It actually adds variety to the guns when it takes 10 bullets to kill someone. This is excluding the sniper, which is clunky to use in anything but long range assassination of repairmen (yet "prodigies" still kill 4 people in 4 shots point blank in the tunnels so that is sort of a problem).

What is the problem, is a number of things. One of them, was building health being too massive to put down all in one go. Making buildings able to take some permanent damage to bring the bulk of it's health down bit by bit until it's a possible-to-finish margin, wasn't the holy grail of solutions, but it definitely adds to the game from what I hear.

The other is repairs. Many time, it was asked "should repair be nerfed"? Many ideas, such as repair needing reload, repair speed decreased, repairgun costing credits, but all of those are volitile ideas.

Ask for assaulting a building's repairmen on the MCT, it is difficult but not always impossible. SBH excel at that, if they can get in some doorways they can shoot the repairmen without needing to bypass mines. However, a suggestion that came up a while back, that was just revived for further discussion, is if EMP mines disabled use of repairgun in their area of effect for the duration of their effect? Then, you walk up to a door, throw the EMP through the door and into the MCT area, and that gets an opening for tanks to leave their mark, while the repairmen scramble away to do repair to a nearby wall until the effect dissipates. That's the idea and discussion anyway. Emps already do a lot with stalling a tank rush in open fire, and diffusing mines, is the argument against.

The other argument, would be that tanks in most people's experience, and especially since building armor because focus-fire switching between buildings "chip" them down bit by bit, work fine, but infantry need more anti-structure viability beside the ellusive "rocket soldier rush". Hotwire already do a lot of structure damage and with sidearms can fight a good fight, and other infantry do much less. SBH can mess up a structure alright, but takes 2 to kill using both c4 and laser-fire on mct, and 3 to insta-kill via c4. Volts are alright but against repairs they are undone point-by-point. One solution is some sort of mild-moderate increase to small arms fire against the MCT. Another is to make infantry more viable to break into a structure and wreck up the place, while mines and base defense make that currently too difficult against even a quarter of an equal opposing force. If "combat" infantry dominated more "surely" against "repair" infantry, it would help, but c4 and sidearms are very formidable even against volt rifles and chainguns.

There are a lot of things to do about this, I know several people reference the Renegade Mod "A Path Beyond" with how infantry did acceptable firefights into buildings and acceptable mct damage, coupled with how "technicians" repair a building with 1/2 the current building health at 1/3 the current free-engi repair rate, but most "tanks" were squishy and they weren't infinitely repairable themselves (vehicles have to return to base for repairs or get repairs from mechanics who couldn't outrepair their own number in enemy tanks).

[Bananas]

The main problems with repairs are: refill spam, remotes, and side arms. Engis in their base are gods. In the field they are easy to kill. Also mines make it incredibly hard to do anything by yourself unless you're a...ding ding...engi.

This stuff has been looked at and discussed some. Hopefully changes will come with the infantry rebalance. If you have any ideas feel free to suggest stuff.

[RoundShades]

You brought up 2 other good subjects. Refill spam, and the prime first-class importance of units that can either repair or destroy a structure from inside and both are the same damn unit.

Refill spam. If it had a 10-15 second cooldown like "Airdrops" have, then an engineer gets the defender advantage of a single refill in case of a firefight in his own structure, if he can't handle the fight in that time he either has to abandon the building and get a refill at another structure and come back, or he has to make the sacrifice and hope for a respawn.

Repair units also being base destruction units. Planetside 2 splits units like these up into 2-3 separate units, A Path Beyond also separate these units, and generally, maybe should Renegade X. Have engineers have remotes but not timed (equal c4 damage, just more useful as it isn't timed), and have hotwire/tech have remotes with just 1 timed. That is a start, giving other combat infantry an advantage over them would help too, but that can fall under "increasing mct damage to small arms fire" and maybe even new mechanics like "variations to infantry speed and armor, so engineers have 85% base speed while anti-infantry auto-riflemen have 115% base speed".

[Aron Times]

I actually wasn't aware about building HP being split into HP and armor. I'm assuming armor can't be repaired? Or is it HP that can't be repaired? As for the TTK, it's nice that it's faster than Renegade. That's what I hated most about Renegade, how the element of surprise was completely worthless to the power of ADADADADAD sidestepping since everything took forever to kill.

[Axesor]

About building armor: HP is not repairable, AR do.

I will always stand behind my view that infantry fights are very punishable and limiting. There is no infinite ammo, health/armor is not regenerateable (vehicled do have infinite ammo but infantry do not? why ). I "fixed" this in my incompleted infantry-only mutator and it's very nice feature! I also balanced snipers. Why just not try it? (not my mutator. I mean armor regen and infinite ammo feature?)

Engi and sniper problems are generaly known and I didn't get why these units are not balanced yet. It's not too hard to edit. Since there is autoupdater, there is room for many small updates and experiments.

I think that only 1000c chars should be able to carry 2x remotes and 1 c4. There should't be any character who can destroy building all alone since there is buiding armor feature (very nice feature )

I can write whole book about balancing all characters but I see no point in that.

[RoundShades]

To be fair, I thought all classes should have 1 timed, engis should have 2 remote but not 1 timed, and hotwire/tech should have 1 timed and 2 remote.

Then, give a beacon-slot 1-timed-c4 purchaseable for any class for 600. Bam. Now any infantry is reasonably capable of doing significant damage to a structure.

This is assuming the very likely event that hotwires are nerfed in direct infantry combat so they can't wreck a LCG 1v1.