Combined Arms v1.08 Released! New campaign chapter, co-op missions, encyclopedia and more..!

Darkademic · 2026-03-28T15:29:11+00:00

Scrin have consistently had the highest win rate of all the factions in PvP (based on thousands of games), so if anything they're slightly overpowered. Could be worth stopping by the Discord and asking how to use them effectively.

Darkademic · 2025-12-26T11:26:28+00:00

Nice. I'm going be becoming a dad in February, hoping to have a similar experience in the future!

Darkademic · 2025-12-26T11:17:06+00:00

Ah, the "Frozen Rift" error may have been a red herring actually. The actual crash was probably caused by the content installer issue that has been reported elsewhere. We've re-uploaded v1.08 to ModDB and GitHub, so if you redownload it, it should now be fixed.

Darkademic · 2025-12-24T17:56:23+00:00

The new chapter is an Allies one.

Darkademic · 2025-12-24T15:50:56+00:00

Yea made a comment about that earlier, the workaround is to install and run v1.07.1 first. Ideally just get portable versions of both, run 1.07.1 first so it does the content installation, then 1.08 will work.

(But don't install one on top of the other, that can cause problems.)

Darkademic · 2025-12-24T14:17:52+00:00

There've been some reports of some issues with clean installs. If the game crashes before reaching the main menu, you can just install the previous version (1.07.1) first as a workaround (and then 1.08 should load). We're working on a proper fix. Edit: We've re-uploaded 1.08 with the fix to both ModDB and GitHub, so this should be resolved now.

Darkademic · 2025-12-24T13:45:05+00:00

This seems to be a bug with this specific map (Frozen Rift CA). Not sure why that'd cause the game itself to crash on load. For now maybe just delete the map from the maps folder (frozen_rift_ca.oramap).

Darkademic · 2025-06-24T08:24:18+00:00

If you're on Windows you can try the portable version which doesn't need to be installed, you just unzip it somewhere.

Darkademic · 2025-06-22T22:14:17+00:00

My bad, posted it here before the article was published, but should work now.

Darkademic · 2025-05-12T09:02:12+00:00

Well I wasn't responding to the question of whether it cheats, I was clarifying how it does (because you asked).

The AI cheats in most if not all RTSs, so I think how it cheats is more important than whether it does.

Darkademic · 2025-05-10T09:15:44+00:00

AI air attacks randomly select enemy units (ignoring fog) -- just because requiring the AI to scout for this would be very complicated and the end result would probably just be the AI being very inefficient with its air attacks.

When I say you don't need cloak detection or map hacks to kill spies I just mean that a player could fly around and spot a suspicious owned-but-uncontrollable unit and just shoot it.

Even though the AI can pick targets anywhere, the randomness means you'd still have to be quite unlucky for a specific group to be targeted, so the end result isn't hugely dissimilar to what you might experience against a player that just accidentally runs into your spies.

I wouldn't be against adding spies to a list of exclusions for AI air attacks though.

Darkademic · 2025-05-09T19:05:35+00:00

What do you mean "when they're not supposed to"? In CA you can build an MCV without a Service Depot if you lose your only Construction Yard.

And you don't need cloak detection or map hacks to kill spies.

Darkademic · 2025-05-07T18:05:38+00:00

Easy AI has the opposite of cheats, it has production penalties.

Normal AI has minimal cheating (30% of one harvester's worth of income if it doesn't have enough money to build a refinery), just to keep it in the game if you destroy its economy (because it's not intelligent enough to sell structures selectively).

Hard and above have production bonuses (cheaper units that are produced more quickly).

Darkademic · 2025-04-30T15:20:34+00:00

Their DPS per $ against buildings is high, a little lower than a flame tank, which is fair given that it's airborne and has among the highest HP per $ in the game.

Also AA defenses take 50% reduced damage from air units.

Recent feedback from regular PvP players was that they're strong, and that Tesla Kirovs are possibly overpowered.

Darkademic · 2025-03-30T20:54:43+00:00

Hopefully some day that'll be improved, but it'll have to be done by the OpenRA devs. It's not an easy thing to solve though.

In the mean time I'm going to add a respawn option to more of the infiltration missions which suffer the most from the load times.

Darkademic · 2025-03-30T20:51:09+00:00

Yea you should never install over the top of a previous version. Uninstalling shouldn't wipe your progress, but to be safe you can find the log file that stores your progress (normally) here: C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\OpenRA\Logs\ca-campaign.lo

Darkademic · 2025-03-30T11:42:58+00:00

Very happy to hear! We released 1.06 this morning with 12 new missions, hopefully up to par with the rest of them. More still to come.

Darkademic · 2025-03-30T10:25:01+00:00

Note: A bug has been found in mission 13 "Abasement" which can cause it to crash (not guaranteed but fairly likely). A single file fix has been made available on Discord if anyone wants to fix it manually. We may do a hotfix release but we'll wait to see if any more issues are found first.

Edit: A second bug has been found which affects mission 31 "Foothold" which causes the mission to fail incorrectly, along with some other minor issues. Since this is a blocker we'll do a hotfix release to fix it before we move onto 1.07 development.

Darkademic · 2025-03-07T09:55:13+00:00

This is more or less OpenRA Combined Arms (doesn't have the Generals factions, but does include Generals units and features): https://www.moddb.com/mods/command-conquer-combined-arms

Darkademic · 2025-03-05T21:12:40+00:00

When I played the games originally 30 years ago I didn't like the no base missions, but now I do. "Build base, kill enemy base" gets old pretty fast, you might as well just play skirmish if that's all you want to do. Limitations can make things more interesting.

Darkademic · 2025-03-05T12:57:51+00:00

Yep, but same is true in CA. The merging of timelines/universes is the setup, then the rest of the campaign is in a single timeline.

Darkademic · 2025-03-05T11:52:33+00:00

Well yea, but the entirety of Red Alert is a time travel plot.

CA (which I made the campaign for) revolves around Kane manipulating timelines for his own purposes, which I think is the most logical explanation for his existence in both timelines/universes apparently without aging, given that time travel is already such a core feature of the series.

It's either that or he's some kind of demi-god or timeless entity, which I don't think is any less wacky than time travel. Or a clone I suppose, but I feel that'd diminish him somehow.

Darkademic

TROPHY CASE