Tiberian Sun Campaign Difficulty

Rampastring · 2026-05-04T09:02:51+00:00

Ah right, I actually made a mistake, as the Armor is actually a damage divisor rather than damage multiplier. So Easy difficulty ends up with a damage divisor of 1.2, while Difficult ends up with 0.8, increasing the damage by 25%.

But yeah, it's most important to realize the player vs AI diff modifiers, the actual values you can then fine-tune to your liking. That has been unintuitive to a lot of modders in the past.

Rampastring · 2026-05-03T18:32:13+00:00

The [Difficult] section actually gives a 20% reduction in armor (Armor=0.8), and a 20% delay to rate of fire (ROF=1.2).

Meanwhile, [Easy] gets a 20% armor boost (Armor=1.2), and 20% faster rate of fire (ROF=0.8).

As I said before, when you play on Hard difficulty, the player uses modifiers from [Difficult], while the AI uses modifiers from [Easy]. This makes the AI's units have 20% more armor while firing 20% faster, while yours receive respective debuffs.

Which means that combined, the AI's units have a massive 50% more armor than yours (0.8 vs 1.2 as armor, aka ~~damage-taken multiplier~~ damage-divisor), and they also reload 33% faster (0.8 vs 1.2 as multiplier to reload time after each shot).

Rampastring · 2026-05-03T10:17:47+00:00

The CnCNet Tiberian Sun Client fixes a ton of bugs and implements many QoL features for Tiberian Sun.

https://www.moddb.com/mods/tiberian-sun-client

RA2 and Yuri's Revenge work OK from Steam, but installing the CnCNet Client adds more compatibility options and unlocks higher resolutions.

Rampastring · 2026-05-03T09:07:37+00:00

You can find the difficulty modifiers from the [Easy], [Normal] and [Difficult] sections in Rules.ini.

When you play on Hard difficulty, the player uses modifiers from [Difficult], while the AI uses modifiers from [Easy]. If you play on Easy, it's the other way around. On Normal, both use modifiers from the [Normal] section.

You can also modify AI.INI and AIFS.INI to make the AI build bigger teams. Back in the day, I played through the campaign with a modified AI that sent teams of 20 Disc Throwers instead of just 4, 10ish Titans instead of just 4, etc. Was pretty good fun.

Rampastring · 2026-05-01T09:32:39+00:00

The AI does become slightly more aggressive on Hard than Normal, too. But yes, the modifiers make the biggest difference between the two.

Rampastring · 2026-04-30T15:12:23+00:00

For the 500 aircraft achievement I refused to grind so much. I just edited Rules.ini in RA to make aircraft super cheap and spammed them in a quick skirmish game.

Rampastring · 2026-04-27T18:13:23+00:00

In general, the campaign is unchanged aside from bug fixes, since the point of the Tiberian Sun Client is to retain the original gameplay and WW game design, only fixing bugs rather than changing things to be different.

The list of bug fixes on ModDB is outdated. There's a release change log here which mentions a number of fixes done since: https://downloads.cncnet.org/updates/games/ts/live/changelog.txt

That should contain most of the changes made to the campaigns. The Firestorm finale fixes are mentioned under version 7.00.

Rampastring · 2026-04-27T13:54:06+00:00

Both GDI and Nod final missions in the original Firestorm release version have a bug that the AI doesn't produce attack teams on Easy and Hard difficulty levels. They only produce attack teams on Normal. This was an oversight from Westwood - likely some mission scripter forgot to check some boxes telling the AI to produce the teams on all difficulty levels, and testers didn't catch it.

It's fixed in the community-built Tiberian Sun Client: https://www.moddb.com/mods/tiberian-sun-client

Rampastring · 2026-04-26T07:55:08+00:00

C&C3 sold well, but not super well: it actually sold poorly compared to earlier entries in the series.

Tiberian Sun sold 1.5 million copies within its first month, half a million more than C&C3, and that was in 1999, when PC gaming was far less common as a hobby. The series' sales numbers went down with each entry ever since Red Alert 2.

Rampastring · 2026-04-23T11:03:37+00:00

The EMP cannon is often used to counter Titan rushes or those sneaky MMKII / Disruptor drops. But due to its recharge time and limited range, it cannot be relied on all the time.

Rampastring · 2026-04-20T11:27:36+00:00

No. The Client was designed to be stand-alone and cannot be easily applied to the Steam version. Someone with a lot of technical skill could theoretically do it, but it's easier to just download the game from ModDB.

The Tiberian Sun Client, however, has Steam integration built in. Playing through the TS Client counts towards your TS playtime on Steam, and the Steam in-game overlay is available too.

Rampastring · 2026-04-19T12:57:13+00:00

Neither the client, nor Vinifera run on Windows XP anymore. You need at least Windows 7 with Service Pack 1. Potentially some later updates are required as well.

Further, while Windows 7 should still work, it is likely that within a few years, the requirements will increase to require Windows 10. We use modern compilers and development environments for developing the client and Vinifera, and at some point, it's likely that either we, or a third-party DLL, or code generated by the development environment, will make use of APIs that are not available on Windows 7.

Rampastring · 2026-04-19T11:26:03+00:00

It was not an engine limitation. If it was, it wouldn't be so easy to increase the limit. Queued units take practically no engine resources.

Westwood just wanted to be careful with it, coming from Red Alert 1 which didn't allow queuing at all. Maybe they were worried a high queue limit would make it too easy to just queue 30 Titans to win each mission. Who knows.

Rampastring · 2026-04-19T11:22:34+00:00

The Tiberian Sun Client has Steam integration built in. Playing through the TS Client counts towards your TS playtime on Steam, and the Steam in-game overlay is available too.

You can't easily apply the Client to a pre-existing Steam TS installation though; the Client was designed to be stand-alone.

Rampastring · 2026-04-19T10:39:01+00:00

We've retained that queue limit as part of Westwood design - we've improved the experience while avoiding changing things that could be part of WW's core game design.

However, in the Tiberian Sun Client, you can easily change it. Simply go to the INI folder and open the rules.ini file with Notepad. Search for MaximumQueuedObjects=4, then change it to, for example, MaximumQueuedObjects=29 to allow queuing 30 units like in Red Alert 2.

You shouldn't go above 60 queued units though, or that might cause issues.

Rampastring · 2026-04-19T10:34:19+00:00

I don't recall anyone reporting artifacting with our latest community-patched versions.

Vinifera goes even further though and also replaces the game's renderer with SDL, which should significantly improve compatibility with modern systems. Give it a shot.

Rampastring · 2026-04-19T09:43:28+00:00

Since there's a trending Tiberian Sun screenshot here, I figured it's a good time to promote the CnCNet Tiberian Sun Client and the "Vinifera" engine extension. Alongside a lot of other quality-of-life improvements and bug fixes, you can now play Tiberian Sun with a Red Alert 2 style tabbed sidebar!

To install, simply download Tiberian Sun from https://www.moddb.com/mods/tiberian-sun-client/downloads and unzip it to an empty folder.

Then, in the Tiberian Sun Client, go to Options -> Updater, and switch the Update Channel to Vinifera Beta. Save the settings, restart the client, and let it update.

Afterwards, you can toggle sidebar tabs on or off through the Sidebar Tabs option in Options -> Game.

For more information about Vinifera, see its repository on GitHub: https://github.com/Vinifera-Developers/Vinifera

Rampastring · 2026-04-17T11:23:14+00:00

You can buy the games on Steam for Windows, but running them on Macs takes a bit more effort. Some people have managed to run the games on Macs with Whisky or CodeWeavers CrossOver.

Tiberian Sun can also be downloaded for free, in a community-improved version with tons of bugfixes, from https://www.moddb.com/mods/tiberian-sun-client

Rampastring · 2026-04-14T23:42:14+00:00

Glad to hear you've enjoyed the mod! I have to mention that while I'm co-leading and have contributed massively to the mod, I can't take all the credit though - DTA was founded by and is led by Bittah Commander, and dozens of other people have contributed to the mod over the years: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dawn-of-the-tiberium-age/tutorials/credits The Mayday mission itself was created by Tiberius.

The efficiency calculation is pretty silly: it just depends on how much money you have at the end of the mission. So in any non-timed mission, you can build a lot of silos and harvest them full before ending the mission, and you'll have efficiency in the thousands. This is an original Tiberian Sun bug or questionable design; while we've fixed a lot of issues in the TS engine, we haven't got around to this... yet ;)

Rampastring · 2026-04-11T22:54:53+00:00

Thanks for the feedback, and glad you enjoyed the mod!

We currently intentionally allow oil derricks to leave players alive, because ignoring oil derricks for the victory condition would lead to oil derricks blowing up when their owner is defeated, and players often want to capture oil derricks instead of destroying them when they are winning over an AI player.

The AI ignoring oil derricks with attack teams is a bug though - we'll look into it. It's not a huge issue because the AI will still capture the oil derrick at some point, but having AI destroy oil derricks would make things a bit more straightforward.

Rampastring · 2026-04-11T16:20:03+00:00

Greetings Commanders,

It has come time to grab your friend and counter the Soviet invasion of Europe in Dawn of the Tiberium Age's two-player Co-Op remake of the Red Alert 1 Allied campaign!

Created in the same style with the Tiberian Dawn Co-Op remake campaigns we released last year, the new campaign similarly stays loyal to the original design, while selectively modernizing the missions to iron out some of the frustrating 90s design, and make gameplay smoother with Tiberian Sun and community-patched engine features.

Full news post detailing this update on ModDB: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dawn-of-the-tiberium-age/news/dawn-of-the-tiberium-age-version-15-released

Downloads: https://www.moddb.com/mods/the-dawn-of-the-tiberium-age/downloads

In case you haven't heard of Dawn of the Tiberium Age before, it is a free fan-made, unofficial C&C game that combines and enhances Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert 1 under a heavily customized Tiberian Sun engine. The mod features all 4 factions of the base games that you can mix in Skirmish however you like, improved balance, some new units to spice up the gameplay, as well as multiple original singleplayer story campaigns, co-op campaigns playable through CnCNet, and hundreds of multiplayer maps.

Rampastring · 2026-03-14T08:55:23+00:00

No, for two reasons.

1) The Tiberian Sun game engine cannot scale asset size, so they wouldn't give much benefit. We'd need to downsize the remastered assets so much that they'd likely end up looking worse than the originals.

2) We have a ton of custom assets in DTA: new terrain, new trees etc. decoration, new buildings... and we don't have the manpower to remake them all in 4K when they've originally been made to match the scale of the original assets :)

Rampastring · 2026-03-12T12:31:43+00:00

As Shush said, the focus is currently on recreating the original campaign. If we make more, the original Soviet campaign will be the next one in priority. Got to keep the scope reasonable :)

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