What a C&C: Rivals 2 could look like

 

 

It has been a while since we've posted a non-news related post on this blog, partially because up until the recent surprise balance patch, things have been quiet. We have interviewed most notable figures in our community and exhausted balance discussions. The other reason is that I personally have been preoccupied with other recent RTS releases, which got me thinking about how those games' mechanics compare to Rivals. It is no secret that Rivals has not been a success, with the studio developing it getting seemingly closed down and EA pretty much abandoning their ambitions on the mobile market shortly after release, if you are reading this, you recognise the potential this game had and have almost certainly been thinking what C&C Rivals could have looked like had things gone the other way.
So this is what this post is going to be about. We are going to go through all the major features that I believe could be improved on and make a potential Rivals 2 a better game, while also pointing out the things that the original got right and need to be kept.
Before we begin, a couple things need to be cleared up: First of all, obviously no sequel has been announced and at this point I have no reason to believe a Rivals 2 will ever be made. This is strictly a hypothetical scenario I will use as fuel to discuss game mechanics. Second of all, I am not a game designer, merely an enthusiast of RTS games. This is all my personal opinion according to my best judgement. This is important to stress for all suggested potential fixes to problems.

Same size

In my opinion, Rivals struck gold with the general size of the map, the average match length and amount of units on screen. You do not need to worry about moving the camera or jumping between units efficiently, plus the screen isn't too cluttered with giant buttons or too many tiny icons. It's all there on one screen, micromanaging different parts of it is the main thing to master. The fixed view also provides an advantage to Rivals as a spectator sport: the camera is not trying to jump around trying to capture many different engagements and developing economies, the entire battlefield is visible at all times.
This bite-sized experience also seems to have resonated well with more casual RTS audiences (who are way more numerous than the competitive crowd), evidenced by our community mostly being made up of older players with not a lot of competitive PvP experience. (Despite the fact that Rivals is only PvP)
Not to dismiss other games, such as World War Armies, trying to make a more traditional RTS experience for mobile, which certainly have their potential as mobile phones and games made for them develop, but the elegance and simplicity of the fixed camera view is such a core part of C&C Rivals that getting rid of it would be a major misstep in my opinion.

2. Steam release

Now that we have established the scale, let's talk platform. Rivals 2 coming out on mobile is a necessity. It's what it was originally conceived to be and since I have no interest in changing the scale, there is no reason for that to change. Mobile gaming has potential and Rivals has a role as a true pioneer in that evolution
However, a mobile only release has its hassles. It is no secret that basically all content creators and streamers for our game do it from PC emulators, despite this almost objectively being a disadvantage in gameplay. It is much easier to record and share footage from a PC. Besides this, I also believe that Rivals deserves to be recognised for its achievements in simplifying the RTS experience while maintaining fun, but still deep and complex gameplay. A lot of people, somewhat justifiably, dismiss the very idea of playing a mobile game. For these reasons, Rivals 2 would have to be released on Steam along with all the mobile game stores. I point to MARVEL: SNAP here, a primarily mobile title that also has a steam version.

3. 2v2

Who doesn't want 2v2? Being able to play with your friends has a major pull for a game like this, team games are often more popular than the seemingly more competitive 1v1 modes in PC RTS titles, so 2v2 in my opinion should be the #1 new feature in our Rivals sequel.
About what it would look like, I refer to the now lost interview with old Redwood dev Joe aka Dragoon, who as far as I can tell said 2v2 was actually pitched and might have happened if not for the studio being gutted.
Each player queues up with 3 units in their deck instead of 6 and besides this pretty much everything is the same. 2 missiles to win, same maps, one shared base.  Only 3 units per player sounds a bit weird at first, but a well  coordinated team could certainly achieve a lot by combining different strategies.

4. Unit cooldowns

The Rivals popcap system is the main mechanic that I have problems with. It works at a first glance and does manage to be mostly simple and elegant, the exact kind of thing Rivals needs, but its simplicity also creates issues with long reaching consequences.
In Rivals, every unit, regardless of its size and health and amount of models alive, counts as one popcap and both players have access to the same popcap. This makes our game pretty unique in the sense that you are quite often actively encouraged to throw away units, to be able to replace them for the time the missiles fires, which is pretty unique among RTS games.
To illustrate the flaws with the system, I will of course use the most egregious example: popcapping, the act of deliberately not finishing your opponent’s units off, in order to block them from making new ones. This is primarily done with squad units, which is why you can sometimes see one man rifle squads running around that the opponent just refuses to kill. It’s not that common to see nowadays, but I trust that most of us have seen games where this can be done to a very silly extent, where top players will dance around and use their higher APM to go to ridiculous extents to avoid killing these.
However popcapping squad units is not the only negative effect of this. Leaving low health units alive technically achieves the same thing, of course they keep all of their DPS while being kept alive, but this is often still not as good as replacing the unit with a fresh one. We have all been in situations where we lost a missile due to not being able to make units in time for the launch. There is also the problem of Rifleman costing the same as a Mammoth tank, which further makes tech units more polar, due to them starting out with less popcap due to double harv and then late game making a tech unit for every single smaller unit an aggressive deck makes.
So what about solutions? There are claims that the game almost had an upkeep system, where the more units you have on the field, the lower your income gets, similar to one of Rivals’ biggest inspirations and confirmed best game ever, Company of Heroes (Editor’s note: haha). However since this would provide a softer cap on production, I worry it might lead to too many units on the field if you just spam whatever the cheapest unit is.
My proposal is to give each unit a unique cooldown, one of their core stats. This cooldown kicks in after you already have a unit on the field, so to make a 2nd one you need to wait the cooldown out. The cooldown then increases with every unit that is on the field. Cheaper units have shorter cooldowns, larger ones have longer cooldowns. You can’t churn out 3 identical units one after another, you have to wait a little bit, but as long as you have another type of unit available, you can produce that. This cooldown also gets reduced a small amount whenever a member dies from a squad unit. As an example, if Attack bikes have a cooldown of 3 seconds, you have to wait 3 seconds for every new one, but if that first bike loses a member, the cooldown goes down a second, so multiple one man bikes actually adds the same strain to your production as a single full health one.The downside of this system is that it is less elegant and more complicated, which you might be able to tell from my description of it. However, my hope is that it feels natural to play, while increasing the amount of meaningful decisions you make and without ever locking you out of the game completely.

5. Economy

I think Rivals’ economy is a decent simplification of the economy in a traditional RTS. The longer the game goes on, the more powerful you become and the more expensive units you are able to afford. What Rivals does differently is move this build-up into a natural increase in your economy that you do not make decisions about. What you do have control over is how you pick your 6 units and their cost to fit in this timeline and choose between 3 different income graphs: no harv, one harv, two harvs.
Now, this lack of choice is the first problem I would address. Most of the time, you make the decision about how many harvesters you build in the first 30 seconds and you rarely change it. In some instances you are even unable to build it (unless your opponent is kind enough to release you from the shackles of double harv by destroying one of them.)
Second problem is the general safety of waiting. The way you build up your economy is by being idle and waiting for the clock to reach certain thresholds. You are not risking or investing anything, a close game happening by itself is slowly giving you the income you need to overcome your opponent.
My idea here is: at the start of the game, the base spawns a harvester automatically. This harvester will provide you a base income that will maybe only increase very slightly over the course of the match. The “build harvester” button is replaced by a button that you have to spend Tiberium on which increases your income. Let's say this button starts out costing 30. After you buy it, the button remains and it now costs 40, after the next purchase 50 and so on, until you reach a certain max number of researches.
Obviously I have not playtested every detail of this proposed new system. I don’t have the means to do so even if I really wanted to…however it would mean you are constantly making decisions about your plan for the rest of the game and those decisions are not as binary as the amount of harvesters you make in the actual real version of Rivals. You are at any time free to increase your income for the rest of the match, if you want to spam Infernos for every unit you need to buy it 3-4 times, for more expensive tech units 4+ times, for very cheap decks you might be able to get away with not investing Tiberium at all. Expensive decks also now have to actually spend money in order to make waiting an effective strategy.

6. More units

A new game would obviously require new units, but I believe that any sequel would have to carry over the entirety of the current Rivals roster into that new game. There are core units in there both from the perspective of C&C lore (you have to have attack bikes, buggies, mammoth tanks in a C&C game) but also units essential to our very understanding of Rivals, such as riflemen and laser troopers. These last units are what I actually want to talk about in this section.
Rivals has pretty good unit design. Not only is it easy to differentiate between all the types of soldiers and vehicles, they all have a unique personality and a unique role in the roster of their respective faction and how they fit into a deck. However we have some staple units that basically no decks go without. Riflemen, Missile troopers, Attack Bikes, Pitbull, Cyberwheels or Attack dogs, basically no deck goes without at least one of these. I don’t have a firm source on this, more of a hunch, but I believe the original direction for the game was to lessen this phenomenon by introducing similarly cheap units that can fulfil the same role such as scavengers, a unit very similar to Lasers, but more expensive due to being able to scavenge Tiberium from units dying around them. Maybe not to such a gimmick-y extent, but the idea itself has a lot of potential.
We should have an anti-tank 10 cost scout unit, both in the Barracks and the War factory. We should have a 20 cost version of Riflemen that are a bit more potent at fighting. We should have a cheap anti-air specialist unit to put in instead of lasers. We should have more early-game, fast units to play around with.
Not to mention all the other more “out there” units that I think would be improved upon when in the context of a larger roster to choose from. When the Battering ram got released last year, there was a lot of disappointment surrounding it, due to it being the last unit the game will ever receive, after a 2 year hiatus and then…not being very good. However I believe the Battering ram being a bit of a let down would be less of an issue if we had several other super niche, meme-tier units (I’ll talk more about base killing later). The inclusion of the MSV as this weird, sole non combatant feels a lot less bizarre if there are 3 others like it, a unit that gives you vision of the full map when set up, for example. I believe balance issues stick out less if you embrace the quirks of unit design.

7. A more diverse tech lab

Tech units have always been in a weird place. They appear in basically every deck in Diamond league and below, but almost none in the top 50, yet you can still see top tournament players lose to them sometimes, despite them seeing nothing but nerfs for the past 3 years. They are stuck in an expensive building and then having a hefty price tag themselves all for units that are pretty much all very slow moving, big walls of stats that you can only get out for the last missile. For the audience that plays Rivals, this is probably the #1 thing to revamp for a sequel.
A leading theory in the community has been to make these units feel more like an evolution, a tier 3 version of the units in the other buildings, so the hierarchy would go from Missile trooper to Grenadier to Zone trooper, and the increase in stats between the last two made smaller. This theory goes up against the one that presumably our old devs held, that these units deserve to have a special place as big game-enders, since they are basically all iconic C&C units, the game should have some enormous units to build up to. My answer to this debate is: why not both?
In our gigantic interview with Rivals Lead Gameplay Designer Greg Black a couple of years ago, he said he prefers the difference between the smallest and largest units to be as large as possible. I would like to apply some of that to tech units. Their variety is not exactly great right now, Zone troopers and Titan essentially fill the same role and they cost roughly the same, so does Rockworm and Centurion and so on, the 2 buildings have a lot of redundancy, which makes these units feel less unique than perhaps they could be.
I propose to make Wolverine, Widowmaker, Zone troopers, Confessors and some other tech units cheaper, as well as the whole building but also bring their stats down. Instead of the currently very hefty 180 cost, it would be a building that costs something around 80 Tiberium and some of the aforementioned units would be around the 50-80 cost range, much more accessible and closer to their counterparts in the other buildings.
On the other hand, other units would remain the huge beasts they are right now, so there are still powerful units that can crush an opponent completely if you manage to get them in play. (With the new economy system of course). Here is also where I would introduce Kane’s Wrath epic units (Redeemer, Marv), simply because they were actually heavily wished for by players when such suggestions were not completely pointless yet. They are basically even larger super units than Mammoth and Avatar, perfect for emphasising the scale both in the overall game and within the tech lab. I’m not terribly concerned with balancing them competitively, especially since this sequel would have like a hundred units, but their presence serves my design philosophy and appeases the crowd that loves giant robots, so why not?

8. Base kills

Base kills have gone through quite a journey in Rivals, in that I believe most of the community approved of them or even really liked them early on in the game’s lifetime, then after a couple months of Jade meta and a brief period of Solomon base rushes, we soured on the idea and besides nerfs to the aforementioned strategies, the 2021 balance patch increased base health, pretty much killing base rushes as anything but a gimmick viable in very specific circumstances, even despite the release of a unit dedicated to the idea.
However I would agree with the not-that-loud minority here, and argue that an alternative victory condition is a good thing and it should be brought back with certain limitations.
Now, the problem with base kills is that they are non-interactive. Typically, you build a deck full of cheap units specialised to win the first missile and then you either use an Ion cannon or a Catalyst Missile + Chemical explosion to deal decent damage to the base…and then follow it up with endless spam of cheap, fast and preferably flying units that can ignore obstacles and the enemy to just mindlessly send them to slaughter to finish off whatever is left of the opponent’s base. After the missile launches, the units of the two sides pretty much stop engaging with one another, one side is just trying to get to the base, the other is trying to surround their own base with units to physically block the opponent (block, not really fight). So base kills were nerfed and pseudo removed from the game, which given this problem and the current resources of our dev team, is an understandable decision.
However I believe an alternate win condition not only provides more variety and appeases the Jade cult still going strong, it encourages more ways to counter certain strategies. If your opponent is set up on the pads with ranged units and you don’t have a way to dislodge it directly, threatening to kill the base to either force them to move or actually kill the base while they can’t respond in time.
My proposal to fix this idea is simple: Any damage done to the base by a unit or commander power (not the nuclear missile) will be repaired automatically at a steady rate. This way, if you want to kill the base, you better do it in mostly one go, you can’t just sneak in the last few hitpoints of damage much later. Base health and structure damage stats are now free to be adjusted in accordance with this mechanic in play.

9. Structures

While we are discussing buildings and structure damage stats, I want to suggest expanding this secret 4th armour type (besides, infantry, vehicles and air). It is in my opinion a bit underrepresented in Rivals, only being present when facing 2 different commanders and the previously just mentioned nice base rushes. I have not quite come up with some clever reason why…I just think it would be nice if it was a full blown mechanic you needed to consider, the advantage of having a good structure killer and more structures being present in an average game and it’s very C&C.
I have 2 main proposals to make this happen: first of all, most new commanders on top of the existing ones should have some sort of structure as their power and second of all: Defences as choosable units in a deck. They would not come from a building, but you can choose to equip them instead of a proper unit to give commands to. Some of them you might be able to “garrison” infantry in, some of them would be 2 ranged, some only AA, just like regular units. Due to them not being able to move, they probably would rarely make it to top competitive play…but it would be a nice additional feature that gives depth to our armour types.

10. World Builder

At this point we are definitely in the wishlist and pipedream category of this article, but I think for most people, once you think about a Rivals World Builder once, you never stop. Since every map has the same size and all the maps are made of a handful of different tile types that have certain variations. Once a World Builder has been created, making a map could be as simple as filling up the map with tiles. This would hopefully result in a massive selection of varied maps, regular map contests would keep the community buzzing and a dedicated dev team would not have to waste too much time building dedicated maps. Win-win for everyone!

11. Battle pass & monetisation

The monetisation system is probably the #1 reason Rivals has failed to capture a large audience. The random lootboxes, the levels increasing unit stats in a PVP game, the frequent pop-ups in your face advertising different promo offers is all too much for the generally older, strategy gamer that recognises the C&C brand. However despite it being such a major topic, I have left it until the end simply because I see no solution that truly feels like it solves the issue. I’m tempted to just say in our perfect dream world where Rivals 2 exists, this is not something we’d have to worry about, but it’s too large a topic to ignore.
Games have to make money and although maybe in an ideal world Rivals could be a microtransaction-free game that sells for 20$, right now no mobile game that costs more than 5$ is ever really profitable. So let’s pick our poison.
Any mechanic that increases the stats of units is unsuitable, we have learned that quite well, so that’s off the list right away.
Second thing that would come to mind is what Rivals already has, Vanity. I could see our Rivals 2 selling cosmetics for every part of the game possible, skins for your units, commanders, explojis, your base, the main menu, custom announcers for all the commanders, voice packs for units, music packs whatever you can imagine. Most games that have used this effectively are very large, like Fortnite and League of Legends, audiences that even a highly successful Rivals would fail to capture, so uncertain the game would ever be profitable.
So what’s left is doing a Battle Pass and limiting what units the player unlocks. I once again refer to MARVEL: SNAP where new cards take months to get even if you are really invested in the progression system and as long as new cards keep coming out, it is pretty much impossible to own all cards. So it’s not nice but I think that’s the best possible route for Rivals. New units come out often, but most people only unlock them randomly months later.

12. C&C to the core

For our last entry, I want to discuss the theme of the game. I believe Rivals is stuck in a weird conundrum where it’s trying to appeal to both the mobile market with brighter colours, a more generic setting, new recognisable characters and the C&C audience by using old sometimes even obscure characters like Oxanna and bringing back Tiberian Sun units like the Disruptor. It being mobile is already a pretty big obstacle, but opening the Play store and seeing a smiling Lt. Strongarm makes that obstacle a giant chasm very few people have leaped over.
The obvious answer here is to just pick one of them and commit. This could lead us down an interesting path to discuss whether Rivals would have been more successful without the C&C brand, where it’s not compared to the legacy of the franchise and only has to prove its name among other RTS-wannabe mobile titles…but I, and certainly 99% of the people I know played this game, would probably never have tried it, so for the purposes of this article, I will unsurprisingly pick the option where we redress Rivals to fit better with the Command & Conquer IP.
This would mean instead of volcanic and beach biomes on top of the generic ones, we could see Tiberium wastelands, deserted towns and ruins or even the futuristic cities of blue zones. Instead of the more goofy commander emotes we could see campy, but still somewhat serious ones. Most importantly though, this would mean bringing back Frank Klepacki, whose music alone makes up a lot of the franchise’s identity. Not to diss Austin Wintory’s existing Rivals soundtrack, which actually won an award, but C&C is nothing without Klepacki. Variations on Act on Instinct and Mechanical Man should show up in battles and probably also play on the main menu. I’m convinced even if you change nothing else, the original CG Rivals trailer would have been received a lot better if you simply replace the generic pop song with the familiar tunes. C&C fans are not that hard to please at this point, you should try to at least make them happy.

There we have it! My best pitch for what a Rivals 2 could look like. I admit it ended up being a bit more of a wishlist of cool things I want than just discussing game mechanics, but hopefully it’s still an enjoyable read.

Written by kennyemmy

New Balance Patch - June 2023

A new balance patch has been released for C&C Rivals, after almost two years! We did not get any official communication about this one, so it was likely an unintentional early release. However, for the time being, we have compiled some patch notes and rigorously tested every unit to determine what has changed (credit to Omeleet). It is possible things were left out, so please let us know if you detect something else has changed so we can investigate!

GDI Changes

Liang
HP 430 -> 150
Start cooldown 45 seconds -> 65 seconds
Purchase cooldown 35 seconds -> 45 seconds
Spawn -2 from enemy base -> -3 from Middle

McNeil
Setup timer 1 second -> 0.3 second
Attack speed decrease 30% -> 70%
Reload decrease 30% -> 70%
Movement decrease 40% -> 15%

Strongarm
Cost 50 -> 40

Jumpjet Troopers
Speed Faster -> Fastest
Jump removed.

Grenadier
HP 550 -> 620
Movement EMP 60% -> 30%

MSV
Attack speed buff 50% -> 5%
Reload buff 55% -> 5%
Movement buff 2.5 -> 4.5
Pack-up time 2.25 seconds -> 1.1 seconds

Rhino
Speed Fast -> Faster
Vision 2 -> 3

Shatterer
Infantry Damage 180 -> 210

Razorback
HP 1500 -> 1530

Orca Bomber
Cost 110 -> 100
Bomb Drop Speed Interval 0.85 second -> 0.5 second

 

 

Nod Changes

 

Jade
Deploy 3 seconds -> 2.5 seconds

Fanatics
Fanaticism Movement Buff 25% -> Flat 2.5 Increase

Scarabs
HP 125 -> 250

Attack Bikes
Charge Up Delay 0.1 second -> 0
Attack Separation Delay 0.1 second -> 0.25 second

Buggy
Vision 2 -> 3

Chem Buggy
Cloud time 1 second -> 2.1 seconds

Giga-Cannon
Infantry Stage 2 Damage 15 -> 8
Infantry Stage 3 Damage 30 -> 12
Charge Store Time 1 second -> 0.7 second

Banshee
Raider added
Charge up delay 0.5 second -> 0

Catalyst Gunship
Infantry Damage 200 -> 270
HP 1485 -> 1530

Inferno
Reload 12 seconds -> 13 seconds
Reload Movement Speed buff 45% -> 20%

Special Thanks to Coinbird for graphics

April Fools!

 It is my pleasure to announce that the next balance patch for C&C Rivals will arrive April 5th, 14:00 PM GMT!

 

Hello Command & Conquer Rivals fans,

Over the last year, we have heard your requests for a more comprehensive balance patch, so we have taken the last couple of months to balance the game across the board.

Patch notes:

Cdr. McNeil has been underused, so we are reducing its price to give him more viability.

McNeil Resonance field cost reduced from 40 to 30

The last patch has hit the Catalyst Gunship too hard, so we are giving back some of its power.

Catalyst Gunship health increased from 1485 to 1550

We know the tricky nature of the repair drone, so we looked into several options. Unfortunately we did not find a way for it to not contest pads, so we are bringing its cost down, making it much more economical to use.

Dr. Liang Repair drone cost reduced from 40 to 30

APCs still prove to be too effective, so we are adjusting them further.

APC Tiberium cost increased from 90 to 100.

We have found these units to be across the entire ladder, so removing some utility should make them less common.

Nod flame troopers and GDI shockwave troopers no longer reveal stealth units.

Shatterers have underperformed, so we are making them more effective against a wider variety of targets.

Shatterer now causes an EMP effect to vehicles

We are decreasing the cost of these 2 units so they help players transition into the tech lab earlier.

Widowmaker and Wolverine now cost 50

Slingshot struggles against the more expensive air units, so we are adjusting its damage to help fulfil its intended role.

Slingshot air damage from 50 to 100

We want Scarabs to be able to take down a wide variety of units, but at greater cost. Moving them to the Temple of Nod should serve that goal.

Scarabs are now in the tech lab, but cost 20 Tiberium.

Attack Bikes and Pitbull have proven to be too dominant, so we are reducing their viability to allow other units to be used.
Attack Bike and Pitbull speed reduced to lowest.

Confessors serve no use and thus are a distraction.

Confessors removed from the game.

Giga cannons are currently very oppressive against infantry, so we are tuning that down, but giving them some health to preserve their power

Giga cannon phase 2 infantry damage reduced from 15 to 10

Giga cannon phase 3 infantry damage reduced from 30 to 20

Giga cannon health increased from 1455 to 2500

The inferno double tile damage is a fun mechanic that we know players love, so we are reducing the reload time to increase its frequency

Inferno reload from 12 to 6 seconds.

We are pleased to announce that this patch is only the first in a new line of planned updates to C&C Rivals! Here is a sneak peek at what we have planned!

1. Monthly balance patches

We are committing to regularly updating and adjusting unit balance!

2. New events!

New events with unique rewards, rulesets, map pools, 3 times a week!

3. Steam release!

We are officially launching C&C Rivals for free on Steam on June 31st!

4. New units and commanders!

Expect new units and some new commanders such as Nod’s Marcion coming out this summer!

5. New and improved progression!

We’ve heard your feedback on progression loud and clear, so we are increasing the max unit level to 20, allowing you to upgrade your army further!

We are very excited to revive C&C Rivals and make the game it was meant to be!

Special thanks to Coinbird for the graphics!

Interview with Entsorger – "I just really, really love the game!"

Today, we're interviewing one of the most well-known and popular Command & Conquer Rivals players & streamers – Entsorger, grinder of Rivals & push-ups, slave to a cat & his chat, master of voice memes & vocal meows.

Q: Hello Entsorger! As usual, let's start with personal questions. Who are you and what do you do when you are not playing Rivals? What other games do you spend your time on?

Entsorger: Sup chat! My name is Carsten, I’m 34 and originally from the USA. After living all over the place I settled in Germany where I have now lived for almost two decades. I’ve worked with computers doing web development for a while and then did a career 180 and became a pyrotechnician! Now as I am still waiting for the industry to recover I stream, pretty much full time together with my very loud and deaf cat, Augustine.

Part 2: Interview with Lead Gameplay Designer Greg Black

We continue our discussion with C&C Legend and ex-dev Greg Black!
This time we are talking about monetisation, popcap, community development and 2v2!

Entsorger: Some mobile games had a PC co-release (Arcane Showdown comes to mind), and most streamers (myself included) use Bluestacks to emulate Android and play on PC. (I highly prefer playing on PC, despite the fact that it is a disadvantage).
Was this ever considered for Rivals? So much backlash came from the fact that it was on mobile when C&C had been solely PC-based so far.
To what extent was the game "built for PC" and then ported to mobile?
And, as you say yourself: the game really is that good, if only people would have given it a chance.

Do you think it could be worthwhile to do a PC release? Have it cost only 5-15€ and drop the levels. Seems to me like PC gamers would give it a shot for 5 or 10 bucks. And the development costs surely must be minimal versus starting a new game?
The game has SO much potential, it feels like such a waste to let it slowly die because of its business model and platform.
I assume EA will not consider something like that unless someone with a lot of passion, effort and money convinces them to do so.
I have a dream of winning the lottery and buying the rights to Rivals, porting it to PC, and finally having it achieve the glory it deserves.

MrBlack: Rivals was always intended as a mobile first (and probably only) experience. We built it on PC of course, because that's how game development works, but every decision we made was about what was best for a mobile game with a touch interface. We briefly discussed doing a PC port but it was never seriously considered as far as I can recall. I think if Rivals had been wildly successful, it would have been an easier pitch to make to port it to PC.
Your idea is interesting but you'd be surprised at the level of effort required to port Rivals at this point.
Certainly, it wouldn't cost as much as spinning up a whole new game from scratch, but It's not clear to me that selling Rivals for 5-10 bucks on PC would actually be profitable. Even if you could turn a profit, I suspect the scale of that profit would be insignificant to the point where it wouldn't make sense to do it. One of the realities of game development, especially a big studios, is that is really expensive. Way more expensive than you'd think. And big publishers are not really incentivized to take small bets, which is why you see so many of them focusing on big blockbuster titles (much like with film studios). From any publisher's perspective, there's an opportunity cost that has to be considered when assigning resources to things. Does it make more sense to put Smart Expensive Computer Programmer on PROJECT A that might make, at best, a few million dollars, or that same person on PROJECT B that might be the next billion-dollar franchise? The reality of market capitalisms is that decision makers are strongly incentivized to put that programmer on the billion-dollar bet and not the tiny passion project. Until we can all escape to the one place that hasn't been corrupted by Capitalism (SPAAAACE!), I don't see that changing. If you do win the lottery though, please hire me and we can make some sick RTS games.

Entsorger: I suppose you're right. But I think that as a passion project I could find a lot of friends who would be willing to help out. Even just us Legion dudes already invest hours upon hours to keep this game alive simply because we love it so much.

On that note, we would also love to be more involved with Rivals and take any burdens off their hands. Ideally, there would be a world where we might have community balance patches. We would be willing to do everything from playtesting to patching if they would only let us.
Do you think there might be any conceivable avenue to approaching that with good intentions?
Community cooperation is not something new, and could go a long way to help Rivals, as the player-base is pretty unhappy with only 1 balance patch every 6+ months.

MrBlack: Community cooperation is great and certainly something I've been involved with in the past. As far as Rivals is concerned I can't really speak to any future plans for Rivals, nor am I privy to any. I also can't really speak to what level of support the game is currently receiving or will in the future. I've been largely out of the loop on the game for a few years now.

Entsorger: Understood. I didn't expect you to know that, but I had to ask. You were my only hope, Obi-Wan Kenobi!
We love this game so much we'd do and are doing everything we can for it.

MrBlack: Yeah, sorry I don’t have better news there.

Entsorger: What do you think led to the demise of rivals?
Many tend to think it was just a marketing problem and perhaps some backlash from the fans (but would they be mobile gamers anyway?)
And based on the lessons you learned with Rivals, what would you do if you would now start to build a new RTS that wants to combine competitive multiplayer with broad appeal and commercial success?

MrBlack: I don't think there was any singular factor that lead to the demise of Rivals. It was just a confluence of things but here are a few that pop to mind.

The mobile game market is really competitive. There's this idea that its really easy to make something cheap and cynical, cash in, and make a ton of money, but that's really not true at all. Maybe it was at one point, but now the market is so saturated with high quality mobile games, games that have been really optimized for success, that its hard to break through. Very occasionally you see someone capture lightning in a bottle, like with Archero, and they get a ton of organic installs, retain well, and monetize well and become a monster hit seemingly overnight, but that's really the exception not the rule. If you look only at "real time strategy games" on mobile, there's only really one big player: Clash Royale. That game came out, was a total phenomenon, and inspired a ton of imitators. But it turns out that you can't just sort of clone Clash Royale and be successful, none of those really on-the-nose clones ended up being hits. The entire RTS market on mobile is basically Clash Royale and a bunch of dead or tiny games.
As far as I'm aware, at one point at least, Rivals was the second biggest game in that category, but it was still miles behind Clash and not a viable business. There's this weird reality of mobile games where some genres, like 4X or Collector RPGS, can support multiple really successful games, but some genres (like RTS) have one successful game and a bunch of also-rans.

Another issue was just user acquisition. Now I'm not a product manager, or expert in mobile games marketing and finance, so I'm going to do my best here, but don't take this as gospel. Fundamental math of free to play games is this, what is your cost per install (CPI) - meaning how much money are you spending on things like advertising, marketing, and promotion divided by how many players are you bringing in? And what is your revenue per user (RPU) - meaning how much money are you making, divided by your total number of users. If your CPI is higher than your RPU, you have a game that basically costs money rather than making it, and that's without even considering the cost to develop the game, maintain the servers, pay the team supporting it, etc etc. One of the issues with Rivals was that it was expensive to acquire users. There are lots of factors that go into this that we control, marketing, the intrinsic attractiveness of your game, the IP (i.e. C&C), etc, and a bunch of factors you don't control like what time of year it is, how much ads cost, what your competitors are doing, what the platforms are doing. For example a little while back Apple gave users the ability to opt out of apps tracking their data, and that caused the CPI for a lot of apps to go way up, because without that tracking data the marketing people could not target ads as precisely as they could before. Meaning to acquire the same number of users, they had to buy more ads, which costs more money. Rivals was not a big organic hit, meaning we had to pay to drive installs (which is normal) but that drove up our CPI.

In terms of the C&C community's reaction to the game, obviously that put us on a back foot. However, the reality is that the C&C community just isn't that big compared to the scale of users on mobile. I mean, at one point Clash Royale had like 100 MILLION active users. So even if every single player who ever played a C&C game woke up and was like "HELL YES, RIVALS IS THE SICKEST GAME EVER AND I LOVE IT WITH ALL MY HEART FOREVER", that maybe still would have been insufficient to make the game financially viable (although it certainly wouldn't have hurt). So its definitely not the communities fault that the game didn't succeed but I do wish more of them had given it a fair shake.

Now the other thing that didn't help us, and I know some of you will roll your eyes at this, is just that we didn't monetize the game very heavily. If you look at some of those other genres like 4X, that monetize really well and can support multiple games, they are basically wallet wars. Everything costs money, everything is on a timer, there's a million places and ways and reasons to spend. They are pretty much straight up Pay 2 Win games. With Rivals, the skill component kind of outweighs the money component. You can literally drop $1000 into it and still suck. Yeah you'll get a ton of levels and you can stomp some noobs for a while, but you will just run into more skilled players that will crush you. Because Rivals is so skill oriented, it really didn't incentivize people to pay. What's the point of paying to win if you don't win after you do? This weak monetization meant that our revenue per user wasn't high enough to offset our other costs. In order for our monetization model to work, we would have needed just a ton more users and a lower CPI, just like Clash Royale. The extra fun part of this is that for all the work the team did to try and keep the game fair and really focused on making it a true skill based RTS experience, people still naturally dismiss it as being a cynical pay to win game. Making games is hard.

All that being said, I think the biggest thing that led to the demise of Rivals is just what kind of game it was. Rivals is a true 1v1 RTS PVP game. Yeah it's scaled down and shortened and mobile-ized and all that, but at its heart it's still a competitive RTS and the reality is that just not that many people are into that type of experience. Its too hardcore, its too stressful, it demands too much of your attention, and its too intense for a lot of players to enjoy. What we found was, if you're the type of player that does enjoy that "knife fight in a closet" experience, and I assume you are if you're reading this, you would enjoy Rivals A LOT. For some people Rivals is just a perfect little RTS crack-pipe that delivers and those high intensity strategic thrills directly to their dome, but if you're not one of those people, it's a pretty challenging game to stick with. Unfortunately for all of us, there just weren't really enough RTS crack addicts out there to support the game at the scale we needed for it to be successful, and Rivals wasn't a game that you could really play casually. I've long ago made peace with the fact that RTS is a niche genre and probably always will be. Multiplayer 1v1 ladder RTS is even a smaller niche within that RTS niche, and I think it will be really difficult for anyone to build a broadly appealing version of that, which still maintains the character of an RTS game as we know it.

I'll be a very happy camper if I end up being wrong about that last point though.

Kenny: Very informative and interesting!

While we had some active development going in 2019, progression got a lot faster, seemingly to increase RPU, trying to get the average player to spend some money, by making it possible to get a lot of value for your bucks. Cloning labs, events with normal and premium rewards, or the daily login calendar that is rewarding the player with 1500 diamonds for just logging in, or perhaps the most egregious example, Rivals Races with a colossal crate as a first-place reward, which trigger once a week on both factions.
Progression got a lot easier during this first year of the game's existence so even F2P players have close to max level collections now.
I think a lot of people in the community will agree with you on monetization.
We all saw replays where people win even while at a -2 or bigger level disadvantage. Seems like the entire system of progression led to a lot of frustration, as players who did spend money didn't really get some huge advantage that guaranteed them the way to the top ranks.
Pro players with low levels were frustrated because being under-leveled can be very annoying even if victory is possible, and then finally its clear the product's revenue was also not exactly soaring.
I feel like we as a community know the answer is basically "no", but I must ask: is there any possible version of events where Rivals is monetised in a different way? A battle pass maybe, where you need to pay to unlock some units, or really go crazy with vanity items.
COD Mobile and Wild Rift are seemingly examples of this, porting a PC game almost 1 to 1 to mobile and using these methods. Does Rivals being a C&C RTS basically doom this approach?
And then the big question: You mention how 1v1 RTS is specifically niche... were there ever plans for a team-based version of Rivals? 2v2? How would it have looked like? How close were we to getting it?

MrBlack: There was talk of a 2v2 mode for Rivals. It was a dream for many of us on the team, but it never really got past the initial idea stage.

As far as I remember, we never got to the point of prototyping it. I think if Rivals had been a big hit and was still being actively developed, we would have taken a crack at it.
There are a couple of issues I see with vanity as a primary monetization vector.
RTS games, in my experience, actually monetize pretty weakly for vanity. We saw this in Starcraft 2 where people were begging for unit skins but then we actually made them people didn't buy them. Vanity works much better in games where there is a proxy for the player, i.e. an avatar (no, not that Avatar), and people can project themselves onto that proxy. People just don't generally get as emotionally attached to their little RTS units so as to want to play dress-up with them.

Vanity and battle-passes also require a lot of content churn to support, and I'd argue its a little harder to think up a ton of different skins for an RTS unit that are super cool but also keep the unit recognizable in combat. C&C somewhat limits our ability to do lots of whacky stuff with vanity that you could easily do in a game like Fortnite where anything goes. For my taste some of the stuff we did do in Rivals was already inappropriate for C&C (unicorns come to mind).
The biggest issue though is just that you need a big player base to support that kind of low cost low impact monetization. Fortnite can make a billion dollars selling skins because they have a huge user base, so they only need to make a few bucks per user to make a ton of money. All sorts of different ideas can work when your user base is huge.

Kenny: So, you came on board once the basics were already laid out? Does that include the mechanic of the missile silos and control pads? We would be interested in how this idea came about, or how it was developed, as at first it seems a little bit odd. 2 missiles to kill a base, capture points in a C&C game, the base being static… but I think the game managed to make it fit really well and it’s really easy to learn once you start playing it.
What's also interesting is the added tension the last couple seconds of the missile gives the game, where its charge can decrease. It’s really nice to see people preparing for a long drawn-out fight over that short timer, executing fast unit switches on your pads but constantly keep contesting the middle pad.

MrBlack: When I joined the team the basic framework was already developed. The hexes, the bases, the missiles, and the pads. There was only one map and a handful of units at that time. The TLDR is the team went through a bunch of iterations on how to make an RTS controllable with a touch interface, and ended up landing on the hex-grid idea. They then developed the capture point idea which started out as a real abstract ticket-based system, i.e. hold the pad and make the victory number go up. That approach worked mechanically but was just too abstract and not exciting enough so they finally ended up developing the missile idea which also added all that cool last second missile stealing tension.

Like I said I found the entire framework to be really quite brilliant although there were clearly places to improve on the margins (like with the deck building change I mentioned early). I was pleasantly surprised at how much of that frantic 1v1 RTS experience you could squeeze out of a couple of hexes on a phone.

Kenny: Rivals is also an amazing game to spectate. You have the entire battlefield in view, you don't have to switch between 2 points on the map to keep up, it's only 4 or 5 units on the field from each side, and there are no real special abilities that people need to watch on a menu. It’s all there on the battlefield, and the missile silo rapidly changing between pointing at one of the two bases is a very obvious sign of who is winning at any given time. How much of this was a deliberate choice when deciding how a game of Rivals is played? Is it safe to say C&C TV and the improved replay spectator mode were added to emphasize this?
Were there ever any plans for official tournaments beyond the Launch event?

MrBlack: Yes the Rivals spectator experience was a major focus for the team early on. The tem would host internal "Scorpion Bowl" tournaments (Scorpion was the internal project name) (Editor: hence the scorpion-prod URL in game error messages!) in the big theatre at EA HQ, because we also really felt like it was an amazing game to spectate. There were grand plans for a fully supported eSports program with ongoing tournaments, we even hired some really great folks to plan and run everything. C&C TV and the spectator stuff was definitely meant to emphasize this. We really had big plans for Rivals and the launch event tournament was supposed to be just a taste of what was to come, but unfortunately, things didn't work out that way.

Kenny: I want to ask about the popcap system.

You probably saw some version of this while you were working on the game, but "popcapping" has become more mainstream. This is a strategy where people deliberately don't kill their opponent's units, but leave several rifle squads at 1 member, thus preventing the opponent from making new units. The popcapping player then kills all these lone squad members near the missile firing, so that you can't replace in time to contest it.  Not a lot of players use this strategy to its full potential, but its enough of an issue that most tournaments ban it.

I feel like this is only a symptom of a larger issue. The popcap system might be my biggest issue with the core gameplay of Rivals. The current version of this mechanic is although easy to understand, which I imagine was the main reason it was designed this way for mobile audiences (just look at the UI segment for it) there are situations where it hinders the game from becoming more interesting in my opinion.

I feel like there are too many situations where due to being popcapped you are suddenly in a worse position and can't respond. A classic example would be winning a rifle war in the early game. You have more map control than your opponent with 2-3 riflemen squads on the pads while your opponent has maybe 1 riflemen. So as long as they have enough Tiberium, they can start spamming some cheap flying unit like drone swarm, and you as the player who actually won the rifle war are punished for it due to not having popcap to respond right away to these flying units. If your opponent times their tech switch well, they can win the missile with ease. The balance of tech units and double harvester is also involved in this.
Is there anything you would change about the popcap system if you could go back in time? Were there ever plans for a more complex and three dimensional system over a max amount of total units? Or do you think its intuitiveness outweighs the negatives of the current system?

MrBlack: The popcap system was one of the most controversial bits of design even during development. There were some people on the team, usually the more skilled players, that would often have critical feedback about the system and we certainly made iterations to it to try and address peoples' concerns.
That being said, the popcap system served a couple of critical purposes: it limited the number of units in play at a given time, and it helped keep the games close. These two aspects were pretty much non-negotiable for us. At various points of development, we actually tried a much more liberal tuning regime for the popcap system and the game pretty much immediately devolved into unit spam and really became unmanageable for players. We also struggled with how much rubber-banding to have in the game, we wanted a soft system that would keep the games close but we didn't want to straight up blue-shell punish better players.
And as you mentioned, accessibility was also an issue. We didn't want a system that required a ton of explanation or another resource (like a supply resource) in order to work. Even with our streamlined system, and the nifty UI widget, it was difficult for people to understand what was going on with the popcap system. For a long time it wasn't really visualized at all and people just kind of had to intuit what was going on.

Are there things I would have changed? Probably! We tried different things during development, but none of them were really better in our view than what we ended up with. I think with a lot of the systems and choices you see in any game there are always theoretically better options that either we didn't think of or were impractical to implement. Usually though when making these kinds of system design choices you're trying to pick the least-worst option and achieve multiple seemingly contradictory goals. Maybe this is an area where we didn't get it right? Hard to know for sure.

Kenny: Yeah, I think I understand the major pros and cons of the different approaches. If a game similar to Rivals was ever developed, this should be the main area to improve on.

My next question would be about no-harv gameplay and rushes. Throughout the game's lifetime, most units capable of performing a successful rush were nerfed and playing without a harvester isn't really popular. Do you think No-harv should have a bigger part in Rivals? We know rushing with Jumpjets, Bikes and other units was nerfed due to newer players, and especially under-leveled players finding it frustrating, but do you think there could be a way to make it more appealing for both sides involved? There is a general consensus that attacking harvesters isn't rewarding enough.

MrBlack: No, harvester games were certainly intended to be part of the game. If I recall correctly were aiming for them to be something that would show up around 25% of the time. So not predominant but also not super rare. I think no matter what you do getting your harvesters rushed is going to kind of suck to some extent. We tried to make it as least traumatizing as possible by having the replacement harvester be free and making it more about rewarding the aggressor than punishing the victim. It's a fine line to walk for sure.

Kenny: Here are some quickfire questions from the community:

Rivals was the first serious attempt at a true mobile RTS. What mistakes were made and what would you change if you had to make another mobile RTS?

MrBlack: I think there's room to improve everywhere, but right off the bat I would start with a more accessible setting / IP. Maybe Red Alert 2 (huge in China) or a more generic and mobile-y fantasy setting.

Kenny: What unit design gave you or your team the most headache? Anything got close to Rocket Buggy?

MrBlack: Off the top of my head, I remember the Flame Tank being really tricky to balance in a way that allowed it to be a realistic base rush option without it being totally overwhelming. The Stealth Tank and the stealth in general was always a highly debated mechanic on the team.

Kenny: What extra units would you have added to the current roster if you had the chance to make more? Any units from the old games you wanted to get into Rivals? (The battering ram isn't released yet, but we know it’s coming)

MrBlack: Good question! Mammoth Mk 2 would have been a fun challenge to add to the game.

Kenny: Marcion has been datamined as a planned commander for Nod, but he doesn't seem finished so won't ever see the light of day. We know his ability is called "Tiberium infusion". Can you tell us what it does in game? Maybe talk about other commanders and abilities that could have been added to the game?

MrBlack: Marcion and McNeil were largely developed by the guys in the balance team that took over after I was largely off Rivals. I don't remember exactly what his power was, sorry.

Kenny: What's your favorite unit? Both in Rivals and in C&C in general.

MrBlack: My favorite unit in Rivals was probably the Giga-Cannon. I was really happy with how that turned out from both a gameplay and visual design standpoint. We used to call it the "Shoot and scoot" on the team. Excluding units I designed myself (looking at you CryoCopter), my favorite C&C unit is the Mastermind Tank from Yuri's Revenge. Other favorites: Rocket Buggy, Stealth Tank, Attack Bikes, Kirov, OG Mammoth Tank, Desolator... I could go on for a while.

Kenny: Happy to report that the Scoot’n Shoot is still a popular nickname!
Are you optimistic about the future of RTS genre, desktop or mobile? C&C Remasters and Age of Empires seem to be doing great, but there are not that many new RTS games around.

MrBlack: I'm going to hedge a bit here. I am encouraged by the number of RTS games being developed right now. I thought AOE4 was great. I can't wait for COH3. BBI and FrostGiant are doing cool stuff. So I think there's a lot to be excited about. However, I do not think that RTS will ever be more than a niche genre. After nearly 20 years of working almost exclusively on RTS games I am more convinced than ever that RTS games are just too challenging for most people to want to play instead of other more immediately rewarding and low stress games. RTS games push up against players cognitive limits like almost no other genre, especially in multiplayer, and that's just going to limit their appeal for a large chunk of gamers.

Kenny: There are no other games on the mobile market like Rivals.  Do you feel like you managed to capture as much of CnC into Rivals as able, or are there additional aspects that you wanted to add into the game?  For instance, some players have passively mentioned expanded base building, mining, larger maps, etc.

MrBlack: I think with Rivals we were striving to really distil the experience down as much as we could. It was more an exercise of what to cut rather than what to add. What made sense for mobile rather that made sense for PC RTS. From that perspective: no, I don't think there's much I would have added to the gameplay. The one thing I really wanted to get into the game but couldn’t make the case for was more classic C&C music. I'm pretty happy with where the music ended up, but I would have loved to just throw Mechanical Man or Act on Instinct in there.

Kenny: Right now, in Rivals, the meta game is warped by a couple of very strong units. This is only natural of course because when meta develops for a long time, like it has in Rivals, the most optimal units will crop up to the surface. Looking at the last few balance patches, the direction has been to simply nerf the strongest units in the game. However, this has left a lot of them feeling mediocre and I think this takes away from the game. The question is, when you are looking at balancing a game, what criteria do you use to nerf or buff a unit from a competitive point of view?

MrBlack: When balancing a strategy game I think its preferable to buff counter units rather than nerf overpowered units. Like I mentioned early I want everything to feel overpowered. I want every unit to feel like a viable option. Nerfing something is sometimes a more direct way to fix a problem, and sometimes you have to do it, but really I think its better to solve a problem via buffs whenever possible. I would say though, for every RTS game you'll ever play, have some sympathy for the balance team. The job is pretty much impossible: the systems are too complex and players are too clever. It's a really thankless task that always leaves someone unhappy.

Kenny: Another balance decision within Rivals was with Lasers/Missiles and Attack Bikes/Pitbull. These units are central to both factions in terms of balance - if you make any of them worse, it changes the way games play out significantly. For example, Missiles and Lasers are used as a catch-up mechanic because they are cheap and the role they play works in many situations, so they can pull you from behind. What this has resulted in is almost every deck running one of these units. To me, this reduces deck diversity because when you try to run a deck without these units, you are a lot weaker overall. Was it intentional for these units to be so central to the balance of the game? And how might you change that?

MrBlack: It was intentional that those units would be core to every deck. It's important to keep in mind that this game was designed with the expectation of multi-year ongoing development. Our expectation was that we'd be adding units for years and that would allow us another vector, other than pure numbers balance, to work through these kinds of problems as they came up. I could easily see a situation where we would design new units that were reasonable alternatives to things like Attack Bikes and Laser bros with different tradeoffs and deck synergies, to address the issues with deck diversity.

Kenny: Scavengers ended up being that!

You talked about how you revamped deck building, so I'm curious about how you found the exact balance about how many units are in a deck. Were there ever versions of the game where you could
have more units? Or less? Do you think 6 is the perfect number?
I think 6 units in a deck give an interesting limitation, since you can't build a deck that has an answer to everything. Tournament gameplay I think became very exciting due to this limitation, as its possible to build a counter deck to your opponent, giving us a cool mind game aspect to deck and map selection.
I am a big advocate and a fan for this side of the game. An example:
Player 1 is known for playing tanks, so Player 2 tries using the Giga-Cannon, but Player 1 will expect this. counters and plays Inferno instead.
It makes for great spectacle when a maybe mechanically weaker player wins against a stronger one due to these mind games and being more versatile in what units they can use effectively.

How much of this was intentional?

MrBlack: I think the decision to go with a six-card deck was made before I joined the team. However, we certainly were aware of and discussed the implications of that decision. Six felt like a goldilocks number for us, not to big, not to small, good deck building options while also forcing you to make hard decisions and leaving you open to some build order poker. I think in addition to the gameplay constraints there were also some UI and usability concerns that would have made it unpalatable for us to go bigger on the deck size. I don't actually know how much iteration we did on that number before landing on six though.

Kenny: It’s been talked about by other ex-devs, but let’s put this theory to bed: Is there an evil EA matchmaking algorithm designed to make you lose? Can you talk about the matchmaking system a bit?

MrBlack: I don't know the specifics of how the match maker works but I think it's taking things like metal count, Elo, and region (for ping reasons) into account. We were trying to give you good matches. There is no secret evil EA algorithm that's giving you bad deck matchups or anything weird like that as far as I know.

Entsorger: Shatterer's sound effects seem to be based on the Simpsons? Is that a personal Easter egg? Who came up with that? On that same note, why does Mohawk sound like a pirate boat?

Are there any other easter eggs in the game?

MrBlack: Wow, good ear! (Editor: credit goes to Omeleet) I believe I specifically referenced this Simpsons clip when talking to our awesome audio designer about the Shatterer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sd_yvCNkPp4

I was usually the initial source of ideas for the unit personalities. The Mohawk was a pretty typical example of this. I, or someone else, had an idea for a unit, I would write up a "one-page" design doc for that unit. This gave a high level overview of what that unit was and what it did. Along with specific notes about gameplay, art, VFX, animation, and audio. I would then work with the various departments on the implementation of these ideas. In some cases what I wanted wasn't workable or someone else had a better idea and we'd end up with something else, but in a lot of cases the other departments were able to deliver a cooler version of my initial pitch.

So for instance, with the Mohawk, the high level overview was: "The Mohawk Gunship is a heavily armed, long endurance, ground attack tandem rotor helicopter gunship. The Gunship flies in a standard configuration but fires broadsides against enemy targets. It’s as if an AC-130 and a Chinook had a baby and it was raised by a Kodiak. "

And the audio notes were: Helicopter pilot that was a ship of the line captain in a previous life.

“Bring ‘er along side!”

“Hard’to port!”

“Fire! Full Broadside!”

“I should have joined the Navy”

“Abandon Ship!”

“Stow it!”

“Cross the T!”

“Raking Fire!”

The thematic idea here (he's a ship captain) came from the gameplay mechanic, where the Mohawk has to broadside its targets.

I don't think we put a ton of Easter eggs in the game. The one big one I added was the Scrin ship in the campaign map.

Kenny: I think it was added after you left, but there is a beach themed map called "castaway", I always wished it would have a volleyball next to some rock called Wilson!

Entsorger: Now that you mention it: there were rumors of a third faction (Scrin) that may or may not have been in development. Can you speak to that?

MrBlack: The Scrin were never in development, or ever planned to be.
So much of the game was designed and implemented with two factions in mind it would have been a nightmare to add a third.

Kenny: Do you think there will be more mobile games like Rivals in the future? Maybe similar RTS games? Rivals was supposedly going to start a trend to make mobile games more complex and full-fledged experiences, does its failure discourage others from trying?

MrBlack: I think it’s always possible you'll see more Rivals like games. Companies use a bunch of different metrics when they make decisions about what projects to greenlight. Sometimes people just have a really compelling pitch and they're able to get people excited about it. More often, pitches are successful when they can demonstrate that comparable games in the market have done well. So yeah I think Rivals, and every other mobile strategy game that failed to match the promise of Clash Royale, makes it more difficult for future RTS games to get made. But never say never.

This now concludes our mega(tron) interview with Lead Gameplay designer Greg Black!
Needless to say, it was a huge honour to talk to him and we hope you found his insights into the game’s development as interesting as we did!