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