Maps

Shooting ground?

Westwood will be introducing new terrain types which affect gameplay, and they vary from ice and rocky mountains to normal flat ground. The map textures range from the classic desert and temperate forest to the newer taiga, coastal (new in that now you have units that can go over land and water), and the frozen wasteland (new in that the ice actually does something now). Red Alert was mostly flat while C&C 2 is more like the original where there was a lot of high ground and cliffs around random places.

Now you also have the option of 4 sizes of maps: small, medium, large and "huge", supposedly twice the size of the largest Red Alert map. A new feature for Westwood is the random map generator. You can tell it to have x amount of mountains, Tiberium, water and other settings and dynamically generate a map from there.

Good morning, you're dead

You can even set the time of day, which affects game-play. Between afternoon, Dusk, morning and night, the lighting is different and leads into another part of the day. Obviously units will fight better at night if they have lights. This would probably make attacking at night much harder (at least the up front form of conventional forms of attacking). You can create watchtowers that illuminate their perimeter with lights to detect. I believe some units also have night vision as well, which would probably constitute for a strategic choice for a nocturnal assault.

Among the more classic setting changes is the amount of starting money, whether you want to start with a base, what technology level you wish to allow(1-7), or turning on the capture the flag feature. There doesn't seem to be any word on crates.

What seperates C&C2 from previous RTS games is the active role of the scenario. The terrain will affect how stuff bounces, the speed at which units travel above it and how whether the units are so heavy that they would break the thin ice that they are located on.