Red Alert 3

It’s official, the Iron Curtain has been lifted, and new information and details about Red Alert 3 have come pouring out of Moscow. A few weeks ago, a press event held in a top secret nuclear bunker treated Russian, European, and American press and community members to an exclusive preview of Red Alert 3. In attendance to answer questions and present Red Alert 3, were Mike Verdu, Amer Ajami, Louis Castle, and Chris Corry.

Ykudza, a long time Russian staff member of the GameReplays community, was also in attendance, and was lucky enough to be one of the first people in the world to get a first look at EALA’s newest creation. Below are the details about the game from the event.

Base Building
During the gameplay demonstration, the game started off with the MCV as a vehicle, rather than starting with a deployed Construction Yard. In addition, the grid-based build system allows players to rotate their buildings in the four cardinal directions (90 degree increments), and is intended to improve overall pathfinding in the game. When you go to place a building, the white grid appears on the ground, and there will be a semi-transparent preview of the building as you move it around to determine its location. If it’s all clear to place, the grid beneath it’s footprint will be green, if there’s anything blocking it, part of it will turn red.

Soviets and Allies both use the MCV system of building, as well as outposts for expanding. The difference is that soviet buildings are pre-placed on the ground and build slowly, while the allies build the same was as the factions do in C&C 3 (in the side bar, with the structure being placed after it’s completed).

The details on Japan’s build system are still behind EALA’s own Iron Curtain, and probably won’t be revealed until the Leipzig Games Convention in Germany this August.

Walls are definitely in the game, and currently build like they did in the Battle for Middle Earth 2. You start by making a wall hub, and then when you place a second wall hub within a certain distance from it (in specific cardinal directions), it will construct a wall between the two hubs for you. This means in order to build a wall around a structure, you need to place four wall hubs (one at each corner). EA have stated that they wish to improve the wall system even further than this, to make placing walls a lot more “crisp” and intuitive.

Each faction will make use of power plants, and a production penalty will occur if power goes offline.

User Interface
One of the interesting new additions to the user interface has to do with how the player will give orders or instructions to his AI ally during the campaign. You can see an avatar of your ally, as well as buttons to give various orders and commands. There are currently no details on what these are yet, but they have a prominent place in the UI (for the campaign anyway).

The overall UI is very space efficient, and similar to the UI design of Command and Conquer 3. What’s new for multiplayer is the addition of a Support Powers experience level bar. This will indicate how close you are to unlocking the next level of support powers during the game. This confirms that RA3 will indeed follow in the footsteps of the strategic layer dating back to its inception in Generals. How the RA3 system will work, has yet to be seen.

The selected unit/structure contextual menu appears in the lower right just like it does in C&C 3, but unlike C&C 3, the unit stances and behaviors toolbar is now minimized in this menu, rather than occupying the lower left corner of the screen (that space is reserved for the Special Powers level indicator). In addition, this is the part of the menu that will house the “activate secondary ability” button for all units.
Most importantly, the radar & minimap have gotten a complete overhaul. Gone are the C&C 3 days where you couldn’t actually see what was on the minimap unless it was the size of a mammoth tank. Now all units and structures have very clear and obvious house-colored pips on the map to make it shockingly easy to see when an engineer is approaching your base.

EA currently have no plans to let players customize the interface.