Command and Conquer

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"He who controls the past commands the future, He who commands the future, conquers the past." -Kane.

Long ago, back before vanilla Dawn of War, back when Starcraft wasn't even a sketch in the minds of Blizzard, one franchise ruled above all others in the RTS genre, Westwood's Command and Conquer.

While some scholars argue Dune 2 was the first prototype of the real-time strategy genre, most fans and critics recognize Command and Conquer as the game that made the genre popular among the public.

Main series/Tiberian Universe

Those were awesome days, example of fanart photoshop.

Follows the conflicts between the Global Defense Initiative, a military coalition formed by the United Nations, and the Brotherhood of Nod, a mysterious quasi-religious global power led by the being only known as Kane spanning nearly a century of warfare. A key element of the series is Tiberium, an alien substance which is slowly xenoforming the Earth, destroying the ecosystem but also giving mankind unique industrial and scientific possibilities.

The games of the series:

Tiberian Dawn: where it all started, Earth is still widely similar to our own, this game features what may become the standard for the industry.
- The Covert Operations: more missions! And hard as fuck.
- Sole Survivor: Just don't, I mean, seriously?! You control only one unit?! If i wanted to play a MOBA I would, well I would dig my eyes out with a melon baller but you get the point!
Renegade: a FPS/TPS featuring Nick "Havoc" Parker, a trigger happy GDI commando.
Tiberian Sun: Grimdark cyberpunk heavy setting, with the entire world altered by by Tiberium into a hellscape, mutants, cyborgs and futuristic weapons such as mechs, lasers and hover technology, it has arguably some of the best cutscenes and scenarios of the game, Uniquely, for Command and Conquer over all, it has the commanders of GDI and Nod as characters, not the player in front of his computer screen.
- Firestorm: CABAL, the supercomputer of the Brotherhood of Nod, goes rogue, attempting to turn everyone into cyborgs to accomplish Kane's master plan. Included new scenarios, more options and units.
Tiberium Wars: Combining the the cyberpunk style with 20-minutes-in-the future of your Dale Brown novels, it introduces the Scrin, the alien empire that seeded the world with Tiberium for its mining operations.
- Kane's Wrath: This expansion centers on everyone's favourite dark messiah, and also adds new units and abilities to all factions. In terms of narrative and plot twists it's one of the most elaborate episodes of the tiberian saga.
Tiberian Twilight: Awful plot inconsistencies and over-exhaustion of the brand combined with significant gameplay changes made this a huge disappointment, it was later revealed that what the fans bought was originally going to be a free-to-play MMO real tactical game for the weaboo market. Believed by the fandom to have killed the series.
Tiberium Alliances: It's a browser RTS. That should tell you all you need to know.

Red Alert series

Red Alert 3 featured so much fanservice that it ended in its logical conclusion.

Originally considered a prequel but ultimately earning its own continuity it starts with Albert Einsten creating a time machine to go back to the 1920s and erase Hitler from history, this ends not as planned. Red Alert follows the battle between the Soviet Union and the Allies during a series of World Wars where every faction seems to deploy increasingly batshit insane wacky technology. The franchise consists on three games and its expansions, the two later add a new faction, first Yuri, a rogue Soviet psyker who attempts to mind-control the entire planet and has a badass army of flying saucers, hulk-like soldiers, virus snipers, grinders that recycle mind-controlled people into natural resources, and some other nasty grimdark stuff, and the second features the Empire of the Rising Sun, a God-Emperor-worshipping Technology Cult which adds transforming mechas, a psionics schoolgirl and beam-katanas, yes, Red Alert is ~~that weird~~ what you may expect from an elegan/tg/entlenman production.

The games of the series

Red Alert: After messing up with time, Einstein leaves the stage open for Iosif Stalin to try to conquer Europe, , the rest is history. Gameplay-wise is the same as Tiberium Dawn, with a very grimdark outlook upon the course of the war.
- Counter-Strike: more missions!(yeah, back in that time that was the best thing you could expect from an expansion).
- Aftermath: More missions and more units.
'Red Alert 2: The Soviets come back and invade the United States, and did we mention the Russians are backed up by the Cubans, the Libyans and the Iraqis? Prism technology, desolator troops to irradiate whole areas with nuclear power, tesla tanks, chronospheres, weather control devices and iron curtain shields are used in this war as standard weaponry. On a side note, this is where Red Alert started to be stop being "Serious" and start getting campy.
- Yuri's Revenge: creepy former adviser of Soviet premier Romanov (yes, we know that was the Tsar surname), Yuri has been using the Soviet invasion onslaught as a distraction to build a network of psychic dominator devices to mind-control the whole planet. unfortunately for him and thankfully for everyone else the Allies travel back in time in order to topple him (and you though Orikan the Diviner was cheating hard), ensuring during the process a temporal alliance between the Soviets and the Allies to crush him. More time travel silliness ensues.
Red Alert 3: The Soviets decide to attempted to pull the time travel trick by themselves and they actually succeeded at killing Einstein. Somehow this turned Japan into the Empire of the Rising Sun, complete with nanolathing technology, laser beams, extreme miniaturization and artistic weaponry from the future. By this point, and with the inclusion of Japan, you know this has gone completely bonkers.
- Uprising: Singleplayer only. More units, a campaing involving a psionic schoolgirl, and a a complete disregard for balance in the form of units such as the Empire's Gigafortress and the Allied Harbinger Gunship. The main campaigns were pretty boring though, being way too short, with a bare bones story with very little of the humor that had characterized the series.

Generals series

With Tiberium being the Grimdark Science fiction to Red Alert's Noblebright camp and ham, EA found out there was a hole in the Command and Conquer line up for something more grounded and realistic. So they came up with Command and Conquer generals, a 20 minutes in the future spin-off with no relation with the two previous settings, instead based on present-day news about the War on Terror and the spread of radical Islam. It also represents a complete change in the game economy which shows a dangerous amount of Starcraft influence (like buildings are built by conventional worker units instead of giant 3D printers). Still, despite some purists arguing that this wasn't a real C&C, most fans welcomed the fresh air it brought along with the opportunity to play a Present-Day modern-warfare themed game which still had some scifi/tongue-in-check elements. Enter the modern world, where the ~~Islamic State~~ Global Liberation Army ravages the Mideast in order to achieve their shadowy agenda, while the United States of America and China (Soviet replacement in the setting as the Commies are no longer around) join forces to show the evil terrorists they can't mess around with the new world order. Expect generous amounts of Chinese nuclear weapons, USA showing off its high-tech-this-is-the-future drone warfare, and the religiously fanatical GLA bombing Infidels with anthrax weaponry piloted by suicide bombers expecting 72 virgins. Seriously, this game came out two years after 9-11, and you know it's development likely took longer then two years with programming and modeling. The game was in development before Al-Qaeda showed up and the Islamic State became a critical Real Life issue, but was released after it did and the game has become prophetic in a nasty way. This first mission of the USA campaign may as well be a retreading of the first gulf war. (US tanks beat other "GLA" tanks easily, air craft blow up other tanks in seconds). EA attempted to make a sequel by 2013, as a multiplayer oriented F2P, but in today's political climate with a real GLA doing real drone attacks? It was almost guaranteed to end baldly, in fact, it went so badly it got cancelled.

The games of series:

Generals: In the modern world, great leaders solve their conflicts with words like... Awesome trailer aside, you got your three factions, modern USA, communist China will be communist and mideast ~~Islamic State~~ Global Liberation Army, great variety of tactics, fun missions, sadly it lacked the awesome cutscenes of the Tiberian and Red Alert series and barely explains where the GLA came from. Still, you can always get your cutscenes by just watching CNN. From a gameplay perspective this one stands out the most apart from the rest of Command and Conquer. Resources are gathered from fixed points on the map, all factions have ways to get infinite money meaning turtling and just nuking, skud-storming or lasering your enemy is more viable (one sub-faction in the expansion even specializes in it), it adds a kinda of "Commander XP" bar so you can unlock units or get access to off map support like heavy bombers and the like, you can see a lot of it's influence on the later Tiberium Wars and Red Alert 3 even if it only got one one expansion pack: Speaking of...
- Zero Hour: New subfactions! More units, and missions! Also cutscenes! Although these were more like CNN news, but that's ok, it also brought a challenge mode where you fights against the generals of each faction (ergo the name of the game mode).
- Not wanting to see the game die, the fine people of SWR Productions decided to make mods to expand upon the game. They have made two so far, each doing something different but both being of high quality. Several units in each mod take after designs of the other games in the franchise, with a few even taking their voice lines from those games.
  - ShockWave: The expansion of the expansion, ShockWave (note capitalization) sets out to take the different playstyles of the factions' generals and expand on them. ShockWave's generals all play very differently from one another, with several unique units, technologies and even buildings per general. On top of that, each faction gets a fourth general and the base army gets several new toys as well.
  - Rise of the Reds: Generals 1.5, Rise of the Reds is the what-could-have-been of the series. It adds two new factions to the mix: the Russian Federation and the European Continental Alliance. After the events of the campaign of Zero Hour Russia's economic growth has gone to shit and aggressive military expansion is the only viable option for them to stick around. Meanwhile, the European Union falls to the mix of GLA actions, Chinese intervention and internal popular uprisings. From its ashes rose the European Continential Alliance, which turned out to be way more totalitarian, militaristic and intolerant towards sedition than the EU ever was. The Russians use more tanks than even the Chinse while the ECA has access to a whole slew of base defenses, solar powered weapons and a broad range of voice actors from all over Europe. The other factions are still around as well: the GLA has moved to Africa on account of everything of worth between Greece and India has been bombed to dust, China is going full 1984 and America's role is to help the ECA drive the invaders from their lands. Again.

Generals 2: Was looking awesome and ready to reignite the franchise, but got cancelled.

Tiberian Gallery

Democracy is not negotiable!
GDI lego fans make it happen!
Old school photoshop.
You don't get more cyberpunk that Tiberian Sun's Brotherhood of Nod.
Reddish and cybernetic, the way the Adeptus Mechanicus like it!
Beware Tiberium's mutating power!
Tyranids wish their monstrous creatures were half as good as a Scrin Eradicator Hexapod.
Skillful fans have been capable to make minis of some of the units.
Sadly it seems like EA followed the taurox and centurion designing vibe with C&C4.