thanks for sharing bro, but I notice that the alien's annihilator tripod only appear as 1 unit in every screen ler, i wonder if it means you only allow to build 1 at a time (since they declare it as "super unit"), but at the same time, alien race suppose to have "mothership" as their super weapon carrier...

thanks for sharing bro, but I notice that the alien's annihilator tripod only appear as 1 unit in every screen ler, i wonder if it means you only allow to build 1 at a time (since they declare it as "super unit"), but at the same time, alien race suppose to have "mothership" as their super weapon carrier...

Indipendence day thingy???
Damn game developers just like indipendence day

Yeah, but you can also see the NOD Avatar Warmech has more than 1. I think you can build more than 1 but its just takes a long time to build and very expensive.
Not Independence Day, War of the Worlds.

yay, preorder starts tmr.. hope to get good price for preorder offer. Gonna get the Kane's edition.. anyone else getting that?

I think fujkenasai means, the Annihilator Tripod== World of the War, Mothership == Independence day. In fact, in the website it descripbe the superweapon from Mothership is capable for take out entire base.... now I really suspect it liao... ... So the new alien race will be SC Zerg + War of the World + Independence Day ?

lol...i doubt the recommended game req. since this is an RTS which doesn't need high FPS, and using an old generals engine (dunno wat was it called). anyways, things might be possible tho. EA is famous for crappin out games (better than UBI) with resource hungry modified old engines. or wait till they at last optimized the final game. (with patches...hahahahaha)...

THE STORY

By now most of you should have gotten a pretty good idea about C&C3's storyline, but let me summarise the basic events for you:


1. GDI has gotten the measure of Tiberium and, thanks to some technological
    advancements, has managed to push the stuff back from many areas of the
    Earth, creating the Blue Zones. Of course, much of the world is still entirely
    overrun by Tiberium - the Red Zones - and there are vast stretches of land
    occupying the neutral zone in-between - the Yellow Zones. Most people live in
    the Yellow Zones while an elite few live in the safety of the Blue Zone cities.
    Supposedly, no-one can survive in the Red Zones. The number of mutants has
    dwindled as the increased prevalence of Tiberium on the planet results in
    organic material simply dying and being subsumed into more Tiberium mass
    rather than being slowly mutated.


2. In C&C3's opening movie Nod comes back, big time. Kane launches a big ol'
    missile barrage at the Philadelphia, decapitating the GDI leadership and leaving
    Lando Calrissian in charge of the world and also a Tibana gas mine on Bespin,
    that old pirate.


3. You, the player, take the role of an up-and-coming GDI/Nod commander under
    the supervision of either GDI General Michael "Rasczak" Ironside or Nod
    commander Tricia "Number Six" Helfer.


If you've been following along the C&C3 newsvine for the pat few months, you know all that, but here's a little-known fact: the two campaigns run simultaneously and, more importantly, both are canon - neither one ends in the complete obliteration of the other side. However, you won't find yourself on opposite sides of the same mission if you play both campaigns, although your actions will be "known" in the other campaign. Continuing along:

4. Nod & GDI have at each other with Kane being his usual coy self and having his
    usual hidden agenda. A turning point is reached when a Big Battle sparks a Big
    Event that causes some Big People in Big Ships to show up and have a Big
    Party: Aliens, the third faction, show up to wreck everyone's day and at last
    take their revenge upon the Jedi.


5. Luckily, Will Smith and Jeff Goldblum GDI and a splinter faction of Nod 
    overcome their mututal distrust to join forces and fly a captured Alien fighter
    straight into the huge orbiting mothership where they upload a virus straight 
    into Mike Verdu's brain! Okay, so that last bit was made up, but GDI and (some
    of) Nod do join forces and, if not defeat the Aliens, at least manage to end the
    campaign in a nice, franchise expansion-friendly, three-way stalemate.

That's the rough outline of the two main campaigns. You all should also know by now that the Aliens also get their own singleplayer campaign to plough through, though obviously by definition it's a lot shorter than the main two. Players will also have to beat at least one of the two "human" campaigns before tackling the Alien missions, though give praise to whatever God you believe in that nobody at EA suggested a Need-for-Speed-style of "unlocks" and being forced to beat the Alien campaign before being able to play them in multiplayer or skirmish - if you're dying to be an Alien, then you can pwn n00bs as them to your heart's content as soon as the game comes out, no need to even glance at that hideous "singleplayer" button on the main menu.

At the summit we got a really nice look at the cutscenes and I can tell you once again that they look awesome; they've also been shot in the traditional C&C style, with the actors speaking straight to the camera - addressing you directly. I know you've all seen that somewhat goofy shot of Billy Dee Williams in the dark room with the lone incandescent bulb for comfort, but let me tell you - I've seen that cutscene, and it actually works pretty well. The camera-work is engaging; I was a bit worried when the director said they wanted to replicate the "Battlestar Galactica" style of having a moving camera -- I admit it, I absolutely cannot watch Battlestar Galactica because I simply cannot stand the way the camera constantly sways and rocks around even when nothing of interest is happening. Luckily my fears of getting motion-sickness from an RTS game's cutscenes were ill-founded and the camera movement is either justified or unnoticeable; at no point did I feel like I was on a particularly unstable cruise ship, "somewhere in the mediterannean".

I don't want to give away too much of the story, except to say that overall I am pretty pleased with the way it's turning out. It seems to me like C&C3 will probably have the most engaging and focused story of any C&C game so far, which I think is saying a lot. If you buy into the basic premise, I think you won't be disappointed with the plot.

With the basic plot taken care of, let's talk about the third side.

THE THIRD SIDE

The fact that the third is aliens has been public for a while now, but one thing I want to make clear is that C&C3's aliens are not necessarily the species that C&C fans call the Scrin. I know a lot of you are asking how it's possible that the powerful race that created Tiberium could possibly be resisted by some puny humans occupied with warring amongst themselves - well, it still may not be possible, because Mike Verdu dropped the very strong hint that C&C3's Aliens, while closely tied to Tiberium, might not be its original creators or unquestioned masters. I really don't want to give away an important plot twist, but imagine if you will that these Aliens have come upon an Earth they didn't expect - that is, an Earth that still has sentient creatures living on it. What if Tiberium was created and sent to Earth by another alien power like a new super-crop created by some kind of intergalactic Monsanto corporation, and the Aliens that show up during C&C3's campaign are really just poor schmuck farmers rather than omnipotent genetic engineers? These salaried caretakers would be given the equipment to mop up scattered resistance, but nothing truly big.

Considering the timelines involved in seeding the Earth with Tiberium, it does make sense that the signal for the Alien "caretakers" to deploy would come from the target planet itself, rather than the originator of the Tiberium. So, part of C&C3's mid-plot twist, and the reason why the Alien faction doesn't manage to crush everyone immediately, is that for some reason the signal has come too early, and the Caretakers who expected to arrive on a planet largely devoid of non-Tiberium life forms instead find themselves arriving in the middle of a gargantuan cross-planetary cross-fire between two well-armed and fully operational battlestations foes.

I hope that satisfies the "how aileens lose?" complainers and "wher r teh SCRINS??" bozars for now; although I know the whole story, I'd rather not give it all away. If you have any specific questions I can answer them in the forums. With the Origin of the Aliens out of the way, let's talk a bit about their Stuff.

First of all, yes, there are some units that are going to remind you of Independence Day. There are some units that are going to remind you of the Zerg, and there are some that are going to remind you of the Protoss. Some stuff is going to be reminiscent of War of the Worlds, and some of it is even a bit reminiscent of Star Trek and Stargate. That much is almost inevitable when creating a mysteriously futuristic alien military power, but the nice thing about C&C3's Aliens is that while many of their units are individually reminiscent of particular things from previous movies, games, and TV shows, overall, as a race, they are pretty distinct and don't feel truly derivative of any previous work. I consider that something of an achievement.

If there's one graphical theme that I would say ties together the Alien race, it's a sense of the acquatic. The towering Annihilator Tripod kind of looks like a walking giant squid. Their basic infantry dudes sort of look like hermit crabs. Their buildings look like they belong underwater, with dark blues in abundance and a sense that the structures are waving to and fro like sea flora in deep-sea currents.

Of course, the Aliens get some of the coolest stuff. They heal in Tiberium ('natch!), they've got airborne harvesters, they've got tanks that power up by sucking up Tiberium and units that have rechargeable shields, and (of course), they get to call in several big-assed base-destroying uberunits.

Still, they do play like any C&C race should play. You have to build power plants. You have to harvest Tiberium (and your harvesters are vulnerable to attack!). You have to build stuff and send the stuff to blow up other guy's stuff. You get factories and defensive towers and walls (but still no gates - unless you count stargates). You have to protect your Con Yard, and as with the other two sides, in C&C3 you can get more build queues by building additional factories or Cranes, and you can fast-expand using a surveyor unit. Their air units work roughly the same as do the others; you've got to first build a pad that can hold up to 4 air units, then you can send them on bombing, scouting, or attack runs - they'll return to re-arm when they run out of ammo.

Of course some of their units are a little on the weird side. Their basic anti-infantry unit is a swarm of bugs that moves in to envelop enemies and tear them to shreds. You can even slap the swarm on any Alien vehicle and they'll serve as a kind of defensive screen, following the unit around and disposing of nearby infantry.

We got to play as and against the Aliens in multiplayer for a few hours and although I had a bit of trouble distinguishing the buildings at first (C&C3 has more structures per side than any previous C&C game), it wasn't really difficult, and the most important buildings are certainly distinct enough for even newbies to grasp. The units are really just like units on the other two sides in that you still have to build a buttload of them to make a dent in any decently-sized defense or to fend off any respectable attack force.

They get some cool powers like the ability to generate Ion storms anywhere on the map at a whim, and their uber-tower also fry up infantry and planes like Keanu Reeves' breakfast sausages. But I'll talk more about powers and towers in the gameplay section of this article; let's first talk a little bit about our old friends GDI and Nod.

I don't want to give you a list of units because frankly you can read that in the manual and in various scattered pre-release articles (and also I forget their names and exact powers anyways)... Furthermore, generally speaking C&C3 is the kind of RTS game where most of the units have pretty obvious equivalents across the board - sort of like the original C&C or something more like Total Annihilation, though not nearly as identical as TA's copy-and-paste unit stats.

GDI & NOD

So, in case you're new to this planet, the other two sides are GDI and Nod. GDI in particular seems to be pretty much the same ol' same ol' GDI we all know and love. You got your Mammoth tanks, your Juggernaut walkers, your ridiculously overpowered grenadiers, your infantry with rocket packs - in the form of short-ranged jump-jets on the Zone Troopers and the Commando - your Orcas, and all the rest. To be perfectly honest, if you've ever played GDI in any C&C RTS - hell, even in Renegade - you shouldn't have any problems with them in C&C3. Sure, there are some neat little abilities here and there, and you won't want to just spam tanks thanks to an improved balancing system that puts effective anti-whatever units in the hands of your enemies, but basically you've seen this side before.

Not that that's a bad thing. GDI will, like USA in Generals, be the newbie side that's easy to play but hard to play well, if you get my meaning. Just don't think you're gonna be able to go around rocking the world with a Hum-Vee loaded up with rocket dudes - C&C3 requires two things to win: combined arms, and lots of arms.

Nod, as you'd expect, is a bit more trixie about things. I've seen you guys whine in the forums about the fact that they have suicide bombers, and even though I played Nod for several matches against Crimson's GDI and the AI's factions during the summit, I admit it: I never used 'em. I didn't even build the suicide guys, but maybe it's because I didn't exactly find tanks knocking on my door every ten seconds. The only thing I want to point out about the suicide dudes is that at least they have decent AI - if you stick them in a building, then according to EA they will automatically pop out and blow up any tanks that roll by, so urban areas could be a fun place to be for Nod players to be with suicide guys in tow. Who knows, maybe now, after doing suicide guys in two RTS games already, they'll get them right.

Nod of course gets the flamethrower guys and tanks, though the guys aren't called flamethrower dudes in the build menu and it took me a few minutes to figure out that that's what they are. Although they bum-rape infantry up close I should say that I did lose a few flame tanks to Crimson's patented Huge Mass O' Bazooka Dudes(tm) and when I sent a few squads of flame-troops instead, they got chewed up by grenadiers almost before they could even get in range.

So yeah, fire hot, but you still gotta get close to the suckers for it to work; don't expect miracles. The Nod basic tank is pretty fun because it's got about a million upgrades and I think it'll wind up being one of a Nod player's favourite units (and what with being the only tank, it had damn well better be). You can give them supplementary lasers, upgraded armour, and even give them the ability to run over larger, normally uncrushable infantry like GDI Zone Troopers.

But while you're pumping tanks, be sure to save up for a few Nod Avatars. You've all seen them, and let me say that they don't look quite as goofy in-game when they're obelisking entire bases. The whole "cannibalizing weapons" system actually works reasonably well although I had trouble getting the flamethrower-equipped avatar to actually set something on fire (the flamer's range is, as previously noted, deceptively short, so you have to move the big guy pretty close). If you're new to the C&C3 story so far, the Nod Avatar can reach over and grab the flame-tank's flame-gun, the stealth tank's stealth ability, or the scout's stealth-detecting ability. It destroys the target unit in the process, and no, you can't steal your enemy's stuff - think of it as cannibalizing your own troops to get a more uber uber-unit. It's pretty cool to send a few stealthed Avatars over to go knocking on the back-door with their Obelisk lasers, and I think as it was in December, the Avatar turned out to be the single best fighting machine on the map, though that's probably because they're still in the beta stages of balancing over there.

(Incidentally, a couple of the guys had a huge 40 Nod Avatars vs 40 Alien Annihilator battle and even the devs were surprised that the engine neither slowed to a crawl nor outright died. Of course the Avatars totally won - The technology of Peace shall prevail!)

Borrowing another page from the GLA, Nod also gets some saboteur-type dudes on hang-gliders that sound like they'll be handy to keep around to use on an unwitting opponent not paying enough attention to their own base. You've all heard about the various infantry upgrades as well - the "confessor" one is particularly fun. Buying Confessors gives all your basic infantry squads an extra dude with a machinegun and - more importantly - some funtacular grenades containing the pure skunk stuff (can you dig it?) that crunks enemy infantry squads up and gives them a serious case of the munchies -- and it also causes them to shoot each other, which they'll attribute to a totally bad trip after they come down from a Shaggy-style high. I had a little fun with those 'nades against Crimson's Bazookamen Of Doom(tm). When fully decked out, you can expect Nod stuff - both infantry and vehicles - to positively motor across the map like bats out of hell, dish out a lot of damage if they get in range, or die really fast if they don't - typical for Nod, their units tend to have less hitpoints and damage-soaking power as GDI's stuff. You do get some pretty nice energy-ball-firing artillery and of course the fancypants Avatar.

Oh yeah, and the Nod MCV walks on legs. It's pretty friggin' hilarious, especially when you pack up your Con Yard and try to scuttle away from that mass of tanks that's overrunning your base. That's what happened in the opening match on the big screen on Day One.

THE USER INTERFACE

You all should know that the sidebar is back. Big time. Better still, C&C3 also keeps the traditional RTS interface of showing you your selected units on the side. The main sidebar area acts much more like an "active selection" part of the UI. You get instant access to your unit & structure factories via the Red Alert 2 tab buttons at the top - tabs broken down into buildings, defenses, infantry, ground vehicles, and aircraft. Under each build category there's also individual tabs for each of your factories in that category - you've seen them as the little "1", "2", "3" tabs in the screenshots so far. This enhancement changes the way the sidebar works - instead of additional factories boosting your build speed, additional factories mean you can just build more stuff at the same time. It's pretty easy to keep track of which factory is which - for example, the numbers don't get reused, so that forward barracks #4 will be #4 until it blows up and no other barracks will be #4 (for you) the whole rest of the game.

The return of the sidebar means you can easily crank out units even while you're managing an attack, which is great, and Greg Black is a God for figuring out how to do it better than any previous C&C game, but there are a couple of downsides. First of all, as far as I know there isn't any hotkey to build something from all your factories at the same time, which is kind of a disadvantage for the hardcore tank-pumpers. It would be nice to be able to hold down something like, say, control, while clicking on "build Mammoth tank", and have that order propagated to all your vehicle factories. The good old "shift" button is back though - hold it when you click and you'll increase or decrease the build queue by 5 at a time.

The fact that the sidebar hides when you've got units selected is a mixed blessing: while freeing up screen space, it becomes easier to forget that you're not building stuff. Whereas in previous C&C games, that huge hokin' sidebar was a constant visual reminder that you need to build tanks, that's no longer the case in C&C3. Sure, you still have the tick-tick-tick sound of building, and the "unit completed" sounds are still there to let you know when you're stuff is done, but it was nice to have the visual cue. I recommended to Greg Black that it would probably help if the little tab icons at the top had the clock-face animation effect like normal C&C sidebar icons to remind you of how close to being done your stuff is, and also point out when factories are idle. Whether something like that will make it in or not, I can't say.

I don't think any true hardcore players will mind the loss of the always-visible sidebar, I just wanted to point out that it does make a difference. I occasionally found myself not building and having cash roll in by the bucketload, but maybe that's just because I suck.

Getting on to the other UI elements, the minimap looks nice, and the EA guys bragged a bit about fixing the size of the dots - they certainly looked fine to me. On the left are your "power" buttons, much like in Zero Hour, although they work a bit differently, as I'll explain later in the Gameplay section. In the bottom-right is a large context-sensitive info box with info about the currently selected unit - information like health, upgrades, and "effectiveness". "Effectiveness" clues you in to the game balancing system by telling you what the unit is good against and what it isn't so good against. As it's something you should be able to look up in the manual, EA was debating removing it to save some space, but I found it handy, even though most of the info was a little obvious (gosh, bazooka guys are good against tanks? Whoddathunkit).

To the left of the unit info box are unit abilities - things like the Avatar's "steal stuff" button, or the buttons to buy upgrades at tech buildings. They're nice and unobtrusive but also way easier to click on than BFME's stupid circular doodads.

Overall, the UI in C&C3 represents a significant modernization of the C&C sidebar, and I think most of you will be very pleased with the results. To everyone who complained about the "Starcraftization" of Generals' interface, I think it's fair to say that EA has redeemed themselves with the quality of C&C3's UI.

Oh, and of course you can select as many goddamn units as once as you please. By all means, make a control group composed of two hundred minigunner squads, and combine it with your 40-Avatar-mechs control group to form the Uber Stack Of Death(tm)

THE GAMEPLAY

You have to admit that EA has a tough audience to please with C&C3 - there's the classic C&C, with its gameplay revolving around small numbers of units outmaneuvering defenses to dive for the Con Yard. There's Red Alert and Red Alert 2, with their masses and masses of tanks thrown head-first at powerful defenses. There's Tiberian Sun, with its slower pace, weaker superweapons, and smaller army sizes. Then there's Generals, with on the one hand its tiny infantry-in-vehicle rushes and on the other hand its large tank battles - not to mention its powerful aircraft.

Well, of course, you can't expect to please everyone, but I think after having played C&C3 that they've done a pretty damn good job of giving most fans at least some of what they want. Some things are right out, like Generals' ridiculous "three bazookaguys in a Hum-vee" rushes, or Red Alert's completely useless infantry. Of course the classic engineers are back, and you can take out buildings pretty fast if you have enough bazookadudes or tanks, so the C&C staples are here. There seems to be a nice balance between micro and macro; you can do a lot of damage with micro, but ultimately to crack a determined foe in the long term you will need to macro up some mixed groups.

One of the things a lot of people have been complaining about is the dearth of Mechs; while Mike Verdu has been working everyone with the "why no mechs makes sense from a plot point of view", I want to tell you that there are mechs - they're the ultimate units. Each side gets one mech - GDI Juggernaut, Nod Avatar, and Alien Annihilator Tripod - and it represents the ultimate unit in terms of hitpoints, armour, and damage. You still need a lot of them to crack a base - three of my Annihilators were pretty handily shut down by Crimson's patented Big Bazookaguy Bunch(tm). But you won't want to toss them at your foe without an escort because all three mech units have a fatal weakness: when they die, they remain on the battlefield as broken hulks for a few moments and any engineer - any engineer, even an enemy engineer - can capture the hulk and bring the unit back online.

In other words, if those five fully-upgraded, decked-out Avatars of yours get wasted outside the enemy base because you forgot to give them anti-air protection, then for the cost of a few engineers, you might be seeing those same Avatars coming back your way under an enemy banner. Let's just hope that your enemy remembers to bring some AA escort - for his sake.

It's an interesting gameplay mechanic and I have to wonder what the modders are going to do with it, but as a balancing mechanism I think it works pretty well to thwart the single-unit masses of the Red Alert series. Actually, over all the balancing system works pretty well in discouraging any attack squad composed of just one or two units. The truly scary attack groups - and the AI will throw them at you (no more "three Kirov" attacks, yay!) - are the ones made up of a couple of units of every type. Expect those kinds of groups to roll over anything that isn't just as balanced -- or significantly larger.

The nice thing is that you have the ability to, on the one hand, build up hordes of units (if that takes your fancy), and on the other hand, motor around with a handful of hit-and-run units - even as GDI! It's fun as hell to load up mortars on the GDI 4WD warthogs bulldogs and take pot-shots at a base from the sides. You can do some pretty serious GLA buggy-style damage if your enemy doesn't have any defenses or fast-response units handy.

Generals fans will be pleased to know that their precious "powers" are back as buttons on the left side of the screen, but Generals-haters will be pleased to know that they don't work the same way as they did in Generals. For one, the "powers" - like reinforcement drops or artillery barrages - all depend on buildings, and if you take out the building, you take out the power (at least temporarily). More importantly, the powers aren't free. Calling in reinforcements or calling down fire from the sky will cost you money every time you do it, so no holding out with that one last unit and winning the game with a lucky anthrax strike or artillery barrage.

I think this results in a system the best of both worlds, giving players access to battle-winning abilities but making them pay for them - no free rides.

Of course superweapons are a bit of an exception; they don't cost cash to fire, only to build, as in previous C&C games. As in Red Alert 2 and Generals, however, building a superweapon causes the fog of war to be revealed around it, opening it up to all manner of nasty enemy strikes.

THE MULTIPLAYER ENHANCEMENTS

C&C3's gameplay is something that I think will bring together many C&C fans in fun slap-happy harmony... or cause everyone to hate it and rant about how it's not exactly like their favourite C&C.

But gameplay aside, C&C3 has one redeeming quality that should enshrine it in the annals of RTS history - C&C3 is seriously going to push the genre ahead when it comes to RTS multiplayer connectivity. This is the stuff that EA calls its "RTS As a Sport" initiative. They are three major features that, as far as I know, have never before made it into a major RTS game:

1. Voice Chat
    Automatic, integrated, in-game voice chat. This one was something proposed 
    internally for BFMEII last year, but didn't make the cut. I'm glad to see that it
    got in for C&C3, as frankly it's about goddamn time. Sure, sure, the hardcore
    players will be running their own TeamSpeak servers or whatever while they
    throw down in their clan tournaments, but for casual players like me, integrated
    voice chat means I can jump into (for example) a team quickmatch and
    communicate easily and effectively with my team-mate. It's nice to finally see a
    feature FPS games have only had for, oh, like the last seven years, come to
    RTS gaming.

2. Match Broadcasting and Narrating
    Continuing in the list of "features Half-Life has had, like, forever" is the ability
    for C&C3 matches to be broadcast, live (or with an optional anti-cheat "tape
    delay"), to clients using either the full game or a free "watch
    matches only" version that will be available for download from day one.
    Although voice chat from the players will unfortunately not be propagated to
    watchers of either the live match or the recorded replay, anything the narrator
    says will. That's right, I have finally found a place where I can be in a C&C3
    game yet blabbing my head off about the weather and my local sports team, to
    the unheard cheers of dozens of replay watchers. For every match, a special
    Narrator observer-player can record an audio track to be integrated into the
    broadcast (and the downloadable replay). He can also do John Madden-
    style "write on the screen" scribblings with coloured markers, also for watchers
    to see. You know what that means: crudely-drawn "Brotherhood of Nod"
    penises or anthropomorphic GDI Eagles will now come free with every smack-
    down. Would you like that pwnage supersized?

3. Integrated Web-based Match-Making and User Tracking
    Did you just totally get beaten by some jerk-off who exploited a well-known bug
    or used a hacked custom map? Express your discontent by giving him a bad
    rating. Are you running a tournament and want to schedule a match between
    two participants for Sunday afternoon? Use the C&C3 website to set up the
    game and send e-mail invites to the two players. Are you bored on Friday night
    but not awake enough to actually play a game? Visit the C&C3 website and see
    who's playing what right now, and who's narrating it, or browse some of the top-
    player-rated matches from the past few weeks and watch the ones you've
    missed with just a click or two. Did that match just have the most awesomest
    narrator ever, who made the awesome moves and strategies just totally jump
    out at you? Don't worry, just click a few buttons and you can give me the
    amazingly high score marks I deserve. I'll appreciate the effort.

    With EA's efforts at web-based unification inside C&C3, RTS is finally moving
    into the integrated age. I remember how awesome it was checking out scores
    and stats on my friend's custom Counter-Strike server, and I still like to vainly
    check out my Battlefield 2 profile. With C&C3, RTS games finally catch up those
    snarky FPS games with their fancy-pants websites and player profiles. No more!
    C&C3 even goes one-up on them and will allow players to schedule matches on
    the website and even jump straight into "pick-up" games advertised there.

    Player tracking goes one-up on games like Battlefield 2 as well, by letting
    players rate each other for skill and sportsmanship after the match. EA is of
    course a bit aware of the potential for abuse, but the reasoning is that a couple 
    of jerks giving stupidly low ratings will be balanced out by the couple of retards
    giving absurdedly high ratings and the throngs of decent folks giving decent
    ratings.

    I think you can rest assured that if you play C&C3 you will probably be visiting
    their official site pretty regularly.

    But please come back here once in a while. Please? I'll bring cookies.

Voice chat. Broadcasting and narration. Integrated match-making and user stats. If these features don't get you more than a bit excited about EA actually raising the bar for real-time strategy with C&C3, you might just be a redneck intractably bitter EA-hatin' jerkwad. Your name is probably also KingOfNod*.

*Horrible in-joke

FINISH HIM

Well, there you have it. There's my huge write-up. There's more to come, though - you know I can't let a community summit go by without making a high-larious video. And while I've said a lot, with the NDA restrictions lifted, I can always say more -- so ask your questions in the forum and I'll do my best to answer them. Aaron Kaufman has given us all free reign to talk about everything we saw at the summit.

That's right, Aaron Kaufman. Apoc. The secret's out (if it ever even was a secret) - Aaron is still alive, and he was at the summit, and I got a totally hilarious video clip of him "dancing". The pictures in the gallery that are marked with the placeholder thumbnails are really just shots that have Aaron in them, so I'll be putting them up shortly.

I hope I've helped shape your pre-release impression of C&C3, and I sincerely hope I've shaped it in a positive dimension. I enjoyed playing C&C3 at the summit and the singleplayer missions I saw didn't look half bad either. Sure, sure, there are a lot of fancy graphical effects and big-name stars involved in the game, but I know EA can do looks-good. This community summit showed me that they can, if they try real hard, not just do looks-good, but plays-good.

I think that C&C3 is going to be a good game, that it stands a good chance of being a great game, and that it has the potential - if EA keeps pushing hard even after launch - to be an awesome game.

any news on what platform it will be on other than pc?

i guess it is around,

For maximum graphic detail:

Core2 Duo E6300 (for max physic detail)
1.5/2GB ram (for max texture detail)
Radeon X1950pro/7900GT (for max shadow and per-pixel shading texture, bump map and HDR lighting)
To play at minimum level of detail
Pentium4 3.0/AMD64 3000+
1GB Ram
7600GS/X1650pro

means gotta get a keyboard and mouse for the xbox?

WTF!!?!? so high!?!?! if really like this, surely i cannot play the game until a few more years in the future...no budget for PC for the next 1-2 years since my purchase 1-2 years back....  

Everything you wanted to know about C&C 3 (with some jokes in it).
Source: HeXetic's Super-Awesome Post-NDA Summit Write-Up!
XboX360. Ever since BFME2 they are pushing RTS to consoles.

means gotta get a keyboard and mouse for the xbox?

I wonder if a PC keyboard/mouse will do for the USB ports.

Nope can play it using the controller. They dumb down the controls for the consoles.