Suffice to say, the method by which structures are produced in what I call, loosely, the 'Command & Conquer model' differs from worker-based construction seen in a variety of other gameplay systems, like the ones mentioned above. I'm not going to go too much further down that particular rabbit hole though. Not that 'realism' tends to be a good indication of quality in RTS by itself anyway. SCVs aren't substantially more 'realistic' than ConYards, in my humble opinion. But in all honesty, a guy in a robot suit building a giant vehicle factory all by himself is a similarly unrealistic truncation of how buildings are constructed in reality. Let's get this out of the way up front: in terms of a visual metaphor for construction and production, a building that can magically construct another building at long range is. They are relatively rare in the genre in that they have a structure that produces other structures. The vast preponderance of RTS games use builder units anyway.Д«ut not, of course, Command and Conquer style games. Total Annihilation style games utilize 'engineer' units that are specialized builders, et cetera. Age of Empires games do this, as of course to Blizzard games and even Command and Conquer: Generals. It's quite common in RTS games to have a generic worker unit responsible for gathering resources and producing structures. In particular, the Construction Yard/MCV. And it's that I want to talk about right now: base building. The Command and Conquer is built around a number of systems that I absolutely love, from its resource harvesting system to how it handles base building. But also I've made my way back to Command and Conquer 3 and Red Alert 3 (only skirmish at this point: I'm nowhere near skilled enough to engage with those games' current competitive communities) and it's made me fall in love with the franchise all over again. There's the remaster, of course, which has actually captivated me in a way that I confess I wasn't expecting of a 25 year old game. In this case, I've been playing and watching more than my fair share (what my wife might call an 'unhealthy amount' whatever that's supposed to mean) of Command and Conquer games. At the very least, I am happy to learn from players and designers who know more than I do, and at the very least I enjoy getting people talking about RTS design. Longtime fans of the particular franchise of my focus possibly or probably have a fine degree of specialized knowledge about it that I might lack, and the topic is unlikely to interest the broader population of strategy game fans or gamers who don't share a major interest in the specific mechanics of whatever game or franchise I'm concerned with at the time.ДЄnd regardless, that's not going to stop me. Writing about conventions specific to a particular strategy game franchise sometimes fills me with a little bit of dread. You can read this at its original location at

Starcraft vs command and conquer