Hey Commanders. This is Greg Black, lead combat designer for C&C: Rivals. For those of you who don’t know me, I’m a long time C&C fan and designer. I previously worked on Red Alert 2: Yuri’s Revenge, Generals, Zero Hour, C&C 3, and Red Alert 3, and more recently Starcraft 2. But enough about me, let’s talk about Rivals.

We are currently learning a ton about the state of the game’s balance and are looking to make some high-impact changes in the very near future. Before we finalize our first Pre-alpha balance patch, I wanted to give you guys some heads up as to what we’re looking at.

Currently, we’ve focused our sights on:

- Nod is currently doing too well against GDI in cross-faction play. We have several theories on why this is, but we are still actively investigating it and haven’t reached any firm conclusions yet.

- Double Harvester openers are overly strong and too difficult to punish. We will be looking at potentially tweaking the economy ramp to make this less viable as well as increasing some of the “punishment” for losing a harvester.

- GDI Sandstorms are too difficult to counter with low-cost infantry. The Sandstorm’s high rate of fire make them overly efficient at countering enemy infantry. We are likely going to nerf the Sandstorm’s damage vs infantry to address this.

- Nod Flame Troopers are overly effective against light vehicles. GDI doesn’t have a ton of units to counter them at low levels that aren’t also infantry or light vehicles. Decreasing Flame Trooper damage vs vehicles will make the Nod Buggy and GDI Rhino more effective counters against them.

- Nod Cyborgs are overly efficient for cost and difficult to counter at lower levels. We don’t necessarily believe the Cyborgs are too strong per se, but rather that they are too inexpensive and easy to spam. There are also some second-order counter relationships (i.e. the things you can build to kill the Cyborgs are easily dealt with by Flame Troopers & Drill Pod) that we are concerned with as well.

-Tech Lab / Temple of Nod (Tier 4) units are generally a bit too inexpensive. Our intention is not for games to turn into Tier 4 Epic spam, but we do want Tier 4 units to feel powerful and meaty. Right now, we think either the economy is ramping too much or the Tier 4 units are just a bit too inexpensive. Expect some cost tuning on them in the near future.

It’s awesome to finally have real players in the game. Expect balance changes to be coming fast and often as we absorb all your feedback and analyze the incoming data. If we’ve missed things you feel are important, let us know in the forums, Twitter, Discord, etc. During this early Pre-alpha period, you truly have a chance to shape the game alongside us. Your feedback and participation are invaluable as we tune and balance the game, and our goal is to make it as fun and fair as possible for you.

“Follow us on Twitter @CNCRivals for the latest news, tips, tricks and videos of the game: https://twitter.com/CnCRivals.”

-Greg and the C&C: Rivals Combat Team