Last night, EA held a launch celebration party for Command and Conquer Rivals. There were exciting matches between famous Youtubers and their fans, a small tournament between four well-known members of our community, and some sneak peeks at the future of the game. You can watch the vod of the event here.

Let’s take a closer look at the reveals and briefly analyse the tournament.

Upcoming Units

The two upcoming units are the Mohawk Gunship and the Laser Drone.

The devs described the mohawk gunship as the baby of an AC-130 and a Chinook helicopter that was raised by the kodiak. It’s a 50 cost GDI aircraft equipped to deal with enemy ground vehicles. If this unit is introduced, it would be able to round out GDI’s air forces nicely. Currently, the orca is a little too weak and fragile for the anti armour role, serving more as an assassin. The mohawk gunship could be the key unit to bring GDI air into meta. All that depends on the exact numbers on these units, so I’ll be excited for their release and see how they perform in practice.

Nod gets a 20 cost anti-vehicle air unit. Seems like air is getting a lot of support. These little guys will enable Nod to open with the air tower, capable of holding off aggressive vehicle starts (hopefully, we don’t know the match ups exactly without seeing the laser drones in practice). Against infantry, Nod can transition into venoms. For the later game, infernos and banshees form the backbone of the Nod air force. Another exciting addition to the game.

An interesting thing to note is that bikes seem to be able to target squad units better in the demonstration, with each individual missile going after separate squad members if the missile does enough damage to kill. This way, bikes become much better at killing things like war dogs and drone swarms with less damage wasted.

Other Content

New art for platinum league and an exciting cloning lab feature coming up.

Platinum players are getting a new art for their league. While not a significant addition, I still find these little things very cool. I spent some time looking through all the art for each league and noticed the increasing tiberium crystals lying on the map, culminating in a big tiberium crater in tiberium league. These are some very cool details. However, this new art seems a little light on the tiberium crystals, hopefully they’ll add some more crystals to it before release.

This is my personal favourite reveal of the stream. A cloning lab that allows us to obtain extra cards of a unit that we get to choose. Perfect for focusing on one unit to level up. From what we know, we will have a permanent chamber for free that we can reuse infinitely. Place a card in there, play a certain number of battles, and out comes a bunch of cards. Any rarity will work in the cloning lab, and we will be able to purchase limited use chambers for diamonds as well.

I think this feature is wonderful. It gives players more choice in progression and more incentive to play, something we desperately needed. However, this feature won’t be coming until update 1.4 (the next big update will be 1.3), so we’ll have to wait and see how the feature is balanced and whether or not spending diamonds on it is worth it.

Competitive Showcase

Last night, we had four competitive players face off one another, each representing a different region.

AliciaDestiny, the representative for the Americas, took home the victory with some excellent decision making and micro and managed to recover after an unfortunate misclick in game one of the finals.

IraqiZorro showcased the giga-cannon, a devastating ranged unit that obliterates most ground units when charged up. However, a few mistakes and a bike rush gamble against Alicia meant that Southeast Asia, the region he represented, did not obtain the rewards.

13lade, our player for Europe and a force to be reckoned with on the ladder, brought out the equally menacing MLRS but ultimately could not overcome the relentless assault of AliciaDestiny.

JadeXyan, representing the East Asia region and a prominent member of our community, came to the tournament with off-meta decks including the MG squad and the orca. Despite her valiant effort, IraqiZorro broke through the MG squad’s defences and overwhelmed her.

AliciaDestiny’s victory means that all players in the Americas region will receive the Launch Celebration Bundle for free. This bundle includes 12,500 credits and 2 epics crates. These resources are enough to boost a new player’s units significantly. As I’m in North America, I too owe Alicia a big thank you. EA has stated that we will receive the rewards within two weeks but likely much sooner.

Final Thoughts

I’m glad to see EA invest resources into the promotion of this game. The viewership on Twitch was very healthy at around 9-10 thousand viewers consistently. This event is sure to increase the player base and grow the game further.

This post is quite different from the types of guides I usually make. A huge thanks to MNBrian for suggesting this recap and helping me with the article. As always, feel free to join our discord here.

Stay excited for what is to come, commander!