Actually the name is pretty bad but i couldn't think of anything better so uh anyways

In my opinion, Cortex Command has gone downhill in playability even though is gone through quite a bit of 'development'. There've been kickass features like Lua and gibbing and scripted missions, but none of them have helped the basic core of the game progress. In fact, it's kind of regressed as development went on; mining gold feels like it's unnessecary as most maps have broken gold or don't even have any, features and items have been added that are cool ideas but are just ridiculously imbalanced, and concepts and half-baked ideas are thrown in with no regard for each other, as if it was just going to get 'fixed later'. The base core of the game, way back in build 10, was still messy and broken but it was expected; the game was free, the game was obviously in early alpha, and it was on a development schedule called 'eventually', it still worked after all. But after two years of development it's even more messy and broken, it's obviously in late alpha, but now it costs money and the development schedule is vaporware. It's never going to be finished within the patience of everyone here. I've accepted that after two years of waiting for the game to get better; so I guess I've taken matters into my own hands in my own way; I've made a mod. It doesn't really magically make the game complete but it makes the skirmish and multiplayer modes a lot more balanced and more like a game rather than a scraped together alpha release.

So to answer the question you're probably asking; this is a revamp mod of Cortex Command. I started it with a few basic goals; to improve the basic multiplayer and singleplayer skirmish mode, to make the game easier to play and less cluttered, and to remove all of the stupid leftovers that haven't bothered to be fixed. Even though I knew the game well it still confused me at times, and trying to play the game with friends was worse because it was exploitable and very confusing for both of us, and in the long term matches were boring as we ran out of money. This isn't a change to the core gameplay mechanics or even the moddability of the game (in fact it's a better development base as the gold price is fairly standard), it simply makes the game more fun to play. The original game had a lot of sloppy leftover development trash, this removes it. This also fixes a lot of serious problems with various parts of the game, such as the extremely fragile dropships and large ammount of weapons and units with minimal differences, or too much variety as to ruin the fun of the game.

So to put it bluntly: I made a 'total conversion' that has removed the factions and integrated the cool parts of each into a smoother and easier to understand package. You don't have to worry about 12 different soldiers or which assault rifle or pistol is better, and you don't have to worry about your friend filling a drop crate with 90 crabs. I tweaked the weapons to feel different but more balanced so there's reasons to use different guns. There's also cool stuff like medkits and land mines and stronger dropships; and as a whole I feel as if the game is a lot more fun to play now.

If you don't think it's necessary; compare

Cortex Command

Cortex Command Redux


Of course it's not perfect: I intended this to be an alternate version of the game that was much more fun in multiplayer, but after a while I've realized that all the game needed was some tweaking as a whole. That was after I ended up removing lots of the entries on certain factions. I fixed MOST of them with recently acquired knowledge, so it's not ABSOLUTELY compatible with every mod ever, things that cross-reference some ronin or coalition stuff may error out. But most shouldn't. I didn't remove what I didn't have to. In the end it's at the point it is now, far from perfect but more than functional and a lot smoother.

So here's where you come in; give me your honest opinion and what you think. Tell me your problems with it, what you would add, and what you would tweak. If you this this is a good idea and want to help me continue this: awesome. It's far from finished, there's still stuff to tweak and interesting things to throw together.

HEY I ACTUALLY FIXED THE MOD OR AT LEAST I THINK I DID AND I UPLOADED IT TO A HOST THAT ISN'T TERRIBAD

Download

IMHO I liked having a large selection of soldiers and such. Gave it more variety.
Also, you removed the Dummies? What was wrong with them?

Well it's not like there's not variety, you've still got the two soldiers and two robots to choose from, and all of the acrab actors. I'm not aiming for simplicity, I'm aiming for smoothness.

The six or so different Ronin soldiers and the dummy soldiers and the undead soldiers were rarely useful and just cluttered up the buy menu, the only remotely usable ones were the Ronin soldiers and all of their differences were rarely useful in a match and were just annoying. The game is really chaotic, so if you buy a soldier that's weak to impacts you'll probably get crushed by a rocket gib where a clone soldier would walk out of it. And that's not a good compromise.

Well I'm not unhappy to see the Ronin and Undead go, but the Dummies were useful: cheap, didn't bleed, and lightweight. In addition, they had a distinct style that was different from the Coalition. They had weapons that were both separate and equal to the Coalition; their grenades were a nice divergence to the regular explodey grenades, and they were the only faction that made extensive use of energy weapons.

Simplicity is one thing, but sometimes it's worth it to keep some more variety. Dummies could have had some tweaking done to keep their weapons interesting (and some removed) but still balanced.

I think the major thrust of this is it turns Cortex into a more multiplayer experience instead of the skirmish mash that it has been. IE, no duplicate functions for anything whatsoever.

I started doing this a few months ago, but I'll definitely keep the factions. I kind of like the sentiment behind these kind of mods though, a kick in the pants to the devs, hopefully invoking some sort of performance pressure

I wish I could run CC at the moment <_<

The thing is that no matter how much you balance values for competitive play, at it's core CC does not have viable head to head competition. Ultimately, I think that core game mechanics would have to be changed to really have viable competitive play that doesn't turn into very boring, very one-sided attrition once one player asserts map control.

However, I applaud you for trying- there was a long period of time where I would consider a competitive rebalance to be the best thing ever (even though I would have kept all factions but just diversified).

For competitive play I think that all the things that make CC unique, like digging for gold and calling in crap via drops, would have to be changed significantly. Stronger dropships is definitely a step in the right direction; but there are so many more things that need to be changed to make CC not so much of an attrition slog in pvp between experienced players.

It's never going to be perfect, like you said, but this is still an improvement. And when you mean competetive play? Do you mean tournaments and such? because it seems you missed my point. What i'm trying to do is just generally improve the game, mostly the skirmish and multiplayer modes. The game unmodified is playable but there's lots of rough spots and 'exploits' that end up making the game unfun, I'm trying to smooth those out.

Also I'll start adding the dummies into the lineup.

I meant player vs player. I just got confused because, personally, I wouldn't want to limit a sandbox (skirmish).

I'm having issues plugging this into a copy of cortex command.

"Failed to load datafile object with following path and name: Base.rte\Devices\mod\cuuube"
The cuuube.bmp is there, but it's not reading it.

EDIT:DERP
it was a \. ok, critical reading fail.

I assume you've got the mac version, but I have no mac to test with so I don't know if it's compatible. If I remember correctly the mac version is different somehow but I can't fix it, I don't think.

Also I compiled a changelog which I never bothered posting.



The air compressor bit I really should focus on but I really don't know how I would improve it. PS it gives you an income so that someone may not be able to attrition you to death.

Everything's fixed and running. Damn, this is better for skirmish than the vanilla CC.

However, you're got a glitch in the compressor that makes it spam the console and lag the game, forever.
Something about there not being object "Emitter" to create.

I have installed it on clean CC ant this is what I've got:

Abortion in file .\System\Reader.cpp, line 531 because:
Failed to open included data file in Base.rte/Scenes.ini at line 225!

Dockvalley... Maybe Rockvalley?

It's a great mod and all but it seems like if you have this mod installed, you shouldn't really get ANY other major mods at all.