Dawn of the Tiberium Age mod for C&C: Tiberian Sun

It has been 4½ months since our last major update. Since then, we've managed to bake some significant goodies, which are now all available. Let's take a closer look at them.

The biggest feature of this update is version 2 of the Advanced AI, our custom skirmish/multiplayer AI. You might remember our first Advanced AI release from 2023. Version 1 only reimplemented the AI's base building, but version 2 also takes over the AI's unit production from the original TS engine code. Instead of building random units from pre-made lists, the AI now dynamically looks at its enemy's unit composition, and builds units that counter its enemy the best. Used to spamming tanks? Get ready to face rocket infantry and other anti-tank units.

The AI has also got many other upgrades. For example, it can now capture tech buildings, and it is better at picking targets for aircraft and superweapons. It might also have learned some nasty micromanagement tricks... but the full list of improvements would be too long for a news post. You can see all the details on our change log page.

To offset the AI being smarter, we also heavily nerfed the AI's cheats - it would be impossible to beat otherwise. Hard AI and easier difficulty levels are now cheat-free, and give a fair experience. Tougher levels, like Brutal AI, are challenging while cheating far less than the official AIs in Tiberian Sun and Yuri's Revenge, not to mention other C&C mods that typically pump the AI's cheats to the maximum to make the AI challenging. You'll find the AI respecting tech prerequisites and build limits of epic units, and being vulnerable to taking out its harvesters - it is now as vulnerable to economic pressure as a human player would be.

We've continued development on the "Vinifera" Tiberian Sun engine extension, which brings many benefits.

First off, we finally have a separate naval queue. Now you can build ships and land vehicles at the same time. With this change, ships have also been moved to the fourth sidebar tab (behind the radar icon).

If you've been using Chinook helicopters to transport infantry, you might've noticed strange behaviour where they drop infantry off one-by-one. That is no longer the case: instead you can deploy the Chinooks when they have landed and the infantry will exit normally, just like from APCs.

Many players who have enjoyed our singleplayer content have wished for a faster briefing animation, especially for retries and replayability. We've now sped the animation up by 2x. The multiplayer score screen has got received the same treatment.

We've also fixed multiple long-standing game crash bugs, at least one of them having existed ever since the original release of Tiberian Sun in '99. That should make your game experience stabler than ever before.

While our balance has been pretty stable for a long time, we still found some room for improvement.

We once nerfed the Nod Bike's range by almost 20% compared to its Tiberian Dawn value. We now feel that was a bit too much, and it has received back 10% of its original attack range.

There was a consensus among the PvP community that the V2 Launcher was overpowered. However, we want to be loyal to the RA1 unit design, which puts us into a bit of a hard place here. We found increasing its price slightly (from 800 to 850) to be the safest way to nerf it.

To force the Soviets to diversify their late-game unit composition a bit more, the Soviet Mammoth tank has received a nerf to its anti-infantry damage. This also opened up room for the change detailed below. GDI's Mammoth stays as it was.

While both of these guys had their moments, they were found to be a bit niche. They've both received a bump to their price, but also a boost to their stats, making them stronger options in the lategame.

The Chrono Tank underperformed against most base-buildings, making teleporting to the enemy's backline with one not as consequential as we hoped. It now deals more damage to wood-armored buildings (which is used by power plants, refineries, factories, and most other important stuff).

People thought the Chrono Vortex was the weakest superweapon option in the game. It now lasts 33% longer, has a higher range, and deals more damage. Against heavy armor its damage was doubled, so you especially don't want your tanks to stay near the void.

That's right, time to grab your friend for some fresh challenges!

If you have DTA installed already, you can grab the update with our client's automatic updater.

If you do not have DTA installed yet, what are you waiting for? Grab it from our downloads page here on ModDB!

You can read the full patch notes on our change log page.

This likely concludes our major updates for this year. We hope you will enjoy fighting with our new AI, as well as the new missions!