As an example, while in the original game using allied artillery against soviet tesla coils was a dead sentence in OpenRA is great to be able to fire well beyond its range forcing you to come out of the base to defend it.
They also added a ton of features which make the game truly enjoyable and fun to play.
Well done OpenRA team!
The one thing I'm missing is C&C Generals and Zero Hour. Those were also really fun to play over LAN.
Meamwhile people make threads about RA what was a bad game even when it came out - "strategy" was to made few overpowered towers, then mass tanks and flood the computer with them. Mutliplayer was tanks + dogs, so the first shot of the enemy tank was wasted on your dog.
EDIT> My fav setup is to join a free empty server , set up 2 teams, 2 AI and 1 human vs 2 AI and 1 human. And then play with my friend. Great fun. The AI adds a bit of a randomness to the games. Easy smooth quick interface. Just perfect for a quick free RTS game with a friend.
Jane had an infectious laugh. She was always baking. She died her hair bright red. She drank too much wine. She didnt know much about the details of technology but she was intrigued by it, she read books and she volunteered to help as a teachers aide at the local primary school.
And Jane had a secret, she was one of the best Red Alert 2 players I had ever seen. We'd have matches over dialup and she would totally wreck me in such a short amount of time. I couldn't figure out a strategy to beat her, it was different every time.
I still have very vivid memories of Jane sitting in the corner of her farm house, big thick glasses on, glass of red wine, leading the comrades into war, and laughing as she bombed the allies into submission.
If you met Jane on the street you would never ever guess that under that farmer's wife persona, lurked a dangerous and cunning war strategist. Totally unexpected and utterly fabulous.
Love you Jane
Whoever runs it, you're awesome!
The player base is only slightly lower than when I used to play RA2 on dial-up like 20 years ago.
I've boycotted EA ever since they ruined the franchise.
Every time I've tried to install this previously, this was my wall :(
For context, I love huge, massive maps with loads of players. OpenRA replays the entire game to restore, it doesn't have a save-current-state routine.
So 20 hours of massive map + 8 players means 2 hours of pegged CPU to reload the save.
Heartbreaking.
EA released CnC and Red Alert as free downloads twenty years ago.
Moving everything to TCP/IP came with a lot of improvements, but we also lost important things. Reminds me of the move from Flash to HTML5.
These days, I'm having incredible fun developing good old AI scripts with LLMs, for my own vibe-coded RTS game. Just choose all AI players here to make them battle each other: https://egeozcan.github.io/unnamed_rts/game/
I even let the LLM generate a tournament script to make AI scripts from different LLMs battle (headless): https://github.com/egeozcan/unnamed_rts/blob/main/src/script... GPT-5.5 leaves all in the dust currently. I cannot beat most in the game I set the rules myself :)
If you are like me, you can just make LLMs create your personal RTS game and also develop custom AIs. It's so much fun.
I'm able to get the mechanics down. But I can't get the graphics past RA1 level yet without killing the process power.
It's super impressive this works at all.
It helps that this is a childhood favorite game of mine.
What are the possibilities for just giving Claude that each turn. Yes, insane over kill, but in a couple of years Claude level AI will run locally on laptops...
If you meant _playing_ raw based on LLM input - that's probably the wrong tool for the job. The latency for you to react to a mango shot is faster than a billion tok/s lol
Because there is no collision between the sky and floor it determines that this is the quickest route. Even with zoning it does something you'll never think of.
Using LLMs as NPCs can be hilarious to watch.
Developing AI scripts, however? They are crazy good! I try to re-balance the game to give a little edge to the humans, then it takes a single iteration for your not-even-sota LLM to destroy me. I mean I'm not the fastest RTS player but for the lack of skill, I have the advantage of being the designer of the game :)
About the RA2 AI scripts: You can react to enemy faction, composition etc. but it's impossible to program it to pull back its tesla tanks when they are under threat from a bunch of rocketeers. Those things are hard-coded in the game engine. I think the only exception was the DeeZire mod which patched the game exe, if I'm not hallucinating.
For a lot of games it can be surprisingly easy to make an AI which beats the median player even when limited to just basic strategies, simply by not getting distracted by the gut feelings that humans have.
Even for more complex strategy games like say Starcraft II where that's not enough, there's this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStar_(software)
I hate the term "AI" applied to games, since AI means so many things and usually implies something smart, "intelligent". But in reality, it is more like a "bot" or a "computer player". And the main goal is not to be super-smart, but to be plausible enough and provide an appropriate challenge to the human player.
There are some "fair" bots in games - like in my favorite turn-based Mechanized Assault and Exploration from the mid 90s. Computer players follow the same rules as the human ones - e.g., if something is not visible to the radar, the computer will not see it. The only "cheat" is the resource boost computer players can have on the higher difficulty settings, but it is totally optional. And as an experienced player, you always let the computer have it, since you want a challenge, and without that boost, it has no chance whatsoever.
I didn't play enough doom to really love it in the same way.
Continuously shifting the goalposts of what "AI" is is, of course, a well-known phenomenon, giving rise to what's called the AI effect or Tesler's theorem [1].
The past year has brought several exciting new developments, which we are happy to share today with a new OpenRA playtest!
The headline new feature in playtest-20260222 are the new random map generators for Red Alert, Tiberian Dawn, and Dune 2000. These work much like you would expect: select a biome, the number of players, and some details about symmetry and resources, then play! Generated maps work both in Skirmish and Multiplayer.

The new random map generators can make better maps than me.
Dune 2000 has received a glow-up, featuring new visual effects for the Sonic Tank and damaged structures, along with the long-awaited “bulk purchase” logic for the Starport. The update includes a complete, community-led balance overhaul for skirmish and multiplayer modes. Meanwhile, the single-player campaign receives its own difficulty adjustments to ease the learning curve.

Dune 2000 includes new, more faithful, effects for Sonic Tanks and damaged structures.
Support for the C&C Remastered Collection assets in Tiberian Dawn reached two important milestones in the (currently) standalone Tiberian Dawn HD mod. The mod is now feature-complete, with new HD sprites for the last custom assets plus a new content manager that allows you to select between remastered or classic artwork, audio, and music. Significant progress has been made towards integrating these features into the core OpenRA Tiberian Dawn – while this release still remains a standalone mod, we hope to complete the merge in the next release.

Tiberian Dawn HD can now choose between remastered and classic assets.
This is another big release for our map-making community, with further UI improvements to the OpenRA map editor, and new tools that take advantage of the random map generator logic.

The new Path Tiler map editor tool makes it easy to place cliffs, beaches, and roads.
Other noteable changes include:
As always, the full changelog is available with more information on the changes and fixes. Stay tuned for more updates and be sure to take part in the playtest. Don’t forget to share your feedback with us on our forum, community Discord server, or GitHub!
That is why I prefer to call them "bots" or "computers" - just to separate them from a shifting mess of definitions of what "AI" actually means. It reminds me of "Destination Void" by Frank Herbert, where the main characters were trying to build artificial consciousness and were struggling to define what it actually means.