Heroic 1.1 Mod

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Wrong link

Link fixed!

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Forgot to post this ( ), without which players shall only see the old medal goals and objectives, not the updated ones.

Download link:

• english.dat

Instructions:

Replace the existing english.dat in language < library of your AMRTS Heroic 1.1 directory with this one.

[TommyCD1]

Personally, I've never been a fan of the "reworking / improving the original content" style of mods. Army Men RTS is no exception, but I went ahead and gave this a try if nothing else than for the advertised improved difficulty. This review is going to be mostly negative, due in no small part to negativity bias, but I hope I can be a constructive as possible.

Unfortunately, as this is largely the base game, there isn't really much to say that I enjoyed. Largely the experience simply comes from the original game itself: mission concepts, strategies, expected difficulty, and the like. There's little "new" content outside of the unit rebalancing and improved difficulty.

Hero Units
====================

Spoiler

The biggest issue I take with the mod in it's current form. The hero units are extremely overpowered. They trivialize any combat, even using them aggressively against large hordes of enemies. With even as few as two or three medics, they become effectively unkillable. I can boil this issue down to two large reasons:

1. They have very large health pools.
2. They are extremely resistant to enemy fire.

These two factors combined make them very hard to kill. Having a large health pool is fine, but with how resilient they are, enemy can barely deal significant damage to them without ganging up in large hordes. And then even a few medics can out heal the incoming damage, as healing obviously restored a flat rate rather than being based on unit armor.
This being said, heroes enable rather brain dead game play. As you don't have to bother with making an army if you don't really need to. You can simply send in a group of heroes with some medics and they'll win even with little babysitting. Otherwise, you can make yourself at home somewhere and not bother creating any defenses. Simply place a hero where enemies approach from, even a single hero is capable of defending one or even two enemy pathways for an entire session.
Here's a playlist of me playing through each relevant campaign mission using only Heroes and medics, showing just how easy it is to get away with this.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=giCCxni ... 7eYjjdMgjr

Unit Re Balances
====================

Spoiler

Some unit changes I liked, some I didn't. Most changes I hardly even noticed. But a few that I absolutely did include:

• Grenadiers

Grenadiers have slightly more health. Most notably, this puts them above the damage threshold where they cannot be oneshot by Bullseye, making some interactions with them rather tedious. Specifically missions where Bullseye is meant to be used as a Spotter somewhat, such as Mission 10, Midnight Snack, or Sandy Breach.

• Mine Sweepers

Mine Sweepers have lower movement speed. The increased radius doesn't make up for this. Slow move speed is already a major problem with vanilla mine sweepers, so I cannot understand why this change was made. You'll end up having to park your ass and wait for your slow mine sweepers to catch up and clear the way. If they're out in front, they'll move slower than the rest of your squad and end up getting poked from behind, causing them to move out of the way and waste time and not sweep mines.

• Mortar Men

Mortar Men cannot target buildings on their own, they have to be told. Why? What's the point of this? The computer players of course are not restricted by this, so this only would ever affect human players. Mortar Men cannot even target things aside from buildings, so I don't understand this change.
Mortar Men also have a very large vision radius. They are able to spot even Guard Towers without being fired upon. For computer players, this is annoying as this makes building defensive towers pretty bad, as you'll be forced to delegate either an expensive Sniper or vehicle or something else that must: A) be able to dispatch the enemy Mortar Man efficiently B) not get mowed to shreds by the rest of the encroach enemy squad while dealing with said Mortar Man.
However, this is absolutely a problem with human players. It makes any and all towers completely worthless, as just three or four Mortar Men can absolutely nuke a tower from beyond it's range. Compounded with the fact that Mortar Men have increased move speed this lets them run and gun enemy towers very easily.

• Choppers

If the Heroes weren't as broken as they are, then Choppers would undoubtedly be the next best unit to use. Building off the base game, they have very high move speed, the ability to fly virtually anywhere they like, and possessing a unique armor type that several units are incapable of even targeting. With this mod, their two main weaknesses are largely gone. They have incredibly high damage output, able to shred infantry and even vehicles with ease. And their main counter, AA Guns, are now locked behind a Super Duper HQ. In multiplayer, this is a detriment, as you'd be forced to invest a large amount of plastic to fully upgrade your HQ to build the guns. But the main issue with this is in single player. Here, the Tan are already fully established, and ready to send Choppers immediately when the game starts. Defending against the souped up Choppers is difficult without relying on your Heroes, as they'll shred through infantry fairly quickly. They also almost never travel alone, so trading a squad a Bazooka Men for the Choppers isn't very worth it. Having powerful Choppers is okay, but the AA Guns should remain unlocked by the Super HQ only, at least then you'd be able to build AA Guns on reaction to getting attacked by Choppers.

• Insects

Insects are extremely powerful. They have increased range, increased health, and they create splash damage. Need I really say more? At least they aren't used in multiplayer, so I can just sick Heroes on them. However, even a large group of ants could easily kill a Hero. Lord of the Ants was at least a breeze...

• Random Target Style

Nearly every unit in this mod uses the Random target style. It causes aggravating behavior. You'll be forced to wrangle your units to behave in a certain way. Enemy units will also decide to chase down their victim should it run away, which is especially frustrating when the first unit they spot happens to be your mine sweeper or medic or the like. This also makes units tend to not focus on higher priority targets. For example, when facing a large group of enemies: you'll want to kill the weakest ones first. You want to decrease the DPS of the enemy as fast as possible. Another thing is they will hard focus their victim, and should the target start getting healed, they will completely ignore the medic until the current target is dead. I can't imagine trying to play like this in Multiplayer, it would be a nightmare...

Game Difficulty
====================

Spoiler

As stated previously, nearly every mission can be trivialized with the use of Heroes. In general, most maps seems to favor increasing difficulty by

1. Using a heavily increased amount of units per assault
2. Having assaults be paced more frequently

I think for the most part this is one of the more uninteresting forms of difficulty this game could offer. In either case, aside from the early missions, most of the missions felt pretty identical to the original versions in terms of difficulty. The use of more aggressive / inflated assault squads could prove to be difficult, if not impossible, in the vanilla game. But with the re balanced units and ignoring the overpowered heroes, it's fairly manageable. Some notable missions which had difficulty changes are as follows.

Mission 9

Mission 9 is significantly easier thanks to the broken heroes. They can easily defend the road solo, or you can defend the road the old fashioned way with towers, then sicc your heroes on the Tan base to completely dominate the enemy. Tan assaults still use the same paths as the vanilla map, so the only real difficulty for this map comes from two factors. One, the Tan sends a shit ton of Choppers to fight compared to other missions. Two, if a Tan spots a Villager and starts to shoot him, due to the Random target style, he will not stop until either he or the Villager have died.

Mission 10

This map is pretty on par with the original version. However, being required to keep all your units alive can prove somewhat challenging, especially due with the drastically increased amount of ant spawns behind you. At least you don't have to destroy all Tan towers, meaning it's even easier to simply camp the leftmost side of the counter and stealth through the map.

Mission 11

Easily the hardest campaign mission, and that's only because you can't cheese the entire thing with Heroes. This map also naturally has a shit ton of ants scattered around and in assault waves, so you'll really start to feel the effects of the super steroids they've been given when it comes to buffs. This is also around the time where the difficulty of the Tan's strategy starts to stem mostly from sheer numbers. It's not uncommon to be flooded with several constant squads of infantry and vehicles, mainly Grunts, Grenadiers, and Half-Tracks. When it comes to getting a gold medal, you must not spend over 12,000 plastic, practically making it required to abandon your base and sneak around the edge of the map.

Waterway War

This could apply to any map that uses the generic Great Battle persona, but this was the first map I noticed it on. The AI seems to play in a specific way. First, it accumulates a ginormous assorted group of, by my estimate, some 30 odd units composed of mostly Half-Tracks, Tanks, Grunts, and Grenadiers. There are other units too, such as Bazooka Men and Machine Gunners. But it will amass this giant hivemind of units, and chase you around the map with it. Each base has its own persona as well, so for every team, there's another swarm. This is obviously problematic on maps like this one, or Basement Baloney, where there's three distinct Tan teams, meaning three giant squads all targeting you simultaneously. Then, after it builds all those units, it starts to get really heavy handed spamming DumDums constantly. It's a real pain to deal with, and towers don't stand a chance.

Lord of the Ants

As mentioned early, the ants are so powerful now that this mission is almost entirely free. You can destroy any of the Tan bases in just a single assault with enough ants. Unlike the original where it's more of a game of attrition whittling down the Tan one at a time with constant attacks.

Sandy Breach

This map, even with all eight heroes, is significantly more difficult than the original version. And this is for one simple reason: you aren't provided any medic jeeps during the mission. This means that while you can win pretty much any fight with your heroes, you'll eventually be whittled down to skirmishing with them as they lose health. And this also severely punishes mistakes, intentional or not. For example, since you are fighting your way uphill by design, there are several choke points where your Bullseye cannot see the top of the hill, but the Tan at the top can see him, particularly snipers. This means they'll try to engage him, and Bullseye's only advantage in a sniper duel, more range, is effectively nulled by this. You could scout with Choppers instead, which is what I opted to do, but then you have to worry about your plain old non-overpowered units getting killed. It's extremely tedious playing this careful, and it doesn't provide very interesting strategy in my opinion. This mission took over an hour to complete with a gold medal the first time around.

Blastoff!

This map is the only map that I was not able to complete. It is too difficult, even with both the weapon and speed boosts and using the heroes strictly for defense. There are simply too many enemies to content with from all sides. Tan facilities have all been doubled up compared to the original version, and assault waves are gigantic groups of 10 to 20 units from each base, all tending to attack simultaneously. I could probably at least protect the rocket with full HP with some practice and good RNG, but getting a gold by eliminating all Tan feels to be impossible.

Oddities
====================

Spoiler

I'm curious as to where you sourced this base version of the game. The audio quality for several sounds is very poor, specifically interface and effect sounds like explosions. They aren't any smaller in file size compared to the original, or at least the versions I have installed, being retail and Steam, so I'm curious as to where these sounds came from. The voice acting seems fine, which is even stranger.
As for graphics, there are several rapid fire units that have had their firing speed slightly adjusted, which results in their particle effects becoming discordant with their attacks. Two obvious examples of this being the Guard Tower and Scorch. I haven't really bothered to try making my own adjustment to these effects to make them match the new unit stats, but it is something that I very easily noticed while playing.
Something else that seems extremely strange to me: all of the .x archives are left unpacked. Nothing is compiled. Trying to create a .x archive of the base folder gives an error that there are some duplicate files too, so I'm wondering if this is the best idea... It could also leave you vulnerable to easy cheating or content theft, if you give a shit about that kind of thing... Although being perfectly honest, the only real downside I experienced purely as a player is the fact that this has a non-insignificant effect on loading times. It's a 2002 200Mb game, but still...

Something else, the music folder in the base archive contains several of the Dark Reign 2 music tracks, are these used anywhere? I personally play without music enabled and I didn't hear it besides. On top of that, the .mp3 have a bit rate of 320 kbps which is extremely heavy on file size with no improvement to quality. I would recommend encoding them at the same bit rate the vanilla tracks are, which is 128 kbps. It can give you a filesize improvement of up to 50% or even 60%. You could also borrow the .mp3 files I have in my own Dark Reign 2 world ports, I made the same mistake before I corrected it after all.
Well actually I didn't make the mistake, someone else on the forum provided the files and I just simply trusted they knew what they were doing... lol
Also, every explosion in the game now seems to use the same sound effect, that of the Tank projectile exploding. Makes it actually pretty difficult to discern who's shooting what from off screen.

Overall I would rather just play the vanilla game. The increased difficulty isn't really enough of a draw for me, especially with the whole OP heroes aspect, but the re balanced units are at least something to experience. With the ratings you've provided, I would like to check "Without cheatin', some missions can't get beaten!". However I would consider that should be the lowest possible rating, not the highest... Anyway, I'll rate 3 out of 6, as again the unit stat changes provide interesting new strategies to try and the increased difficulty incentivizes particularly veteran players of the game to try the original missions once more.

Per map ratings

• Mission 1 - ★★☆☆☆ - Pretty much identical to the original version, but with a new OP Sarge.
• Mission 2 - ★★☆☆☆ - Slower mine sweepers makes destroying all mines tedious.
• Mission 3 - ★☆☆☆☆ - You have to try to lose this mission. Protip: Rescue the reinforcement, but don't use them to keep them alive.
• Mission 4 - ★★★☆☆ - The speedrun strat of running to the goal zone still works. It's easier to get gold as well since there's no health bonus anymore.
• Mission 5 - ★★☆☆☆ - Another map with the same experience. Once you realize how stupidly strong ants are, you'll come to the correct conclusion to simply bumrush through everything. Not even the surprise sniper on the staircase can stop you.
• Mission 6 - ★★★☆☆ - I don't have to waste any resources upgrading the HQ, so thanks for that. I also have to run around trying to find the new and exciting cockroach locations, so thanks for that.
• Mission 7 - ★★★☆☆ - Increased difficulty can be noticed for the first time this mission. Still the most difficult part is trying to find every last mine with the lazy mine sweepers.
• Mission 8 - ★★★☆☆ - Have I mentioned that Paratroopers now drop in squads of 9 instead of 5? The strategy of freeing the radio guy then immediately heading due north towards the nurseries works just the same this map.
• Mission 9 - ★★☆☆☆ - This map is by far the best example of how insane the new Heroes are. They can single handedly defend the entire road, or make quick work of the Tan bases.
• Mission 10 - ★☆☆☆☆ - If the "double damage" heroes took was universal to all maps, that'd be more interesting. Otherwise it's jarring to have your as of till now invincible bravo team suddenly losing to one sniper.
• Mission 11 - ★★★☆☆ - Easily the most difficult campaign mission. I find it's not worth it to stay where you live. Instead churn out what you can afford with the 12,000 plastic cap then travel alongside the beds.
• Mission 12 - ★★☆☆☆ - Well, at least Hoover isn't a direct downgrade to the regular mine sweepers anymore... Having to manually shoot the farm animals is tedious.
• Mission 13 - ★★☆☆☆ - I stopped pretending at this point and just full on committed to using the heroes for everything at this point. The hardest part of locating all the Tan containers remains in this version.
• Mission 14 - ★★★☆☆ - This mission is a significant difficulty spike in the original game, and here it would seem the same. Very rapid Tan and insect attacks have to be watched for, but the heroes are too good.
• Mission 15 - ★★★☆☆ - You don't even need to build a depot on this mission. You're given 5,000 plastic to play with. Very satisfying to dump everything into Mortar Men and nuke the shit out of Blintz. Of course, the heroes enable this degeneracy.
• Garden Siege - ★★☆☆☆ - Fun fact: Have you realized yet that your heroes can survive even a DumDum attack? I'm not kidding when I say they are overpowered.
• Blind Pass - ★★★☆☆ - Make a squad of Choppers to clear out the left side, then have Sarge and Scorch solo the entire right side. EZ
• Flooded Follies - ★★★★☆ - I get Shrap this time, so that's nice. Choppers still completely dominate this mission as they do in vanilla. Honestly, hard to f--k up a mission where you essentially walk in a straight line into enemy territory.
• Tricycle Treachery - ★★★☆☆ - Seems like the bug / oversight in vanilla is fixed where you only need to destroy one of the distinct Tan teams.
• Bathroom Blitz - ★★☆☆☆ - This is probably my second favorite Great Battle, so it's a shame that the whole OP heroes thing trivializes it.
• Waterway War - ★★☆☆☆ - Whereas in the original, it is obviously intentional that you only need to destroy one specific HQ, here you'll have to take out all three of them. After the gb horde is killed off, and your base with it, it starts littering the map with DumDums. Especially problematic is that the muddy hill area is still pathable, which is extremely annoying to defend against.
• Basement Baloney - ★☆☆☆☆ - Another case of actually enforcing the player to kill the Tan bases in general. Also uses the generic gb AI which spams. Not good.
• Sandbox Shenanigans - ★★★☆☆ - I expected the Tan depot to count towards the victory condition. So I ended up finishing the map before I finished eliminating all of the DumDums. That annoyed me a little.
• Lords of the Ants - ★★☆☆☆ - Pitifully easy, but it's over the top levels. Nothing wrong with a power fantasy once in a while.
• Midnight Snack - ★☆☆☆☆ - If the original version wasn't easy enough, now you have Sarge AND Vikki on your side!
• Tan Some Hide - ★★☆☆☆ - A skirmish map with medics. Very easy.
• This Old Fortress - ★★★★☆ - With the improved pathways and Guard Tower sight lines, this is the only map that I would consider to be "better" than the original version.
• Sandy Breach - ★☆☆☆☆ - A skirmish map without medics. Very tedious.
• Hostage Situation - ★★☆☆☆ - If you haven't realized how broken the heroes are, then this is your wake up call.
• Road Block - ★★★☆☆ - Strange pacing. Your heroes aren't going to die, so you don't have to worry about that. However towards the end you are nearly constantly under attack. It's easier to defend a little further north where the two roads are closest, since you can actively have both roads on screen at once.
• Blastoff! - ☆☆☆☆☆ - Alright. It's too hard. I can't beat it. Are you happy?

Potential bugs I encountered.

• On Lord of the Ants the bottom right Nursery stopped spawning Soldier ants at point before capturing the first Nursery. I ended up playing the rest of the map with only Workers and Cockroaches.

This new code will update all the keybinds in Heroic 1.1 mod.

• As of downloading ( 02 / 08 / 2024 - 02 / 10 / 2024 ) these keybinds aren't in the hosted version. They should probably be added.
• The download contains the following files.
  • ../drvmgt.dll
  • ../secdrv.sys
  These files pertain to the game's original SafeDisc DRM and should probably be removed.
• Likewise, these files are also superfluous and should probably be removed from the download.
  • ../AMRTS.log
  • ../Setupreg.exe
  • ../UNWISE.EXE
  • ../settings.cfg
  • ../screenshots/
  • ../user/saves/
  • ../user/data.cfg

[Secg]

Potential bugs I encountered.

• On Lord of the Ants the bottom right Nursery stopped spawning Soldier ants at point before capturing the first Nursery. I ended up playing the rest of the map with only Workers and Cockroaches.

Thanks for pointing it out.

This is the link to download the bugfixed version.

• antparty.7z

Ideally, after the player-controlled Insect team would have capturing the northeastern, Worker-spawning nursery, the southeastern Soldier/Warrior-spawning Nursery would still spawn Soldiers/Warriors instead of stopping due to a coding error of mine.

Instruction:

Extract the cintents of the file antparty.7z into the folder antparty < so < missions in the AMRTS Heroic 1.1 directory.

Thanks also for your critical yet nevertheless constructive review! I will address its statements at a later date!

Signed,

Secg!

[Secg]

• Mortar Men

Mortar Men cannot target buildings on their own, they have to be told. Why? What's the point of this?

To prevent them from autotargeting whatever building which is nearest to them yet is also one I do not want them to damage lest they would accidentally draw unnecessary aggro from nearby enemies to themselves.

I also experimented with allowing Mortar Men & Shrap to target not just buildings but units as well, yet when they got attacked, instead of retaliating by shooting back (like DR2 Artillery Units), they just... walked up to the attackers . So I again only allowed them to attack buildings.

[TommyCD1]

I also experimented with allowing Mortar Men & Shrap to target not just buildings but units as well, yet when they got attacked, instead of retaliating by shooting back (like DR2 Artillery Units), they just... walked up to the attackers . So I again only allowed them to attack buildings.

Yes. For whatever reason, in this version of the game engine, giving the unit the "FireIndirect" ability prevents them from auto targeting mobile units. Not even the AI will do so. I don't know why this change was made, but yeah...
And the Mortar Man doesn't run away because it thinks he can retaliate, since it technically can damage its aggressor, so it responds by trying to approach the enemy until it is within range. But because it can't shoot on his own, its range never comes, ergo, it never stops approaching.

And also, after sleeping on it, I realized I didn't actually provide much in the way of solutions so... review part 2.

Problem: The Hero units are overpowered.

This one is the easiest to solve. I would just remove the hero armor type entirely, as that's what allows them to be tanked by medics. If they were taking full damage, then the strategy of healing them wouldn't work anymore. If you want them to be tanky, that's fine. But I would recommend doing it simply by giving them a high health pool. That way they can still win most one on one engagements, and can fight for long periods of time. But they will still be outclassed by large groups of enemies, or can be relied on entirely solo.

Problem: Tan assault groups come in giant blobs of 20 to 30 units at a time.

This I think is a problem because it basically forces you to use your broken heroes for defense, or to build in abstract places where the AI doesn't patrol. I think in terms of difficulty there's a much better way to go about this kind of thing. First, I would recommend that you have much smaller squads that attack more frequently. So for example, instead of a group of 3 or 4 Half-Tracks every few minutes or so, why not just 1 Half-Track every few seconds? Something like that could prove much more manageable and would also help with unit traffic.

Problem: Large hordes of enemies build up en mass outside of facilities.

This is often simply because your base is ordering too many units. If you're requesting squads of upwards of 10 to 15 units each attack, then it may seem like you need to purchase a large group in order to keep up with demands. But you can combine this with the previous solution I provided. Create smaller squads and use them instead. You'll notice that an AI base repurchases a unit once it's been recruited into a script, rather than waiting for it to die. That means that if you only want a few units in a frequent pace, you only need to actually purchase that small amount as well. As as the squads are constantly recruited, they'll be constantly repurchased in rapid succession.
Another solution for this is to have your facilities reside in separate bases. For example, if all the facilities on the map belong to one base, then clearly you'd want that base to produce a lot of units, right? The problem becomes apparent though, as the player destroys more and more facilities, the remaining facilities start buying more and buying units in order to keep up with the base's demands. It's a little bit of extra work to have multiple bases, but personally I would say that it pays off greatly.

Problem: Chopper balance.

With Tanks being as nerfed as they are against infantry, Choppers easily become the best unit to use over any other. With their speed, they can be anywhere very quickly, or respond to danger when needed. They shred through any armor type, making them hard to counter. Balance is very tricky, but I could offer a few solutions?

• You could reduce their health, letting them be picked off easier by splash damage.
• You could enable a soft counter to them, such as Bazooka Men. Bazooka Men currently aren't nearly effective due to
  • Choppers shred infantry armor type
  • Bazooka Men splash damage is rather small
  • Random target style makes it easier to kite a single Chopper who can fly, other a single Bazooka Men who is grounded and slow

Problem: There isn't much "new" to experience beyond the vanilla mission experience.

I understand this is the largest order, but I always personally had this problem when it came to these types of mod. You've taken some correct steps at least, with changing some medal goals, or adding / repositioning some key strategic spots.

I would definitely go for more of this, or you could do something new. You can create new scenarios or rework existing ones? For example, what if in Mission 7, the Chemical Weapons Factory could retaliate, or its key destruction points had to be located à la Sarge's Heroes 2? What if in Mission 8, you had to defend the captured PS2 as left over coding may suggest was once done? What if some missions had a required time limit like Mission 5 does? Rescue Sarge in Mission 11 before he is killed... Blow up the railroad bridge before a train goes through it... Beat Flooded Follies before the counter actually floods...
As a final note, I could suggest something rather extreme: You could create a new mission group! Something like Great Battles, just a small set of self contained missions that are designed around the unit changes, or just simply new. It doesn't haven't to be a lot, something as small as three missions can go a long way.

[Secg]

Problem: The Hero units are overpowered.

This one is the easiest to solve. I would just remove the hero armor type entirely, as that's what allows them to be tanked by medics. If they were taking full damage, then the strategy of healing them wouldn't work anymore. If you want them to be tanky, that's fine. But I would recommend doing it simply by giving them a high health pool. That way they can still win most one on one engagements, and can fight for long periods of time. But they will still be outclassed by large groups of enemies, or can be relied on entirely solo.

Problem is I'm too emotionally attached to the hero armor type to simple just remove it ( ).

Even so, I take your criticism seriously, so instead I will heed this suggestion of yours:

If the 'double damage' heroes took was universal to all maps, that'd be more interesting.

and will double the base effectiveness of attackers' weapons' against the hero armor from just 10% - 40% to 20% - 80%. This mean that heroes shall be only slightly more resistant to damages instead of massively. That way, heroes, while still powerful, shan't trivialize most missions (e.g. this means Sarge won't be able to one-man-army the whole 1st campaign mission "The Thin Green Line" anymore ).

However, that would mean that the Special Operations mission rocket.x aka "Blastoff!" shall become... unplayable as there shall be no overly powerful heroes to soak up the brunt of the Tan attackers' damages ( ). Therefore, I will have to redesign that mission's attack waves; should not be too hard, just very time-consuming (especially with my upcoming tests and surgery).

Spoiler

One Exception:
In Campaign's Mission S11 "One Man Army", the Tan's and Ants' weapons shall be only 5% to 20% ( ) effective against Hoover.

Meanwhile, in "micro-"missions/skirmish missions (i.e. "A Few Green Men", "It Came From the Basement", "Baths of Glory", "Midnight Snack", "Tan Some Hide," "Road Block", etc.) which don't allow players to build and rebuild strctures and units, I will increase the effectiveness of attackers' weapons' against the hero armor from just 20% - 80% to 23% - 90% (or 24% - 95%). That will make the hero armor virtually identical to the infantry, all to make the micro-missions harder. Even so, I shall still have to increase the difficulty the mission "Hostage Situation" (by preplacing more units ), as even tho' in that mission the Tan attackers' weapons are already 20% - 80% effective against heroes, you still deem it too easy.

[Secg]

Mission 11

Easily the hardest campaign mission, and that's only because you can't cheese the entire thing with Heroes. This map also naturally has a shit ton of ants scattered around and in assault waves, so you'll really start to feel the effects of the super steroids they've been given when it comes to buffs. This is also around the time where the difficulty of the Tan's strategy starts to stem mostly from sheer numbers. It's not uncommon to be flooded with several constant squads of infantry and vehicles, mainly Grunts, Grenadiers, and Half-Tracks. When it comes to getting a gold medal, you must not spend over 12,000 plastic, practically making it required to abandon your base and sneak around the edge of the map.

[...]

[*]Mission 11 - ★★★☆☆ - Easily the most difficult campaign mission. I find it's not worth it to stay where you live. Instead churn out what you can afford with the 12,000 plastic cap then travel alongside the beds.

I never intended to re-design Mission 11 into That One Level (just as Mission 9 "A Fistful of Plastic" was for me while playing vanilla).

However, I re-designed it to be possible, even with the 12,000 Plastic cap, to kill all Ants while not losing your (player's) base to the Tan & Ants' attack.

I refuse to condescendingly tell you to "git gud". I suspect that your ending up not able to defend your base comes from your playstyle as a player who favors offense as the best defense (e.g. when given 5,000 Plastic to start you didn't even bother to construct a depot and thick lines of defense against the Tan attacks but just spent all that Plastic on as many Mortar Men as possible to nuke Blintz), while I am a defensive player & I spent most of my Plastic on base defense.

[TommyCD1]

Make no mistake, I definitely play defensively. I like managing a single group of guys and taking things slowly one at a time, which of course requires a base to replace them from.
The whole thing with the heroes, and the videos I posted for them, was just to demonstrate how insanely overpowered they are as is. I would not recommend actually playing like that, especially if you don't know what you're doing. I know it looks like I just glue a few medics to them and let the game play itself, but those actually took several attempts and strategy. The problem I wanted to demonstrate was that it is even possible to do in the first place...

But the main problem with the way difficulty is handled on most if not all missions is really the attack waves. If you want a lot of units, that's fine. But I absolutely recommend sending them in smaller groups. Sending them in big groups isn't fun to deal with, especially given how early they come. On most maps it might not seem like that much of a problem, given your heroes can defend you from the three or so angles enemies attack. But on missions where that's not an option, like Mission 11, or the Great Battles where you only get to use Sarge, or Blastoff! where you get hit not only with giant waves but also from six different angles of attack, AND only have four heroes to defend yourself with... yeah it gets messy.

Also I never meant to give the impression that Mission 11 was some difficulty hell or anything. I just meant it in the sense that, of the 15 campaign missions, it is the hardest. That's all. There are several Great Battles, or several Special Operations that are much more difficult.

[Secg]

Download link:

• beach.7z

Extract the contents of the file beach.7z into beach < so < missions of your AMRTS Heroic 1.1 directory.

Features:

Spoiler

Player will now receive two Halftracks, two Tanks, and... three Choppers as reinforcements (still no Medic Jeep, sorry!)


Location of a nearby health bonus, loosely guarded by a Sniper & a few Bazooka Men & Machinegunners, whom 3 Choppers & 2 Halftracks can easily handle.


The Tan patrols shall temporarily stop during the cutscene showcasing the Tan HQ (so players shan't lose Heroes or Land Units to patrolling Dumdums)

Still,

Please report bugs! I'll fix them asap!