Command & Conquer

What if Hitler had never existed and Nikola Tesla had lived at the time of the cold war? Einstein was working for the Allied forces consisting of America and Europe and Nikola Tesla had never left for America, instead developed weapons technology for the Russians.
Command & Conquer: Red Alert explores this world picture by putting the player into the role of a military commander to run a campaign against either side, leveraging various technologies that in the real world never made it beyond theoretical physics.

The Command & Conquer franchise of games have been defining the status quo for RTS (real time stragety) games for a decade. What is the secret to this kind of success?

Lets identify some of the basic elements that exist in each C&C game.

Good Story
There are two different C&C series, one with real world powers such as the Allied Forces and Soviets and the other one in a fictional setting of the Global Defense Initiative, GDI against the Brotherhood of NOD.

There has always been a compelling story to the C&C games, realistic yet fictional and the player was introduced to the story trough cut scenes which also served as mission briefing.

Gradual introduction of game elements
The single player campaigns introduce new game elements in each mission and the player has to use the new technology, together with the already available technologies to finish the mission due to map design or special event triggers.

Intuitive interface design
The interface is divided into the world view and a side panel containing the different build options. Buildings, infantry and ground vehicles, air units and base defense items each have their own tab in that column to keep the player from having to click trough item trees or having to click on specific buildings to issue build commands.
This allows the player to keep an eye on the progress of a battle while planning ahead by starting to build additional units.

Player interaction with the game has been researched and the results put into practice. No aspect of the gameplay appears tedious to the player, instead, basic use of the game appears intuitive with the AI helping the player out by taking over tasks which he is not always interested in.

Scalable multiplayer and teamwork
Multiplayer matches can range from two players to 8, players can team up and have the option to fight against NPC players or teams of varying difficulty and strategy presets.

Fighting not just for the sake of fighting
Players will eventually run short on the finite amount of resources on a map and need to fight over this tight resource pool in order to build an army massive enough to eliminate the enemy. Players also have to fight over strategic points on the maps such as mountain passes, bridges, replenishable resource providers and other items of strategic interest in order to maximize their chance to win the match.

A big army is not always a winning army, strategy is key
On the easier modes of the game it is certainly possible to win a match using a large amount of combat units but as the difficulty increases a player has to think of new strategies to achieve his goals. There are small commando units that take out key defense systems to breach a path for the rest of the army, covert units that steal technology, money or disrupt systems or units that hide the existence of armed forces from the enemies radar. These units open new ways to build a strategy and win against a player that would seem to have the upper hand because he has a larger army or more resources to spend on defenses.