RTS expansions mean new units, and Kane’s Wrath brings these to you in the form of four new sub-factions. The GDI gets the earthy marine units of the Steel Talons, who sport Tiberian Sun-era mechs such as the Wolverine and Titan at the expense of some of the newer C&C3 units - however, they also get upgraded units such as the armoured harvesters.
ZOCOM are tiberium-haters with tiberium-resistant armour and upgraded Zone Troopers, and they’re also invincible to tiberium-related attacks. The GDI also gets the ridiculous MARV - a gigantic, garrisonable, rolling tank-monster that eats up tiberium and rolls over lesser tanks like they roll over troops. The Nod get Marcion’s Black Hand, with their special infantry and flame-throwing war mechs, and The Marked of Kane’s cyborg units prove to be both great fun to use and frustrating to fight. Their epic Redeemer also bears some resemblance to the mechanical spider from that gawdawful Will Smith movie, Wild Wild West.
The Scrin, alien-types that they are, get the Reaper-17 and Traveler-59 - the former focused on upgraded firepower and shielded harvesters, and the latter having Yuri-esque mind-control abilities as well as thesneaky trickto use tiberium against its users. Their epic unit is a garrisonable spider-thing (this expansion is big on arachnids) that can also collect dead units and recycle them into resources.
The single-player campaign is classic C&C action, but with the difficulty verging on the imbalanced. However, the centerpiece of Kane’s Wrath is the frankly fantastic Global Conquest mode. This feels like a mixture of DEFCON and Risk, generously peppered with Total War. The game opens on a map of the world, with cities as the points of tactical consideration. These cities provide resources for all three factions in different ways, and each faction starts with a few bases placed onto the map.
These bases have a ring of influence, which grows as the base levels. A city within your ring generates resources for you, based on what’s going on in that city. GDI want cities happy, and gain the most currency from smiley townsfolk. The Nod will gain nothing from an obedient town, and must keep cities under their influence in turmoil if they’re to reap profit from them.
The Scrin don’t care about how happy the people are because that doesn’t affect how tasty they are. They sap the population of each city with each turn, but gain credits from them regardless of unrest, giving them a different tactical approach to the world map, and one that’s excellently balanced.
Affecting the state of the world map is done by assembling strike forces. A strike force is limited by your cash reserves, tech level, and a standard size limit, and usually consists of an MCV and several groups of troops. You can use them to set up a base, extending your influence over more cities, or launch attacks on enemy bases - using the specialist base-damaging Ion Cannon, for example. Or you could opt to hobble your enemy’s resources with a Media Blitz, to lower unrest in Nod-controlled cities.
So far, so not very C&C. However, when your strike forces meet with the enemy, be they other forces or bases, you can either auto resolve or fight it out in real time. Your strike forces can be customised or launched in preset configurations, and auto resolutions are calculated in a reasonably predictable and realistic way, to the point that two bombers can obliterate a strike force if it hasn’t got any anti-aircraft units.
