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[Nyerguds]

Originally Posted by Szilvio

"The Max buildings I have are quite low, I can only build the staples such as a refinery, barracks, heavy vehicle factory, no hi tech or palace and then after that I can only build 3 turrets but the people beating the game seam to not have this limitation."

May be stupid question, but do you have radar station? If you have no radar, you can not build higher structures. You have to have some buildings to be able to build new ones...

Actually, this is true... the maximum structures limit is ridiculously low. After a certain amount of buildings you get that annoying "unable to create more" message. There's an easy fix for that though... order a bunch of units from your starport and go destroying some enemy structures. For each structure you destroy, you can build a new one. In the last Harkonnen mission I completely wiped out the Ordos just to finish my base.

The same thing applies to units, though ordering them from the starport throws off the scale a bit.

[another_guest]

Aaah, the annoying building and unit limit + the issue that prevented starports from delivering your latest huge, expensive order

Those were the days...

[MrFlibble]

Originally Posted by Nyerguds

There's an easy fix for that though... order a bunch of units from your starport and go destroying some enemy structures. For each structure you destroy, you can build a new one.

It's not as easy as that though. There's a correspondence between the size (in tiles) of the structure that you destroy and what you get allowed to build. If you destroy a Turret, for example, you won't be able to build a Palace yet.

Same with the units, as there seems to be a separate global limit for each unit-type (Foot, Wheeled, Tracked and Flying), which is, at least in v1.07, reflected by the availability of certain units at the Starport (e.g. you might find that all units except carryalls and 'thopters become unavailable, then you destroy some enemy Quads and tada, Quads and Trikes are no longer "out of stock" too).

Login seems to have problems ("click here to login" doesn't work).


At any rates, I played Dune II for the first time because I heard so much about it. It's very different from, err, Dune (the first videogame), but it
figures as a nice complement ("A nice complement, huh? Dune II won awards in 1993 you dumbass!"). Hmm, ok, it was more than a complement. Let's say it invented its own videogame genre. Either you will adore it or you won't.


But I find the videogame wasn't hard at all to win. Ok, I had to restart about 3 times on Mission 8, but once I got what I was doing wrong, Mission 9 was much easier (except I used saves about twice early on for the Death Hand attacks).


Thing is, a lot of people expect or desire Dune II to be fast and frantic. They want battlefield action and after they cry that they can't finish the late missions. I browsed some of the strategies here and somehow I didn't see anything close to what I did, which made everything sooo easy.

It's a simple 3 notes rule: Economy - Defense - Patience

In the late missions (let's presume you all had it easy through the first 7),
you have either low amount of Spice available, or low amount of possible structures to built.


In both cases, you need to spread, about in that order: refineries, turrets, a starport, and a repair facility. You don't really need much more, but you need a starport to get the most Harvesters possible, fast. In the meantime, building rocket turrets and repairing them often, added with a few tanks bought at the Starport will create a strong defense line. You need a defense
line so strong that you don't need to even worry about it.

Then, you need a Palace to use its free weapon ASAP. I find that if you play Atreides, the Fremen will destroy the most quantity of units while you simply defend your base. The Harkonnens, it's a joke how it's easy to win with them. Ordos requires more strategy and are the most fun. Saboteur are VERY useful and fun, but you need to help them.

Next step is buying carryalls (keep checking the Starport) so you can have your units repaired. If you don't spend too much on Factories and Upgrades until you have plenty of credits, you should be fine with a Starport, but save sometimes in case the Starport freeze on you (or..it WILL let you down if the Windtraps are not working fully).


In Mission 8 you will loose Spice pretty fast and why it's important to choose carefully what you are ready to pay for, and create an "army" that you won't have to replace (because you won't have the credits to replace it). Better to buy lots of Turrets and keep defense destroying a good portion of the enemy for a while.

In Mission 9, credits is not a problem. The problems are lacks of availability of stuff (units and space to built), and... missiles. For the missile you need to spread your base with lots of empty space early on (build in diagonal), and then send a MCV start a new Construction Yard. This is your best bet.
You will eventually get enough money to rebuilt anything lost easily, but keep the essentials, don't go for the fancy base that has everything. For the availability of space, you will notice that if you take your time, and use the Palace weapon aplenty, you will start receiving much less visits to your base. That's when you can start to destroy your own Turrets and the Windtraps needed to power them. You can build Silos instead, or other needy structures, like the Factories. The Starport is is not rich in Units, but with patience you will get more than what you need.


When the battle is advanced, it's rather easy to send a small group of a couple launchers and some tanks to destroy, first, turrets one after the other,
or at least the ones that prevent you from going "behind" the enemy bases.
You start from an extremity and pave your way in, or you may want to go directly to the palaces but then you need more tanks to attack defense
units. After that, take pauses when a unit is sent by a carryall for repair, and let your Palace weapon do some more jobs for you. As you advance like this,
everything is so easy that you can take time to harvest more spices (building silos as soon as enemy structures are down). You can also try fancy stuff like letting Ornithopters destroy the whole enemy down (buying them one after the other).


All I'm saying is I thought the videogame was easy to win. I didn't expect the Death Hand and the heavy attacks on the late missions, but then I thought "ok, all they're asking is that I take my time". And indeed, if you take your time (you only need to rush about refineries, harvesters and turrets in the beginning), it's rather easy.



Talkie

[gorber]

i remember some serious 12 hour sessions with this one. Amazing.

[tzutzy]

I'm still having problems with the Radar Outpost. I'm using version 1.07 downloaded from the site, plus I've also downloaded the fix (Mr Fibble).
As soon as I try to place the Radar, the game freezes.
Any fixes?

Thanks

[Dry Mango]

This was the very game that started off the entire Real-Time Strategy genre. Warcraft is more widely known, but a lot of people don't give Dune 2 the credit.

I certainly remember my dad ordering this game through the mail back in early 1993. The version he got contained a number of bugs. When you went to the Mentat screen and clicked on Wind Traps, the game would lock up. There were others, but it has been too long since I actually played the game without using DosBox.

I always thought the easy way to beat the game was to play the Harkonnen. Besides their vile statistics they were strong and well armored. I used a number of Devastators to take down the rocket turrets and the Rocket Launchers to destroy the Refinery and Construction building from a distance. Don't forget the lovely Death Hand. If I missed my target I could always go back and reload my save file.

The Atredies were to me, sort of a balance. Their Fremen were more of a nuisance than an actual help, but the Sonic Tank did good enough. The rest of their units were either good or average.

The Ordos were hard to play as. You cannot build Rocket Launchers at your Heavy Factory, you have to import them. Their Trikes were fast, but weak and vulnerable. My biggest complaint was it's unit at the Palace. I spent 999 Credits my Harvester cashed in from the spice to build a Palace, just for a Saboteur? I mean, it was weak. One hit from a Siege Tank or a Rocket Launcher was more than enough to blow up the Saboteur, and it just proved that I wasted a lot of Credits. Would of been better to have a group of them, and invisible to Turrets/Rocket Turrets.

Overall, the game was one of the best in it's day. The cinematics were well presented and highly detailed, and the gameplay was the first of it's kind. The only problem was the copy protection, but I guess that was meant for people not to copy the data and source code onto a blank floppy disk. Hehe

Good times...

[MrFlibble]

Originally Posted by tzutzy

I'm still having problems with the Radar Outpost. I'm using version 1.07 downloaded from the site, plus I've also downloaded the fix (Mr Fibble).
As soon as I try to place the Radar, the game freezes.
Any fixes?

Turns out this is caused by corrupt speech files. I've made a little fix for that, read more info here.

[The one who flew]

I'm trying to use TiMidity to play Dosbox's MIDI music, but the mission music in Dune 2 won't loop, it only plays once!(yes I unchecked "Not Loop") I can reset the music entering the mentat screen but that's quite annoying having to do it every ½ minute. I tried different versions of Timidity I could find on the net and different Dosbox versions but can't get it to work.

Anyone have TiMidity set up and working?

EDIT: Ha, nevermind, found another software MIDI synth, this one works great and doesn't need virtual MIDI ports with loopMIDI or anything! http://www.hydrogenaudio.org/forums/...howtopic=87639

This soundfont sounds pretty good: http://www.geocities.jp/shansoundfont/

EDIT2: Fuck me I'm stupid. I probably shouldn't use the patch for GUS music when I'm not gonna use it That seemed to cause the incompatibility.

Well at least now I can choose from half a dozen different ways to listen to Genral MIDI games.

[MrFlibble]

The one who flew, that's very nice of you to post all this info Thanks a lot for the links!

I haven't tried playing Dune 2 through DOSBox with TiMidity (although other DOS games with MIDI music worked fine with the TiMidity++/Twsynth combo that installs the alternate MIDI driver on Windows), I've been using pure GUS emulation in DOSBox along with this patch that adds GUS compatibility to Dune 2.