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[Domomonkey]

Any advice on the third Harkonen mission when fighting Ordos?

No matter what I do I vcan't make any headway on their base. The PC spews out units nonstop and repairs it's buildings so fast I can hardly make a dent.

[Eagle of Fire]

It been way too long since I played this game so I cannot remember mission specifics... However, the first few missions are usually the easiest. You should not have too much problem taking the upper hand.

If you really cannot corner the AI then remember that there is always a fixed amount of spice on the map. The first thing you should do is build two refineries and sit tight until your develop your base and have enough units to make a strong attack. If you don't win in the first wave keep attacking them in waves and they will eventually fold to your superior money gathering power.

[me_lobo]

Originally Posted by Domomonkey

Any advice on the third Harkonen mission when fighting Ordos?

No matter what I do I vcan't make any headway on their base. The PC spews out units nonstop and repairs it's buildings so fast I can hardly make a dent.

First of all, have at least two harvesters as mentioned above. Second, dont use trikes at all, just for exploration. Third, AI spews unit as you mentioned, but they barelly create a huge wave (only at the first contact) so post your defensive vehicles in reasonable numbers. Fourth, create rather large group of vehicles, go around your enemy base and alway try to lure the guards one by one. Your first target should be the enemy construction yard, ir he will replace the destroyed buildings (many times over your units).
This strategy wins most (probably all) maps of the game.

[MrFlibble]

Building a wall of units and advancing them slowly isn't a very good idea, simply because if one unit is attacked, it will only get support fire from the few neighbouring units, and the AI, even if sending one unit at a time at you, will slowly drain your unit's health as you won't kill off attackers fast enough to minimize damage. You should rely on more micro and scatter your units (don't build Troopers except if you want to capture enemy buildings, they're too slow and weak, even with their superior range of attack) and then concentrate your fire on each enemy attacker by surrounding it with as many Quads of your own as possible. This way, you will quickly dispose of enemy units before they have a chance to deal significant damage to your attacking force. Also remember that a unit that stands directly north of its target deals maximum damage (yep, that's an exploit of sorts).

As it was said above, scout the enemy base and find its Const. Yard, and take it out first. Try not to advance in the path of the attacking enemy, which is usually the shortest path from the AI's base to yours. Go around, take out or capture the Const. Yard, then the rest will be more or less easy.

[Domomonkey]

Any advice on getting it to run quick in W7?

It really crawls when there is a lot of action on screen. I am using Dosbox, Should I be changing any settings?

[The Fifth Horseman]

Make sure the core is set to Dynamic, under game options set the speed to fastest, and then increase/decrease the cycles until you find the optimum value.

[MrFlibble]

I know it's a bit lazy, but cycles=max works fine for me As for the CPU core, setting it to auto usually suffices IMO, although dynamic won't hurt either. It's the cycles that seem to make the real difference though.

[Domomonkey]

Odd.

When I push cycles up just a little bit everything starts to skip and the sound starts to go bad.

I will try changing the core settings to see if that fixes it.

[Domomonkey]

Setting the CPU to dynamic and the cycles to max in the conf instead of using the function keys in the program itself fixed everything. Game now runs super smooth.

Thanks!

I also beat the third mission. Having things be responsive helped quite a bit.

[MrFlibble]

Originally Posted by Domomonkey

Setting the CPU to dynamic and the cycles to max in the conf instead of using the function keys in the program itself fixed everything. Game now runs super smooth.

Setting cycles to max should give DOSBox a value depending on the estimates of your real CPU's capabilities, and it seems to do the job quite well

From mission 4 onward, things are going to be quite a bit easier since you get tanks and, further on, even more powerful units, so mission 3 really might be a bit hard - I remember my own first time, it was Harkonnens too (in fact, this is probably the easiest of all three Houses), and I even stopped playing for a while as my "wall of units" strategy (somehow this seems a common thing for people to try) failed utterly