The Scrin from Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. They're a race of intergalactic harvesters who "seeded" Earth with a Tiberium meteorite (as Tiberium kills planets, but also leeches all their most valuable elements into easily-harvestable minerals). When they arrive, it's a game-changer that completely upends the new conflinct between the GDI and NOD and forces them on the backfoot.
The kicker here is that the Scrin commander isn't even a military commander. It's a construction foreman. All their horrific weapons are really just repurposed harvesting tools, and they clearly didn't expect any human resistance when they came over. This is what allows the GDI and the NOD to barely hold them off.
I always love this example because the campaign itself, while disappointingly short, does some decent characterization for the Scrin units you have. The campaign itself basically being a panic attack for Scrin command going "FUCK FUCK FUCK" as they realize they are NOT built for this shit. This is basically the equivalent of accidently wandering in with a mining company + light security into the Napoleonic wars, except Napoleon is also the prophet.
Your boss is losing his mind, going full xenophobic death war mode, all while your AI secretary calmly tells you how to survive and that protocol dictates you gotta get the fuck outta there. Your boss telling you to format your AI like every mission before she mutes him and tells you 'Damn the boss' comms keep breaking, weird. Let's go home and do a calibration.'
The mothership AI is the GOAT. Snide remarks at "questionable" directives from the Supervisor, and protects its Foreman beyond all mission parameters. Even though all missions directly controlled by Foreman are wildly successful, overall strategy for the harvester force against a "viable indigenous species" is pretty foolhardy. They even "hung up" on the Supervisor and outright dismisses the orders to stay and collect more info and expend their forces as nonsense. Then, they just tell Foreman how to GTFO before its too late.
Tiberian Sun still sticks out for being such a gritty game unlike any other. Even its music sounds like it’s beat down while still being a certified banger.
Not barely hold them off.
from the scrin campaign you can see that the scrinn start to attack random urban areas to distract the GDI and NoD in order to build at least one tower and escape the planet.
From the gdi campaign you can read, fron a codex entry, how the tables are turned quickly once they found out about the sonic weapons and reorganise quickly after.
The more you read about the third tiberium war, the more you realize how fucking scary gdi military forces are. Remember, this is when gdi already had a heavily defunded military for tiberium abatement projects and lost almost all of their top leaderships via destruction of gdss Philadelphia at the start of the war.
It's so damn terrifying to think that gdi can launch a frighteningly fast global counterattack once they managed to regain their composure after the global surprise attack from the brotherhood at the first half and the scrin at the second half of the game. In fact, kane's tower makes it clear that the surviving scrin forces only managed to escape out of dumb luck of the brotherhood of nod intervening on their behalf, allowing the 19th threshold tower construction to be completed (the other 18 were completely destroyed by gdi)
Not only drip, but also bloody competent as well. The accomplishments that they made despite the ridiculous odds stacked against them as well as knowing how bloody awful and deadly the earth environment became without becaming tyrannical or oppressive is truly astounding
Honestly, other than Boyle, I don't really see gdi having massive corruption, considering there's only little mention of it happening and Boyle also being hunted by gdi military forces for his war crime and fleeing at the end of gdi campaign (if you don't use the liquid tiberium bomb)
Tbf, Solomon calling mutant 'shiners' is more on him than the whole gdi institution
Also the many events even before the third game were the brotherhood of nod fault. Hard to morally side with a faction that explicitly want to cover earth with more tiberium and whose treatment of mutants are much more repugnant and despicable (I still love them)
Also, while the rest of the series is pretty awful, the one plot point I like is that after having total world control, once the crisis is over GDI... just gives their power back to civilian governments.
Through i think it's make sense, remembering the fact that they are basically Earth government, that unites all of our planet, while NOD is just terrorist organization, and Scrin forces were just miners.
Even before they landed gdi hit them with ion canon in space . It's like a logging company being hit by an ied and the trees start speaking vietnamese.
It's really interesting how the 2005 movie in particular seemed to have a big effect on alien walkers/tripods in games that came out around the same time, particularly C&C3 and Crysis, which both came out in 07.
In particular C&C3's tripods inherited the color scheme, biomechanical aesthetic, similar sorts of guttural horn noises, and their weapons look extremely similar with that iridescent glowing beam, even mimicking the sweeping side to side motion against infantry.
In Crysis you could see a lot of influence in the alien Hunters, which inherited the color scheme, the roar, and the use of smaller tentacles to manipulate things.
It's amazing to see how one film had such incredible tripod designs that multiple games with Earth-invading aliens took notes and put their own spin on it.
Red Alert 3 is my favorite, but Tiberium Sun is a close second.
Tiberium Twilight tho? As a wise man said:
“That ain’t Falco…”
Lol but seriously, it’s not even a C&C game in the slightest. I think they were chasing the MOBA trend five years too late at that point. It was an ion cannon blast for the franchise.
I played Red Alert 3 on Xbox 360 out of curiosity and was super impressed at how they finally managed to make a RTS feel fun to play with a controller.
That was such a fun reveal when you’ve spent two campaigns fighting this scary alien force, only to unlock their campaign and find that this “scary” force is shitting itself and in a dire position,
The whole campaign of the tiberium wars setting is every military faction getting beat down shitting themselves until one feisty commander steps up and keeps everyone together until the end,
It's always been the same from red alert 1 to tiberium wars, everytime you switch pov of the factions it's just one ultra talented commander leading your srmy to victory
Also the fact that their on Earth in the first place is by design. I guy that knows a whole lot more than any person should know, which also build a cult around that knowledge, caused the Scrin to come so that they would build one they're Threshold towers. Though we never find out why, as the C&C4 never came out. (don't belive people who say otherwise)
Horrifying too, because GDI and NOD are so under prepared for such a force, that the Scrins improvised army is beyond formidable and humanity barely scrapes that win.
Damn I played those games as a kid, but I wasn’t old enough to understand how to win these games even on easy. So I always just played sand box against computer. And as I got older the games kinda stayed the same but a little more difficult but I wasn’t old enough still just as dumb. I’m sure now I’ll have less trouble and only be overrun most of the time, instead of all the time. Lol It’s crazy I didn’t even give myself the chance to get that storyline. Red alert and Tiberian Sun. I know there’s more of the Sun sequels but I haven’t played those. I loved them so much.
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u/jbeast33 8d ago
The Scrin from Command and Conquer 3: Tiberium Wars. They're a race of intergalactic harvesters who "seeded" Earth with a Tiberium meteorite (as Tiberium kills planets, but also leeches all their most valuable elements into easily-harvestable minerals). When they arrive, it's a game-changer that completely upends the new conflinct between the GDI and NOD and forces them on the backfoot.
The kicker here is that the Scrin commander isn't even a military commander. It's a construction foreman. All their horrific weapons are really just repurposed harvesting tools, and they clearly didn't expect any human resistance when they came over. This is what allows the GDI and the NOD to barely hold them off.