To be fair, I haven't played the post-Westwood titles to any extent besides the demo versions (not counting
Generals, haven't played that at all) so it's not really easy to judge for me, but the Westwood era games are already very diverse, even though clearly all being developments of the same game mechanics.
I'm thinking it would be reasonable to have a clear definition of what makes a "true"
C&C game (apart from having Joe Kucan as Kane) because frankly I'm a bit at a loss here.
From what I remember, the original
C&C &
Red Alert existed in the market where Blizzard's
Warcraft games were the main competitor, with a fair number of clones of both
C&C and
Warcraft around to spice things up a little. Apart from the modern/futuristic setting,
C&C was noted for asymmetrical tech trees of both factions whereas in
Warcraft 1 & 2 the sides' units and tech basically mirror each other with the exception of magic (which does make a difference though).
C&C also allowed for pretty complex in-game scripted events (even more so with
Red Alert), which was something almost completely non-existent with Blizzard before
StarCraft, although I'm not sure how evident this was for players altogether.
I cannot tell anything about multiplayer capabilities of any of the games, but both
Red Alert and
Warcraft II support skirmish games versus the AI.
Tiberian Sun built upon the foundations of previous games, adding new units and to extent new mechanics, and the scripting system allowed for more complex scenarios.
StarCraft on the other hand was a complete overhaul of the
'Craft gameplay philosophy with three almost completely different races while a scenario scripting system was introduced for the first time. Interestingly both games shifted away from the player commander-centred storytelling in the singleplayer campaigns, with
TS completely eschewing this (the player commander would then return in
Firestorm while
StarCraft introduced some very intense non-player character interaction as the main driver of the plot while keeping the Commander/Cerebrate/Executor with a more or less limited narrative function.
Firestorm again built upon
TS's foundations and as far as I can tell actually properly implemented some design ideas that were planned for
TS but not fully realised as the development was rushed. Some very complex scenes can be played out in game, with dialogue voice-overs. Blizzard kinda-sorta caught up with this in
Brood War. On the other hand,
FS completely discarded the map selection routine making the campaigns completely linear but this could've probably been expected from an expansion pack. Notably, all previous
C&C game expansions were simply "mission disks" with no overt campaign linking the individual scenarios (although some of the
Counterstrike and
Aftermath missions are linked chronologically, but can still be played in any order).
Red Alert 2 pretty much refined the
TS formula but I felt that some of the less trivial innovations from
TS were discarded for the sake of streamlined gameplay, such as subterranean units and concrete that can be built to block them, mobile detectors, laser fences etc.
All in all, there are several features characteristic of all Westwood era
C&C games, summarised below:
- there's only one resource type as opposed to 2+ in Blizzard titles
- the base is built from the Construction Yard in a radius around it, no builder units and arbitrary structure placement anywhere on the map
- you can only have one unit of a certain type (infantry, vehicle, aircraft) being built/trained at any given time, constructing several production buildings only speeds this up; 'Craft games allow to build as many units simultaneously as there are production structures
- there are no unit upgrades to be researched during the game, units come out as good as they are (except the latter titles where units can gain experience and level up)
- units generally don't have special abilities save for special/alternate attacks like the Commando's C4 or attack modes in a deployed state
- you can capture enemy buildings with engineers
- multiple weapon attack types that have damage modifiers depending on the target (infantry, light or heavy armour, building). In TS and later there are weapon/armour types defined in rules.ini. For comparison, StarCraft has three damage types (Normal, Explosive and Concussive) with modifiers versus three unit size types (Small, Medium and Large). I guess this makes sense where there's no clear distinction between infantry and armour for alien races
- very flexible engine arrangements allowing for easy modding (lots of stuff offloaded into rules.ini and modifiable), but the map editor only allows to create multiplayer/skirmish maps, no single-player campaign-like scenarios (campaigns can only be created with third-party tools). This does not apply to the first C&C that has almost everything hardcoded though