30 Years Later, Command & Conquer’s Excellent Level Design Still Sets It Apart

By Marc Normandin | September 24, 2025 | 3:00pm

Video Games Features Command & Conquer

30 Years Later, Command & Conquer’s Excellent Level Design Still Sets It Apart

Editor’s Note: This week at Endless Mode, we’re exploring maps and how they help us navigate virtual spaces, both literally and not-so-literally. Whether it’s RPG overworlds that work as abstractions for a larger backdrop or crumpled scribbles that offer more insight into the person who sketched them than actual directions, we’ll be offering our thoughts on the near constant presence of in-game maps.

Your greatest foe in Command & Conquer is not the GDI’s mammoth tank, the Brotherhood of Nod’s array of flame-based weaponry, the GDI’s satellite-targeted ion cannon, nor the Nod’s Obelisk of Light. It’s the terrain. It is always the terrain.

You can avoid those tanks, you can avoid helicopters and bombers, and you can even avoid getting fried by towers that fire sci-fi lasers to cement the idea that Nod is more than they seem, if only you master the terrain. It’s the most important thing you can do in Command & Conquer. In fact, conquering the environment, using it to plan out the most efficient attack, is the only way to achieve the high scores that will elude you if you spend all of your time building up a huge force to ram through the front door. There are far more casualties that way.

The original Command & Conquer was designed so well with this idea in mind that 30 years on, it remains not only playable but mesmerizing. It may be simpler than the real-time strategy games that came after, whether that’s other Command & Conquer games or the rest of the genre, but that simplicity is relative. The original 1995 edition of Command & Conquer, released for MS-DOS before making its way to Windows, Sega Saturn, PlayStation, and in an enhanced, fully 3D form on the Nintendo 64, remains a treat to this day, and one that will test you and your patience. The answer, always, is to learn your surroundings, and how to use them to your advantage—never rush in, always scout, always locate what’s hidden by the fog and defended by bands of units that don’t want you to find the cliff overlooking the construction yard, or the hidden surface-to-air missile defense system which is keeping you from calling in an air strike on that dangerous—but vulnerable—batch of artillery units that Kane’s commanding office has been flying into a Nod base.

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Westwood Studios was responsible for Command & Conquer, but it wasn’t their first time making an RTS. Three years before, this team developed Dune II, a licensed follow-up to an earlier adventure game. To put it simply, Westwood’s turn with the franchise essentially determined what future real-time strategy games were going to be. It predated Age of Empires, it predated Warcraft, and it ended up as influential as it did because it married the technical aspects of Hudson Soft’s Military Madness with the real-time play of Sega’s Herzog Zwei, resulting in something that felt intuitive. Three years later, Command & Conquer was Westwood’s first go with their own series in the RTS space, and it was a massive and influential success in its own right.

Command & Conquer’s story and visual elements, such as its cutscenes featuring real people playing the role of soldiers and commanding officers and reporters and so on, gave the game significant attention and still sticks in the mind all this time later—these elements couldn’t even be fully replicated on the Nintendo 64 edition of the game, despite that system’s added horsepower. That’s all (excellent) window dressing, though. The heart of Command & Conquer is in its strategy, and its strategy is based around its maps.

Even the game’s MacGuffin, Tiberium, is inextricably linked to the environments of Command & Conquer. This alien mineral reached Earth, and began to spread, and spread, and spread. Harvesting techniques were sorted out, and it turned out that this mineral was worth the time it took to extract—the world’s armies are funded basically solely via Tiberium.

It is not some magical rock that can be harvested without consequence, however. The entire world is in worse shape every day in Command & Conquer, and it’s not just because of the constant fighting between the Global Defense Initiative and its foe, the cult-like Brotherhood of Nod led by the enigmatic Kane. Tiberium leeches nutrients straight from the soil and plants that it’s attached to—while this whole idea is explored much more in the follow-up, Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, it’s not particularly subtle that this war is fought over a mineral that is literally killing the Earth and its inhabitants. This is not just something that happens in cutscenes or to push the plot forward, either, but in the levels themselves, forcing you to include the existence of Tiberium into more than just your cash-counting calculations.

Tiberium changes the environment and the map—the vents it creates when taking over trees cause more Tiberium to grow, but the clouds it spews are toxic to people. In case you’ve forgotten because you’ve been hanging around Kane for too long, your soldiers are people. Tiberium’s spread makes parts of the map dangerous or impossible to cross without either paying a price in blood or waiting until you’ve harvested a path through. Even as it harms your troops, even as you watch a flamethrower-equipped soldier die from the fumes, taking out his comrades in a fiery explosion in the process, you find yourself greedily seeking more to replace the troops that you lost. All you need is more Tiberium, all you need is more soldiers—everything can sort itself out if only you get more.

Are you playing as the GDI and want your soldiers to cross a field of Tiberium without dying along the way? You have to build an armored personnel carrier, an APC, to get through safely. You might need to protect that APC, though, as Nod forces are lightly armored and much faster than the GDI’s heavier, better-protected vehicles, meaning they can easily catch and harass this vehicle before it gets to its destination. Because of this, you need to build an escort force for the APC, and take into account what kind of terrain you’re crossing over—for instance, tanks that have to make a whole bunch of turns to ascend a narrow mountain path are going to slow you down. It also just so happens that much of the GDI campaign takes place in mountainous, rocky regions of central Europe.

These kinds of slow-paced stratagems can save the day, even if they seem costly and time-consuming in the moment: fill an APC with soldiers, and you can take out SAM sites that are around—but not in—the Nod base, allowing you to soften up their forces with air strikes rather than risk a direct assault against a fully fortified stronghold. Or, if you’re on the Nod side, and you know that speed is your advantage, figure out where to draw out GDI forces—the slow-moving GDI forces, remember—to terrain where they will be susceptible. For example, set up mobile artillery on high ground that they won’t be able to reach before you’ve exploded them all. Do that while sneaking into the GDI base so you can either destroy it outright or capture it with engineers.

Finding the second entrance, or the hidden defenses, or the weaker point of egress, or whatever else will give you an advantage, requires exploration. Your enemies will always be waiting, watching, and building up their own forces, and you are often, purposefully, at a disadvantage, whether it’s in terms of resources or location. You must be on the lookout for whatever will give you the edge and utilize the terrain to your advantage. Otherwise, every level will be slow-going, because you are not going to easily outmuscle an enemy force that is doing the same thing as you: harvesting, building, and biding their time for the right moment—and place—to strike.

It’s in these moments—and they are frequent, given they are the basis of every level in one way or another—that you see the strength of Westwood’s design, which still shines through 30 years later. Whether you’re in a late-game map with access to the biggest and baddest tech, or much earlier on with smaller forces and little in the way of artillery or explosive power, Command & Conquer still captures your interest. And it’s because of these maps, and what they hide behind a black shroud that initially limits you to a line of sight around your starting area. You are always at a disadvantage, as you don’t know what path is best or even what paths exist until you’ve scouted them yourself, but thankfully, it’s a disadvantage that can be overcome by engaging with the map. And if you don’t, if you try to just force your way with sheer numbers, you might win. But it’s going to be ugly, it’s going to be frustrating, and it’s going to be expensive in both Tiberium and blood. Maybe Kane won’t mind paying that price, but what about you?

Learning your environment, studying the terrain, and then attacking based on what you find. It sounds like a simple thing, but it’s only simple because Westwood did such a fantastic job of marrying strategy to the environment of each level—if you’ve ever played an RTS where the maps are missing that extra something, where they just kind of exist as a flat-ish place to build on instead of something to be reacted to, then you understand what Westwood accomplished here three decades ago. It explains why Command & Conquer, like Dune II before it, ended up with a stranglehold over not just audiences, but also other studios looking to create their own real-time strategy offerings.

Marc Normandin covers retro video games at Retro XP, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon, and can be found on Bluesky at @marcnormandin