One Happy Team...

Completed Atreides campaign of Dune 2000 as well.
For Atreides, there’s one interesting mission where you start without a base, and need to capture a starport from smuglers, reference to Gurney Haleck episode from the original book.
The “superweapons” for both Atreides and Harkonen are somewhat laughable. Atreides airstrike (basically A10 from Command&Conquer) cannot destroy a single turret, not a refinery. Considering that unlike Death Hand, those can also be countered with rather cheap missile towers, it’s quite lackluster.

Sonic Tanks are surprisingly good against buildings, and I ended up using them quite a lot, despite their tendency to friendly fire.
Fremen are fun, as much as anything is fun in this game. They are invisible, and do considerable damage to buildings, so if you start with an airstrike, Fremen can usually finish it off. The only problem is that a destroyed building always produce a few riflemen, and those finish off Fremen quickly, so basically it’s a suicide squad.

Still, there are a few nice ideas in the final maps, like the back entrance to the sardukar base, accessible only to infrantry, which Fremen can use to destroy the Construction Yard. Then there’s a bridge from Imperial base to the Harkonen base, that allows you to destroy Harkonen Construction Yard as well.

I was curious if capturing Emperor’s Palace allows you to build sardukar. It does. They are very cheap and deal tons of damage, but like all the infantry in this game very squishy, so a single tank can take a bunch of them.

I’ll skip the Ordos campaign, since I feel they are all pretty similar: you turtle in your base, until you accumulate a bigger army than AI can supply, waste this army on enemies pre-built defences, and repeat the process over and over again.

Completed Harkonen campaign.

One awesome feature that amazingly was present all the way back in ’92 are the carryalls. They speed up your economy by carrying harvesters to and from spice fields, and they also carry units heading for repairs, if they are free. And, unlike in many other games, they actually circle instead of hovering in one spot.

The campaign is hard and easy at the same time. Since every mission you start with an empty base, and your opponent is given a considerable army, surviving the first minutes can be ridiculously hard, considering how fragile most of the units are. But if you manage to survive, defensive turrets are incredibly cost effective, so after a while your defences become mostly impenetrable, considering how bad pathfinding is. It turns out into almost a tower defence.

I played this game as Harkonen mainly to see the Devastator tanks. They are Mammoth tanks from Command&Conquer, just with stupid splash damage. If Ordos’ Deviator captures them, they sometimes decide to selfdestruct, dealing more damage than the would otherwise.

The only mission I actually enjoyed is the penultimate one, because if you capture the mercenary base, they will fight for you. That’s the only time you get an ally, and quite a useful one too. Also, that’s one of the few missions where you don’t have to hunt up to the last harvester to win. In the last mission, I spent probably 10 minutes hunting the last one.

There is one decent CGI at the end, where Harkonens bomb Emperor flying palace, and he commands to release the Sardukar. The strange thing, though, that it plays after we already destroyed the palace and the sardukars with it.

I’ve never played Dune 2000 back in the day, maybe because I wasn’t a fan of Dune 2 in the first place. Although I love both Command&Conquer and Red Alert dearly, and I did complete Dune 2 once. But I decided to give Dune 2000 a try. the original version doesn’t work that well on Windows 10. The cutscenes aren’t playing, the speed is either too fast or too slow. So I went with the Gruntmods version. It supports resolutions up to 4K, although the maps in this game are so tiny they would fit in 4K twice.

The engine is from Command&Conquer, with a couple of transparency effects, like the electricity indicating a worm. There are no rally points, and no queuing. Which is especially annoying, since in this game buildings need to be placed on concrete. Concrete comes in blocks of 2×2. But for the basic resource gathering refinery you need 3×2, so you end up placing 4 concrete blocks before placing a factory.

One element I don’t remember in either earlier Westwood games or later ones, such as Red Alert 2, is the need to upgrade buildings. Basic barracks produces just the machine gunners, and for rocket troopers you need to upgrade it.
The only nice detail I found about this game is that despite all three factions having light tanks, they have different stats, with Atreides being the baseline, Harconen being stronger but slower and Ordos being faster but weaker.
The game also has live-action briefings before missions. Curiously Harkonen’s mentat here is called Hayt and he’s a gola, just like in Dune Messiah. Why not use Piter from the original Dune book?

I mean, he actually acts like Piter, the deranged drug addict, and not like Hayt the boring phylosopher anyway.
The main problem is that campaign isn’t much fun. AI gets those random drops of reinforcements that you can’t predict, and in general quite overpowered even on “Normal”. On the other hand, the pathfinding is terrible, so you can confuse your opponent by building cheap walls.