General Tips

Smash Them Bridges

Plenty of the maps in CNC3 feature bridges. These rugged devices will let you move your units past otherwise impassable chasms, but they can also allow your enemy's forces to attack you, as well.

It can sometimes be helpful to knock out a bridge that's leading into your base, assuming you want to turtle up, build your defenses, and scale the research tree, giving you a position of strength from which to attack. Doing so cannot be done by just attacking the bridge outright, though, since it's not considered hostile to you. If you want to destroy a bridge section, you can do so by selecting an offensive unit, holding down the CTRL key, then right-clicking on one of the links in the bridge. They can take a bit of time to be fully destroyed, however, depending on the type of unit that attacks them.

Smashing bridges will force the enemy to repair them or find another way around.

Relatively few maps in the campaign, at least, will let you totally defend yourself just by smashing a bridge; there will often be another, more circuitous route that the enemy forces will be able to use. But still, smashing the bridges can sometimes let you divert a two-pronged attack into a single channel and thus let you more easily defend yourself.

Bridges can be repaired by the slow-moving engineer units each side can make, whether they're called Engineers, Saboteurs, or Assimilators. Still, it'll take time for an enemy to get an engineer across the battlefield, whereas you will be able to march one over from your infantry factory in minimal time when you want to repair the bridge and move out.

Hold Your Ground For Automatic Repairs

Each unit will have four levels of aggression you can set, but most of the time you'll want to be toggling between Guard stance, the default, and Hold Ground. These are basically identical, but units on Guard setting will move a bit when they spot enemy units and fire on them, then return to their previous position when the enemies are dead.

Having your heavy soldiers hold their ground near war factories will help repair them. If you capture opposing or alien units, they'll be repaired here as well.

Hold Ground can be useful to help you defend a base, however. Every faction here has a building that constructs vehicles. These buildings can also repair vehicles that are stationed nearby. If you build one of these buildings at the front of your base, near where your enemies are likely to attack, then you can park some of your advanced units near the building in Hold Ground stance. That way, they won't move away from the building, and as soon as they take damage they'll start getting repaired. The repairs are fairly slow, and the building will only repair one unit at a time, so your forces can still be overrun if the enemy attacks with a large enough force, but for taking out small patrols, this should help quite a bit.

Note that this can also work for air units in some instances. If you hover a Venom Patrol Craft above a Nod air tower, or a Destroyer above a Scrin gravity stabilizer, they'll automatically be repaired, as well, but it can sometimes be difficult positioning them precisely enough to make the building activate for repairs.

Find The Crates!

There are plenty of scattered supply crates around many of the maps in CNC3. While in previous games, some of these crates would have neutral or even harmful effects when opened, all of the crates in CNC3 have positive effects. To open a crate, simply move a unit across it.

Crates here have three effects. The first is a healing crate, which completely heals all units in a small radius around it when opened. It doesn't appear capable of actually bringing fallen members of an infantry squad back to life, however. The second is a cash crate, which simply adds a set amount of cash (usually a thousand bucks) to the purse of whoever picks it up. Lastly, veterancy crates will increase the veterancy of all nearby units (in a very small radius) by one level when opened.

Note that you can't tell these crates apart just by looking at them, as far as we can tell, but you can get a readout on the contents by moving your mouse over the crate and holding it there for a few seconds. Eventually a readout will pop up detailing what's inside, allowing you to decide whether or not you want to pick it up. Veterancy crates can be activated at any time, and are especially helpful for expensive units or units that are about to become heroic, while cash crates should only be picked up if you have enough room in your cash cap to get the whole stash. Healing crates should likewise only be picked up by units that have been damaged.

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