I've played every Command & Conquer there is. The first one, Covert Operations, Red Alert, Counterstrike, Aftermath. I've been waiting for this one since Red Alert, which means since 1996, which means since I was sixteen. I stock shelves overnight at a grocery store and take classes at the community college in the afternoons, and on Friday, August 27, I got off at six in the morning, slept four hours, and was at the store when it opened.

Two CDs in the box, one for GDI and one for Nod. It's round two of the same war. Tiberium has spread all over the world: whole regions glow green, the crystals keep growing and changing the land, and there are things living out in the Tiberium fields you don't want to meet. And Kane is back. Everybody figured he was finished at the end of the first game. He isn't. That's not a spoiler. You find out almost right away.

The movie scenes have actual movie actors in them now. James Earl Jones plays General Solomon, who runs GDI, and Michael Biehn plays McNeil, the commander you play in the GDI campaign. They look like a good TV movie. Joke all you want, but I watched every one.

The game itself looks great. Night maps actually get dark, lights throw light on the ground around them, and explosions leave craters in the dirt. Tiberium glows. GDI walks now instead of rolling: their main units are walkers. Nod hides: stealth, cloaking, and units that travel underground.

Verdict after two weeks: it's not Red Alert. It's slower and weirder and more complicated. I like it a lot. I'm not sure yet that I love it. Ask me again at a month.

GDI is the side that wins a fair fight. Titans are the backbone, Wolverines eat infantry, and Disc Throwers are the best infantry in the game, period. Orcas hit hard from the air and have to go home to the Helipad to reload. The Mammoth Mk. II is huge and slow and costs a fortune. For defense you build Component Towers and finish them as a Vulcan, an RPG or a SAM, and the Firestorm Generator throws up an energy wall around your base that nothing gets through while it's on. Then there's the Ion Cannon, which is exactly what it was in the first game.

My take: if you're GDI, make the fight fair and you win it. GDI's problem is that Nod never fights fair.

Nod is the side that cheats, in the legal sense. Stealth Tanks you can't see until they fire. A Stealth Generator that hides your whole base. Subterranean APCs that drive underground and come up wherever they want. Tick Tanks that dig into the ground and turn into little bunkers. Artillery that out-ranges almost everything once it deploys. Cyborgs that don't mind standing in Tiberium. And the Obelisk of Light is back, and it's still the scariest building in the series.

My take: Nod wins by never giving you the fight you want. If you're Nod and you're trading head-on with Titans, you're doing it wrong.

Full unit-by-unit notes for both sides are on the Unit Notes page.

This is what's working on Westwood Online right now, from my games and from watching a lot of other people's. It'll change. Everything changes when people figure a game out.

1. Money first. Get a second Refinery up early and keep your harvesters busy. Whoever has more money ten minutes in wins most games.
2. Scout early. Find out what side they are and where their harvesters go.
3. Hit harvesters. Nod: Attack Cycles and Stealth Tanks. GDI: Orcas. A dead harvester hurts more than a dead tank.
4. Keep something at home. Engineer rushes are everywhere in week two. A Nod Subterranean APC full of Engineers can pop up right next to your Construction Yard. Two or three infantry parked at home will save your game. Learned this one the hard way, twice.
5. Anti-air before you need it. Put a SAM on a Component Tower, or build SAM Sites if you're Nod, BEFORE the first Banshees or Orcas show up, not after.
6. Nod: dig in. Tick Tanks dug in at a choke point with Artillery deployed behind them stop almost any early push.
7. GDI: mix it. Wolverines and Disc Throwers for infantry, Titans for everything else. Medics behind the Disc Throwers.
8. Bridges die. Don't send your whole army over one bridge.

To be fair about it, here's what's bugged me, in my games, on my computer (Celeron 400, 64 megs, a Voodoo3 I'm still paying off):

• Pathfinding. Tell a group of Titans to go somewhere and half of them pick the long way, single file, right past an Obelisk.
• Crashes. Twice the game has dropped me back to the desktop in the middle of an online game. One of those, I was winning.
• Harvesters that just stop, or wander off toward the wrong field.
• Lag on Westwood Online in the evenings, when everybody's on.
• Engineer rushes feel too strong right now. That's my opinion and I could be wrong once everybody learns to defend.

As for balance, it's too early to call. Everybody on the ladder swears the other side is too strong, which usually means it's pretty close. I'm hoping for a patch for the crashes. Everything else, I can live with.

Every ranked one-on-one I've played. Record: 9 WINS, 6 LOSSES, plus one that crashed.

As GDI: 5 and 4. As Nod: 4 and 2. Make of that what you want. I make of it that I need to stop losing to Engineers.

Want real strategy for a game people have had two years to figure out? Read Commander's Field Manual, Total Annihilation strategy from two years on the Boneyards.