User talk:Caissa's DeathAngel/Factions of Command & Conquer

Format of article
If anyone has any ideas as to how to structure the article, please post them here! Will probably use this page for brainstorming, in the absence of many other contributions. Caissa&#39;s DeathAngel (talk) 20:00, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Do you think it will be necessary to include factions from Command & Conquer: Generals. I think we should, since it's recognized as a part of the series (albeit it has no continuity of any sort with the others). I suppose only the three main factions would be necessary for that game. For the sake of simplicity, should Allies and Soviets be exclusively in the RA section (otherwise we would have a Tiberium verison and a RA version of each faction)? Also, I believe that Civilians should be left out of this article. Info about other factions' views towards them can be incorporated into each faction's section. I've made a step to be bold and went ahead and set up the article for RA and Generals factions. -Thunderforge (talk) 21:02, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Another issue, would organization by era or game be better? The advantage of era would be that we could group games and expansion packs (as well as Tiberian Dawn and Renegade) and we wouldn't have to keep stating what game the info was part of (i.e. we could just say, "In the First Tiberium war..." and include stuff from C&C, Covert Ops, and Renegade). The problem we might run into trouble would be some fuzziness with expansion packs, particularly Kane's Wrath (would the first act be in the the part about Second Tiberium War or the Third?). In that case, sorting by game would be better. -Thunderforge (talk) 21:24, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Thank you very much for your contributions Thunderforge! Yes, I do not intend including civilians, the term is far too broad and insufficiently relevant to the plot to include them - it's the plot significance that leads me to include tiberium based species, this including the Forgotten and allowing a full clear out of the Miscellaneous factions of C&C page - that will of course completely disappear after the merge, which looks on initial impressions to succeed.
 * By era or game is a different story...remembering that we have to keep it short we won't be doing much more than summarising the broad history - where we can go into detail is in conception, development, reception and legacy. Perhaps therefore we don't need to segregate by any more than series for that? Genuine question btw, not rhetorical. I think the Tiberium/Red Alert/Generals split is a good one, because we're not trying to discuss the plot so the pedantry of what constitutes what is irrelevant. For the same reason actually I'd rather avoid separate sections for the subfactions - that's what's caused the Kane's Wrath and Generals articles to become such a mess after all! Caissa&#39;s DeathAngel (talk) 21:51, 14 November 2008 (UTC)

Conception, development, reception....
Here's my big dilemma right now - do we divide by series, faction, or have a single section covering it all? We're risking it getting kinda big if we find the stuff for it, but by cutting back the plot and gameplay stuff we can fit it all in. I suppose it depends on what we have and if it covers them all individually or more as a collective...feel free to use this section of the page as a dump for links that contain information that can be put in the article that you haven't gotten around to properly adding yet...but if you could say why you're putting the link here it would be great so we don't wind up with spam or the like thanks! Caissa&#39;s DeathAngel (talk) 22:51, 14 November 2008 (UTC)
 * The more thought I give it, the more I think the best way would be to divide by series -> faction -> game. For example:

Tiberium Series
We've got the GDI, Nod, Scrin, and Tiberium monsters!

Brotherhood of Nod
Nod is awesome! They got sweet Tiberium tech! Their leader never dies!

Command & Conquer
In Command & Conquer, they got stealth tanks.

Tiberian Sun
In Tiberian Sun, they have subterranean APCs.

Tiberium Wars
In Tiberium Wars, they have nukes and stuff. Alternatively, we could ditch the game divisions if we feel the need:

Tiberium Series
We've got the GDI, Nod, Scrin, and Tiberium monsters!

Brotherhood of Nod
Nod is awesome! They got sweet Tiberium tech! Their leader never dies! In Command & Conquer, they got stealth tanks. In Tiberian Sun, they have subterranean APCs. In Tiberium Wars, they have nukes and stuff.

As for covering it all, I say that we give it a shot having all factions for all games on one page. If the need comes to divide it into separate pages, we'll do that. I do think we need section divisions for series and faction, otherwise we've just got a big, ugly stream of text. -Thunderforge (talk) 23:52, 17 November 2008 (UTC)
 * Oh I totally agree that only one page is needed! What I was thinking was whether we have a single section for Conception and Development for each series/faction or if there's just one for the page. Legacy and reception we only need one section for. Check my latest structural change, along with a dummy lead btw. Caissa&#39;s DeathAngel (talk) 15:35, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Link Dump Section
Stick 'em in here, could be useful! Actually a full reference just in need of using (taken from the Dune II article incidentally), it's an article called Origins of Command & Conquer, so could well be very useful indeed! Can't access it in work but if someone can work it in we could make good use of it I reckon! Caissa&#39;s DeathAngel (talk) 15:44, 25 November 2008 (UTC)

Citing the Games
I was wondering what a good way to cite the games would be, so I had a look at StarCraft. The way they cite plot elements is using Template:Cite video game. Have a look at that. StarCraft adapts it a bit by throwing on a link to an online transcript at the end.

This method should work just fine for citing levels (e.g. the Scrin ship in Tiberian Sun can be cited this way), but my concern is how to make it work when citing cutscenes (e.g. mission briefings). While you might be able to pass most of them off as being part of a level, but it gets a bit fuzzy when multiple levels point to the same movie (mostly a concern with Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert). And how would you cite, say, the intro cutscene for Red Alert?

I'd like to somehow have a clear way of citing cutscenes, since most important stuff happens during then. I like how StarCraft linked to a transcript. The closest thing I know of for C&C is a page with Tiberium movies and Red Alert movies. Unfortunately, we can't link to a specific movie, but we could like to one of the pages. If we were to cite the movies using the names given (which I presume are the official names since the site is run by EA), we'd have a solid way of citing movies. What are others' thoughts about this method? Are there any ideas about how to cite cutscenes? -Thunderforge (talk) 02:31, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

That definitely seems to work for citing the games, and its what the current articles use for citing cut scenes as well. I'm wary of excessively citing in-game though, because it gives the impression of the article being well sourced when it isn't. The Brotherhood of Nod article for example as it stands has 48/50 references being ingame. Ideally we need to be avoiding in-game citations and focussing on 3rd party discussion. This is particularly important if we're avoiding as much gameplay as possible in this article, leaving that to the main series articles and the C&C Wikia.

For this article I think we need to focus almost entirely on the external stuff, but I'll cover that elsewhere. For what you're saying, yes I think that works. It is a shame that we lack a plot transcript like the one StarCraft has, but as we do I think that method of ingame citation and movie citation works just fine. Caissa&#39;s DeathAngel (talk) 11:29, 8 December 2008 (UTC)

Minor Factions
Well, college is done for the year so I figured I'd add a bit more to this article. I started off with info about the minor factions. I copied text from Miscellaneous factions of Command & Conquer and pared it down into a manageable form. It's without citations, but I think it's a fair start. I made a short section about Yuri and tried not to focus on the man himself, just the faction. The more I thought about it, the more it seemed to me that tiberium lifeforms (with the exception of The Forgotten) really didn't qualify as a faction. I mean, we'd just be writing about visceroids and blossom trees and stuff. That really seems to belong to the Tiberium article, not the factions page. Also, I'm not sure if CABAL warrants a faction or not. I haven't played Firestorm, so I'm really not sure. Any input on that would be appreciated. -Thunderforge (talk) 00:17, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
 * Hey man, I apologise for the delay in doing anything, losing my internet for 2 weeks then personal stuff coming up then the holiday season has sapped all my time away! Hopefully after the next few days I'll be able to do something seriously with this. What you've got there is fine for now, I don't think we're at the stage of major copyediting yet, and finding development information has been harder than I expected. Perhaps this may need to be a shorter article than expected to avoid loads of Cruft. We shall see, as I say in a few days I'll try and get some major work done. Caissa&#39;s DeathAngel (talk) 00:30, 24 December 2008 (UTC)
 * You mentioned finding development information has been hard. I haven't had much luck with that either. Mostly what I've been trying to do is salvage what's already available on other articles and editing it down to a semi-reasonable form. The trouble is, there's some good stuff that's just too big for us to use (like Brotherhood of Nod, which is well written and sourced, but gets too detailed at the end), some worse stuff (like Global Defense Initiative which has many issues), and some nonexistent stuff (even Command & Conquer: Red Alert doesn't talk about the Allies and Soviets!). My immediate goal is to take the info from the three Tiberium faction pages and bring it down to the basics, and put the Generals section in an adequate form. It seems the RA section needs to be more or less written from scratch since info about it doesn't really exist. One of these days when one of us is feeling ambitious, we can try that. Also, you hadn't said whether or not CABAL counts as a faction. If it does, then I think I'll have to ask you to make that part, since I have no knowledge about it at all. -Thunderforge (talk) 05:36, 24 December 2008 (UTC)