DESO

DESO is the name of the ini section in Red Alert 2's Rules(md).ini that covers the settings for the Desolator (Iraq's country-special infantry in the unmodified game).

The game is hard-coded to perform special functions with this unit, although not all of these are known.

One special function relates to the rate of fire of the RadEruption weapon, which the Desolator uses when deployed to create a radiation site on the ground beneath him. The actual rate of fire for the RadEruption weapon should make the weapon fire more frequently than it actually does in-game. The special function appears to only let the Desolator fire the RadEruption weapon when the amount of radiation at the deploy site falls to a certain level, presumably to prevent radiation levels rising too high.

If the RadEruption weapon is used by another unit, then the rate of fire works normally.

Bugs/Side-Effects/Unexpected Limitations

The [DESO] was hard-coded to have different deploy-weapon firing timing than other units to coincide with the unit’s art Sequence.

• Starting from Ares0.1, you can now set IsDesolator=yes on other InfantryTypes or, indeed, IsDesolator=no on the [DESO].

[DESO] and all infantry deployments with IsDesolator=yes can only release secondary weapons and do not follow the DeployFireWeapon setting

If Infantry has ImmuneToRadiation=false, it will not be able to successfully release any weapons when deployed

• This is related to the G.I. Bug in the link below, This bug has been fixed in Ares 3.0.

See also

Immune G.I. Bug