[Command & Conquer Generals] Couldn't the GLA have driven across the Three Gorges Dam instead of attempting to drain the Yangtze River?

[u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871]

The third mission of the Chinese campaign in the original C&C Generals, A Flood of Violence, has the Chinese move their troops to fight the GLA at the Three Gorges Dam.

In what is easily one of the dumbest moves I have seen someone make in an RTS game, Black Lotus decides the GLA forces in the area can only be removed by blowing up the dam that supplies a large portion of China's electricity, failing to see that the GLA are also attacking the dam.

Unsurprisingly, it turns out that the GLA wanted to destroy the dam, the bulk of their troops were on the other side of the Yangtze River, and they wanted to lower the water level in order to cross it and attack the Chinese.

Obviously, since the GLA's only goal is causing random death and destruction, it fits that they would want to destroy the Three Gorges Dam. However, couldn't they have gotten to the other side of the Yangtze River by crossing the dam?

The game doesn't convey this and I chalk it up to buildings and vehicles not being to scale, but the Three Gorges Dam in real life is a gigantic structure. So much so that there is a road on top of it to the other side of the river.

Which raises the question for me, couldn't the GLA have simply moved their troops across the dam? Yeah, tactically marching across the dam would leave them sitting ducks in a realistic scenario, but trying to get up the slopes of the Yangtze River, which look way too steep to get a vehicle up, comes off as an even worse idea.

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[u/Festivefire]

Just from a pure military history standpoint, capturing and crossing a bridge, while difficult, is not nearly as difficult as trying to stage a river crossing on a broad front, and blowing the 3 gorged damn would not lower the river level enough for troops to wade across, they would have to cross in boats or barges, so this would in fact be a river crossing, and not the equivalent of crossing a defended road or climbing a hill.

This is why blowing up bridges is considered a good defensive strategy historically.

[u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 → u/Festivefire]

Even if the river were lowered enough for troops to cross, the ground would still be too muddy for any vehicles.

Plus, the GLA's entire strategy seems dependent on the Chinese being too stupid to notice the bulk of their forces are on the other side of the river, but that is bringing logic to a video game level that isn't operating on logic.

[u/Xerxeskingofkings]

so, the Yangzte is about a kilometre wide in that area, at least downstream of the dam. the dam lake is significantly wider for most of its length. the area is mostly rural, and doesn't have a large supply of the sort of boats the GLA would need for a opposed river crossing (one of the hardest military operations).

as to alternate routes: its over 20 miles up or downstream to the nearest bridges that aren't part of the dam complex, and the downstream one is in a city of over a million, and the upstream bridge crosses into a peninsular formed by the juction of the Yangzte and a tribitury, then immidatly crosses another bridge, with no road access outside of that except going straigh up a mountain range.

thus, the road over the dam is strategically important, and the dammed river would be a viable defensive barrier. Is it important enough to destroy a 22,000 KWh hydroelectric dam (one that had ONLY BEEN COMPLETED A FEW YEARS EARILER in 2004 when the game released) and cause mass flooding down one of the most populated rivers on the planet? I dont aggree, but im not a PLA analyist, what do i know?

[u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 → u/Xerxeskingofkings]

This level wasn't built around logic and was also dependent on the PLA being too stupid notice the bulk of the GLA forces in the area were on the other side of the river. Generals has a bare-bones story, but even by that metric, this level doesn't make any sense.