Just to expand on cfehunter's point, At the beginning of every game, a script randomly picks a country for your side to play as. This mean that there will be more variety in the gameplay as you pit the two unique country units/structures/powers against each other. Also, there will hopefully also be a small chance that global war will be triggered, which means that all country-specific units/structures/powers are available in the match,
There are currently no plans to add anything that wasn't in Red Alert 2. Technicians will be going into the game as playable units. We did mull over the possibility of a Soviet Spy, but we have scrapped those plans for now.
It's hard to put a time frame on these things because it's dependant on how much free time we have to develop the game. Hopefully maybe soon?
Hopefully we'll have normal mapping, specular mapping and gloss mapping. AR is currently running on the latest branch of scripts (scripts 5.0) so we are at the cutting edge of W3D development!