Star Wars Empire at War is the first game ever that gives you the power to command an entire war for the Star Wars Galaxy at your finger tips and the freedom to decide how to do it. The game is set between Episode III and Episode IV of the Star Wars series. This real-time strategy takes place in the wake of the Jedi slaughter that has disrupted the balance of the force. Players wage ground and space battles all in an effort to gain control of the galaxy. All of the gameplay and action within Empire at War is persistent, meaning that strategic and tactical elements from previous events will have a permanent effect on the galaxy.Star Wars: Empire at War is a Real-Time Strategy (RTS) game that is, quite simply, amazing in its scope and grandeur. This game has all the elements that both hard-core Star Wars fans and dedicated strategist gamers are looking for. In Empire at War, you must fight battles in space and on the ground, giving the game a dual-layered design that forces you to operate on both an involved strategic level as well as a tactical level. Add epic-looking battles with dozens of great touches, outstanding sound effects that you’ve come you’ve come to expect from LucasArts, the contrasting play styles enabled by playing as either the Rebellion or the Empire, and a broad array of unforgettable characters, and you’ve got a game that lets you truly immerse yourself in the Star Wars universe.
Land battles are highly enjoyable and extremely challenging, involving heavily armored AT-ATs and more. View larger. |
Fight epic-looking battles in space with outstanding sound effects you’ve come to expect from LucasArts. View larger. |
As a player, you’ll be involved in virtually every aspect of the conflict between the Rebels and the Empire. View larger. |
The storyline of Star Wars: Empire at War occurs between the two trilogies through the end of “A New Hope.” As a player, you’ll be involved in virtually every aspect of the conflict between the Rebels and the Empire. You must simultaneously manage your economy, develop technology, build factories, planetary defenses, ships, and space stations, as well as get information on new planets and maneuver your various forces around the galaxy. Unlike some strategy games that are decided by who has hoarded enough resources to overwhelm the enemy, here it is just as important to build your forces up in an intelligent fashion in order to gain power. And to ensure you aren’t ever allowed to sit back and relax, it all happens in real time, so if you spend too long considering what to build or where to send your fleet, you’ll be inviting a computer attack that could reverse your gains.
Star Wars: Empire at War has a huge number of variables you’ll need to consider. Many planets have unique bonuses, such as allowing certain units to be created more powerfully or cheaply, thereby increasing your credit income by different degrees, as well as only allowing the largest ships like Mon Calamari cruisers and Imperial Star Destroyers to be built on certain planets. And the Empire and Rebels obviously both have their differences. The Empire usually generates a lot more money, which it can use to overwhelm the rebel forces if left unchecked. The Rebels, on the other hand, have far fewer resources, which can make them more difficult to play and learn, but they can steal technology and sneak raiding parties past many of the Empire’s space defenses. And each of the two sides has their own distinct Hero units, which can be extremely powerful and can sway the course of battle greatly. You can use Palpatine or Mon Mothma to reduce a planet’s production costs; C3PO and R2D2 to steal technology or hack into an enemy’s turrets and turn them against their own troops; Darth Vader to force-push entire groups of enemy soldiers on land; or Boba Fett to crush concentrations of fighters by dropping seismic charges in space. To balance out these massive powers, both sides can hire generic bounty hunters to try and eliminate a rival hero from the game.
While the land battles in Star Wars: Empire at War are highly enjoyable and extremely challenging, involving heavily armored AT-ATs and more, the space battles are truly breathtaking. Watching a Star Destroyer crawling with bright-blue ion energy, or an entire wave of X-wings explode into flame, or witnessing a fully-armed and operational Death Star blow a planet to smithereens are unparalleled experiences in this galaxy, or any other. And the visual and sound effects aren’t the only thing that will amaze you during a space battle. The bigger units like space stations and Star Destroyers all have hard points pertaining to different systems. You can target these different systems to cripple ships in different ways, taking out their shield generator, weapons system, or engines to reduce their effectiveness, or taking out the hanger on Imperial capital ships to thin out their fighter cover. And as you destroy a cannon or shield generator, that piece will break off and float away. And while most ships eventually explode, the Mon Calamari Cruisers and Imperial Star Destroyers will actually tear in to pieces that continue to linger throughout the battle. What’s more, you always need to watch out for ships the AI (artificial intelligence) might be hiding in asteroid belts, waiting to spring them on the flanks of your fleet at the worst possible moment.
The strategic layer of Empire at War takes place on a two-dimensional galactic map showing you all the planets. In the full campaign mode, you must consider and plan around more than 40 such planets, whereas in some of the simpler conquest scenarios, you may end up dealing with as few as eight of them. Instead of playing in the campaign mode, you can play multiplayer matches over a LAN or online with up to eight players. The LucasArts’ matchmaking system makes finding an opponent easy, and if you are playing a head-to-head match against a friend, you have the ability to save a match and reload it to continue at a later time. Delivering a presentation that is as epic as the films themselves, Star Wars: Empire at War is ideal for any fan of strategy games, and absolutely necessary for Star Wars aficionados.
- Real-time strategy game takes place between the two trilogies through “A New Hope”
- Play with a multitude of heroes for each side, each with their own abilities
- Control the battle between Rebel and Empire forces on both land and in space
- Dual-layered game play requires you to manage both strategic and tactical levels
- Play campaign across more than 40 planets, or play multiplayer with up to 8 players
List Price: $ 49.99
Price: $ 8.82
Enjoyable Lucasarts product,
I was looking forward to playing this for awhile. I pre-ordered a copy and when it arrived I leaped into it. It is a decent game overall. The graphics won’t wow you. They aren’t top of the line, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing because it will play on a majority of computers out there today. There are little things they did add in like when ships explode and the men and pieces of metal will come tumbling out into space…nice touch.
I think I was expecting a bit more…there isn’t a whole lot of tactics/strategy to the game that can’t be solved by a quick mouse hand. If you excel at Warcraft/Starcraft type games then you will be right in your element. The space/land battle maps are very small and claustrophobic where there is no room for manuevering or flanking. It’s basically move in and slug it out clicking all over the map to ensure victory. It’s not completly dull, but it’s awful close. In it’s entirety however, they play pretty well and enjoyable.
One misperception I had was that the space battles were in 3-D similar to Homeworld or Nexus: The Jupiter Incident. They are very 2-D, but will appear 3-D if you switch to the cinematic camera which is pretty cool when you are in a big space battle and you have everything under control and can watch the battle unfold other than from a isometric top-down perspective.
The gameplay itself is entertaining, but I really did not like where time continued to advance on the strategic map. You can slow the time down a lot and of course there is pause, but time continues to advance and you need to stop and really slow things down immensly on the Galactic Conquest games. Speaking of pause there is no hotkey for it which makes pausing the game during land/space battles annoying especially when the battle is very busy and costs me a few units. I really would have prefered a turn-based strategic level similiar to Star Wars: Rebellion. On the massive Galactic Conquest map it’s almost unplayable on a normal speed because it is so daunting managing 30ish planets. I highly recommend putting the speed to lowest and then just hitting the fast forward key if you need time to speed up a bit.
The tutorial and voice acting are very good. They explain the game pretty much without having to crack open the manual with a few omissions. I wasn’t sure how to build Imperial Star Destroyers until I realized i needed to upgrade my Space Station as well (To build these big boys anyway you need to be on a specific planet as well.)
The game is fairly balanced between the Rebels and Empire. The Star Destroyers are definately the kings of the skies and tough to beat. The rebels have a lot of little tricks though to help them out like the annoyingly frustrating Raid tactic where the Rebels can bypass your defending fleet and land directly on the planet with a army to wreck havok. This forces you to overfortify a lot leaving little for offense at times if your borders cover many worlds. However, the AI isn’t outstanding so you can bend a bit. For example, there seems to be a definate lack of building the big Mon Calamari cruisers or Imperial Star Destroyers on Galactic Conquest. I give the other side breathing space to get a big battle but the AI seems to only like to build average frigates and waaay too many missile boats which have the armor plating of a Pinto.
There is a cap on how many units can be on a Land/Space battle at one time. For space battles it is 25 points for the Rebels and 20 points for the Empire. Big capital ships like the Mon Calamari Cruisers and Imperial Star Destroyers fill up 4 points each with most frigate types taking up 3 points and your corvetters will fill up 2 points. Fighters like the X-Wing and Y-wing take up one point. The empire never has to build fighters because they auto-launch from Star Destroyers with the exception of the TIE scout (which sucks).
It’s almost impossible to lose as the Empire. You can setup your fleet with five Imperial Star Destroyers (which puts you at a cap of 20 units out of 20 units) and fight a Rebel fleet 10 times your size and you will win everytime because the AI does not concentrate all their big capital ships and instead brings in lesser missile boats and corvettes which get chewed up by a few salvos from your Star Destroyers and you can focus on their Nebulan and Assault frigates one by one. The AI won’t wait and concentrate, but send them in piecemeal to get smushed. One of the good parts of the AI is that it is very choosy where to attack. If you have fortified all your border planets with Level 5 space stations and a decent fleet the computer won’t attack unless it has a big force. It will go on the defensive mostly and wait for you. It’s not that much more challenging playing as the rebels either when I built up a large invasion fleet to combat Coruscant which was heavily defended and when the two Fleets engage I see the AI has…
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|Building a Better Empire / Rebellion,
Building a Better Empire / Rebellion
Well I recently purchased and tried Star Wars: Empire at War. It’s a bit like Rome: Total War I’m told. Just in space, without centurions, nor chariots, and the Emperor shoots lightning bolts from his hands.
Hey at least you can’t say it’s a boring change.
If I were to compare this game to something it would have to be Star Wars: Rebellion or maybe even Master of Orion II. But don’t get excited about the second comparison, its missing some of the things that make MOO2 great. It is a however marked improvement on SW: Rebellion.
Firstly, there are different styles of play in the game. In fact the game is really a set of sub games all kind of rolled together. The first element is to play a campaign for either the Empire of the Rebellion much like the StarCraft games. You run missions that have a large scope in an evolving story and have set forces available for each new mission.
The best style of play in my opinion is on the full fledged galactic map where you pick a side and a scenario. What I mean is, you have the map (or at least part of it depending on the scenario) and the game starts with each side having certain assets. The Empire always gets more, the Rebellion always less. The victory conditions depend on, and largely define, the scenario.
In any style of play you will be taking on both space and ground battles. The space battles are played on a space map that is largely open, but does contain hazards like asteroid fields and energy storms that you have to watch out for. The scenario is always one side attacking and one defending. As is the case in real life, the defending side usually has the advantage because they have more prepared defenses. This is especially true if you are defending and have a large space station.
The ground battles are a little like Command and Conquer, without all of the unit building. Before the battle you have time to build the buildings you need to defend the planet but during the battle itself you just have to be a better tactician. The main difference from the space battles is the presence of terrain and build pads. In strategic locations on the map there are build pads where whichever sides captures them can place a turret or bacta (healing) station or some other useful item. This is handy for defending players but clever attackers can use them as well.
Some defenders structures occasionally spawn extra units but you cannot really build units during a battle. So again, the defender has a slight advantage but BOTH sides must use their available units well. A good tactician will dominate both ground and space battles. Also, maps are different for different planets. So the frozen fields of Hoth will be different than fighting on Coruscant.
Generally speaking, the Rebellion has better Starfighters and ground units. The Empire has better Capital Ships and Armor Ground Units. Troops are vital in the game and you can’t take over a planet with AT-ATs alone. Also, starfighters (especially bombers) can savage larger ships quickly by destroying their hanger decks, cannons, or shield generators. The Alliance Corellian Corvettes can destroy starfighter wings en masse and even threaten larger ships when in packs. Then again, the larger classes of Star Destroyers can unleash HUGE amounts of firepower and their hangers spew out TIE fighters and bombers like a fire hose. Also, Imperial Repulsor Tanks are fast, shielded, hit hard and likely to destroy any Rebel player who doesn’t have a small legion of missile troopers handy (their main weakness).
One thing I didn’t mention yet is the special units. If you are an imperial player and Han Solo is running around on the planet, get ready to be frustrated. He will show up at the weakest point, blow away a turret or a few stormtrooper squads and then run off the moment he starts taking real damage. He will then show up at the reinforcement points (places that judge the amount of troops you can have on the battlefield) and take it over reducing the amount of troop you can have in the battle. Oh and Chewbacca is never far behind and he has the ability to take over armored vehicles and turn them on your own troops (like a certain AT-ST in Return of the Jedi).
Special units add a LOT of the star wars feel to the game. Each side has different special units with most of them as you would expect. Han, Luke, etc for the Rebellion and the Emperor, Darth Vader etc for the Empire. Many of these special units have special ships or vehicles that they fight in during a battle. So while Han may be sporting his pistol and guile on the planet, expect to be chasing the Millennium Falcon through asteroid fields on the space map. Admiral Ackbar only leaves home in his Mon Calamari star cruiser Home One and the Imperial Captain…
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