Naja

I bet that poor, type-cast James Earl Jones is sick to death of being affiliated with that role he played 20+ years ago. Sure, Vader is the most badass you can get. But being melded to that character forever? How do you think Mark Hamill feels about being Luke Skywalker for the last 25 years?! The guy hasn't been in a decent movie since!

I think that it all depends on how far in the canon timeline EaW goes. If it only stops in the late Episode IV era, then the logical choice for an expansion pack or sequel is the episode V and VI eras. However, if - and I'm hoping that this is the case! - the game does indeed encompass the original trilogy, then yeah, it would be a bitch. Sky's the limit, eh?

If the Executor and/or its ilk are indeed in the game, I wonder how they're going to scale it. Most books (and the movie canon!) show the Executor being MASSIVE in comparison to a regular ISD. Almost 11 times as long. Wheras in the X-Wing series of video games, it's only a mere 3-4 times as long. I honestly don't care about that technicality as long as it's in. Hell, maybe some ambitious modder will put it in if Petroglyph doesn't. But I'm hoping that it doesn't have to come to that. I'm hoping that they cave in to our sordid desires, hee hee.

Homophobia! W00t!

Ohh, if only your heroes could go insane, like some of your generals in RTW. I swear, all of my Roman leaders are either sodomizers, drunkards, abusers, or raving lunes. An actual speech one of my generals gave before a battle: "But BEWARE, men, BEWARE! For I have eaten all of the enemy's bees, and they have been without honey for many a moon. They are angry! Go forth, my pretties! Go forth!"

Actually, EaW starts just before episode IV. So Tarkin would be verymuch alive.

The only possible reason I can think of as to why Petroglyph wouldn't have an SSD is because (they decide) that it didn't fit within the III-IV timeline era. Which is bunk, if you ask me, because I believe the Executor in Star Wars lore was launched just after the Battle of Yavin - indicating that a: it was under construction at least before episode IV, b: the Empire long had it on its drawing board. Let's just hope our guys read their expanded universe novels. Otherwise, they might decide that the SSD was an episode V thing.

By realistically, I mean no Jorus C'Boath, no Thrawn, no Mara Jade, etc. Only people that you would expect to see in the Episode III-IV era. Here are those whom I would expect: Galactic Empire: Emperor Palpatine, Darth Vader, (maybe) Grand Moff Tarkin, Admiral Ozzel, (maybe) Captain Piett, Admiral Motti, General Tagge, (maybe) General Veers, (maybe) Captain Needa Rebel Alliance: Mon Mothma, Garm Bel Iblis, General Dodonna, Wedge Antilles, (maybe after you conquer Tatooine) Luke Skywalker, Leia Organa, Bail Organa, Chewbacca, Han Solo, Obi-Wan Kenobi

Same thing!

I bet that those Petroglyph folks frequent this site, or at least have at one point. They've been bound to see one of our...numerous...SSD threads. I strongly agree. The heaviest a Rebel starship should be is a Mon Cal. As someone said, "cookie cutter" match-ups between two opponents' units are very dull and unoriginal. Starcraft strongly alleviated that by having three very diverse, yet very balanced factions, and I would like to think that the Petroglyph folks are aiming in this direction. Hell, I'm sure they grew up alienating their girlfriends and quitting their jobs as soon as Starcraft came out, just like a bunch of us did. I think this is as much as we know: The New Order Strengths: More starting planets, strong capital ships, numerical superiority (TIEs, stormies), Death Star! Weaknesses: Not subtle, starfighters are plain crap, vulnerable to hit and run raids, loss of a super weapon is crippling The Alliance to Restore the Republic Strengths: Ubiquitous spy network, strong and hyperdrive-equipped starfighters, elite forces Weaknesses: Less starting planets, limited amount of strong capital ships, limited forces at first I would say that that's balanced enough for me.

You know, has anyone here ever played Emperor: Battle for Dune? If you recall, there is a level where you and a bunch of your armed forces are playing in the inside of a Guild Highliner, and while your combat takes place on all sorts of bridges and platforms, the level itself does a great job of handling scale - it really looks 3D and like there are a whole bunch of other levels beneath you. They made elevation look very detailed and varied, too. Imagine what Petroglyph could do with that hypothetical, what with their new graphics engine. Coruscant, if they're going to do it (and I don't see how they could not), is going to look breath-taking. Why else haven't we seen any screenshots yet?

-Will there be a "recall" ability for fighter sqaudrons during space combat, to recall them back into the hangar of your starship/s? This would be for situations where you would only want your starships to fight, for example, when victory is assured with only your capital ships and you wouldn't want to risk losing some of your fighters. - What will a ground battle on Coruscant (Imperial Center) look like? Will it live up to all our wildest Star Wars expectations and be a multi-leveled, planet-spanning megalopolis? - TIE Interceptors and B-Wings after lengthy research? - Super Star Destroyers: hero unit, or possible to build after research?

X-Wing Alliance wasn't really true to the series in a lot of respects, or at least for as much as a fan would like it to be. A couple squadrons of B-Wings could take out an SSD with enough time on their hands. I think that Star Destroyers, which apparently in the expanded universe are the flagships of fleets consisting of hundreds of other ships like Strike Cruisers and Carrack Cruisers, should be configured as such: very elite and expensive units that are fucking near-impossible to destroy by the Rebels, forcing them to engage in multiple battles of attrition (fighter raids, most likely) to gradually damage the Destroyers, allowing them to be vulnerable to a killing blow battle situation when it is vulnerable enough.

If Home One was indeed a ship specifically given for a hero in space (like Ackbar), perhaps we would see...well...I believe it is called... THE EXECUTOR????

Oops, didn't log me in, for some reason. "Guest" was me, just in case there was any confusion.

I apologize if it came off as a debate, Cain. I just get a little self-competitive when it comes to keeping up on the issues, and sometimes it rubs off on people. My bad. Sparta was interesting. Wasn't a true democracy (not all of the people had electoral power) or a true republic (no elected representatives), but an oligarchy of several aristocrats that were elected by a council on an annual basis, I believe. If I would compare the U.S. to one of the two Greek cities, it would be Athens. While we are not a democracy (we are a republic), the burden of every citizen is -not- to learn to fight...the burden on American citizens isn't to really do all that much, these days. Irrelevant fact: did you know what the etymology of the word "idiot" is? It comes from the Athenian "idiotes," not meaning one of inferior intelligence as we take "idiot" to mean, but literally "one who is ignorant of politics." Lots of idiotes in America.

I was aiming for an apolitical thread... I already said, I'm not equating the Rebels and the insurgents in the same boat in terms of nobility. It's obvious that the Rebels are noble because they exist in the storyline of Star Wars, which is the classic good vs. evil dichotomy. In the real world, good vs. evil is very hard to find, especially in war. The Islamic fundamentalists fight for what they believe is freedom to them, and some of them blow themselves up in the midst of civilians. We fight for what we believe to be liberation, and some of our top officials order prisoners of war to be sexually humiliated and tortured. See how the black and white vanishes? While the insurgents can use very terrible means (like civilian bombing), their goal is verymuch political! They seek to oust American troops from Iraq, and more than likely to establish a Muslim theocracy if that is accomplished. A lot of Americans don't see the point in understanding their enemy, and it really will be our downfall in Iraq unless we can start to do so. And you don't see fanaticism, ignorance, and stupidity in some American troops? In Bush himself, who claimed that God told him to "strike against Saddam" ? There's still a bunch of people who believe that Saddam still has WMDs. There's a certain secretary of defense who exclaimed how we would be "greeted as liberators" ... Again, black and white comparisons usually have no place in war. All I'm saying is that an us good/them bad attitude is not only a naive way of interpreting a war, it is often disasterous, strategically. If we understand what compells some Iraqis and other Middle Easterners to become insurgents, we know another way to defeat them and end the insurgency. But if we just sit back and attribute their actions to "they're barbaric," and stop there, all we've accomplished is to convince ourselves further of our own righteousness - doing so wins us no victories in this ever-escalating war.

I just remember reading an article describing large white eye icons on double decker buses, advertising that you were being watched. Creeped me the hell out. 1984, anyone?

*A joke* Q: "Why does the sun never set on the British Empire?" A: "Because God doesn't trust them."

Always glad to be proven wrong, then. Just makes me cringe to know that there are average British citizens at all who would welcome that kind of "reform." How popular/unpopular are those developments in your country?

I'm going to do my best to make this as apolitical a thread as possible, I'd ask the same from everyone else. This is strictly a strategic comparison for the game. But yes. I was thinking about this today, about how the creators of EaW have intended not only for the Empire and the Rebellion to have drastically different units, but equally different styles of play. The Empire, for example, is much too noticeable to try stealth, but with the benefit of its mass armies of elite troops, it can wreak total havoc wherever and whenever it wants. The Rebellion is smaller and much more decentralized, and since a conventional battle against Imperial forces would be suicidal, it relies on hit and run guerilla warfare to gradually bleed the Empire dry. What better parallel in today's world than Iraq! I am not implying that the United States is an evil empire, nor that the insurgents are liberty-craving do-gooders like in the Star Wars saga; the real world obfuscates such easy polarities really quickly when it comes to war. But what I am saying is that strategically, the two make a very good illustration of the faction balance that we will probably see in Empire at War. No army on this earth can face America in a conventional war. America devotes more money towards military funding than all European nations combined, and therefore has one of the most technologically advanced, well-trained, and well-supplied armies the world has ever seen. Against another standing army (like Saddam's), it is only a matter of time until it crumbles before American might. However, large armies throughout history have always had trouble with smaller, more decentralized guerilla forces that don't play according to the rules. The Iraqi insurgency, much like the VietCong, is an unskilled, rag-tag group of young people determined to oust an occupier (or in the case of the Rebellion, to restore the Republic; same difference). They would never dare facing American forces out in the open, for fear of being wiped out in one swift stroke. So instead, they use their intimate knowledge of the land and the cityscape to nibble away, little by little, at their enemy's armies, hoping to bleed them slowly rather than outright confronting them. Just as the burden of American forces rests on forcing the insurgents into situations where they have no choice but to be trapped in an open confrontation, so must the Empire do to the Rebels. As equally frustrating to the American leadership as it is to the Imperials is how both insurgencies lack a central leadership structure, and therefore can theoretically indefinately perpetuate themselves in their fight against the larger professional force unless totally wiped out. Just as the burden of the Iraqis is to lay low, pick off soldiers one by one, and bleed the Americans over time of their money, manpower, and will to continue the fight, so must the Rebellion keep a low profile on each planet they may be hiding on, taking advantage of the intelligence they know of about the Empire's monolithic fortresses and holdings, and keeping the Imperials guessing, trying to stretch the Empire's forces thin to make them vulnerable to hit-and-run attack after hit-and-run attack. Thoughts, gentlemen?

To all the Brits on this message board, my heart goes out to ya. That must have sucked beyond anything fathomable. But there are a lot of misconceptions about the war against people like bin Laden that bother me. For one, this has nothing to do with a "War Against the West." Believing in that paints a false dichotomy of freedom v. tyranny/civilized v. barbarism. These terrorists, while still fanatics with no justification for the violence of their deeds, in fact -do- hate us for our actions: our foreign policy actions. Bin Laden hates America because a: we fund and support dictatorships (the Shah in Iran, Saddam Hussein in the 80's, the Kuwaiti royal family, the SAUDI royal family, Egypt, etc) that oppress their (Muslim) people, b: we support Israel, and c: we have soldiers stationed in Mecca and Medina, the two most sacred of Muslim holy sites. Britain is considered a target because it is "complicit" in Iraq, and because a lot of its former Middle East foreign policy was in the same direction as America's (it was our partner in the military coup that placed the Shah in power in Iran, for example). The other main grievance I have is the utter willingness people in my country have to give up their civil liberties in order to feel "safer." Thanks to those loonies in Congress renewing the Patriot Act, the government can break into our houses and perform unreasonable search and seizure on any public transportation without probable cause, and can wiretap our homes and spy on our emails, medical records, and credit records - all without a warrant or probable cause. It allows American citizens to be labled as "enemy combatants," and therefore they can be arrested and imprisoned for an indefinate time without even being charged with a crime. The Supreme Court only ruled recently that these people have a right to legal representation and trial. Somehow we're not "patriotic" enough if we disagree with the Bush administration's way of waging war; we're supposed to be docile and servile. No offense to the British members of this board, but how can you live in such a -monitored- country and not feel invaded? I know that the motive behind the technology is deterrance - that people won't commit crimes because they know they're on camera. But does that mean every British citizen is a suspect? It sort of disturbs me with the lack of public outcry in England about privacy rights being trumped in favor of a criminal surveillance technology. But that's just my 2 cents.

It seems like regular infantry (stormtroopers, Rebel soldiers) have painfully short ranges, however. From all of the footage/screenies I have seen, they practically have to be at point blank range to shoot at each other!

http://kickme.to/woodsboro/ This site has some badass new models for most of both sides' capital ships, although I have a few questions if anyone would know: 1. Fighters. It has a lot of Expanded Universe fighters and most of the traditional Rebel ones, but none of the standard Imperial 3 (TIE Fighter, TIE Bomber, and TIE Interceptor) are available. Is there any other place, or any other modder, that you know of who has done this, or who has made a TC or something that includes them? 2. Other texture files. It seems with this site's texture files that only the closest textures have been applied. Again, would there happen to be any modders or sites whose mods or TCs have included new capital ship models that include close, medium distance, and far away? I'm a law student with no time on my hands, so some suggestions or at least a finger pointing in some direction would help! Thank you!

Errrm, under the Fighter section, the tutorial link doesn't work, and none of the fighers are the standard Imperial 3 (TIE Fighter, Interceptor, Bomber), and neither the Rebel A-Wing or B-Wing are present, either.