Naja

Yeah, but think about how inconvenient that would be to play. I'm all for realism and Star Wars canon, but...you need to equally include gameplay, too. I believe that the Death Star should be able to take out starships and planets, carry its own TIE squadrons and carry even ground forces, so as to "preclude a support fleet," as someone put it. However, it should be counterable within conventional means (like Red Squadron or just a squadron of regular Rebel fighters that have a certain % to succeed, during which they'd be vulnerable as all fuck to Imperial fighters). Think a really spruced up version of the Star Wars: Rebellion Death Star. That was, for all intents and purposes, the Death Star II - just conventionally vulnerable for the sake of gameplay.

Why give the Rebels a superweapon? I thought that Red Squadron was well-suited to taking down the Death Star.

Unlike the Planetary Ion Cannon which completely disables a ship for a temporary period of time, the Y-Wing's Ion Cannons only midly disable a capital ship. So, one squadron will irritate you because your Star Destroyer will move slower, fire at a worse rate, use less of its laser batteries, etc. But 3+ Y-Wing squadrons can perpetually take potshots at your heavy ships and more or less keep them in an ineffective state. Now, like I said, that alone is not bad. The Rebels get the good starfighters, and starfighter-killers like Tartans are always effective at blasting them away. But I always play with about 8 Tartans in my Imp starfleet, and even when concentrating fire on those Y-Wings, they always manage to sneak through and put holes in my ISDs to make them completely worthless in battle. I hope that's a balance issue that will be corrected.

...in that I believe that the current reinforcement system for ground and space battles is neither convenient, nor fun. It's not convenient in that you have no choice of what units you start the battle with, for one thing. With space battles, this is further amplified; if you have a critically imbalanced group for the task at hand, you more or less have to sacrifice one of your space units in order to get the unit you need, to satisfy the paltry 20 unit limit. > While it may be more forgiving for ground battles in that capturing reinforcement points can help you out, ground battles are still rather slanted towards the attacker. He can send endless hordes down from space, while you just have a base (that you're barely acquainted with) which magically conjures up a horde of infantry or light vehicles every so often. While a ground defender can store excess units in space (why on earth in space of all places??), presumably an attacker would have vaporized those precious transports in his orbital attack. While it may seem like just nitpicking, what really gets to me is the effect this has on the gameplay. It's just not fun having such abysmally small pop caps that necessitate sending another ship or two every other minute or automatically spawning an AT-ST company when your garrison gets blasted. I'd much rather have one standard fleet engagement...as any other person would expect. Or a "one last stand" sort of situation where a defender's forces and an attacker's forces are all that they've got. Especially considering one of the other major dissapointments, that units and structures don't retain damage after battles, the fun we can have in these battles becomes very limited after a while. And on another note, what's the deal with the turret/sensor node/resource extractor building slots that any side can just approach and build things with? Is this Battle for Middle Earth, or something? I want Darth Vader to wreak havoc on the enemy, not sit in the Tatooine heat like a dumbass, walking to a strange device and conjuring up a Bacta tank. :

Not to mention the headache-inducing ion cannon ability of Y-Wings. While certainly it gives the Rebels a certain 'edge,' and it conforms well to their starfighter superiority, I haven't seen anything of the Imperials' capital ship superiority to counter this. The shit lasts too long, anyway. 3 Y-Wing squadrons periodically blasting my ISD can keep it from retaliating long enough to blast off its shield generators, turbolasers, engines, hull...

I downloaded the Empire mod which allows you to do Galactic Conquest as the Empire. This starts you out with a VSD and two ISDs, which is pretty rockin'. However, I'm very dissapointed by the amount of damage their turbolasers do! I team up all three destroyers against some pitiful little Rebel Corvette, and the shield damage stil inches its way down! WTF, a single ISD should be able to trash a Correlian Corvette, not to mention give a Nebulon B Frigate a run for its money. On another note, I'm dissapointed in general at how weak capital ships are. I'm not referring to how bombers can easily take them out, because that's necessary to balance. But if 2 or 3 X-Wing squadrons are taking glancing potshots at your Star Destroyer and the shields go down 10%, methinks that you'll have to either descrease figher lasers against cap ships, or increase capital ship strength overall. Let's not make this game like X-Wing Alliance, where one B-Wing could take on the whole of the Imperial Navy... :-\

I had a crash (didn't crash to desktop, just froze) when I won a space battle over Eriadu. I had no ground forces with my fleet. This was the error signature, if it's of any help: AppName:sweaw.exe AppVer: 1.0.0.0 ModName: sweaw.exe ModVer: 1.0.0.0 Offset: 0029a4a0

The Death Star cannot fire on capital ships, and it's probably a sure bet that it cannot launch fighters like Imperial starships can, right? I would assume this to be the case, since the Imperials would be burdened to protect their Death Star at all times with a fleet. However! Would it be possible to mod this? To make the Death Star able to destroy enemy ships and launch TIE squadrons of its own?

...that this game lacks is a hotkey for Attack Move. 'A' means Attack, but not Attack Move. If there's an important hotkey that can make a whole lot of difference in the heat of the moment (particularly in land battles, which tend to be very chaotic and fast-paced), any RTS fan will tell you that it is Attack Move.

At first my thought was "Star Destroyers are TIE Fighter factories?" But apparently, all Imperial capital ships (Acclamators, Victories, Interdictors, and Imperators) have a certain limit as to how many squadrons they can release in a battle. Acclamators have 4 TIE Fighter squadrons and 2 Bombers. ISDs have about 10 TIE Fighter squadrons and 4-5 TIE Bomber squadrons. They way it works, so I've seen, is that the ship launches a certain amount of fighters (the Acclamator launches one Fighter and one Bomber squadron each, the ISD launches about 3 Fighter squadrons and 1 Bomber squadron), and as soon as one squadron is destroyed, another of its kind replaces it. When the limit has been exceeded, no more fighters of that type replace it. I tested this out. In the space tutorial, I sent useless sortie after useless sortie of TIE Fighters after the space station (intentionally letting them get gunned down by Z-95s) and lo and behold! No more TIE Fighters after 4 tries of that! It's not exactly canon, but it's nowhere near as bad as we've thought. We could simply mod in the Interceptor as one of the fighters that, say, an ISD launches.

Do you know what I'm referring to? The grid-like graphic that you see in space battles? If you zoom out enough, you'll see it in the asteroids of both the Imperial and Rebel space missions. Is this particular only to the demo? Or will the full game show it?

Your complaints would have more relevance if this was something unexpected. We've known that space battles would not be 3D for almost as long as this game's been in production. Why you choose now to complain is beyond me. I personally find nothing wrong with the current "2.5D" setup. The only eyesore that gets to me for space battles is that "grid" type thing when you zoom out enough, and I think that's something only for the demo...right?

Like I've said, my main gripes are simply camera-oriented, and some other small things. Camera oriented due to the still-buggy Cinematic View, and due to a very inconvenient way of rotating the camera while in normal view (which I, honestly, haven't figured out how to do yet). And the main small thing I'd like addressed is a Hold Fire and Hold Ground option for units. Otherwise, they'll just be stupid and chase something that you might not want them to chase, and they'll get blown up on your watch. My Rebel artillery kept wanting to go after turbolaser towers and got mowed down every time until I *carefully* placed every unit where it should be - having to babysit your units for fear of them getting confused and destroyed = not too fun.

I think that Delphi means that defenders can build ground units during any ground battle if any of their inital 10 units gets destroyed.

There is still a "grid" in space battles. I'm not sure if that's intended to stay there, but damn is it an eyesore!

We can only begin to imagine the complexity that you guys must be strugglin' with. The attention to our bitching is duly noted, and appreciated.

I absolutely agree. Having damage remain after battles would be a chief way in which the Rebels could harass the Empire by persistant (though weak and irritating) battles fought on their terms. Think of a cloud of mosquitos biting someone so frequently that he succumbs to anemia.

The demo was probably a 7, for me. The graphics were pretty good (aside from Kashyyyk - for some reason, the graphics were pretty shoddy there, particularly the trees), the Star Wars atmosphere was very crisp, and there was a very palpable "feel" for each faction. When ordered around by that asshole Imperial, I really felt like I was taking orders from some Third Reich-esque, opportunistic military elite...I can only imagine what Tarkin will be like. Space battles were very fun, but ground felt lacking, for some reason. The main gripes I had were camera-oriented. The cinema camera is still very shoddy and needs lots of refinement. Often times, it jerks around and focuses on the least exciting part of the battle when there are all sorts of cool explosions and stuff occuring. It's been dissapointing, because I often just zoom in rather than risk turning on the cinema camera, because even if I "switch" around views by pressing Space Bar over and over again, 9 out of 10 times I won't see anything too cool; and if I do, it won't be for long. I don't know if there is any sort of "rotate camera" option when in the main view, but it isn't very clear if there is one, or if there is, how to use it. Also, there needs to be some sort of "Hold Ground" command for ground units. When I was on Tatooine, my idiot Rebel artillery kept trying to be heroic and sallied forth, only to get vaporized by turbolasers. :-\ It got very unnerving to have to babysit all of my ground units.

A lot of fun, but needs a lot of improvement. 1. As everyone is saying, the Cinematic Camera and Follow Unit Camera are very sloppy and need drastic improvement before release. The Cinematic Camera in particular is very jerky, and always focuses on the least exciting part of the battle. I've had AT-ATs crumble before a rocket barrage, hordes of infantry being gobbled up by a Sarlaac Pit, a VSD exploding, and somehow the camera never focuses or zooms in on any of the action. And when it does, it never focuses on the area for long: it either swivels around, or immediately goes to some unexciting part of the map. > 2. The camera system is still very awkward. The game could really use an easier, more intuitive "rotate camera" option (Rome: Total War had perhaps the best one - just put your mouse cursor in the corner of the screen, and the screen rotates. Earth 2160 had a decent one, too, where you just held down the right mouse button and rotated the mouse or mouse ball in whichever way you wanted the camera to turn). 3. Units need a Hold Ground option!!! I've had Rebel Artillery units sally forth (on their own whim) and get pulverized by Turbolaser implacements! Ground units should have a toggleable option between "Hold Ground" (fire on any enemy within range, but do not pursue), and "Pursue Enemy." 4. Units need better path-finding. Maybe it's because I always max out my invasion force, but the units are still really tripping all over each other. Also: when I select different groups of units into one group and tell them to move to one place, they all go at different speeds. Isn't there a formation option that I heard about? Or at least a "go the speed of the slowest unit" function when there are different types of units in a group?

Hmm. Defenders on ground maps during the campaign can produce units during battle?

Isn't there a Galactic Conquest mode to the demo, too? Also: is what Cain fears true? Will the demo have only a limited amount of time before you can't play it anymore?

Couldn't disagree with you more! Consider this, through a strictly marketing perspective: a. Most polls on EaW sites show that the majority of people following this game are Imperial fans. Why not follow your prime demographic? b. People have already been waiting a long time for the demo; waiting a little longer to include the Imperials wouldn't make much of a difference to those who are already biting their nails in anticipation of such a cool game as this (especially if you considered axeing the tutorial element altogether to save time and file size for the Imperial addition - every RTS fan and their mother knows how to manipulate an RTS interface, and very few people read manuals or play tutorials before trying out a game). Rushing out something people see as unfinished is not a substitute for a completed product; compare EA to Blizzard. Furthermore, this Rebel-only release is not an act of convenience; the demo download size is already immense, considering its contents. You could argue that adding the Imperials would double its already immense proportions, but there are ways around large downloads, even for those without cable modem: c. There have been a lot of announcements regarding this game that, to a sizeable amount of people in the core market for it, have found to be very dissapointing. Showing how it feels to play both sides (including the Imperials, which are enjoyed by the majority of Empire at War fans, as we've established ) will relieve a lot of tension felt in this demographic, and perhaps secure the purchasing of this game by those who were doubtful, and considering not buying it. Withholding the full experience will have the opposite affect from the planned "they'll have a small taste and want more" effect you speak of; those who have been patiently waiting for a full "taste" will get impatient, those who are impatient or dissapointed will feel suspicious and might re-consider whether or not to buy the game, and those who are already 50/50 on it might decide to not risk a $50 purchase altogether. This, I believe, would pose an unnecessary risk for such a miniscule (and wise) change - why run the risk of losing buyers when the alternative would take only a small time longer, with no risk posed to the demand of this product whatsoever? The marketing perspective clearly points to the better business decision. Fin.

I'm hoping it's the latter. What purpose would a Rebel-only demo serve, anyway? It would make no sense.

Wait - we can't play as the Empire in the demo?!??!

Oh, but imagine the Rebel ambush potential!!