First, I've been reading these forums for a few years now and have been a member, but had to get a new login...I just never made many post before. So hello to everyone, nice to have been reading your post for a while...:Wave: But I have to say WOW! you guys are being really hard on EAW, though I can understand why. Seems you all dislike it because it's not (rebellion 2). I personally went into playing the EAW demo with the frame of mind that it will not have any resemblance to rebellion or homeworld at all. I've learned my lesson from lots of past games where I had expectations of them being modeled or designed after another feature or concept that I absolutely loved in another game. The fact of the matter is gaming companies most likely do surveys for what the "Majority" of gamers want and that's the direction they go in. Clearly the support for rebellion and homeworld has been almost extinct over the past few years, no developers believe they will be able to make money if they attempted to do sequels or anything similar. I mean I can search the internet all year and find maybe, just maybe a 100 people who still like rebellion outside of this site. That's pushing it. Now I absolutely love rebellion, might even be addicted or obsessed with it..LOL But I will not try and say or think that EAW or any such game in the future is not good simply because it doesn't hold up to my expections based on rebellion (or even homeworld when it comes to space combat). In my opinion, EAW demo is the most incomplete and possibly rushed demo that I have played in my life. After looking through the files for the past week, I've seen so many comments written by the developers that clearly show me that the demo is the furthest thing away from the full game, that I can't begin to compare my love for rebellion to EAW Demo. It also makes me believe that a february release for the final game is too soon and possible will be yet another rushed Lucas Arts affiliated game. I mean come on, every single game affiliated with lucas arts for the past 2 years has been rushed and ultimately lacking in major ways. It's clearly about sales and not about customer satisfaction. With all games of the same genre, there will always be some similarities, but that's no indication something was modeled after rebellion just because EAW has it's version of the same concept. Some concepts are simply basic and fundamental in nature that you have no choice but to include it. As for the demo itself, if the demo is even 50% representation of the full game, then the following are how I see the game. First, everything will be unstable because it's an incomplete demo with stability and balance issues that are not even present and the devs clearly didn't even attempt either for this demo. To me it's the hardcore basic workings of the game, kinda like a football team doing a practice walkthrough of a game situation....it is the furthest thing away from the real thing and one most definintely does not represent the other or gives any indication of either being or working as you would like. The ground combat clearly needs less obstructed space if the maps are to be as small as they are. The spawn points are just too darn close to use any effective strategy. on the tattooine map, your spawn point is literally one or two steps outside of the enemy radar range. If you take a couple steps to the north, boom, an enemy turret is shooting at you or a scout team has spotted you out before your forces can even land. So there is no time to organize once you land on a planet. Plus it takes forever to get your whole force deployed on the ground. In most cases, you've lost one or more units before you have your full fleet/platoon on the ground. The ground hero's are just slighty overpowered. Boba fett can fly in literally untouched, land, pull out a flamethrower and kill all infantry troops in one pass of the flamer while at the same time taking vehicles HP's down to either half or even kill them too should they have damage already. I hate to see what vader or palpatine can do. Han solo and chewy are weak compared to boba fett on the ground. The space hero's clearly favor the alliance. The millenium falcon has an invulnerability special ability that allows it to destroy a whole imperial fleet (include SD's, Acclamators and space stations) if done correctly. I suspect a rebalance fix there though. The Home One (ackbars Mon Cal capital ship) is a powerhouse and is down right the baddest non-fighter ship in the game. I slaugthered an ISD with Home One and a fleet of fighters, that's it. Red Squadron is only limited by their health and sheild points being low, but they have a lucky shot ability that can destroy almost anything in the game with one shot and it only takes 20 seconds to recharge. The imperial weapons power up ability is unbalanced. When you use it, your shields are gone in an instant and the enemy is hitting your hull and your still not taking out the enemy much faster than if you had not used the ability. Tractor beam, well almost totally useless as there is not much reason for the alliance to retreat. Tie bombers don't have any special abilities nor do tie fighters, plus you can't build them, they are only deployed from SD's and other cruiser ships. SD's simply die to darn fast. Mon Cal's are clearly superior. I didn't get to test vader and his interceptor prototype, but looking in the files at his special abilities, I didn't see anything indicating he would be as bad ass as the millenium falcon or red squadron. The space battles could be a little better, but come on, for the first RTS game like this, I have to say it does look pretty good. However, take out the cinematic mode and you don't have anything special. OH and the Fog of War (FOW) is mitigated by the fact that you can go into cinematic mode, rotate the camera so it's on a flat plain with your fleet and spin the camera around until you can see the whole enemy fleet in the background. Wow, you can't see the units under the fog in normal overhead view, but in cinematic view you can see the level of the space station and that their are two big ole SD's sitting waiting for your fleet to attack. So no surprises due to FOW. The galaxy map is clearly too junky. I guess I'm used to the nice organized sectors in rebellion. In EAW, you can't tell the difference from an outer rim planet or an inner rim one....only true star wars fans would know since most of use know what planets belong to what part of the galaxy or sector. The planets are all too close together. The demo only has 43'ish planets, I'm still wondering where the other 37 will fit...:scratches head: The good thing about EAW is that you don't have to click the mouse button 20 billion times like rebellion....good thing they added shorcuts for everything LOL. I hate the no shortcut thing in rebellion so much that if I knew how to do it, I'd rebuild the executable to add my own shortcuts There are a few other good things about EAW but this post is already longer than I wanted. Maybe another post for some of the better stuff. However, knowing this is a demo, I haven't given up on EAW just yet. I actually like the ease of modding. I think it's a good place for beginners to start learning modding. So I'm doing a little bit myself for my own personal analysis of the game. That's keeping the demo alive for me, but I was not impressed by the 1 ground and 1 space battle demo. They could have at least included tutorials for hero's and other things, clearly this demo is the rawest, most basic you can make a demo....in fact, the demo wasn't even needed because the trailers/movies showed us more than the demo did. So the demo is only good for getting an inside look at the units/ships IMHO. Honestly, I see huge potential for EAW and it is clearly gonna be able to be expansion friendly even down to possibly upping the graphics quality and LOD (level of detail). I really don't understand why it has taken this long to make this game....it clearly hasn't got all the workings of some of todays more difficult games made. In the end, I will buy the game....but replay value will be left up to if the full version impresses me. I'm thinking it will simply because of the modding ability.....talk about being able to do TC's...this game will be a dream for that.
