Samheyn

Not true. There is no lucas source that says "watch the movies and you get the details". In the end we are talking about 1 movie that was made to be a stand-alone (I know lucas had the scripts for 3 EP but didn't know he would earn much money with the first) and 2 other movies wich obviously were made without great thoughts about continuity, sizes or other realistic stuff. Actualy it doesn't matter how big the movies models were because they weren't created to fit excact sizes but to fit into the movie scences. The only person who can make something canon is mr.lucas and as we know he doesn't talk about these kind of things. Next there are the games themselves... even if the measurements aren't the same as in the movies there is a continuity in the use of ship sizes. So why should anybody care about these movie models ? Every Star Wars game you get to play has almost the same ship sizes and because of this these sizes are what you have to live with. In the end these sizes were selected carefully and every SW-Game that I played since X-Wing makes me believe that these sizes create the right atmosphere and should be kept. Lucas seems to keep them and if they would be sooo deadly wrong someone over at lucas arts would advise the game developers to change them...

Perhaps the demo is going to be released after the game. Yeah, I know, you wanna shot me for this thought, but in the past the guys from westwood used to delay their demos up to some weeks after the games release. But it might be that Lucas handles these things a bit different than previous WW publishers like virgin or EA... at least I don't think they get a demo out before 2006....

Just name one Lucas related ressource that says the home one is larger than 1600 km. As I said before, things you get from the movies are no prove and non lucas sources which don't explain where they got the info from can't be taken for real.

Things from the movies are just facts fans used to get by comparing ships seen from different angles or the actual ship models. Personaly I think that these sources aren't canon... yes, the guys of the ultra-realistic-faction say that everything seen in the movies is right and lucas himself does not know what size one or another ship is in reality... but I don't care about this. Most canon sources say that there is no mon cal that is longer or better armed than any imperial-class star destroyer and that the only reason the mon cal can go head on head with a star destroyer is that it has very good shields. Did those fans who compared the movies models ever think about the sizes beeing just used because of technical reasons ? Perhaps some had to be bigger so that the fighter models would fit in certain scenes or you could see small details on their hull. Perhaps the movies never claimed to be 100% realistic and the facts used in the vehicles guide or in most of the lucas games are just how the ships were ment to be. To me this seems much more logical.. think about it.. why should a ship hide that could easily outgun every imperial ship it encounters ? If I had a ship 2 times the size of a imperial star destroyer I would have used it for direct attacks on the empires main fleet bases... but in fact the rebels only used the mon cals as fleet carriers and command ships.

Thats the point where I trust my favored computer games magazine.. yeah I know, they aren't always right with their reviews and there are many games that got good marks because of their GFX which are actually sh*t and others which have a good gameplay but only average graphics get only like 3,5 out of 5 stars or below 80%, but mostly the reviews are good enough to tell if the game realy includes the features and units you would like or if everything turns out to be very disapointing... you just don't have to listen to the things they say about graphics, sound or other things that just touch the surface of the game and have nothing to do with the star wars feeling or the games playability (and even more could be judged about very differently , depending on the point of view and the taste of the gamer) It is good to know what the game is all about early and what might be to expect, surely... but I don't think I want to know every singe little thing about the game or how it works in the end. To me it's fun to experience it myself, even if it's fun to discuss how I would like it to be or what a good game should contain (and thats what this forum is mostly about)

Yupp, and as we know the guys at west.. uhm ... petroglyph always did a great job with their expansions.. even if they never had large amounts of new units they almost every time had some very well balanced ones and good new features as well as challenging missions for the pros. And there is another good thing about an expansion : If the game is released summer or fall 06 no one will talk about it anymore in fall 07.. if there would be an expansion the community will waiting until the expansion comes out which could be in spring 07 there would be still people left in 08 to do some work in the modding scene

Later on the rebels didn't even have the fighter superiority(Tie MKII,Avenger, Advanced or how you want to call it was just much better than everything the rebels could ever develop or even produce not even to mention the Defender or Missile Boat.. even the Gunboats!).. I think the rebels won the war by hit-and-run tactics, overwhelming civil support and the fact that they never underestimated the power of their enemy while the emperor thought the force would tell him everything, even the tactics of his enemys (and he underestimated that his own strategy wasn't able to correct the difficulties that appeared because of the strong will of the rebels to overthrow his regime). They never wanted to face the Empire head on at all. The only reason they started a massive attack on the deathstar was the fact that they knew that the emperor was there to supervise it's final phase of construction and they had these infos the botan spys were allowed to pass on to the rebels so they ran into this trap.

I think it's a great difference if you fight against AI or Human... the AI will never fear you.. it will never think about the way your fleet looks or if it is impressing... I noticed this in many games.. even a less effective formation might bring dissorder in your (human) enemys line if it just looks like his units would never be able to ripp their way through the battleship-group... other way round it might be that a good formation looks so weak that he underestimates you and runs into a trap... an AI will never run into a trap of this kind (if it is well designed and does no stupid rushing). but back to the actual topic : There is one problem with this "1 after another" tactics: fighters. the bigger ships surely wouldn't be able to move or turn that fast that they could move behind or in front of the battleships, but a group of bombers should be able to do torpedo runs on the rear of the last ship in line even before they reached the firing distance. Also scouts could spot your formation early on and the enemy could line up so that your first ships front would be in direct firing line of the enemys broadsides.

In fact I don't want that many new infos. In the past I was always disappointed if I bought a game I wanted to know everything about before it was released. Happened to me with C&C Tiberian Sun and other strategy titles... I knew every unit, every type of map and so on before they brought it to the stores.. and in the end everything I was excited about turned out to be not that great at all. You know what I'm talking about? If a game gets overhyped you lose the sense for the real inovations. The thing that realy excites me is the possibility to create my own galactic civil war in the star wars universe and as long as the star wars feeling is in I will never be disapointed by any of the features... (if there aren't any major graphics or gameplay issues)

A very delicate question... but I think I'm absolutely satisfied with the ships from EPIII to the end of EPIV if there will be an expansion with the timeline EPV to EPVI+. I don't want to miss these great EPIII and old republic units, but I want a well balanced version of the post EPIV vehicle-pool too (mods are cool too, but is much more difficult to balance new vehicles for a modding crew than for the guys at Petro). So the only good solution would be a expansion set with some units beeing replaced (rebel fleet gets some self designed units for special use like the b-wing. empire gets more massive units like the ssd and advanced space superiority fighters like the Avenger or Defender TIEs) And I think that it would be no prob to give us an expansion if EAW sells well because of the possibility to implent new planets, story missions and heroes into the strategic part of the game.

Didn't petro tell us they would use xml files for the moddable content ? So it would be very similar to the way freelancer could be changed. It is very likely that almost everyone who has at least a basic knowledge of scripts would be able play around with this, even if things like making own ingame movies are just hard work.

Delphi said "hardly noticeable" indeed. When talking about "pop cap" most of you think of a 200 unit limit like in Starcraft or WC where you have to spent more points for bigger units etc. There is a pop cap, yes. But there is one in every RTS. As Delphi said there was a pop cap in c&c, too and I remember that I never reached this limit when playing without any rules.ini modifications and default unit prices. Also think about the AI that perhaps builds the largest fleet its ressources allow it to produce. Perhaps at the end the enemys units would decrease the performance to a point were even on a high end machine the game wouldn't be playable anymore. It coul possibly be that you will never reach the unit limit in a standard game and perhaps it can be raised through mods if you think your machine could handle it...

Don't forget that petro use some totaly new ships they designed on there own... thats not a problem to me if they look sweet and they give them a good background and it might explain the reason why the rebel interdictor can jam enemy missiles.

Seems like there are more trys to make it "SW:Rebellion"-like than we initially thought. I think it would be great to have the possibility to let your heroes start an uprising or sabotage the garrisions on one planet while you do a false attack on another planet.

I thought that lucas only included the destruction of the death star into ANH because he wanted the film to become a great success and didn't know if he would earn the money to make the other two parts of the rebellion era ?

Might be that lucas recognized that his "shield dome" idea would be a serious error in the star destroyers design. But I still think that he didn't realize this problem until EP6 was released. And we know that many imperial ships and ground units (even the stormtroopers and their "helmets"/easy-to-spot white armor) have major design errors. So I think it is more a try of the EU writers and SW fans to erase this from the canon star wars universe. It is the same problem as the Executors length. Some sources speak of 7,2 km length, others of 8 km and fans analysed the movies so they came to 11 km in total. All these different informations are used in books, games, online libraries etc. so no one knows which is the actual size. One more thing to mention : The star wars combat simulator games (X-Wing Series) are one of the oldest lucas series with personal influence by george lucas. It is most likely that the ships descriptions are 100% canon. I prefer to trust a lucas certified game from lucas arts than trust fan information (magazines, boards, fansites - even theforce.net) or some EU writers. And as this game is a Lucas Arts game the domes most likely will be shield domes... (why should they change this concept they used in every game from the original xwing to rebell assault and xwing alliance?)

mhhhm.... the domes on top of the bridge tower are the deflector shield domes, no sensors. You may read this in every vehicles guide. In fact I thought I remember how one of the SSDs two domes got destroyed and therefore the front shield failed. Indeed the shields are "projected" by a network of little antena, but the power needed to shield the massive SDs is produced inside these domes, one for the front and one for the back.

Sorry folks but i'm just against any form of religion anyway... not in a radical meaning, everyone should be allowed to believe in what they want but I don't think it leads us anywhere. Keep in mind that "Jedi" isn't a real religion... it is always described as a codex and jedi do not worship a god or even the force itself...

As I said in another topic : The games name itself suggests that the timeline ends around epVI. Sure,after the battle of endor there are still many worlds under the control of the empire but I don't think there will be any EU related story as there is no evidence. The screens and feeds didn't reveal any units (or heros) from the post-endor timeline. Perhaps there is an option to play the game without any story and conquer the universe the way you would like to without any endor-like event, but even without endor happening I doubt that things from the post-endor timeline will be used for the game. And so at least EaWs technological and story-timeline only covers pre-EPIV to EPVI..

You are certainly right... but this games title is "empire at war", so it sounds like its all about the rebelion era and ends with the liberation of coruscant (which is after all the real end of the empire, even if the wars ending was obvious after the battle of endor). I think that there won't be any units which were developed or produced after the battle of endor. So the TIE Defender might be in whereas ships like the E Wing or the Mon Remonda not.

Waypoints are essential to every newer RTS game imo. But it gets annoying if you have to set waypoints all the time because of the bad unit AI. I would prefer intelligent pathfinding... And in fact base building is what I miss most in WW2 RTS...

I don't think there will be any clones at all... and I think there is a certain reason why the guys at petroglyph use this timeline (pre EPIV to end of EPVI). EP IV to EP VI would leave petro with a lack of canon groundunits as they had no real importance in the rebellion era (as a discovered rebel base is a lost one) As EaW starts with the end of EPIII the old clone war vehicles might still be in service (and will possibly be replaced with the much more "empire like" AT AT and AT ST). This way Petro have much more units...

Concerning the Unit AI : Even if Westwood is one of my all time favorite game design studios I have to admit that their unit AI and pathfinding has never been the best out there in the RTS genre. But as there will be no "harvester" units it could possibly be that the AI is at least "acceptable". Building : Let's think about the possible options 1. a) You can only build from the galactic map and buildings are placed on preset or random positions. b) You can only buy upgrades for existing bases wich are always the same. (like echo base on hoth which could perhaps start without any surface based turrets and shield generator) 2. Teradyns version (I like it ) 3. Buildings might be build in combat only and bases remain as they were left after the battle ( perhaps with the option to remain on the planetary map after the enemies have been defeated and rebuild the bases) (unlikely)

As far as I know every starfighters missile launcher might be refittet for use with all types of starfighter-size missiles (as seen in all SW related space combat simulations) so the defender could easily be changed to use some torpedos instead of concussion missiles. But after all it could be that the Tie Defender isn't in the game at all or might only be researched close to the end of the campaign because the defender got into production shortly before the battle of endor and so at the end of the EaW timeline. Additionaly the Tie Defender never was produced in great numbers. It was much to expensive and the emperor used to concentrate his ressources on rebuildung the TIE MKII factorys that Zaarins forces destroyed...

The planet will be removed from the game and you will have to pay 20$ to get a key from lucas that brings it back..... no... I don't think "persistent galaxy" is meant this way Every time you start a new game you will be able to destroy as many planets as you like (or can afford...)