SirNuke

Wikipedia Still Rocks, regardless of the current events. G-level: George Lucas stuff C-level: Everything EU that isn't contradicted by g-level S-level: Old stuff that has elements that have now changed

I recall from my X-wing days (the lucas arts space simulator) the Tie Bomber taking more damage than either the Tie Fighter or Intercepter. They, did however, still tend to be easier to kill because they were slow, but not because they were flimsy.

Many of their programmers have experience with Westwood Online. Though I am sure EA kept control of the servers and software used on Westwood Online (is the service even up anymore, I wonder?).

My bad, it's flash player 8. http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/download.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash

Make sure you have flash player 7.

I was wondering about that as well. Perhaps red squadron are the X-wings?

I believe demos get released simultaneously on game websites [ex: fileplant, gamespot, ign, etc] and the offical site. Typically, however, the news gets to people through the game websites, so they download it there. I was able to download the AOE III demo from its offical site at 350kb/s, rather then waiting in a 500 person long line in fileplanet.

RTS originated from board/turn-based strategy games, only played in real time. The level of management doesn't affect whether or not the game is a RTS. But in all seriousness, in RTSes the only commands you give during skirmishes are 1: attack a specific unit 2: use a special weapon/skill/spell/whatever or 3: retreat, if the battle isn't going well. Not very far away from simply watching the battles.

Stay cool vaderis. While I agree that people tend to complain too much on this forum but you aren't going to convince anyone like that. Regardless, I want to bring up a few points. 1) You can set the speed of the game in just about every RTS game. 2) I don't know why I didn't think of this before, but they knew they wouldn't have much time to show off EaW, so it is likely the a) speed the game up a lot, and b) made the units weaker as to make the game progress faster. 3) Don't judge game balance from the Lucas Arts videos, I believe Delphi mentioned that they weren't good examples. Game balance is just about the last thing you finalize in an RTS. I think it is very likely the balance will change quite a bit even between the demo and the final release. 4) Graphics are sill really good, the compressed videos we have seen aren't going to do it justice. After you have played that game we judge whether or not the graphics are good (also keep in mind that a lof the LA movies are very zoomed in, which tends to make stuff look a lot worse [and also you can't judge the texure quality until you actual play/see the game on a computer monitor, as that is one of the first things to go when the movies are compressed]) 5) However cool it would be to make units use the terren for cover, I suspect it is way too CPU intensive to have the troops do stuff like that. Imagine playing a FPS with a couple hundred bots (plus the fact that you can't scale that type of setting, unlike eyecandy where you can simply draw less on slower computers).

Every non-RTS has one of those, surprise. I'm not sure I fully understand your statement. Message cueing is considerably easier in most other genres, as either there is no time based element (turn based games), or messages are simple enough that simply listing them doesn't cost the player time by looking at them (aka, the recent kills in a fps). In an RTS it is difficult to design an effective message cue that A)Provides enough information that the user doesn't have end up go directly to the event anyway, B)Doesn't distract from what is on the screen, and C) Doesn't confuse the player about duplicate events. In an FPS, you just send the message "Location X has fallen to the enemy! [or SirNuke AK-47 ]", and the user sees the message and instantly knows what happened, and will not be confused by looking back at the cue 30 seconds later and seeing the message again. In an RTS, the user might see 'Units under attack', then look back at the message 30 seconds later and wonder "am I under attack somewhere else, is that the old message, or am I still underattack somewere"? For anyone who hasn't played Dawn of War, it lists the old messages (building finished/unit finished/upgrade finished/you are under attack) on the left side of the screen. It is nice most of the time (though the attack message problem I stated above happens to me from time to time), and is particularly helpful since you control very few units (so leaving a single sqaud behind and easily tip against you), and each squad must be upgraded quite a bit before it becomes powerful enough to use (so knowing the moment the unit is finished is very important).

I personally loved Dawn of War's message cue system. Really nice to be able to quickly view all recent messages rather than the just the latest.

Au Contraire, the first official in game movie shows the rebels getting destroyed, or at least it would have had the movies extended all the way (it was the first two movies to be released [now they have been combined into one movie]). First movie entry here. It seems to me that the EaW will be balanced in a similar way to Command & Conquer Red Alert, with the allies being balanced towards stealth and information control, and the soviets being balanced towards raw power. For example, the Heavy Tank (weakest tank for the soviets) was more powerful than the Allies' Medium Tank (strongest tank for the Allies), but was only slightly more expensive. Obviously, when an Allied player was forced into a tank battle with a Soviet, the allied would almost always lose. Despite this, however, the Allies could still beat the living heck out of a soviet player by playing battles right. Often this meant fighting the battle next to water tiles, where the allies' extremely powerful cruisers could turn the tide. If you are uninterested in reading my above paragraph, my point is that thinking that a Imperial will simply always dominate when facing a equal or less Rebel force is very incorrect. I suspect if the game was done completely realistic, then yes the rebels would tend to just roll over and die when faced on the ground. But whether or not you would admit it, you [meaning everyone] would much rather play a fun game than a realistic game (or at least everyone should prefer a fun game). Besides, I would think making a game 100% realistic is much easier task for modders then making a game fun. Lastly, I don't think it is bad marketing on Petroglyph's part. How many battles have been released were clearly one side was dominating the other? 3 or so? (most of the short movies on lucasarts.com don't count, as they are just a small part of a large battle). /cues naysayers and hard core fan boys, and people who aren't mature enough to have a intelligent conversation on this topic.

It is much quicker to tell which units are yours based upon unit color, even if it isn't hard to just 'see' which side. And also some of the units aren't shown (or aren't very prominate) in the movies, so until you get used to the game they might not be very obvious until you have played the game a little. Plus you probably need team coloring for the team battles (2v2, 4v4, etc).

I'm not saying EAW will run on MX chipsets. In fact, I would be extremely suprised if it did (though who knows? as ugly as it sounds you might be able to use a mx card with software rendering turned on). Regardless, my point is don't judge from screenshots. BF 2 was the first game to alienate me and my graphics card, and I hate it for it, still haven't played it. Yeah, BF2 orginally did that to my FX5200. It also particularly annoyed me since it was the first game that I simply couldn't run.

I would think that a correctly scaled death star would be simply too large for game play.

I was talking about the artillery in the LEFT hand corner of #6. I apologize for my apparent lack of ability to make directions Regardless, I suspect the game will scale to at least moderate level graphics cards. A big fps game (like battlefield 2) can afford to only alienate part of the game market by only running on higher end cards. On the other hand, the rts market isn't quite big enough to ignore users with a moderate to low end card. I think it is reasonable to believe that EAW will scale fairly well (For example, Half Life 2, despite its extremely realistic graphics on high end cards, was able to run on my backup GeForce MX440 64MB [at still respectable graphics levels and at a good frame rate]. While I suspect most developers dream about making their games scale half that well, my point is that it can be done and can be done extremely well). Back on topic, the ground graphics still seem very good to me. The main two things I noticed is in #6 the ground seems blurred and unrealistic to me, most likely the result of zooming in, and how it doesn't quite look like the infantry are really standing on the ground (it's hard to describe, but look particularly at the rebel troops).

The rebel's artillery's scouts, perhaps? (I can't recall what the name of the unit is. The unit in #6, top right corner).

Gamespot has a preview (released today), where they write their thoughts after playing the game. Should (hopefully) answer some of the many questions floating around. Check it out here: http://www.gamespot.com/pc/strategy/starwarsrts/news.html?sid=6140634

I believe the correct answer is the fact that game balance is one of the last things you 'finalize' (since just about any change in the game can completely mess it up). Furthermore, they most likely have multiple 'versions' of balance being tested, and the different movies come from different versions (furthermore, I suspect that the balance have changed quite a bit from the trailers to these newer movies). I personally thought that the Infantry were taking too much damange without dieing in these new movies (though I also thought that the AT-ST took too many hits before dieing). However, the new movies may just be from a version that is tweaked to strongly favor infantry, which may not be a bad thing as infantry are vital to your battles (required to capture flags), and since infantry seem to be near worthless in many rts games.

I suspect that one of the following situations will occur: 1. The Imperial/Rebel campaigns are the same, only the view point changes. If so, one of the early missions for the Empire will probably be defend a base (or whatever) from Rebel intervention. The Empire already owns the plans, and they aren't going to get x-wings because the sucessfully defend. However, I would think for balancing issues that the rebels must have the x-wing later in the Imperial campaign. 2. The campaigns are completely different, in which case the empire probably won't have a defend the plans from the rebels mission, and the rebels will have a required mission to take the plans (as in you can not advance in the game until you beat this mission). 3. The campaign missions are not linear (don't have order). I suspect that one of the possible missions the rebels could then undertake would be to attack a certain Imperial planet, which contains the plans. Until they attack sucessfully, no x-wings. On the Imperial side, this will just simply be a planet to defend. Of the three, I think the nonlinear (#3) goes along best with there 'change Star Wars history forever' claims, and personally I think it would allow the most flexable game play (and therefore, I really hope they do the campaigns in the style of 3).

For a game that is probably going to go gold in a little more than two months, I would think they would be really trying to create a buzz. In my opinion, Empire At War has the potential of becoming a new gold standard in the RTS field, attracting the type of fan base where it gets played 5 years down the road (such as starcraft). An outsider, however, would never guess that empire at war might be that type of game. In particular, there has only been one offical ingame movie, compared to the 8 or so that were released by roughly this time for battlefront 2. Also compare it to the ungodly amount that civIV had released by roughly this time (and civIV was apparently really rushed to get competed in time, partially hence why it has trouble with the majority of ATI video cards). (going gold means you stop making changes to the game [or any computer program] so you can start making the cds [and for most companies, start working on patch 1.01]) I can't speak about the released information for any games (like specific these are the units, etc) as this has been the closest that I have followed a game since.... possibly C&C Red Alert 2. Regardless, it seems to me that Lucas Art's marketing department efforts are a bit lacking.

http://www.bookcake.com.tw/book_img/TH9010004.JPG Bit harsh there, eh?