Single and Multiplayer

Single Player

There are three separate single player campaigns in Emperor, one for each of the Great Houses. To complete a campaign you need to complete at least 10 missions, and even then only if you advance directly towards another House's headquarters. You can play up to 40-50 missions if you decided to take over every single territory on the map. Add that up and there are around 150 single player missions out of the box. If you're looking for a lengthy single player fix, Dune can do just that.

I played through the single player campaigns and found that the path you take through the game is the same for each house. You're a scrub commander trying to prove your worthiness to the man/things in charge at the beginning, gaining support as you win battles. In the middle of the campaign you gain allegiance with one or more of the sub-houses. Near the end you gain the help of the Fremen (which isn't explained in the Harkonnen story…) as well as the Sardukar. Don't expect drastically different campaigns between the houses - the only differences are the units and the bad acting during the cut scenes.

You may or may not like the fact that you get new units very quickly and without purpose in Emperor. Usually games don't let you build super units until very late into the campaign, but in Emperor you can build them all at the halfway point. I tend to like games that spread out advancements as much as possible and make you fight to get them. Emperor throws two or three units at you in the first handful of missions until you're maxed out.

Almost all of the missions are the same - build a base and wipe out the enemy. There are only one or two squad-based missions (where you can't build a base or gather resources, you can only use the units the map gives you). Every now and then the computer will attack one of your territories; in these missions you have an established base (but not the one you built when you captured the territory), but that doesn't last very long - the enemy starts with a handful of units and no base, so you can easily rush them with a squad of infantry.

Assaulting an Atreides base

Night fighting

The big three

Each campaign features a mission where you travel to an enemy home world to wipe them out. While this sounds fun - a change of pace from fighting on Dune - these missions are some of the most frustrating in the game. Since you're not on Dune you can't collect spice for money, the only source of income are lumps of cash your house supplies every few minutes. Because of this, you never have enough resources to power-build a large army quickly; as Harkonnen it's very hard since you can't repair your units like the Atreides and Ordos can.

Multiplayer

I hacked through a handful of multiplayer Emperor games, and in general I had a positive experience (except that I had to install Westwood's bloatware "Internet Components"). There's a Quick Match feature, much like Half-Life's, that puts you in a one on one match on a random map as a random house. This is good because you don't need to deal with finding a game to join, worrying about stupid partners, or determining the game settings, but it's bad because you can't choose your house and you can get stuck in a match where the connection between the two players may not be optimal.

Gathering forces

That base is going down

Me=Winner

Emperor hasn't been out long, so there aren't many people in the multiplayer lobbies yet. The few games that I did play were enjoyable, though. Since there's no fog of war (standard setting for Quick Matches) gameplay tends towards "He's building unit X so I need to build counter unit Y". You also need to take big risks to win the battle - your enemies can always see you coming and what units you're building so once you have a plan you need to do it as fast as possible.

There's also a lot of Harvester hunting since cutting off the money supply is the best way to out-produce your enemies in this game. I liked the multiplayer games because they were quite cerebral - you need to outthink your opponent to win, a sign of a good RTS.