Gameplay

The RTS Way

Emperor emphasizes unit specialization. That is, units are generally good against infantry or machines, but not both (this reminds me a lot of Shattered Galaxy). I like this because there are no units that dominate the game on their own. The closest I've found so far are the Atreides Minotaurus that can lumber across a map in packs, destroying everything while taking a beating, but even these can't fight against air units or fast tanks (this tactic also probably only works against the computer). This forces you to mix your units in large groups for attacking and defending.

You can scale the tech tree for any house in a matter of minutes. There's almost no early game in Emperor since you can start building the mid-level units in less than two minutes from the start of a battle. This basically kills the early rush tactic since mid level tanks can mow down infantry.

Speaking of infantry, these footmen are as disposable as public bathroom toilet paper. There are a lot of units that can kill a group of infantry in one shot. I would say infantry are completely useless, but they do serve a purpose because they build very quickly. You can pump out more than 10 infantry in the time it takes to make one tank. If you rush right off the bat masses of infantry can do a lot of damage. Unfortunately the tech tree builds so quickly that you only have one shot at infantry rushing.

That infantry is dead in 2 seconds

Four minutes into a game

Endgame

Emperor has an experience system for units -- the more kills they get the better they fight. There are obvious advantages to leveling units, for example, Atreides Snipers can cloak when they reach Elite status. The problem with this system in Emperor is that units don't last long in battles. This reminds me a lot of Starcraft, where everything is disposable and you don't care if one unit lives or not. It's basically impossible to have squads of Elite units and only one or two of them aren't going to make much of a difference.

Emperor has the traditional resource management of Westwood RTS games - big fields with few harvesters. The big difference with C&C is the use Carryalls - big planes that carry Harvesters between the spice refinery and the spice fields, saving the lumbering vehicles the need to trawl across the map. Old Westwood RTS games suffered from slow resource gathering, but the Carryalls in Emperor alleviate the problem nicely. To make things even quicker you can upgrade spice refineries to support three Harvesters (you get a free Harvester and Carryall each time). Carryalls are a bit stupid though, they're supposed to rescue Harvesters under fire, but all they do is pick them up and put them right back down.

The Carryall/triple spice refinery combination also changes a fundamental tactic of RTS games: the expansion. Carryalls travel quickly, so harvesting time due to the distance to spice fields is greatly reduced. This means the necessity of expansion basses is debatable. I found that I never needed to build expansion bases for the sake of resource gathering as long as I defended my Harvesters. I think that the expansion base is one of the fundamental qualities of RTS games that makes them enjoyable, so taking out that element takes away a lot of strategy.