Micromanagement

Ant Farm

Micromanagement, micromanagement, and more micromanagement. Did I mention micromanagement? Well you'll be doing a lot of it in Emperor. For starters, there is a lot of friendly fire. Units like the Harkonnen Flame Tank and the Atreides Sonic Tank can do more damage to your troops than the enemy. While I don't mind the concept of units that friendly fire, the units in Emperor are next to impossible to leave in a group. Hence the micromanaging to make sure that you don't wipe out your own troops.

Units do not attack buildings unless you directly order them. I can understand that this is a "feature" since you can take buildings with engineers, but it's a real pain in the ass. If you order a unit to attack a building, he won't defend himself if he's being fired upon. A "smart" system would be much better, where you could toggle your units to auto fire on buildings and disengage to defend themselves if attacked.

Antz

Base Demolition

Check out the shadows

Adding more to this point, units can just be plain dumb. A prime example is that your units will not defend themselves if their attacker is out of their range. If a foot soldier's attack range is 20 feet and the unit attacking him is 30 feet away, he'll just sit there and die. If one unit in a group is being attacked, the others near it won't help. Some of these problems have been solved for years in other RTS games, I don't see why Westwood doesn't fix them. There's a fine distinction between total control and plain lack of common sense, and this aspect of Emperor comes very close to crossing it.

Another issue is the large discrepancy between unit movement rates. Fast units like infantry move three or four times faster than the slow units. It does make sense to have the powerful units move slowly - you wouldn't want the strongest units flying across the map since it would make everything else useless. The problem with Emperor is that the heavy units move so slowly that if the fast units don't guard them the battle will be over by the time your heavies arrive. Luckily this only affects the late game, since the early and mid-game units have similar speeds.

Spice refinery

Sandstorms are common

Repairing

Also traditional to Westwood RTSs is the slow rate of vehicle production. If you build multiple factories, only one can produce units, extras only reduce the time it takes to build them. I never liked this system of building units since besides the slower rate of production, it is yet another point that deters the need for expansion bases. It slows down the overall pace of the game since you're sitting around waiting for units to build instead of commanding them in battle.

Last but not least, Emperor's minimap is a regular Greek tragedy.. The biggest problem is that units make a big blob on the minimap no matter what size they are. This makes it impossible to tell how many units are advancing on you - five soldiers spread out looks exactly the same as 15 tanks bunched together. I know that there's no fog of war, but clicking around on the map to see advancing troops defeats a big function of the minimap.