Sub-Houses

Sub-Houses

Besides the main houses, Emperor features several sub-houses with units available for anyone to use. This is somewhat ironic; a few years ago RTS games only had one set of units for all sides, and now Emperor is introducing shared units back into the mix. What this does for gameplay is it allows everyone to use a few modular components to compliment the units their house makes. Unfortunately, since many of the sub-house units are strong infantry, it lowers the usefulness of the standard infantry even more.

The Sardukar and Freman each produce two similar infantry units. The first is a machinegun-toting heavy soldier that's good at taking out other infantry. The second is a heavy infantry that specializes in destroying vehicles and machines. All of these units take a long time to build, but they can compliment a house's vehicles well. For example, Ordos Laser Tanks (anti-vehicle) with Sardukar Heavy Infantry (anti infantry) are a good combination for hunting down Harvesters. Fremen Fedaykin can also call Sandworms to ride into battle.

Guild NIAB tanks

Tleilaxu Contaminators

Dropship delivery

The Ix, Tleilaxu, and Guild also offer specialized units. Ix produce the Infiltrator, a cloaked suicide vehicle that can sneak into an enemy base and destroy buildings. The Projector, a unit that produces holograms of units in the battlefield, can make your army look larger than it really is. Unfortunately holograms disappear as soon as they're attacked. Tleilaxu produce units that mutate enemy units into more of themselves. Sounds neat but the units are so weak that they usually die before they can successfully infect enemy units. I like the Guild units the best - the NIAB tank can warp across the map and has one of the strongest weapons in the game. Perfect for "dropping" in the back of a base to destroy factories or other key structures.

Random Bits

The acting in the cut scenes are so terrible it's hilarious. Kind of like watching a B-movie just to see how bad it is. The humor factor is enough so that I won't knock Emperor for it.

The 1.07 patch added the attack-move command. What the hell were they thinking, not having attack-move in the original game design (another total control vs. common sense point)? This game might have been almost unplayable without it, and I'm sure glad I patched it before I started playing.

Harvesting

The Guild Palace

Harkonnen army

The traditional installation programs for the C&C games are legendary; it's too bad they didn't make one for this game. No war machines churning or back story, just boring loading screens.

Emperor is also blessed with long load times. On my system it takes three minutes to get from desktop to battle.