star wars empire at war galactic conquest

But the game itself does not acknowledge this. This was true for the old canon that Empire of War drew on, it’s true for the new canon, and it can be inferred from the films themselves.Īnd the game’s narrative attempts to reinforce this, for instance making a big deal about how you can run off with X-wings but have to leave the rebellion-sympathetic engineers behind the X-wing project to their fates because you cannot hold a planet in open defiance of the Empire a later game quest sees you launching a daring raid to intercept the prison transports holding those engineers en route to Kessel. Yet the Rebels are a shadow organization, waging guerrilla warfare and receiving secret funding, especially prior to Endor. It’s made me reflect on the bizarre game design decisions made for the Rebels, decisions that contradict the spirit of this organization.įirst and foremost, the game is about slow but steady resource development and territory expansion. In my most recent time with the game, I’ve been playing as the Rebellion, pushing through the campaign mode. The campaigns drag this out further, with only the gradual addition of new planets (and thus new territories to replenish your opponent’s losses), thereby preventing the sort of end-game roll-up that would otherwise occur in the galactic conquest modes.īut, you know, it is fun, and its big battles still look fairly pretty for a game that is now over a decade old (though the ground troops always appeared rather plastic).

In practice, this can be a very protracted stalemate. Especially since there are only two factions, this middle game can be a brutal slugging match, a back-and-forth resource drain, until one side inevitably rolls the other. Outside of the skirmish game modes, the campaigns and galactic conquest modes have an all-too-common problem in strategy games: the long, slow slog of redundancy through the middle game. That said, as much as I have played of it over the years, I’ve mostly played as the Empire, and I’ve only ever bothered to finish the Imperial campaign. Star Wars: Empire at War is a game that I occasionally return to, because it’s something that can be played for a short or long amount of time, it’s fairly repetitive so it’s easy to learn but can reward creative strategies when one is in the mood to put forth the effort, and it does a decent job in its best moments of capturing some of the cinematic thrills of Star Wars battles, both on land and in space.

Star wars empire at war galactic conquest