008Zulu said:
Rainbow_Dashtruction said:
I'd really enjoy Empire at War if not for two features. Being unable to set commands when time was paused, and the fucking bullshit super easy to upgrade space stations which later upgrades took unreasonably large fleets of extremely high end battleships to even scratch, and constantly fucking spawned battlecruisers which spawned fighters, which was just plain bullshit.
I hated how, when as the Empire, a swarm of X-Wings could obliterate a full sized Star Destroyer. But when I tried that tactic as a Rebel, I got cut to pieces. Still, it was worth it to see the Death Star blow up planets.
Y-Wings, not X-Wings.
If you can manage the skirmish lines properly, the space game gets horrifyingly lethal, fast. Fighters (X-Wings, A-Wings, TIE Fighters, TIE interceptors) are your counter to enemy bombers (Y-Wings, TIE Bombers, B-Wings).
Capital ships get used against fighters (Star Destroyers, Corvettes, Mon Cal Star Cruisers, ect). But, you need a fighter escort to protect them from bombers, and you need bombers to take out your opponent's capital ships.
There are a few major exceptions, like the missile gunboat, which work like long range artillery, and you can use them in place of your bombers, if you want. (IIRC, all of the factions have a legitimate, all capital ship build for dealing with enemies.)
You can also use fighters to pick off your opponent's picket lines, and there's a hierarchy between the fighters.
With a little careful play, a single Imperial Class Star Destroyer, or Star Cruiser, with 4 flights of X-Wings and 2 flights of Y-Wings can snuff a level 5 station pretty easily.
The only really nasty thing is that the Imperials get (most of) their TIEs as garrison units, meaning when they get destroyed, they don't represent a real loss for that player, while Rebel fighters are never garrison units, so every loss has to be manually replaced.
I do like that all three factions actually play differently, though. Rebels do better with hit and run tactics... which is really weird for an RTS. You want to get in, cripple a few ships, and book it, before bringing a new force in later to finish them off. Imperial have a strong incentive for heavy commitment. You hit a system with Star Destroyers or AT-ATs, and roll over any opposition. Consortium works around finding weak spots, and exploiting them, undermining your foes before you finally move in and attack (as I recall, it's been awhile since I've actually played as them), they also have a very different board to deal with, because they have a ton of units that require you to have a specific planet under your control, while the Rebels and Imperials rarely need one specific planet for anything.
