Emperor: Battle for Dune Preview

Each of the houses will have a specific super-weapon attack that will be emitted from their main base. Harkonnen will have Death's Head Missile, its radioactive blast scorching anything in its range. Atreides super-weapon is called Hawk Strike, a holo-picture of an enormous hawk that appears with subsonic pulse making enemy units run in panic or remaining paralyzed at site. The Ordos have Chaos Lightning that shuts down power in all enemy buildings making the units go berserk and attack each other. There will also be five sub-houses, with which you have to use diplomacy in order to make them help you: the Fremen, the Sardaukar, the Tleilaxu, the Ix and the infamous CHAOM guild.

The Fremen are the natives of Dune. They are powerful warriors capable of sustaining the desert better than anyone else. They have mastered the sandworms so the alliance with them would mean some worm-riding. Apart from that they also know of various secret underground passages used for surprise attacks.

The Sardaukar were once the Emperors guard, well trained to survive on Dune. They respect the Fremen, but they consider them to be the enemy. Allying with them will bring you quick assassin units. House Ix are weapon dealers willing to help anyone who can afford it. They can provide you with new technologies and weaponry, but they don't fight themselves. They have some interesting holographic units, which can imitate the enemy and let you explore their territory.

Unlike them, Tleilaxu despise modern technology and deal in cloning and reanimating the dead, and designing genetically mutated units. They are rumored to have secret contracts with the guild. Their units look like the Zerg from Starcraft.

The Guild are the masters of interstellar voyage, mostly thanks to the navigators - people who mutated because they were constantly emerged in mélange. They could grant you faster movement and traveling through pace.

Westwood decided to add a new dimension to the strategic planning and give the players a chance to focus on their moves. This will best be seen on the planetary interface, the screen where you select the next mission. There won't be a linear campaign. All you will have is a map of Arrakis divided into 33 territories. Each of the fractions will in turn be able to conquer one of their neighboring territories. The AI will take turns to play after you, weather they attack you or each other. The strategic map will show the displacement of all your major units (Shogun-like feature, right? -Ed). Your main goal is to invade the HQs of the other two fractions. In fact, when you conquered all of Dune, you have to go through a couple of jump-gates to your enemies' home planets and complete a couple of missions there. As I already said, each will take turns in attacking moving or supplying units. The campaign map will give you a lot of possibilities. For instance, your reinforcements in a mission will depend on how many neighboring territories you conquered. If you stumble into a particularly troublesome foe and lost once, you can first surround his territory, and then attack him. The possibility of losing a mission but still continuing a campaign is a refreshing novelty in the game. Another novelty is that you can end a mission if you fulfilled only the primary goal (like meeting one of the sub-houses).

When you decide to attack an enemy territory, you trigger one of the 100 possible missions, and its video briefing. This makes the game far more flexible and dynamic enabling you to influence plot development. One standard campaign will consist out of 15 to 20 missions (about 20 hours gameplay) providing great replay value. Video sequences will feature numerous famous actors like: Lucita Vander, Michael Dorn, Michael McShane, and Vincent Schiavelli (Never heard of any of them, at least by name - Ed).

As you close in on the final clash the story culminates. You get new tech levels; other sub-houses want to join in, etc. The end of the campaign will take you from Arrakis to Giedi Prime, Sigma Draconis or Caladan. In each case, you'll have to visit two of the three in one campaign. The first couple of missions will take place in open desert, but as you near the headquarters of your enemies, you'll begin to feel their influence on the desert: the recognizable Atreide white marble fountains, Harkonnen dumps and swamps, and Ordos ice surfaces.

The missions will take place in full 3D. The new robust engine will let you zoom in and out, pan around a location or unit and determine scrolling speed. This will all be simplified for easy use. Each unit will have a lot of polygons and even more animations. Advanced shadowing system and dynamic lighting should provide realistic explosions and other eye-candy. Westwood is developing this engine in cooperation with Intelligent Games from London (who also worked on Dune 2000), so, we can expect something new and inventive. The interface will be a combination of the standard Westwood-style interface and remain in 2D, but the minimap will be 3D and follow camera rotation and movement.

The game will feature separate complexes for unit and building and upgrade production as well as starports. Starports will let you build units (ok, transport them from an orbiting spaceship) without having to wait on the production cue, but that will make them a bit more expensive. There will be numerous building upgrades, the most interesting of them being adding multiple ports for unloading resources into the factory, letting several harvesters get rid of their load at the dame time. Spice mélange will be the only resource, and you will easily spot it because of its strong orange color. Extracting spice attracts worms (worms come in three sizes) that can wreak havoc in your base. The Fremen will let you control these animals if you ally with them. The hardware requirements are still a mystery, but we can suspect the game would require at least a PII 300 with a 3D accelerator as the game supports resolutions up to 1600x1200. Emperor: Battle for Dune could present something revolutionary in 3D RTS considering Westwood's reputation in strategy, but the 3D technology is something they till have to prove themselves at. We can only look forward to testing it around the middle of the next year.