Introduction

At some point when someone was designing a real time strategy game, they asked the question, “I wonder what it would be like from the perspective of the infantry soldier I just built”. The Empires mod for Half-Life 2 answers this question in the way similar to previous endeavors such as Command and Conquer Renegade and the Natural Selection mod for Half Life. Empires strives to take the concepts outlined in previous games to new levels players have not experienced and in doing so becomes one of the few games that can be called an FPS/RTS hybrid.

Game Name: Empires v2.22
Developer: Empires Mod Team
Genre: FPS/RTS
History: One Month worth of play.

Empires v2.22

Game-Play

Gameplay is fairly straight forward for someone who is playing an infantry, and not too hard to pick up if one has previously played marines in Natural Selection, overall there’s a three to four hour learning curve to get the hang of choosing your class, load out, and figuring out where to go.

Players can choose from four classes, Rifleman, Scout, Anti-Tank, and Engineer. The rifleman excels at killing other infantry, but is useless against vehicles and structures. The opposite is true for the Anti-Tank class, carrying only a pistol to kill other infantry with, but very strong against structures and vehicles. Engineers can place one turret, radar station, drop supplies, and repair/build much faster than other classes, all classes can build structures, but only engineers can repair vehicles. Scouts can snipe people, as well as disable turrets and have limited invisibility.

Personally I found the engineer and anti-vehicle classes to be the most useful, the automated turrets engineers can place have are 100% accurate and have a very long range, both the anti-infantry and anti-vehicle turrets will kill their respective targets extremely fast. The anti-vehicle rocket launcher is also extremely powerful, killing lighter vehicles in a few shots.

In traditional RTS maps each team will have a commander who sits in a heavily armored vehicle, the objective of these maps is to kill the other command vehicle. The commander can switch between driving this vehicle and an overhead RTS view of the battlefield. One can select individual units or groups of units and issue them orders which will place a way point on their screen. Additionally the commander can also place structures for players to build and create vehicles (players can also do this if allowed by the commander). To ensure that games eventually come to an end, both teams have a limited number of spawn tickets until they are no longer able to spawn.

Aside from the RTS and base building there are also other game types, they are; linear territory control and Attack/Defend. In these game types there is no commander or RTS style of game play, just a series of capture points and a number of spawn tickets for each team.

Map		FPS view

Maps

The maps in Empires are designed for mostly larger games of 32 or more people, the largest servers currently hosted at the time of this article are for up to fifty people. Due to their size the real time strategy maps are somewhat lacking in detail, this is partially due to the limitations of the source engine.

The other maps are well designed and offer a good amount of detail, and options for teams to work together to flank an opponent and don’t get too heavily bogged down. They feel very much like Day of Defeat Source maps, the rolling capture points and no vehicles completely change the game dynamics from the RTS model and offer.

Bugs & Issues

I did not encounter too many glaring bugs or issues; the only large one found during play testing was that the map emp_streets_of_fire always crashed everyone out with no error message. There are some areas though where the mod could stand to improve upon.

For one, on the large RTS maps, it would be nice to have some sort of auto-drive or auto-run button, so your character could continue to move if you wanted to look at the map or other things. Additionally, several times during play, vehicles got stuck on turrets, and it would be nice if friendly units and turrets could clip through each other like other orange box games such as TF2 or Left4Dead.

Another issue in some maps is detail, as I mentioned earlier some of this might be due to engine entity limitations, but some of the smaller RTS maps could stand to have a little more detail here and there. This could be done using some low polygon count trees, rocks, or even simple terrain deformations to create fox holes or other “natural” barriers and variation. The maps could use some more variations in the textures used as well. While this may present a similar problems with relation to the engine, just a little variation here or there to break things up would help some of the RTS style maps a lot.

Great details

Overall

Empires 2.22 is by no means complete, but it is a very unique experience that takes the RTS model developed in games like Natural Selection and takes them to a whole new level. Despite the rather steep learning curve and issues with Empires, it is worth giving it a go, provided you have Half Life 2.

Rating out of 10 Rating Description 8.5 Graphics A good job of departing from a ‘half life’ look that some mods suffer from borrowing textures and models too heavily, the detail on the models and the interface system is very well done. 6 Map Variation The non-RTS maps leave something to be desired and feel too much like Day of Defeat, depending on how the spawn tickets are set up these maps might end prematurely if they are set too low. 9 Fun Factor Very fun to play with friends and some of the veteran players are willing to take the time to help out newbies, make sure you find a large game as smaller ones tend to get bogged down a lot. 6 Learning Curve Very steep learning curve, especially for aspiring commanders, veterans willing to help offset this somewhat, but be ready to die, a lot, your first few play sessions. 7.3 Overall Rating - Good Not an average. See Rating legend above for a final score breakdown.       Click here to see explanation of Rating.