Empires
Half-Life 2
- Multiplayer Real Time Strategy
Empires
Half-Life 2 mod | Released Nov 30, 2007
Empires is a mod for Half-Life 2 which will combine the genres of real-time strategy and first person shooter. Each team has four classes to choose from (scout, rifleman, grenadier, and engineer) with unique weapons and skills each. One player will become the commander by entering the team's command vehicle to build the team's base and lead his team to victory. Once your base is built up, purchase vehicles from your team's vehicle factory to open up another facet of Empires' gameplay. Vehicles can be customized with unique weapons, armor, and engines. The commander can research improvements to all aspects of vehicles such as longer range cannons, homing missiles, and armor-piercing machine gun rounds. Once your team is prepared, lead an assault into the enemy base. The enemy team is defeated when all players are wiped out with either no place to respawn or no reinforcements remaining or the team's command vehicle is destroyed.
Empires
Empires (Noun): A group of states or other territories that owe allegiance to a foreign power. Luckily, there are no peace treaties going on here.
Posted by Psymon on Mar 6th, 2006 digg this super bookmark
Review
[page=The Plan]
If you need something to compare this to quickly then it's Battlefield 2 + Natural Selection * Custom Vehicles, add in some storyline, forget to use a sander, wait half an hour to cook and you have Empires.
Note from the Editor: This is a review of a beta - kudos to the Empires team for getting something out in the world already, and we know it's not yet a finished product.
The Barracks: You spawn here. There's people inside being very busy
Empires (Noun): A group of states or other territories that owe allegiance to a foreign power.
Luckily, there are no peace treaties going on here.
Empires features two factions, the Northern Faction and the Brenodi Empire (You thought it was going to be the Southern Faction, didn't you?), who funnily enough are at war with each other. The aim of each army is to either reduce the other army's reinforcements to zero or destroy their command vehicle.
What sets this apart from all the other team mods is that an elected commander (read: the first person in the command vehicle) can build factories and other such buildings to aid his/her army to victory at a cost of resources that regenerate over time. Vehicles can also be built, modded and are pivotal to your faction's success. With a range of chassis, plasma and ballistic weapons and other such bolt-ons, it's a fully-fledged feature rather than something being tacked-on for the fun of it.
"Empires features two factions who, funnily enough, are at war with each other."
Incase you couldn't tell, it's a bridge!
When you first join a game, you choose one of four classes and one of your team's barracks to spawn from. Each class has a host of weapons to choose from and skills to put to use; Riflemen are your standard grunts and, therefore, are the strongest. Scouts are the quickest and use silenced weapons, they can also set co-ordinates for artillery to fire at. Grenadiers have RPGs and mortar launchers for some explosive fun; they are tasked with the job of bringing down enemy vehicles. Lastly, but most importantly, the engineers! Using their funky construction kits (which look like swipe-card scanners), they construct anything and everything your empire needs. They also deconstruct the enemy's assets.
The chap sitting in the command vehicle gets the task of researching new technology and ordering his/her fellow teammates around the battlefield from a nifty over-head viewpoint. The RTS format might be borrowed from Natural Selection, but fits in with the mods concept of large-scale war and is vital to the structure of the game.
It all sounds fantastic, but how does it all hold up in game?
[Page=The Battle]
The Pistol A.K.A. the wooden pea shooter
Well, mostly. But what mod doesn't have problems?
Firstly, the bread and butter of the mod, the combat, is OK. The guns are nothing to shout home about, and pure laziness on the part of devs means they're lumped with names like SMG2 and 9mm Pistol. If you're making a Sci-fi world, then a little effort on the names of the guns is a must, seeing as there's a storyline spanning three whole web pages to put a bit of context to the battle. Also, the RPG in this mod is a total joke. I spent at least five rockets just to destroy a single turret. Sort it out.
The sights and sounds of Empires aren't that great either. All the maps look as though full bright is on and two of the maps are a symmetrical greyness. The weapons models are basic a look like tubes with bits stuck on and the buildings are difficult to distinguish between each other. A bit of colour on the outside of them would be nice. Many of the weapon and vehicle sounds have been borrowed from vanilla Half-Life 2; the only up side of the sounds is the voice acting from the commands, which sounds like a bad mix between Scottish and Russian.
"The voices are a mix of Scottish and Russian, it's almost like a bad joke"
What is this? Some sort of indication on the outside of the building show what it is would be nice!
The rest of your team can really effect the experience that you take out of the mod. The majority of the players know what they're doing, many will wait for people to mount up to go on a mass engineer deconstruction raid which, when done correctly, can cripple the other forces advances. The commander has quite a few options open to him, like he can stop members from being able to manufacture vehicles, which is nice. The only two gripes I have with the commanding in Empires is that the Squads system doesn't work (You can create a squad, but no one can join), and it has the option to build a Aircraft Factory, but it's grayed out. Damn them devs for teasing us like that.
But the one thing that renders the whole thing mostly unplayable is the lag. Oh the lag, why most you attack at the most in-opportune times? Due to the vehicle code being unchanged from single-player Half-Life 2, it brings the whole mod to a complete stop. Which is a shame, as the vehicles are the coolest part of the whole lot.
So is it any good? Yeah, It might be a bit bland, but it does a lot of things well and isn’t a complete lost cause.
[page=The Scores]
Scores:
One fancy glue gun.
Design - 4/5
It has all the ideas in place, but some of them need a bit of polish (Like the squads system not working, yet it has the option there).
Graphics - 3/5
While its maps are huge, taking at least ten minutes to walks from one side to the other, they are often basic and are full bright. The weapons lack style and looks as though they are carved from wood with a sledgehammer!
Sound - 3/5
Almost all the sounds are borrowed from single-player Half-Life 2, and the voice actor needs to be shot/ hired to do comedy.
Game play - 4/5
There's definitely some fun to be had playing this, it's just a shame that not everything is fully in place yet. But remember, it's only a beta.
Total: 14/20 (70%)
Download: Moddb.com
Note: As of the v1.01 patch, the lag is now much better, with the average being around 80-120 odd. This means it's much more playable, but I won't be updating the scores. I feel that while it's more playable, it's still the bland, un-populated mod it was before.
Download: Moddb.com
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Half-Life 2Developed By
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You can't actually join a squad. Yes, you can create and invite people to your squad, but no-one can actually JOIN a squad of their own accord. This is a major failing of the system in my opinion.
I just reread that part in about the squads is thats your only gripe with design i'd think agian its in the game and its useful.
In my experience Empires is the best HL2 mod so far released, once you get into it. The problem with 'lag' is often caused by players playing on home-based servers due to the lack of commercial servers at this stage.
Definitely a worthy download, even if you're waiting for the 1.01 patch.
I admit there are problems and Psymon has probably encountered some of them if not most.
The mod borrowed the overhead format from NS? Wow, I guess being the first on Source would make that comparison inevitable, I'd like to think it's stolen from every other RTS. But that aside, there's options to pan and zoom, something NS didn't have.
As for the maps being on full bright, there is a slight problem with the bloom shader. Turn it off with pp_bloom 0. The values need some tweaking and I figure it will be corrected with the next patch. As for the aircraftpad not being buildable, it was announced long ago the mod wouldn't feature aircraft just yet. Teasing it is to many it seems, I think it's smart to gray the building out as it essentially would do nothing if built.
The squad system works. The only thing I assume happened is that the author didn't know how to invite people or that the people he played with didn't know how to offer themselves to join. It's fairly simple if you know you have to be looking at the guy you want to join (assuming he isn't in a squad already).
The lag, yes, is pretty bad. But not tottaly unplayable when you join a decent 16 player server. It's unfortunate but there was no indication of what would happen when released to a limitless amount of external factors outside of the internal tests.
As far as sounds go, I agree. But that's what happens if there's no sound engineer on the team (Or one that reappears a week before release).
But yea, discussion is kinda pointless, as everything will probably change anyway. I just hope for the next review the reviewer spends a little more time with it. Games are quite fun and not as laggy if you know where to look.
Funny he didnt comment on the animations :).
How is Empires better than any other mod available? Another retarded answer that makes no sense whatsoever. Have you even laid eyes on any Minerva:Metastasis screen shots? Besides the Half-Life 2 story-mode itself, Metastasis contains everything essential for a great mod and should be played by anyone who was intruiged by the HL2 storyline. But, since you haven't played Part 2 of Metastasis, and wouldn't know what a great mod is, keep YOUR innacurate comments to yourself. Because, in the end, you are only making yourself look like a donkey.
the maps definatly arent full bright. other then that i completly agree, the game needs alot more polish, but by no means is it a bad mod.
Krenzo is workign his ass off, and it looks like he is making headway! Check out some of these screenshots of a game on the official server.
Empires.cw-hosting.net
Check out the forums for the next server/client patch updates. Its going to be a fun time.... trust me!
P.S. - Thought your comments about the mod would have been fine for a blog, but please don't joke about mostly krenzo's hard work over the last year. It is a work in progress, and it is getting better every day!
I don't understand why all this buzz going on is about.
Psymon, your review was right about everything. It was a fact that the game lagged, it was unplayable at times when it exceeds like 20 vehicles, the squad system didn't work as well as the battlefield 2, the voices were amusing and obviously not fit for the mod. Everything was right, and this wasn't one of the greatest beta I have ever played.But don't get it wrong, some aspects of the mods were enjoyable.
So to all the people with their own criticism aginst this review.. are you telling all of us that this was a stable mod ? We should praise them instead of pointing out the obvious mistakes? ya?
the jokes?a bit harsh? yes, enjoyed your humor but jokes aren't excatly constructive criticism.
Maybe next time in your reviews psymon, you would cut out your jokes and just get straight to the critism. That way it doesn't sound like you are making fun/bashing of the mod, the team really worked hard on it.
And lastly a question, are you guys starting to write articles about betas now?
Would another review when they come out with a newer, better version shut up guys up? This mod has problems, most mods do in their first release. We review the version that we have now. I can't say that "Oh this mod is fantastic in four versions time" because that isin't the version we have now.
Oh, and if you dislike the bad jokes, get used to them. It's half the fun of writing this stuff. Without the jokes, it's just a big blandness of bland. (I love the word bland. "I'll take the blandest thing on the menu!" "That'll be the scampi sir")
alot of the comments in this review are incredible wrong, and some are down to not reading the manuel special the squad system which actuely does work if you use simple common sense
also iv never seen anyone review a mod neagatively when they play on a bad server.... since its the servers fualt and not the mod kapeesh all in all a bad review, it reminds me of the american media in a few ways miss quoting and all that carry on
what you have to understand is that the devs firstly wanted to bring out a stable and playable mod, and after that concentrate on the rest, like the sounds and other less important stuff.
I think they deserve a well deserved ovation, because being able to drive tanks and in further releases even fly airplanes, who would have imagined that with the HL2 engine ?
Good job empires team !
yea i'm with carnifexje on that one, the team did a great job, there is some things to work on. also the squad stuff did work for me? I joined squads and could give commands. I'd like to see some more work from these guys but for a first release this is amazing stuff.
I agree with every aspect of the review. Yes, this is a Beta, and I cant wait to see everything implemented to the fullest extent. Psymon<< nice wording of the review, I enjoyed your sense of humor.
who is Psymon to comment on this mod
and make bad jokes at the teams hard work
his mod has no media a bad description
personly very angy with this review of a mod that has turned the tables on standart rts/fps
JOE SHOULD HAVE DONE THIS REVEIW
im not really enjoying the game that much.
the game seems kinda flat and boring.
The hidden, NOW THATS A REAL MOD and they are only in beta as well.
I'm going to shoot in the wild and say you don't know what a review is for, TKAzA? The point of a review is to rate the criteria of the subject at hand. If Empires wouldn't of given such a crappy presentation on its first release, then we wouldn't be in this position. Empires sounds like it contains a great base for an equally great modification, but it's just not there yet. This review isn't here to rate what MIGHT happen in the next few months of development - it's rating what we have now.
Hurray for the development team for attempting to release something great at this stage in development status, but get real; it's a beta. It's bound to have problems, and Empires is a prime example. Maybe they should have waited longer to fix the lag problems and found away around the vehicular transportation? I dunno, not my shot to call.
And Joe needs a break, look at his profile lately?
In all honesty, I didn't see any animations problems. Unless you're talking about the guns being all over place, but that's due to the lag. I tested it out by makeing my own server and the guns animations worked properly.
Harsh, but well-written.
i know what a review is for its for a fair opinion on a product or in this case mod
this reveiw is biast and his opinion is not realy worth the same as joes or a mod leader with some acomplishment
i am aware every on has a right to there opinion but when its like this it angers me and realy would make the devlopers feel bad
I'm going to finish this arguement and say that although they might have given it a great shot, if the developers cannot take constructive critisism in the form of a review, then they need to rethink their career and move elsewhere that doesn't involve the general public's consent.
in not constructive
its biast and uses bad jokes to be little the mods aspects
I too believe the reveiw could have been done a little better. The mod wasn't too terrible yet it wasn't too great. I found the " bad jokes" to be something unique, and uniquness is king in the modding industry. It may not have been a great idea to have gone into beta just yet but what they have done with building creation and vehicle customization really is something remarkable.
I think this is a great mod, one of the best to come out for hl2 so far. Some bugs to fix out but come on it's a beta
If this is the best mod to come out for halflife2 someone needs to get their ass in gear. I think the review hit the nail on the head. early release or not, you can't release an unfinished product, slap the word 'beta' on it and say its good to go. It definetly is a long ways off from anything worth gawking over and they definetly need a new animator pronto. It is a great concept (even though its been done before, even more so done in another mod Natural Selection) but it just was executed kind of poorly. However it could get better on final release. I don't remember anything in the mod standing out for me except crashing 2 times in a row on loading into a server and an infinite loop error message in console. I guess they just need to sit down and think of ways to polish this off and make it something worth playing.
I agree. I don't think that the review would make the developers feel bad, it must all be stuff they know (unless they have never actually played the mod). On the other hand, TKAzA making comments about the reviewer's mod is not contrustctive.
Me? I play Empires a bt online. It lags a whole lot. I'm going to try it out on LAN on monday and see what that is like. I look forward to seeing what this ends up as.
Ignoring these comments (as usual), great work on your article Psymon. Definitely not a bad article for your effort in this one, and was looking forward to read about this mod.
I think both sides of the argument are true (yes im fence sitting on this one). It is a beta so perfection cant be expected from it, although the team should have put some more effort into the beta. That brown/cream coloured gun doesnt look too good ( i cant really talk, i suck at modelling :P ) so maybe some more design problems should be sorted out. I havent had a chance to play it yet, im downloading now so ill have a chance to see it up and running. The mod itself is pretty damn revolutionary for the HL2 engine so that is a big plus. There arent too many rtsfps out there so i say the more the merrier.
Good job... Reborn's team watches you. Our project could use such coding if you don't mind...
Moddb.com
nice!
I'm with Chop. I think it's a perfectly fine article that hits the nail right where nails are supposed to be hit.
the mod is pretty much unplayable. lag is the worst i've ever seen since i tried to play Anarchy Online on a 333MGhz computer without a video card like 8 years ago. Buildings are mysterious grey blocks, guns are named things like SMG2, animations horrible and only like half-done, models are generally damn ugly. They don't need a new animator, they just need an animator (if they already have one, they ought to tell his parents that he's spending to much time on the computer and not enough writing his Treasure Island book report). Sounds are just ripped off HL2 single player... if you need any more just ask.
True, it is still in beta, but it's unplayable. I have a mod HL2 in development called Alien Massacre. It's just a command prompt and about 4 gigs worth of german pornography avis, but it's still in beta. It's a really good idea, the mod, it combines customized weapons with intricate RPG system and RTS aspects and FPS blah blah, but its unplayable, so what the hell does it matter how great of an idea it is.
if its unplayable how are people palying it? chew on that one
No it doesn't. You cannot join other people's squads in any way, shape or form. It does not work.
This is a good mod, you can have some fun with it, it's just that some of the features don't work yet and hinder the mod a bit. The lag on the other hand, is out of control and brings this down a lot.
I'm the new staff member. I just haven't been give my dot(s) yet.
Even if Psymon hadn't jumped at the chance of reviewing this mod, I wouldn't have been able to write up anything on it anyway. I've never been able to connect into a server without it crashing back to the desktop on me. Though that isn't enough evidence to substantiate all of Psymon's claims, it's a clear enough indication to me that there might be problems with the game, however awesomely refined it may or may not become on down the line.
I am looking forward to playing it when something stables comes out, though.
It is called hyperbole. Let me show you.
hy·per·bo·le ( P ) Pronunciation Key (h-pûrb-l)
n.
A figure of speech in which exaggeration is used for emphasis or effect, as in I could sleep for a year or This book weighs a ton.
psymon, the squad system WORKS !! believe me, I have played a lot of games where I was in a squad.
And this game is NOT unplayable, only when you play on servers with over 16 players. If the server is a bit proper, it can handle 14-16 people with ease and no lag. So first play the game some more before you get to your conclusion, thanks.
ok first thing: hit F then choose a squad menu, there you can create a squad, then aim for a player you chose to invite into a squad then open th squad menu again and there's Invite into squad (or something like that), then the player you chose receives a "Private" info about invitation and then he opens a squad menu and voila theres a new button - IT DOES WORK!!!
second thing: its a beta (as you already pointed out). which results in many things (like BSOD once and impossibility to even start up my PC again - left it that way for about an hour and its up again, so i guess something got overheated and then its my fault. most of the time i was a commander, people somehow liked me :DDDDDD). lagginess: bah try a better server with ping caping at 125ms, then its almost no problem most of the time (but it definitely needs some optimization). you cant blame them for missing aircraft factory. learn to bear with betas, if you cant wait for a later release or stick to hyped mods, your choice.
third thing: you havent mentioned the cruicial parts, like high level of customization for vehicles (weapons, armor, engine). there's really nice array of vehicle weapons (the vehicle set is ok, even though its not too original) ranging from long ranged artillery over depleted uranium MG shells to small nukes (harrrharrr). missed limited engineers ability to create things like turrets just by themselves (but thats not a big problem).
so what does this mod miss to be gold?? definitely most of the stuff you mentioned. infantry weapons do need some artistic touch (on the other hand, rusty vehicles of northern faction look quite nice, WWI style - dont take it literaly :)). animations do need a some degree mostly for infantry. artillery needs some better direction - cant find out how to watch a place spotted by a scout yet, wanted to find out today on their site, but it seems that its down. network optimization. tweaked economics (start is ok, but later on resources r not a problem anymore 15k-20k is an average). finished aircrafts (but i can live without it for quite some time, but it might be a really nice touch). some tweaks to commander view (ever got stuck into a cliff? even though you were looking from quite some height). apart from feasting on a quite established idea started with Natural Selection mod or Savage game if you wish (cant remember the first time it was used and which one of these was released first), it seems like a good start with many new ideas implemented into the game concept (remember that deep degree of customization and array of weapons?).
Carnifexje, the squad system DOESN'T WORK!! In the F menu, it only has an option to form or leave a squad. You cannot join anyone elses squad.
1) What the point of playing this mod with less than 16 players? NONE!
2) 95% of all servers do lag, and the ones that don't are full.
3) You can play the first ten minutes of a match without lag, until people can start spawning vehicles. Vehicles are what cause the lag.
Shhhh! I've played this mod more than enough to come to a conclusion.
oh and i forgot ranking + skills. and found out that the site just came up, seems like you cant use a shot taken by scout with your artillery, anyway it might be a great touch to open up a small Picture-In-Picture window to see the results (HL2 seems quite capable of such a thing)
Still doesn't change the fact that this is a terrible review: mainly because it's painfuly obvious that the review hopped on and played one or two rounds. How did this guy get a reviewing position?
There are no "plasma weapons" in Empires, he didn't even mention the differant play-modes. This is a ego-stoking trash review, not a good article of constructive criticism.
Exactly.
I think alotta people forget how mod releases used to be some time ago...remember the first CS versions? BAAAD (compared to later versions).
I don't think there should have been a review like this at all, yet. You guys have just become too accustomed to the recent "only one final release with patches"-politics in some mod teams...a bad developement btw...
Getting some early versions out for people to criticize and give suggestions on is a great thing and should be more appreciated by the lot of you that is complaining now... Stop complaining and get your @ss to their forums and tell them what you didn't like in an orderly fashion.
Mods aren't like full price games that only get one final release in a box, but need time to deleope - and releasing a beta is a part of that!!
What do you want anyway when you're complaining about a mod? Did you pay for it? I guess not...
Constructive criticism = good
Stupid bashing = bad
heh...man thats exactly what i wanted to hear and left that unsaid in my comment intentionally. i just wanted to know if any1 has a same point of view as i do. happily :) theres at least one :)).
btw theres a missing "then" in "if you cant then wait for a later release"
Thanks for the review. Thanks because it prompted a good debate after, the finer points of which tell me more about the mod than any review could. I won't play this version just yet, I don't have the time these days, but its one to watch for sure.
Planethalflife.com
It is a BETA.
Right now this mod is a hell of alot better then any other mod. This is the worst review I have ever read.
There horrid, its basically just a lot of diffrent gun jerks (back for firing, and a kinda weird up thing for the melle but hits)
I believe the review was fair, its a beta.. this review may, and probaly will help the guys making the mod fix problems the community has with it in the next release (especially the anims)
Over all it was good, i never tried playing it with more than like 1 more person as it was even lagging then O_O
Great mod. I'm totally addicted to it atm and considering its still in early stages it has huge potential. Gratz to the team keep it up!!!
That's the lag (I think). The guns are all over the place online, but I tried it in a server offline and they were fine.
Well, i thought the article was very well written, with many good insights into how the game works and what makes it good and what makes it bad. (Though i've personally found the squad system works fine...) However, as said before, the article seems to totally belittle the mod with little mention of the fact that it's a BETA. (In my opinion, there are no better BETAs out there).
-DaMaN
Why are people saying that there are no better betas out there. Ladies and gentlement, Hidden: Source is in beta and it has no issues. Me, I like this mod. I'm going to try it out on gigabit LAN soon and find out whether the lag is really that bad, because I found it unplayable online.
I think the review is fair, and that developers should take it onboard. I like the sound of this mod, the new players guide had me very pumped indeed. I look forward to seeing what it will be like in future times.
Stop bashing the review, the review serves its purpose.
The mod is NOT BAD! He gave it 70% for fuck sakes. Saying "It's a BETA" is just stupid. We all know it's a beta and we realize this. Slapping "Beta" at the end of a mod name doesn't change anything. All it does is say "This is what we have, tell us what you think and we will work on it some more." thats EXACTLY what Psymon did!
Calling this the most stable beta ever is just too stupid, you've got your head so far up your ass on that comment. I think the mod is intended for larger game, the fact that it cannot hold its own with more then 16 players just blows, that's a lot of points lost there. The maps are HUUUUGE!, whats the point of having huge maps if you only populate it with 16 players?!?!
The mod indeed isn't the most visually stimulating experience, the mod IS fun when you manage to play it for more then 5 lagless minutes. The lag is understandable, they only have so many testers.
The voice acting is rather funny, I laughed at it, I'm not putting down the artists at all though, they did what they had to with what they knew how to do.