Battlerealms 12th SW:BG 13th EE 14th if thats not bad and transparent anough it seems EE is shipping with a known command lag bug and balance wise battlerealms probably wasnt ready to go either at least thats what the forums seemed to suggest. Got the dates from MFO also since some of you loved the original so much There having a demo tourney for the new ahriman's gift.

Doug,

I have the final of EE. What's the command lag bug?

I've also been playing a late build of Battle Realms. What's the supposed balance issues?

-Tom

http://www.empireearth.cc/readtopic.asp?postingId=601537

Thats the post referring to the command lag bug. Though I think I made a mistake that post was on the 27th it went gold on the 28th I believe. So they may have remied the bug before it went for duplication I really messed up sorry.

As for battlerealms I'm pretty confused about that hole situation I was accepted into the first beta test. The biggest problem I knew of was the wolf clan werewolves could run across the entire map in seconds slaughter all the enemies peasants in about the same amount of time and you never needed to leave any troops for defense. And they were just to strong to boot especially with bite. Glass sword (serpent clan ability) seemed overpowered allowing a first tire unit to kill any unit of any tier though also killing himself. Alot of other little things like that as well.
Then there were issues with micromanagment your peasants would stop building a tower to go attack hut. Though I'm pretty sure they fixed that.

Now I know they were addressing all these issues but we never recieved the next version of the beta. So there's likely new problems.

It appears I was probably wrong about EE and I do know if some multiplayer balance issues are the only problems battlerealms is better off then most.

I sure hope Battlerealms is as cool as it looks. I think I'm going to have to buy it simply because the concept art for the game was so awsome.

I've played the demo for EE and I'm hopeful for it too. I was a little preturbed by the choices for what to include in the demo. I played through all the tutorials and thought I knew what I needed to know, but than I start up the first real scenario and get tossed into a war against Napolean. I had trouble translating all my newly aquired bronze-age combat skills to the Napoleanic age...

Brad Grenz

EE is a hybrid of Aok and Cossacks: European Wars, and many of Cossacks' resource paradigms and unit balances were used when the game moved past the eras covered traditionally by the Age games. Accordingly, the unit specs tell essentially nothing about the units purpose, since all the relavent info is hidden in 'vs.' counter-bonuses. Gun Cav beat Sword Cav. Sword Cav beat Gun Infantry (but not by a whole lot). Gun Infantry beat Sword Infantry and Gun Cav. Bombards have the most splash damage and are useful vs. massses. Elite Infantry (w/Gun Armor) beat Gun Infantry (obviously). Pike Infantry beat up Cavalry (if they survive to get there). Bronze Cannon have virtually no minimum range. The other one (forget what its called) kills buildings pretty well. This could be totally wrong, its just what i pulled from the demo.

The only difficult part of the demo is that last battle in the Napoleon Scen, and lack of a saved game makes it annoying long to replay. Basically, make a mass of both Cavalry types, Halbediers and upgraded whatemecallits, brit infantry i guess. Also be sure to build multiple towers as close as possible before engaging. Another cheese tactic is to build a settlement nearby, upgrade it by 'inserting' 5 vills. and then build 5 houses nearby in its radius of effect (the morale bonus mentioned in the training scenerios).

If im on the subject of EE, i have to point out that i feel its just plagerizing AoK sometimes, and more deliberately than merely standardized genre specific details. Much of the EE community, and most of the RTS gamers hired by SSS, are made up of ex-AoK players whom -hate- Ensemble with a fiery passion, feeling 'betrayed' by them because of their refusal (or MS's) to release a pre-expansion patch to correct some very detrimental imbalances, and have thus taken it upon themselves to 'best' ES at their own game. Many of ES's units had only sketchy historical basis; the Gothic "Huskarl" was they admitted the best they could do given the paucity of documentation, and so used a Germanicism of the Anglo-Saxon "House-Carls" of Harold at Hastings. The Cataphract was merely one of many Greek names given to heavily armored cavalry. Of course other like Chu-ko-nu did have real counterparts. But EE takes all these elements as givens, and you see Huskarls in service with the Goths as though there really was basis for them. I don't know, perhaps im reading too much into it. It just struck me as odd they wouldn't weed out factual errors unless they didn't realise they were wrong, or were just copying AoK to be blunt.