Goater24

I actually was playing this thing 280hz and the UI animations were really bad, really distracting, but I started to be able to ignore it. On my latest revisit, I was unable to figure out why suddenly Devastators weren't moving the way I had balanced it. Eventually I was looking at the DGVoodoo program I had installed on it. I'm not sure how the file was generated (because I couldn't find it in backup duplicated installation files) but editing dgvoodoo.cnf, there was a section for framerate. In there you can cap it to 60. The game might have been a 30fps game, I don't' really remember because when I owned the game as a kid, we didn't exactly have a good computer that could push performance like what you can do today. I do know those UI animations look a lot less ridiculous at 60fps. I still cap mine at 144, because I just wanted it smoother gameplay animations. The way the game dealt with speed, is what inspired me to mess with these rules. I noticed that at higher speeds the framerate was smoother. So my solution (the OP for this thread's solution) was to slow units down. Yes, the scripting happens faster. But I would also argue that the original balancing on this game was very.... first draft. Which is why I opted increase health pools on all buildings and units. So now battles aren't just everything blowing up instantly. And it helps a little bit with microing your units through some of the maze like terrain. I didn't touch costs or build times though, as that was something I attempted a few years ago, and it resulted in off world missions being basically impossible because I couldn't keep up with the AI. This current rebalance I have affects health pools, unit speeds, unit damage values, ranges. I've tested playing through each campaign on easy with it. Off world missions were doable. But, in order to get through Harkonnen's Geidi Prime mission, I had to resort to turning gamespeed down so I could do a more calculated rush, and I did have to rush. Turtling wasn't feasible. So it's just barely playable, and maybe a more skilled RTS player could work within those confines better. I agree about the gamespeed framerate decoupling, but more than anything, I just wish it was widescreen. I don't get why this is the least liked of the old Dune RTS, it has such amazing potential. It has the tab system introduced in RA2, which to me gives it a huge edge over Dune 2000 for me. Plus no need to put down concrete for everything. But the maps are kind of not that great, and balancing were sloppy. But that soundtrack, oh man that soundtrack. Anyway, sorry for wall of text. Thanks for the conversation on the game. I just feel like no one cares about this game anymore.

Sorry about necro and I guess double post? This is so odd. Last year I uploaded my rules and talked about how I made the Devastators fast. After seeing Dune Part 2 recently I decided to boot up these rules, but I noticed Devastators were quite slow. I remembered years ago not being able to make mech units walk faster. But I swear back when I worked on this, I had the Devastators moving really fast. Anybody have any idea how to make mech unit speeds faster? I've tried everything I can think of.

That's interesting. I have my carryall speed set to 6. Advanced is set to 10. Partially because I have my whole balanced designed around turning everything down really low, so I can turn the gamespeed up to like 6 so the gameplay feels more fluid. The only drawback of slowing the carryalls down that much is they kind of shake weird when carrying the harvesters. I haven't done any testing with that MinCarryTileDist parameter, but I guess I did interpret it as the the limit of how far they could travel without a carryall coming to pick them up. Because I'm pretty sure you can order them short distances without carryall intervention. Kind of like the tunneling APCs in C&C Tiberian Sun. You order one to move more locally and they roll to it, but if it's too far away, they go underground. I'll admit, some of my balances are kind of outside of what Westwood would have done, like I gave most units much faster turning speed, but I did it, because this game's maps tend to be very crowded, and units tend to break up and go wherever they want. I tried to make everyone slower and more responsive to work around that. I will admit, my most iffy rebalance, is I made the Devastator like really fast. But I did it because even with all the increased health pools, having it be slow meant it was never breaching my bases, they just weren't a threat. Then I thought, well the thing is modeled after a Ram, so why not make it a crazy charging Ram. It's honestly kind of terrifying now when they attack. I really wish this game got more attention. It needs a widescreen mod. It needs the same level of online support as other Legacy Westwood titles. I don't know how it's the least regarded Dune rts. If it was in widescreen and rebalanced in a smart way, it's easily superior to Dune 2000, or at least vanilla Dune 2000 where you didn't have unit queuing. It's a real shame that the Herbert estate just completely wrote off old titles. They probably don't even know how important Dune is to the RTS genre. Years ago, I found an old Emperor Battle For Dune promotional video with Louis Castle, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Y_HcuXIrZw ) talking about how EBFD had a co-op campaign. A feature I didn't even know the game had, and of course didn't have the internet to be able to take advantage of, back in the day. I only discovered it back when you could still play Emperor on XWIS servers. Unfortunately I was never able to get that feature to work. I always wished I could play the co-op campaign with a friend. It's another thing, where if we could just get some kind of modded version, like OpenRA, maybe that feature could finally be realized. Rules.txt

I know this game has an issue with the widescreen being cropped. That wouldn't even be an issue if the UI lined up properly. I was wondering, what would it take to get this thing into widescreen proper. Would someone need to modify the UI to match to a 16:9? I've opened some of the archive files, but haven't been able to figure out how to repack them. Not sure if that's where the solution would lie. It's just a shame this game hasn't gotten a proper widescreen hack.

I guess I never noticed. I'm pretty sure I would have increased refinery health pools. Maybe I don't notice it on mine because all the Carryalls are slower so maybe they never fill all three docking pads at once. I haven't messed with this value but at the top of rules.txt under General, there's a value: MinCarryTileDist=10 //carryall pickup harv I wonder if decreasing this would allow harvesters to move on their own more. It feels like the Carryall will pick them up depending on how far they gotta move.

Thanks for sharing yours. I was wondering, how do I use a .tib file? Is it like the rules.txt? I was also curious what you meant by refineries bugging out. One of the things I did in mine was decrease Carryall speeds as well. I might steal the docking pads don't give you harvesters or carryalls idea for my rules set, or at least try it. I wonder though, could a similar slowing of the tech advancement be achieved by making them more expensive and take equal time to build as refinery?

I see a ton of them going for $20 on Ebay if you're not concerned about having the big box or manual.

I saw your mod over on Moddb recently. I haven't tried it yet, but I just want to say thank you for completing a mod. It's a shame this game's modding scene isn't bigger. It's just great to see someone else still sees the potential in it.

Sorry to necropost, but I don't know anywhere else more relevant to discuss this than this topic on this website. Emperor is such an underrated game that needs a few things done to it to really make it work better. I'm partially posting to find out of the original topic creator has ever posted their mod. I similarly got inspired to do an overhaul on the balance back in 2019. I think I posted about it here or on another Dune mod site. I ended up doing something similar to this guy. I recognized that game speed and framerate were tied. The quirks of that were very apparent when infantry turned. I made every unit slower. I gave different types of infantry have different walk speeds. I slowed everything down so that I could take the game from my default of 5 speed, up to 7. Now the game looks more fluid, and is still slightly slowed down. I doubled and sometimes tripled health pools for all units and buildings. Adjusted build times. I gave almost everything much snappier turn radius. So the game is hopefully smoother to micro with. I originally was designing it to improve the campaign. The problem I run into is when you're in a really scripted mission. Since the game is running at a higher speed, mission scripts happen sooner, and since the units are slower, it takes longer to get through the a level relative to the scripting. It's manageable when you have control over income, like on Arrakis, but when you go off world you run into trouble. I actually gave up on the mod back in 2019 because I hit the Harkonnen Brother vs Brother mission. My income couldn't keep up with the amount of units and nukes they slammed me with. I decided to come back to the mod this week, years later, and I was on Ordos off world mission with the Tleilaxu attacks and I remembered that was another thing my rebalance made more difficult. The Teilaxu with increased health pools simply were too difficult. My solution this time was to make them the exception. Gave leeches and the melee units health more on par with vanilla infantry. I figure it's a fair trade. Their units have the ability to basically death sentence mine. The rules.txt has entries for increasing spice income on offworld missions, but so far I don't fully understands how to increase it or what the numbers represent. I wish there was a way to mod the campaign so you had to capture every territory. As far as EBFD modding, it seems the best we have is editing rules, which it needs desperately. It's a shame this is the least regarded Dune RTS, because it could be the best if it were properly rebalanced and given widescreen. It's certainly my favorite. I'm attaching my rules.txt as of today if anyone is interested. As far as I know it has to go inside a "Models " folder in your "Data" folder in the install directory. I had to make the Models folder. Rules.txt

Thanks for the reply. I just wanted to be clear, though, do you mean that co-op doesn't work at all anymore, even on XWIS? We can get on, but when we start it up, it says "connecting" and then the games just lock up completely. I've been looking all over the internet to see if there's a solution. I wasn't able to get tunngle to work, and then I found out co-op doesn't work through Lan, so I didn't do hamachi. This game was ahead of its time in so many ways.

Hi, First off, I love this game. Well I was surprised when last night I just discovered this game has co-op campaign support. So I've been looking up online to find out how to get it to work. A buddy of mine and I registered in XWIS, and logged in. We got on the server, but every time we started the campaign the "connecting" screen just locks up, and so does the whole computer, we had to reboot entirely because our mouses wouldn't work. We both have updated to patch 1.09, and I'm not sure what to do. I've looked all over, but seeing as how much of the info is over 6 years old, I'm at a loss. Are the XWIS servers still up, or is there a better server to do co-op campaign, any info would be awesome, thanks