Do any of these mods make Dune2\2000 worth playing for the non-Dune enthusiast?

[Sneakgab]

Ie: for somebody with no particular like or disdain of Dune, but who does have a like of strategy games.

When I owned my now long last copy of Dune 2000, I felt that the game was far too simplistic.

Moving away from Dune22000, would emp be worth re-installing with any of these mods?

The rest of this post's relevance is not too great but I shall keep it here anyway.

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I did not think emp too great, because the nature of the game seems to force one to immediately move all his forces to the spice or to attack. There is no sense in any other option. Why bother with defending your base only to have your harvesters destroyed or be completely destroyed (if you tried to split your forces) when you can take the spice and thus simultaneously destroy your opponent's harvesters (and thus, him) while defending your own? The worst that will happen is that you will both end up with your bases disabled, yours via destruction (and his too if you attacked instead of putting all your forces on the spices), and his via no spice (if you put your forces on the spice). I suspect that what most frequently occurs is that the forces clash in the spice, and whoever wins there wins (though, I hardly played this game since my old comp started having trouble with it for some reason. I think I may have gotten it working later, but my desire to play was reduced by the seemingly mystical size of my opponents armies, reducing any hopes of victory to absurdities. I often wonder about that. Was my connection broken or something? It's not like I don't know to build quickly, I have played SC and the like, and yet I remember that while I did not have a BO, [as is the case in most games I play), the disproportion of forces was nothing I had ever come close to seeing before)

Now, certainly I don't want to put up a forest of static defense, but neither do I wish to be forced to rush in every game, ending all matches in less than 5 minutes. Frankly, I question the existence of strategy in any game where the players are granted less than 5 minutes to think (remember that even if a ends in 5 minutes, the battling is carried out before that and the planning even before that).

HOWEVER, with all that said, there was something about emp units and battling that was quite classic. I think it was that the game did not use stupid hard counters like so many games. Flame tanks and inkvines may be dedicated anti-infantry units, but under the right circumstances infantry can easily destroy them with little to no losses (at least, a bunch of either). When I refer to hard counters look at something like Age Of Empires. Emp is somewhat the opposite of such silliness. What you do with your units seems to be very important. For example, used right a few feydakin can destroy many flame tanks. Used wrong they might all die only having killed one.

Thus, despite the unfortunate economic system in the game which forces both players to rush all their forces to an early clash, the gameplay mechanics are quite excellent, comparable even to the likes of Total War and Heroes (though, I think this one takes the cake for being most strategic).

Having played very few matches in Emperor, I realize that I may be wrong in all I have said, but the above is pretty much the feeling I currently have.

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[MrFlibble]

Out of all the remakes, I'd recommend Dune II The Maker, Dune Legacy and Dune 2: The Sleeper Has Awakened.

I agree with what you say about Emperor. I didn't like it too much, mostly for the straightforwardness of strategy imposed on the player, and SP missions mostly being just skirmish on relatively small maps.

BTW, this thread belongs to Other Dune Games IMO.