you can say what you want but to os star wars Galactic Battlegrounds and it exspansion wil always be part of old age of empire and commander of conqueror family games
Galactic Battlegrounds is probably the second game that I've played the most time in my life after RuneScape, and despite it not being my favorite RTS (that being Kane's Wrath), the fact that I can create entire maps and modify unit traits using triggers thanks to the game editor makes this game endless fun. I can create my own campaigns, make Jedis be actual one man armies, create an alternate storyline in the form of a selfmade campaign. Expanding fronts gives life to a 20+ year old game and that's insane when you think about it. Do Command and Conquer Combined Arms next ❤
I wouldn't be surprised if they end up doing what they did with AoE1, and just re-making the whole game into AoE2 directly as a expansion. Potentially even with a faction or 2 making it into the main multiplayer like Rome did. Imagine fighting the Goth horde with a line of stormtroopers, and starting to sweat as the front of the horde inches closer and closer to your firing line :V
Force Commander holds a special place in my heart. It was the first boxed game I ever got. While it has its quirks, it kind of defined my initial RTS experience along with Red Alert and Original War.
@@DemonEmbarasser it was, in many ways actually. Very true. But it is one of these strange cases when that was one of the first things you experienced and tend to retrospectively look at with rosy eyes. Even though it truly was a really badly made game. It works a bit differently when you have a little to compare to...I still appreciate it exists and would be thrilled if someone took those concepts and build up on them further. EaW was close to that, but not entirely.
@@sedlja4605 I remember launching it the first time. And shits just standing there like wtf are you supposed to do? So unclear and the graphics were poop. Battlegrounds still holds up til this day
@@DemonEmbarasser Ye, that's fair. Personally I tried it before I tried GB, so without that frame reference, and no other 3D RTS to compare to it was lots of fun. I got a demo on a demo disc that came with my first desktop and still played the hell out of it. And bought the box copy later with pocket cash. It was a lot of money back then.
I really love how these games never die. Literally every time I play a game from my childhood it has changed in a good way. It's like the content for each game is inexhaustible. Just the other day I booted up mafia 2001, and I found a freaking bus. An actual drivable bus. True, it was from a mod from like 6 years ago, but it was a massively pleasant surprise.
Ive been singing the praises of this mod for years, Im so so glad more people are finding out about it, and that the devs are continually providing updates for it
I know right? I love it too. I think i actually found out about Battlegrounds via the mod itself in general. Before that i never even knew that Star Wars had an RTS made in the same engine as AoE. It was a pleasant surprise.
Despite being similar to aoe2 and being technically outdated even at release I must say I loved the base game as a kid. It was a easy choice since I loved both rts games and star wars. As a kid I found other games like aoe2/3 to be dry and preferred the fantasy of either star wars or aom to be more exciting. This games campaign from what I remember was actually pretty good it also has enough differences from aoe2 like air units and such that I would recommend it. Maybe I should go back and try this mod.
re:farm reseeding - it doesn't happen _completely_ automatically, but you _can_ queue up reseeding in the Food Center, which is a feature ported over from AoE2: The Conquerors. Funnily enough, for a long time the only version of AoE2 I had was the unpatched base game, which didn't even have that, you had to manually reseed every farm every time, so having the queue at all in SWBG felt very convenient. It does mean you're putting down a lot of carbon up front that you can't access unless you unqueue reseeding, so the modern fully automatic reseeding is definitely better, but it's better than nothing.
You're right, yeah I could've worded that better. I know you can queue but just not set and forget. I was playing 1.0 AOE2 recently on my old PC and the farm reseeding every time was killing me man!
I think you've sold me on this game/mod. Going to look into it when I get home from work. The number of distinct factions sounds especially impressive.
Something very important for you Zade! You said that you haven't known StarCraft before and you're very excited to experience it. Indeed it is the world's leading RTS for a reason. But it's very important that you start with Starcraft 1 and not Starcraft 2. The RTS polling you did may have given Startcraft 2 a high score, and it's campagin might be great, but it wasn't true when you said Starcraft 2 has a good story. It does not. It's story is garbage. But Starcraft 1 has the best story of any RTS, and much of gaming in my opinion. Don't spoil it by doing SC2 first!
WoL was fine for me but i could see the Kerrigan w**k fest coming so i never got the other two parts that and the fact that they decided to split the game up into three parts for full price each rubbed me the wrong way.
I used to play the hell out of Galactic Battlegrounds back in the day, so much that the disc literally disintegrated inside the CD-ROM drive. It's an exciting thought to get back into it with this awesome mod!
The engine holds up and is timeless imo. Early 3D rts games look hideous, and even some current ones overdo the effects and are a hard to read mess. The beautiful spite art is sharp and bright and easy to tell stuff apart.
That's what I think too. I love Isometric games much more than the early 3d games. The early 3d games have aged very badly in most cases, super low quality textures, deformed looking 3d models, lack of details like grass and so on. I will definitely prefer clean isometric games over early 3d games at any point in time.
Ive just found your channel and finished binging your dawn of war retrospectives and youve also done a SWGB video?! I play this game every month since I first started playing it in 2004! earned a new sub!
I feel disappointed that Galactic Battlegrounds doesn't have an eSports league like Age of Empires II does. It's ironic considering that Red Bull (which hosts the Wololo Cups) had Star Wars livery for its F1 team, complete with the pit crew dressed as Stormtroopers, for the 2005 Monaco GP.
there is a very small MP community, it doesn't help that voobly (something aoe2 has more or less moved on from) is required to play it. I wish one of the bigger aoe2 community members would notice it, I feel it would fit them better than aoe4 or aom
One dream game I've had is just Star Wars: Empire at War but "Galactic Battlegrounds" for Land battles. Although it might get too involved/lengthy at that point, but I think the idea still stands.
I have been playing SWGB ever since it came out. Sure I have had even long periods of time when I didnt touch the game but I always keep going back to it. Ever since EF came out, there is just no other way for me to play it anymore. It is absolutely necessary for me to have it. One of my favorite mods, ever.
Expanding Fronts is to SWGB what The Forgotten Empires mod was to the original Age of Empires 2 game, it's pretty good and I've been playing it on and off against the AI and it gets pretty enjoyable despite it's shortcomings. So a side note, i bought SWGB on GOG since it has always worked fine out of the box so my mod install has been super stable, if you get crashes to desktop and weird glitches like it happened to Zade try out the GOG version since it is as cheap as the steam version, sometimes it gets even cheaper.
The digital releases of SWGB are essentially the same. Not one version is going to run better for someone. Rather, people have issues from different configurations on their PC. Most commonly, people experience issues with full screen instead of windowed mode and some people run into issues when they install the game/mod somewhere in Program Files instead of within their User folder.
I played a ton of GB back in the day i loved it and while it may have looked like AoE it felt different enough to be its own thing. On a side note its nice to get AoE 1 in two's engine which is what we AoE 1 fans just wanted in the first place so i hope someday to get GB updated.
I played this game all the time as a kid, I just reinstalled it a couple days ago and I had no idea this existed. I know exactly what I’m doing the second I get home from work
9:22 Yes you can setup farm auto reseeding on Galactic Battlegrounds, just go to the farm "factory"(the one with red crap on it) and you can queue the reseeding man...
@@Zade_95 If I may interject - that was actually a design decision, as well. The team wanted players to keep tabs on their bases and farms and to keep the mechanical complexity of the game, staying true to how the game played 20 years ago, so it's one of the reasons why these automation QOL changes weren't added to EF. Though I reckon I could help make an argument to have it as an option in the launcher, since it's something many of the players and members of the community are asking for. Hmmm...
Farm auto-reseeding exists (kind of) in the base game, you just have to queue them in the food processing centre. Would seem odd if the mod had removed this feature.
i remember when i first played this way back then, i wondered how the droids used food. Looking through the manual to look for the lore, actually finding it was really cool, and idk, it made sense to me at the time. you use the food to feed the maintenance crews who man your droid factories. they need lunch breaks for every droid that gets made, there's just hundreds of them that rotate on 5 min shifts 🤣
I so wished an expansion for ROTS campaigns would be released too in 2005, I wouldve been perfectly happy with just that, dont care for the later prequel crap.
You know, it would be hilarious if someone could mod the game to actually do multiplayer with Age of Empires. Imagine trying to send trebuchets against blasters!
When I was a kid, I played this game everyday, it was my favourite rts! I even learned how to mod Just so I could have more reasons to play this game, it's a gem. But even with my nostalgia goggles on, I agree that it hasn't aged very well.
Regarding AOE2 DE I went through the exact same thing when I tried to play this game recently.. AOE2 DE's modern features are incredibly good and I find it's really hard to readjust when playing this.
I rmb playing this or seeing my brothers play it when I was in the first grade, maybe even before in kindergarten. The UI (esp the map) and the graphics were imprinted into my brain. I obviously didn't know the name of the game, but I could always recognize it whenever I see screenshots of it.
That's neat. I bought Galactic Battlegrounds on Steam a few years back but it wouldn't even launch, couldn't find out what the issue was, so I just requested a refund. I've been tempted again since, but then just don't really want to risk buying it again only to refund again. REGARDLESS, thanks for tipping me off about a C&C Generals mod! Will definitely be scoping that.
I would put it like this: Galactic Battlegrounds isn't a reskin of Age of Empires, rather it's a Star Wars game made to play like Age of Empires. There are so many smaller changes to the AoE "meta" that it comes off fundamentally different. Blasters grenades and AA missile troopers instead of swordsmen or archers, the addition of aircraft, buildings needing power, shields, etc; it all makes the game play out very differently despite being played in fundamentally the same way. Which is why I love both games, since each one does things a little different, just like the rest of the Age franchise. Except Age 1, that one's just too painful to play😂
immediately went for my cds and popped them in almost done downloading the mod too yep its battlegrounds time (man i miss the scholastic bookfair, where i originally got the game)
I remember back in the day when I found out about the game, and it was because of a mod that changed the OG AOE2, and then I found out it was a completly different game... Maybe, it could be done with AOE 2 DE... with a little bit of 3d modeling for the buildings and units...
I genuinely liked force commander, it was clunky as all get out, but it was a lot of fun, especially when I figured out the key commands on how to capture buildings, since the AI LOOOOOOOOOVED TO DO THAT.
Now I can explain why droid factions would require housing and food actually it's for the workers the workers who are building the droids the genotians and whoever is working on Droid Manufacturing cuz there has to be also other humanoids would probably require food and drinking substance because even though you can make things automated you're still always going to need at least a small Skeleton Crew to make up the workforce and to build the droids this is actually why you actually have repair genotians who would at one point had been walking around and repairing the droids the builders who build the shelters would have been the ones using the shelters Plus those shelters could also represent charging stations for the droids as you would notice back in one of the episodes from the Clone Wars Circa 2009 one of the droids would complain about needing to charge before eventually collapsing as if the droids ran out of power your shit out of luck the shelter's probably represent areas to charge also you are going to require shelter for workers as well this is probably why they have the shelter mechanics and the food mechanics even if they never thought about it as clearly as I have
I did not know that there was mod D: Hmm... time to download the game and see it for myself. Also, maybe this might not be an RTS game, but I've been wishing for Black and White to be released on Steam. Maybe a talk about it here and there might give Microsoft some nudge XD, especially since Starfield got on the positive side.
Galactic Battlegrounds was the very first video game I ever played. I literally played it until the cd shattered inside my parents computer (and then I got another copy from a friend and kept playing). The only thing holding back the Expanding Fronts mod for me was the AI. I found that the old AI simply couldn’t figure out the new civs and maps, and most of the time it would just build hundreds of buildings, but not a single military unit. Since the AI is trash, and multiplayer is near impossible, it’s sadly not worth playing the game. What’s an RTS game without an opponent?
i remember the last time i tried to play Galatic Battlegrounds i was irritatetd by the music. it was too loud if i remember correctly. have they fixed it?
I agree that it's mechanically more interesting than AoE2. I think the only area it suffers compared to AoE2 is the visual quirks of the engine and Star Wars don't mix well. Something always felt extremely wrong when X wings and AT-ATs do a 180 turn with no animation at all in a split second. On launch it was insanely jarring and off putting but after 20 years I'm just so used to it.
