Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds

aka: SWGB, Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds
Moby ID: 5332
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

The destiny of a galaxy hangs in the balance, and you're in command. Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds lets you lead Star Wars armies to victory in intense real-time strategy clashes. Enter the fray as the Galactic Empire, Rebel Alliance, Trade Federation, Wookiees, and other civilizations or organizations in campaigns that will determine the final outcome of the Galactic Civil War.

Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds is an epic real-time strategy set against a backdrop of the entire Star Wars saga. The conflicts involve six key civilizations: Galactic Empire, Rebel Alliance, Wookiees, Gungans, Royal Naboo, and the Trade Federation. Execute your campaign over land, sea, and air with more than 300 different units and structures in single-player campaigns, skirmishes, and multiplayer battles.

Combat arenas extend from interstellar asteroids and aerial encounters to submerged cities and ground battles. Deploy vast legions of units into battle--up to 200 per side--with groups that include bounty hunters, Jedi Knights, stormtroopers, X-Wings, AT-ATs, snowspeeders, AT-STs, Wookiee Kas tanks, and droids. Manage your resources and integrate the power of upgradable technology into your strategy, such as Wookiee ingenuity, advanced Gungan biotechnology, and Jedi stamina. Each technology level brings new wonders and new forces. Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds features accessible gameplay built upon the familiar RTS engine adapted from Ensemble's popular Age of Empires series. Use the scenario editor to create custom single or multiplayer battlegrounds with virtually any Star Wars units and settings.

Spellings

  • ꘟēƒå¤§ęˆ˜é“¶ę²³ęˆ˜åœŗ - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

230 People (227 developers, 3 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 72% (based on 29 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.6 out of 5 (based on 34 ratings with 5 reviews)

Star Wars version of Age of Empires, and that's a good thing

The Good
Unlike the previous Star Wars based RTSs, (Rebellion & Force Commander) SW:GB is a traditional isometric view; gather resources; build a base; build an army; blow the enemy to scrap game. In short, it doesn't try to be overly ambitious, and focuses instead on making a fun real time strategy game in the Star Wars universe based on the Age of Empires II engine.

One real strength that AOE has passed on to SW:GB is the multitudes of research possibilities. Most combat units have around 5 upgrades, thus your Stormtrooper may be stronger or weaker versus an opponent's depending on the amount of resources and time you've spent on making him all that he can be. Furthermore, each unit has armor that protects it from different types of assault, so a siege unit may be all but impervious to blaster fire, but melee attacks are lethal. This creates battles that aren't comprised of only "Big guns" but instead encourages armies of varied units for maximum efficiency.

My favorite aspect of the game is the bonus missions. After you complete each campaign for a certain race, you are rewarded with a historical recreation of a battle from Star Wars lore. So far my favorite has been the Trade Federation's, which allows you to wage war on the Gungans as in Episode I, but this time the Battle Droid's control-ship wasn't destroyed. Needless to say, chaos and utter destruction ensues as your mechanized armies lay waste to those salmon colored swine.

There is more to say, but nobody wants to read it, so I'll just highlight: Six races to play; Battle of Hoth; you can win by controlling Jedi Holocrons, building and protecting a monument, reaching a specific score, or by destroying the enemy entirely; random multiplayer maps; map/scenario editor included.

The Bad
All six races are very similar, each having their different versions of the same basic unit. It's true that the Empire's basic starfighter is weaker than the Rebellion's, but many of the naval units are exactly the same on each side, just different art. Every RTS doesn't have to be like StarCraft, but they should at least aspire to have the same kind of difference between races.

My real complaint is with the Wookies. I would have expected them to be different than all the other races, yet there they are, with all the same types of buildings and all the same kinds of weapons. Granted they are a civilization similar to any other race, and their home planet is an elusive one, thus little is known about how they fight their wars, but I wasn't expecting to see anything similar to a tank, or airborne fighters.

The Bottom Line
Great Star Wars strategy game. If you like Age of Empires, and you like Star Wars, it'd be hard not to like Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds

Windows · by MA17 (252) · 2001

I've got a good feeling about this.

The Good
When it was decided to make a real-time strategy game set in the Star Wars Universe, Lucasarts had the bold vision to use a 3D engine, let the player switch viewpoints to experience the action firsthand, and do away with conventional resource harvesting for a point-based system. Unfortunately the game, Force Commander, was hammered for having a bad interface, poor controls, an unwieldy camera system, and uninspiring graphics. As a result, their second foray, Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, is a completely conventional RTS game basically modifying Age of Empires II for the Star Wars Universe.

After a well edited, but grainy, montage of famous Star Wars battles, the player has the option to choose one of six race-based campaigns (including a tutorial level narrated by Qui-Gon Jinn). Each campaign has around seven missions: usually six of which offer a loosely tied together narrative and then one or two bonus or challenge missions. The races, for want of a better term, offered are the: Trade Federation, Gungans, Empire, Rebels, and the Wookies.

Missions have variable objectives ranging from the typical base-building, enemy-crushing ones to ones where you have limited numbers of troops to complete a series of tasks or ones where you need to accomplish certain objectives in a limited amount of time. Some missions nicely fill-in the blanks in the Star Wars history, like what happened after the Death Star was destroyed above Yavin IV while others expand on side remarks, such as the Trade Federation mission where the objective is to disable Nabooā€™s communication array.

SWGB does have resource management (food, carbon, nova crystals, and ore), but there are at least five ways to get food, carbon is plentiful and nova and ore can be found. You spend the harvested resources to buy more workers, buildings, units, etc. Once you have certain levels of resources and buildings, you can then increase your technology level (up to level 4). Each level allows more upgrades, from studying the latest in armor design or a more efficient way to harvest carbon.

Each race has equivalent buildings and units, but the manual hints that there is some balancingā€”for instance, the Rebels have better aircraft than the Empire and the Trade Federation have better troops than the Naboo. I found in SWGB, more than in most RTS games, that it is important to balance your armies. Aircraft will need support from the ground to take out anti-aircraft turrets, naval units should have anti-air support, and ground troops will need to support your artillery. For the most part, thereā€™s no tank rushing here. Artificial intelligence is mostly good, but I think that itā€™s more scripted (cued by certain events or time) than off the cuff.

Graphics are functional (see below) but each race has a definite look to it. Sounds are lifted from Ben Burttā€™s archive and the score is a nice mix of John Williamsā€™s familiar themes. Voice acting isā€¦ good. Hero units arenā€™t voiced as convincingly as the other ingame units but the campaign narrators are pretty good.

Not really sure where this should go, but on certain levels it pays to cheat a bit. Youā€™ll find Mara Jade observing Vaderā€™s activities, a ripple in time and space that connects Kashyyyk to Tatooine, and more.

The Bad
I really enjoyed the first 75% of the game. After that, the repetition set in. Itā€™s nice that SWGB offers so many races, but in every campaign, the early levels have a tech level cap while the later (or last) levels let you use the full potential of the race. After a while, starting from scratch really bothered me. I came to a point where I said, either I can keep playing ā€œmore of the sameā€ or I can move on to another game.

Mission difficulty is all over the place. Sure there are three difficulty levels for the game itself, but within each race thereā€™s no progression of difficulty, so the level of challenge varies.

Iā€™m not sure how much I can fault the gameā€™s graphics. They are definitely functional rather than beautiful, but the game is limited by its 2D isometric view. It isnā€™t a game where snowspeeders fly under AT-ATs, tripping them with tow cables. Rather the snowspeeders hover next to AT-ATs and pummel them with laser blasts. Likewise, you wonā€™t see TIE Fighters chasing X-Wings or vice versa.

Final quibbles: carbon from trees? Tauntauns on Bespin? After Darth Vader says, ā€œNow Iā€™m the Master,ā€ being told he canā€™t convert a building because heā€™s not a master. Hero units you have to hide away so they wonā€™t get killed. Tauntauns in space?

The Bottom Line
With Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, you get six campaigns, over forty missions, maybe 80+ hours of gameplay, and a fun and well-supported multiplayer game.

You also get average graphics and much repetition.

In the end, itā€™s worth it. I would recommend this game and playing it in short bursts rather than marathon sessions. You get a lot of value for your money.

Windows · by Terrence Bosky (5397) · 2003

Better then any previous Star Wars RTS

The Good
I'm a fan of Star Wars (I'm sure you are all aware of that now) and I'm also a fan of Age of Empires. So I was expecting big things from this after it was announced a while back.

I'm glad to say, that after a few weeks of playing, it's a very clean package, with everything a Star Wars fan could want. A chance to lead the Rebellion and the Imperial march. Recreations of the movies most important scenes (like the battle of hoth) thanks to the multiplayer options. And, what I believe is the most important of all: An easy way to kill Jar Jar over, and over, and over, and over ......

Where was I. Oh yes. GB is fun for all the above reasons. The single player campaign's are actually very well put together. Similar to AoE they go by the timeline. So the you will start with the battle for Naboo and work your way through to the Battle of Endor.

And since its AoE all over again, controlling each unit and maintaining each area of the game is very easy indeed. It helps greatly if you have played AoE before. Even then, newcomers will find things simple to accomplish at first, then gradually increase in difficulty.

The Bad
Although its an easy game to get into, and there is plenty to do, its still AoE. And the fact that the graphics and gameplay are basically the same won't help the cause for those looking for something new. I did enjoy playing as each race in the galaxy that I love, but I found it wasn't a real challenge thanks to my many days with AoE.

The thing that hurt the most was the graphics. AoE was never a marvel to look at. Simple, yes, but nothing compared to say Battle Realms. Here's the killer though. Ensemble studios are working on Age of Mythology (i.e. AoE3), and so far the screenshots look very good indeed. The question is, why wasn't the same graphical engine used for this. Surely some of the new techniques in the engine could have been tweaked in.

The only other problem I found came from the AI. At times some troops will find themselves stuck at bad times during a fight, meaning I had to spend hard earned money to replace someone I shouldn't have had to replace.

The Bottom Line
As a whole. Galactic Battlegrounds is a solid title that is hard not to like. But there is nothing here that will make it a huge title for everyone to sit up and look at, since AoM, Empire Earth and Battle Realms has this covered.

Still, it's always good to log on and relive some of the best moments of the movies with pals. And a laugh is always had with Jar Jar (not of the movie kind!)

Windows · by Kartanym (12418) · 2001

[ View all 5 player reviews ]

Trivia

Cast

Chewie's father, Attichuck (featured in the tutorial campaign), made his debut in 1978's infamous Star Wars Holiday Special. Attichuck's nickname is Itchy and he was played by Paul Gate.

Online servers

The game's online servers (which were hosted on MSN Gaming Zone) were shut down on 19 June 2006 in the wake of MSN Games' shift from "CD-ROM matchmaking service" to casual online games.

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Related Sites +

  • Conquer Planets
    An Apple Games article about the Macintosh version of Galactic Battlegrounds, with commentary being provided by PR & Media Director Amy Torres (May, 2002).
  • Q&A: LucasArts' Scot Brew on Gladius
    interview with Scot Brew, senior technical art director at LucasArts

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  • MobyGames ID: 5332
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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by NeoMoose.

Macintosh added by Corn Popper.

Additional contributors: Terrence Bosky, Unicorn Lynx, Dan K, Zeppin, Cantillon, Plok.

Game added November 11, 2001. Last modified March 22, 2024.