Dune II: The Building of a Dynasty

aka: Dune 2, Dune II, Dune II: Battle for Arrakis, Dune II: Der Kampf um Arrakis, Dune II: The Battle for Arrakis
Moby ID: 241
DOS Specs
Note: We may earn an affiliate commission on purchases made via eBay or Amazon links (prices updated 3/29 2:56 AM )

Description official descriptions

The planet Arrakis (also known as Dune for its sandy landscape) is the only place in the known universe where Melange (more commonly known as the Spice) can be found. The Spice is the basis of interstellar travel and thus the standard of the Imperial economy. To increase productivity, The Padishah Emperor has invited three powerful Houses (Harkonnen, Atreides, and Ordos) to compete against one another economically and bring up spice production. Competition among these houses begins peacefully but soon turns ugly as they battle each other with armed troops, advanced weaponry, and spies. The planet itself is also hostile, with dangerous sandworms inhabiting the spice fields.

Dune II is often considered the first mainstream modern real-time strategy game and established many conventions of the genre. Even though set in Frank Herbert's famous Dune universe, the game is only loosely connected to the plot of any of the books or the films based on them. Controlling either of the three Houses, the player must fight a number of battles against the other Houses. In the early levels, the goal is simply to earn a certain number of credits, while in the later missions, all enemies must be destroyed.

The single resource in the game is the Spice, which must be collected by harvesters. The spice is converted to credits in a refinery, which are then spent to construct additional buildings and units. There are two terrain types: buildings can only be constructed on stone, while the Spice is only found on the sand. However, units moving on sand attract the large sandworms of Dune, who are virtually indestructible and can swallow even large units whole. As levels progress, new and more advanced buildings and units are made available, including structures like a radar station, a repair facility, or defense turrets and, for units, various ground troops, light vehicles, and tanks. Each House can construct one unique special unit, and, after building a palace improvement, can unleash a unique palace effect.

After a mission is completed, the player can select the next mission on a map of Dune. This choice determines the layout of the next map to be played but has no effect on the overall campaign.

Spellings

  • Dune II: Битва Древних Династий - Russian spelling
  • הקרב על אראקיס :II חולית - Hebrew spelling
  • 沙丘魔堡II :王朝的建立 - Traditional Chinese spelling

Groups +

Screenshots

Promos

Credits (DOS version)

47 People (44 developers, 3 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 86% (based on 33 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.9 out of 5 (based on 178 ratings with 16 reviews)

Worth absolutely nothníng

The Good
Well, it was one of the first RTS around. It's got decent music. Actually the very best computer beeper sounds I've heard and the MIDI sound on real sound cards is not bad either.

The Bad
It's got horrible graphics. They are horrible by today's standards and they were horrible back then when the game got released. Heavy tanks looked mostly like deformed pigs. The computer AI is just about as intelligent as a brick - to counter this it cheats massively (for example, it can place it's buildings everywhere - even over your units). The units themselves are ridiculous. If a rocket tank that generally shoots in a 90 degree arc in front of it is the highest technology available, I'll start to cry. Game tactics/strategies is nonexistent. Might require a little more thinking than original command&conquer due to the fact that the missile turrets are so powerful. The amount of units and buildings is strictly limited (25 units/side,99 buildings/map), and especially on the last two levels you are pounding both limits frequently. You cannot control more than one unit at a time, making a coordinated attack impossible.

The Bottom Line
If you REALLY want to play every single RTS out there, then go for it. Otherwise, almost any RTS is better than this.

DOS · by Aapo Koivuniemi (41) · 2002

The game that started it all.

The Good
Although Dune II wasn't the first RTS game (preceded by Art of War, Herzog Zwei and few others), it was the breakthrough that made it all possible. Just like the Ford wasn't the first car, the assembly line Ford invented made it all possible.
The reason Dune II is the father of the modern RTS is because it featured so many innovations and improvements in just one game that it resembles its predecessors as much as you modern car resembles the first cars made. Some of Dune II features and innovations:

  • Dynamic background music. The music seamlessly changes to fit what is currently going on - whether its a fierce battle, a possible threat or simply peaceful gathering of resources. And the music is very good on your basic Adlib.
  • Truly beautiful VGA graphics. Every piece of graphics in Dune II was hand drawn, and the work was detailed. Although some of the earlier RTSs had some nice graphics - this is the first that actually utilized it so perfectly, since it had the technological edge of using the VGA's 256 colors.
  • A choice of who you played. You could choose between the three houses. And the choice mattered since every house had a few exclusive weapons and different technological evolvement rate during the game.
  • Simple resource management: Spice and Power. This paradigm remains true today in Tiberian sun and most other RTSs.
  • Strong emphasis on the real time element. You had to think fast, react fast and move fast. This was new.
  • Speech. The units spoke (if you had a soundcard with DAC), and let you know what happens with them. You also had someone to tell you what is happening: "construction complete", "enemy approaching, from the north!", "unit destroyed", "your base is under attack!" and so on. The speaking helper is taken for granted in today's games - but try to play without it once and see how you fare.

Dune II featured many other improvements, such as a mouse interface, the sandworm that eats mechanical units and the automatic turrets.

And it was fun. So much fun indeed. You'd play it for houres at a time, only stopping when you had to, then keep playing it again.

**The Bad**

  • The interface, although advanced for its time, is very annoying by today's standards. You have to select a unit, then choose an order, then click on the target. And you could only select one unit at a time, making army movement a tedious process. Although this interface was the best at the time, the developers should have thought if this problem during beta-testing.
  • The AI is pretty bad, even when compared to art of war, but that could be attributed to the limited amount of memory and CPU cycles available for the AI.
  • The map variety is limited, and once you play all 9 missions with all 3 houses, there is nothing new.


**The Bottom Line**
A great game. Fun to play, even by today's standards. If you like RTSs, you should play it, if only to see how it all started.

DOS · by Mickey Gabel (332) · 2000

The Godfather of the RTS Genre

The Good
Anyone whose first foray into the RTS genre was through Command & Conquer, Warcraft, Starcraft or Total Annihilation totally missed out on Dune II. Dune II defined the RTS genre as it is best-known today and was the most complex, innovative and (most importantly) playable RTS upon its initial release.

Conventions in unit control, unit production, base building, resource gathering and campaign structure have all evolved but still remain relatively unchanged in even games as contemporary as Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War.

Dune II's gameplay should be familiar to anyone who's ever played any post-Dune II RTS; the gameplay itself is rather basic but is wholly rewarding. Though the three factions (Atreides, Harkonnen & Ordos) are vastly similar with their basic units, subtle differences manage to distinguish the functions of each others' basic units and buildings enough to keep things interesting and replayable. In addition, the higher-level units which each house can produce differ vastly in their tactical and strategic purposes (which is more than could be said about Warcraft 2). When replaying the game under a different house, the knowledge gained while playing with their previous house can be used in their new unit choices.

Graphically, the game is colorful and units and buildings are all distinctly and effectively rendered. I've read complaints that this game hasn't graphically aged well, but please keep in mind that this game was considered stunning in 1992.

The sprites and animations all work well with the gameplay with animations and indicators that respond respectively with the gameplay. Little details such as billowing smoke from highly damaged units or the primitively yet effectively executed rippling sands to show movement of the Sandworms help immerse the player into the games atmosphere.

Dune II is a perfect example of converting an extensive, complex, and relatively unillustrated (visually, at least) world with a devoted following into an effective, immersive gaming experience. Westwood renders the Dune Universe with pure sci-fi aesthetics by combining smart designs with the visionary grandeur imparted by both Dune's novels and film. The splashscreens and cutscenes best exhibit this; each is rendered to a very high standard (considering the age of its release) and each provides unique character to their respective houses while giving the player a schematic close-up of the Dune tech.

The sound leaves a bit to be desired; it's mostly meepy floop sound effects unless you had a decent soundcard. But it's some of the best meepy floop sound you'll ever hear.

The Bad
Being such an early incarnation of the modern RTS, the game is not without its gameplay flaws. The enemy AI is just not up to snuff for certain tactics. Turtling is one of the tactics that the AI can't seem to overcome; once Turrets and Rocket Turrets a player simply as to wall their base in and crank out units. This aspects removes a large portion of the game's challenge in later levels, but it's mostly assuaged by the fact that it's a rather fun tactic to take on (considering the AI is the only one that suffers).

The AI also has a tendency to send pathetically small attack squads; against the average players' steadily growing attack/defense force, the AI's forces get crushed pretty easily. Again, another product of being an early RTS game; the AI does ramp it up towards the later levels though.

Unit obsolescence also runs rampant in Dune II; a lot of the earlier units effectively become useless once you have access to units even one tier above them. I found Heavy Troopers to never be worth building at any point in the game; I could simply gun them down with trikes en masse. Once I could build Quads, Trikes became useless. Once I could build Medium Tanks, Quads and everything below them became useless. Some units like the Heavy Tanks were totally useless since they were far outgunned by Rocket Tanks.

Missions don't really vary much; they're either "Collect X amount of Melange" or "Destroy Everything that's Not the Same Color as You". This flaw is again reconciled by the fact that the idea of more complex missions had not yet been introduced into the genre.

The Bottom Line
I don't expect many to seek out the original Dune II and to install it onto a dinosaur unless they really, really want to know what people were feelin' back in 1992. However, I do recommend to any RTS player worth his salt that he or she spend $10 for Dune 2000 to get a taste of it. So go out there and build your Dynasty.

DOS · by ET2600 (15) · 2005

[ View all 16 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Old third-party extras for Dune II (PC) MrFlibble (18144) Aug 29, 2012

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Dune II appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

AI

The computer cheats. The AI does not get unlimited money per se, and its economy can be drained. However there are several situations where the AI gets a money boost: first off, a little amount of credits is added whenever it gets a replacement harvester (this is also true for the player). Secondly, whenever an AI player's structure is destroyed, it seems to get some money back. It can build units without refineries.

Credits

A largely unknown but very curious feature in Dune II is that a small amount of credits is frequently subtracted from the player's budget, the amount directly proportional to the current power consumption in the player's base. In other words, the players pay for the power they use.

While many people have observed seemingly random "leaks" of credits while playing the game, the real reason was found by TrueBrain of OpenDUNE team. The full account can be found here.

Development

Westwood artist/designer Joseph Hewitt:

Dune II has long held the honor of being the first real-time strategy game. There has been some dispute to this claim with people pointing out some of Westwood's earlier titles such as BattleTech: The Crescent Hawks' Revenge and the previous title BattleTech: The Crescent Hawk's Inception. Other games like The Ancient Art of War have come up as even pre-dating those. I could also mention most of SSI's catalog of strategy games, some of which Westwood ported to the Amiga and Atari ST in their early days. The point is, those are turn-based strategy games (TBS) where you take turns moving units with your opponent(s). Dune II was an evolutionary step forward with "real-time" action. There were no longer any turns, everything happened in real time. Comparing turn-based strategy to real-time strategy is like comparing chess to hockey. Nothing wrong with either, but the pace and strategic thinking used in the two is quite different. This jump in evolution was so different from previous strategy games that phrases" turn-base" and "real-time" came in to being to separate them.

It would be unfair to not give credit where credit is due however. One of the things our industry has done from the beginning is building on the success of previous games. Taking what has come before, polishing it, adding something new and creating something new out of it. Dune II was no exception and was inspired by some other great games. A lot of the development and production side of the game was inspired by Populous and Sid Meier's Civilization, two games that were played quite a bit in the office. But the most credit should go to a little known Sega Genesis game we were playing in the office called, Herzog Zwei. Herzog Zwei can be viewed as a real-time game, but it isn't generally lauded as the first RTS because it isn't really the same type of game. Herzog Zwei was its own unique thing and feels more arcadey than a strategy game. The player isn't individually controlling all the units in Herzog Zwei, so much as controlling one unit that is kind of a transport director. Dune II, on the other hand, took all the elements of a traditional turn-based strategy game, large armies of units, added resource collection and base building, and had you manage them in real-time. This was quite different than the turn-based strategy games that it was born out of.

Editor

Dune II utilizes "PAK"-files, which are essentially several files archived in one. It is extremely easy to figure out the format and write a packer/unpacker. Therefore, an unofficial Dune II level editor was written as a third-party freeware program by an unknown fan in 1996. it can be downloaded from the Dune II: the Building of an Empire website.

Mentats

You can make a mentat blink or move its mouth by clicking on his eyes or lips, respectively. The same is true with the girl telling you about the houses at the beginning of the game.

Ordos

Out of the three playable Houses in Dune II, House Ordos is never mentioned in Franks Herbert's books. The development team borrowed the name and the herald of the Ordos from The Dune Encyclopedia, a third-party compilation of Dune related material that was approved by Frank Herbert.

Here's an account of this by Marc Cram:

I was a producer and designer for this project. The original idea was to make a game that captured the fun and imagination of those plastic army men. There were a couple of games out of Germany that were heading in that direction, but nothing that had all of the different equipment and abilities that we wanted to put into a game.

Virgin had the license to do Dune. They secretly gave to the project both to Westwood and a French company (cannot remember the name.) The French finished the game first, which was a 3D crawl game.

Our thoughts were that the story was too complex and rich to replicate in a video game. We decided that it would be best to take all of the fun elements in the game and create our own story.

I had read the books once and was a little confused as to all of the elements, but my friend Wesley (by the way, Wes is in another game. Eye of the Beholder I & II. The character's name is Wently Kelso and he is an apathetic archeologist, which fits the real Wesley's personality perfectly.) Anyway, Wesley was a big fan of the books and so I invited him to lunch at the Golden Nugget buffet.

Over a piece of salty roast beef, he pulls out the Dune Encyclopedia. He told me that the book was very rare and would not let me take it home. So on the back of a Keno pad I started writing down the profiles of all of the houses. (I think I still have the Keno pad).

Originally, I was going to use House X as one of the houses, but it seemed better as a resource. Also, living in Vegas, the House Ordos seemed like the Mafia. This appealed to me for some reason.

Like many other non-canonical Houses introduced in the Dune Encyclopedia, House Ordos bears the name of a real geographical location, suggesting it originates from Old Terra. House Ordos is only briefly mentioned in the Encyclopedia, so its background in the games was entirely created by the development team. While the Atreides and Harkonnen heralds in Dune II were taken from the Encyclopedia, the Ordos herald with the snake and the book was taken from another House, Wallach. Dune Encyclopedia describes the Ordos herald as crossed bones with a green ivy on golden background.

Patch

The patched game (v. 1.07) is incompatible with old saves, but a very nice feature is included: If you try loading an old save, the game will recognise which mission you were on and will simply restart it, meaning not all of your progress will be lost.

Super Dune 2

An unofficial add-on called Super Dune 2 was released by some hackers around 1994. This add-on changed the three original Houses to the previously unplayable Fremen, Sardaukar and the unused Mercenaries faction (which was apparently planned by the developers to own the Saboteur Ordos superweapon, but that was dropped in the PC and Amiga versions). The add-on featured more challenging missions, however, the game mechanics remained largely unaffected. Thus, the "new" factions all have similar tech trees (with all units but the Ordos Deviator and Ordos Raider Traike available), and the only difference is in Palace superweapons: the Fremen have Fremen reinforcements (Atreides weapon), the Sardaukar have the cluster missile (Harkonnen weapon), and the Mercenaries have the Ordos Saboteur. Also, Fremen have control over some of the sandworms on the maps.

The add-on also had a few bugs stemming from the fact that the "new" factions were never meant to be playable. The most noticeable is that the Mercenary and Sardaukar players are unable to properly lay out concrete blocks, which they can only placed adjacent to other structures, but not to other concrete blocks or walls. This limited base construction and layout, and also forced the player to spend credits on repairs of structures placed on incomplete concrete foundations.

Other bugs were of a more cosmetic nature. Territories conquered by Fremen and Mercenaries would become discoloured on the conquest map; the Mentat facial animations of Fremen and Sardaukar were all messed up because the proper coordinates for eye and mouth frames were never set in the game executable. The Mercenary Mentat would often appear with the wrong palette, as it uses a separate palette for the House introduction screen in the original game. Also, all new factions would get the Atreides victory cinematic when the game was completed.

Awards

  • Amiga Joker
    • Issue 02/1994 – #3 Best Strategical in 1993 (Readers' Vote)
  • Computer Gaming World
    • October 1993 (Issue #111) – Strategy Game of the Year
    • November 1996 (15th anniversary issue) - #70 in the “150 Best Games of All Time” list
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #30 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking

Information also contributed by Chentzilla, Henry Aloni, hydra9, Indra was here, Joseph Hewitt, Lev Epshteyn, Maw, MrFibble, PCGamer77 and Qlberts

Analytics

MobyPro Early Access

Upgrade to MobyPro to view research rankings!

Related Games

Dune: The Battle for Arrakis
Released 1994 on Genesis
Dune 2000
Released 1999 on PlayStation
Emperor: Battle for Dune
Released 2001 on Windows
Frank Herbert's Dune
Released 2001 on PlayStation 2, Windows
Elland: The Crystal Wars
Released 2022 on Windows
D.O.G: Fight For Your Life
Released 1997 on DOS, Windows
Dune
Released 1992 on DOS, Amiga, 1993 on SEGA CD
Dune 3 aneb Achtung! Die Kurve...
Released 1993 on Amiga, DOS
Gothic II
Released 2002 on Windows

Related Sites +

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 241
  • [ Please login / register to view all identifiers ]

Contribute

Are you familiar with this game? Help document and preserve this entry in video game history! If your contribution is approved, you will earn points and be credited as a contributor.

Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Tomer Gabel.

Amiga added by Famine3h. Acorn 32-bit added by Kabushi.

Additional contributors: xroox, PCGamer77, Ledmeister, Игги Друге, DarkDante, Crawly, Strangerhand, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, Nightson Blaze, Jiseng So, MrFlibble, FatherJack, Bart Smith.

Game added August 22, 1999. Last modified February 13, 2024.