STAR WARS™ Galactic Battlegrounds Saga

Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds is a RTS game developed using the Genie engine, the core of both Age of Empires I and II. The gameplay is similar to AoE II but with some twists: units can use stealth, buildings require power (or they'll work at 25% speed), shield generators, jedi instead of monks (and bounty hunters, a counter-jedi unit) and aircraft (and ground counter-units for those too). Music is nice, a mix of the soundtrack from the original trilogy and Episode I (no music from Ep. II, why not GOG?). Graphics are not as beautiful as Age of Kings and look dated by 2001 standards; you get used to them quickly, however. Also, since the game is based on Age of Kings, you can only set as resolutions 800x600, 1024x768 and 1280x1024. The game itself doesn't feel much like Star Wars: gathering Age of Empires-like resources; floating aircraft (as other units, stays still in mid-air unless you order it to move, and stops again to fire). The campaigns contribute positively to the experience, but not enough to be immersive. About bugs and GOG fixes on them: - The typical pallete glitch from older DirectX games is fixed. - The music plays from an OGG file during gameplay (no CD music anymore) but it doesn't loop; you either have to Alt-tab out and back, or mute and unmute the music in-game to make it play again. - Clone Campaigns (original, retail) messes up with the AI in vanilla Campaigns. The GOG version does not fix this, but it still includes the Battlegrounds.exe (unpatched) which is unaffected. It won't play music, though. - No widescreen support, as adding it would require creating new graphics and patching. The AI issue is something critical which almost made me use GOG's money back guarantee. Either this bug should be fixed (unlikely) or a shortcut to the vanilla executable should be added including the pallete glitch patch and the new source for music. It made me waste a few hours finding out what was wrong, and ultimately why I only give it 3 stars.

I have lots of fun with this game and think it is a great deal for its price but i do have a few complaints. First of all, artillery units ammo moves very slowly (exept for the gunguns artillery) and makes them very inaffective. Secondly, the different factions units have no differance, the only thing seperating the factions is the look of the units and each have 1 unit of thier own. Despite these complaints,i enjoyed the game, but advise that yohu should only get it if you are willing to give it a significant amount of effort, because it is quite complicated compared to some other rts games like starcraft.

I love this game and prefer it to Age of Empires 2 actually. The star wars universe is just cooler and this kind of RTS works better with less melee unit types and more ranged unit types because they don't all get messed up in formations and collisions as much as AoE2. My main gripe is still the AI and moving commands. If your guys are shooting an enemy and it dies and you click a new one they won't all attack from position. They'll try to reform and then shoot. Kind of stupid and most times you're better off attack-moving and not concentrating fire on a target but letting your units free aim. Just like AoE2 some of the missions are rather stupid and killing buildings is really hard, but the open battles are a lot of fun.

Hi this is one of my childhood rts i played with my bro all the time! Its absolutly cool AOE in the Star Wars Universe, it has all the Sounds from the Universe you love and know, all the Lore with Challenging Ai. I had the Problem that my Mouse was lagging and freezing in the main menu, note that ive googled and tried every way to fix this GOG´s help Section to. I have a GTX 980 Supersampling etc. Multi Monitor Set up. I just disabled Nvidia Shadowplay and it works like a Charm other games to like Warlords Battlecry 3. Hope it helps.

I'm a fan of RTS games, and I was looking forward to this despite the prequel campaigns. To my surprise, I couldn't even force myself to finish it. The game is straight-up boring. All the factions are nearly identical aside from a few minor faction-specific bonus upgrades, and it gets very old very fast seeing the exact same unit with a different skin. This repetition also strains suspension of disbelief when you switch from, say, Wookiees to droid soldiers, yet are still having to build farms to feed them. The graphics haven't aged well and look rather ugly, though I'm sure they were fine for their time. The environments are all very similar, mostly grassy plains with lots of trees (some of which, inexplicably, are Earth species like oak or pine), and most planets are indistinguishable. The plot is bare-bones "attack this base and destroy it" fare, and every mission feels about as exciting as watching paint dry. Worst of all, the entire game is utterly glacial- you'll be spending most of the time waiting for your units to sloooooowly shamble from one area to another, even on the fastest setting, and every building takes an eternity to destroy, even with an army of fully upgraded artillery. Compounding this is the terrible pathfinding, which results in your units constantly backtracking and running in circles as they trip over each other, sometimes stopping dead, sometimes going the opposite direction or getting stuck behind trees- even ranged units that have a clear line of fire will often wander around, confused and lost, if ordered to attack a building a few feet away. If the game weren't boring enough already, the music was so loud that it drowned out everything else, even on the lowest possible setting, so I had to turn it off completely and fight in silence. I'm sure it was a solid game back in its day, but nothing special even back then. Ignore the nostalgia-blinded reviews, this one isn't worth the money.