Empires (HL2 Mod)

[Wurmy]

Ok. So what is Empires?

First off, it is a mod for Half Life 2. So to play it you'll need a "valid Half-Life 2 engine game" (This means, Half Life 2, Counter Strike: Source, pretty much any Source game). It's an online game, which gets really fun when you have 30-40 people playing at once (Usually a server that has this many)

So basically, Empires is a mix between an FPS (obviously) and an RTS (Think Command and Conquer games). In the game there are two factions, whom for some reason seem to hate each other (You can read up on the back story, but I just play for fun). At the beginning of each map, each team choses their commander. The commander will be the one to play through the RTS mode. He will place buildings, research things (I'll get into this later), and generally command the team to victory.

Everybody else plays as a soldier. This means that every soldier on the field is NOT an NPC. It is an actual human being that you can't really control, although you can try. Each player can chose one of four classes.
- Rifleman (Your basic shooter, firepower for infantry)
- Engineer (Builds things twice as fast, can build it's own turret and more)
- Grenadier (Missile launcher, mortar and mines. What else is there to say?)
- Scout (Basic sniper, can 'sabotage' enemy buildings etc..)
That is it for infantry, mostly. As infantry you will also get promotions as you get more points. With each promotion you pick a new 'skill', such as more health or being faster. There are also specific 'perks' for each class, such as the hide ability for scouts and mine-defusal for grenadiers. As infantry you can also join squads. When you join a squad you can automatically choose a perk and you will also gain points for your next promotion (NOTE: Promotions are reset each map. There are a max of 4 skills you can choose with the best promotion.)

Now onto vehicles. Vehicles are almost the 'backbone' of this game (Along with research). So vehicles are, like infantry not controlled by a computer. Each vehicle is controlled by a specific person. You can, obviously, create a vehicle in the Vehicle Factory. At the beginning of a round your team will start off with the basics:
- jeep chassis
- APC chassis (acts as a mobile spawn-point)
- AFV/Light Tank (Same thing, just different names for the two factions)
- Standard Armor, engine and weapons.
So your team will automatically start off with shitty things to put on your vehicle. Wait. What is this? YES! You have vehicle customization! You can customize your vehicle! You can put the weapons you want, the armor you want, the engine you want, and more! Brilliant! Except.. you only have standard armor, engine and weapons.. This is where research comes in.

After your team places down a radar, your commander can start to research! This means better weapons, better tanks (Mediums, heavies and artillery tanks) and other things (such as turrets).

That is the basics of gameplay. It gets really fun during the 'end' of the game, when both teams have researched the best stuff and you have pretty epic tank wars :)

If you want, here are some screenshots.

I highly recommend this game for anybody that has a Source game (Half Life 2, CSS, DOD:S, etc) It is VERY fun it will eat your time and, by god it is so much fun to nine-mine an enemy CV. What I mean by this is that when a grenadier places 8 mines in one spot. Then he places another mine elsewhere. This will cause the FIRST mine to go off, which causes a chain-reaction that causes all other mines to go off which causes BIG explosions :D. And CV means Command Vehicle. If it is lost, your team loses :<

Want more info?
Empiresmod.com
Empires Wiki
Empires Forum (You can also suggest things to add to the game, but I HIGHLY suggest you look at the things other people have said before. Just to get an idea of how to do it :p)

Download? Right here! The game is completly free for anyone to use!

So, anyone mildly interested? :)

PS: I HIGHLY suggest you read the manual before you go in-game. Do this while you wait for the download. This will help you get started on how to play. And people won't tell you to read the fucking manual in-game :) Although there ARE training servers if you don't want to read.

PPS: One more thing!
Aircraft.
No, sadly there are NO aircraft right now. RIGHT NOW! Yes! There WILL be aircraft in future installations, (version 3.0 I believe). So that is something to look forward to for me at least :)

So, discuss I guess. I'll try to answer questions you may have about this game.
And my name in-game is "Kill3rTomato". Maybe I'll see some of you :)

.. Hope I didn't leave anything I wanted to say out :<

[Wurmy]

One can try :<

Bump

[Fleshlight]

there's so many mods for one game...i cant keep track off all of em!

[delta9678]

well, I am downloading counterstrike right now, but will it run on my laptop? My laptop can run most flash games pretty good, even at high quality, but I am afraid it wont run very well. Another problem I am having is the extremely confusing download page. Theres like, 20 things there and by the looks of the instructions, it says I only need one.

[YourBFFGLaDOS]

Hey man,
AWSOME GAME. played before its awsome. Hey whats your steam ID i'd try and get together with you
somtime.

[Bloodman101]

At 1/23/09 11:50 PM, delta9678 wrote: but will it run on my laptop?

What video card do you have?

I have an ATI RADEON HD 3470 on my laptop and I can run css/hl2/etc fine.