Emperor: Battle for Dune

Emperor: Battle for Dune from 2001 is a real-time strategy game from Westwood Studios, creators of the legendary Command & Conquer series, and a direct sequel to the successful Dune 2000. The player chooses one of three Great Houses - the Atreides, the Harkonnens, or the mysterious Ordos - fighting for control of the desert planet Arrakis and its precious spice melange, with each house having its own units, buildings, technologies, and style of waging war, supplemented by minor subhouses with their own commanders, units, and further tactical variations for the individual campaigns.

Compared to its predecessor Dune 2000, built on a classic top-down 2D view, Emperor switched to a fully three-dimensional game engine, which enabled varied terrain, elevation differences affecting units' range and visibility, and a smoother, freely rotatable camera over the battlefield. The series remained true to its rich use of live-action film sequences with real actors, for which Westwood had already become famous with Command & Conquer and Red Alert, and which here link the individual missions into cohesive house campaigns with their own storyline for each faction. The game was released only for Windows PCs and never received any console or later platform versions - it remains a purely PC strategy title of its time. In addition to the separate house campaigns, Emperor also offers a range of skirmish and multiplayer missions against computer opponents, where units of the home house can be combined with those of additional subhouses, and maps differ not only in terrain but also in the presence of sandworms and other hazards of the desert environment, which must be taken into account when planning an attack or moving units across the open desert.

Why play it: Emperor: Battle for Dune is for fans of classic RTS games with house politics and cinematic cutscenes, who will appreciate the move to a fully 3D battlefield, more pronounced differences between the houses, and more elaborate campaigns compared to earlier entries in the series.