Completed all four (if you count the prelude, otherwise three)
Universe at War (2007) campaigns.
What a wonderful and unique game, and though it has room for, and never received, an expansion (obviously there's a fourth faction just begging for a bit of refinement and enablement), it is in no way incomplete (in fact, much content seems to be deliberately omitted), though perhaps in need of a minor patch (more on that at the end of this post) on top of the existing ones. Everyone should play it.
I wrote earlier that this is a spiritual sequel to
Generals and
Zero Hour (2003), which might surprise some, it certainly surprised me and is why I short listed this game and played it in my current couple of months of gaming back-log reduction. OTOH I've read old posts on the codex that say its just a rehash of the C&C formula, which goes too far, IMO, but it's also an acknowledgement that I'm not alone in seeing similarities. First I want to emphasize that Universe at War is an evolution of Generals in particular, and is quite far removed from earlier (and later) C&C games. A few things stand out: The production system, the presence of a third source of resources, and the combat controls and system. Arguably the game's "tactical dynamics" system can also be thought of as an evolution of the general powers system.
In pre-Generals C&C, buildings are produced and placed strictly one at a time, globally, through a production menu. Units are produced one at a time, but may be queued, through the same production menu, but in different tabs. The way the tabs are divided varies from game to game, but basically you have buildings, infantry, vehicles and aircraft. You need to have at least one of a certain kind of building to produce a certain type of unit e.g. you need a barracks to produce infantry, but units are produced globally, and come out of a designated "primary" building. Units and buildings are payed for as they are produced -- a half built rifleman only consumes half the cost.
In Generals, you have builder units, and you can produce as many buildings simultaneously as you have builder units. You pay for a building as soon as you place it (or unit, as soon as you queue it), not as it's produced. Likewise, you can produce as many units simultaneously as you have production buildings for those units. Like earlier C&Cs, you can't queue the construction of buildings, but you can queue the construction of units. However, in Generals, every unit production building has a finite queue of 9, you can't just queue up 100 riflemen, for example. You also have no handy global way to access unit construction buildings except eating up a control group, but you do have hotkeys to access builder units, so you can quickly bring up a building construction menu, in a way, but the first builder the hotkey selects won't necessarily be the closest, and it also always moves the camera.
When comparing to e.g. Total Annihilation or "Age of" games where you can shift click build orders and issue infinite unit spam orders to unit production buildings, the restrictions in Generals may seem like an oversight, or a case of bad priorities from the developers, but really they are quite deliberate, and clearly grounded in the older C&C system described. The idea behind restricting queues is simple though not obvious -- make production a periodic requirement to attention, that steals the player's precious attention resource, periodically, from other tasks such as monitoring exploration or battle micro. More helpfully, it forces the player to actually think about what they are building. It's counterintuitive that these kinds of restrictions can make a game better or more strategically interesting, but a good example I mentioned earlier is AirMech, and how its micro compares to the micro in e.g. Starcraft, which is also restricted, but in a different, IMO worse, way.
That said, the periodic need to monitor and action production need not move the camera to steal attention, and that's where Universe at War improves on Generals, from which it lifts the basic system (builder units independently produce buildings, but you can't queue build orders, buildings independently produce units, but production queues are finite). At all times, your production queues are very easily accessible from the GUI or by hotkey, and what's more, the GUI lets you immediately inspect all your unit build queues of a certain type simultaneously e.g. you can immediately see what all your barracks are producing as soon as you click on the barracks GUI button, and you can immediately issue unit build orders to any one of the buildings. It's really a phenomenal GUI, and a much better take on the same thing than in Tiberium Wars (which is closer to pre Generals C&C than it is to Generals in its overall system). Likewise you can easily select the *nearest* builder and issue a build order, again without moving the camera. You can press the hotkey twice in quick succession to move the camera.
Basically, Universe at War pairs the immediate, global, production overview and actionability of earlier C&Cs, with Generals' addition of simultaneous production, and also that game's same restrictions and periodic requirement to attention, but with the controls more at your fingertips, and without the necessity to move the camera or eat into your control groups.
Now, anyone who has played Generals knows the importance of the guard command, so much so that G moving was a thing. But you couldn't both attack (or A) move and G move with the same order (AFAIK), which is what you really wanted to do most of the time. Well, in Universe at War, attack moving into a guard is the default movement order given on a right click, which helpfully also shows the guard radius at the destination (as two circles, one smaller one for movement limit and one larger one for engagement limit, I think). Groups of units will also form up and maintain formation on the march when given this kind of move order. The other kind of move order is an "on the double" order, appropriately given with an impatient double click. When given this order, units will break formation, avoid engaging any enemy that would cause a delay to their destination, and when they finally get to their destination they will hold ground, rather than guard the area. When issuing move orders over negligible distances, they function essentially as stance and formation change commands. While I like the simplicity and effectiveness of these controls, and they are marked improvement over the controls in Generals, I still miss having direct control of formation facing and rectangle ratio as in later SAGE engine games such as BFME2 and Tiberium Wars.
Universe at War also inherits Generals' emphasis on damage over time (radiation, heat), and bonuses to damage when scoring multiple hits from the same unit (e.g. gattling guns) or units of the same type (e.g. inferno cannons). These may seem like small things, but they affect how combat plays out to a great deal. Unit movement and projectile speeds also seem better tuned to, and more cohesive with, these design choices, than was the case in Generals.
Another similarity is the economy, though it's somewhat remixed and even Total Annihilation-like. The primary source is ofc. harvesting, which is now in the form of obtaining mass from civilian structures or wreckages, which can be more or less sprawling or concentrated depending on the map (which is kind of cool, that it becomes a map thing rather than "hardcoded" for lack of a better term). What doesn't depend on the map is the recycling -- dead units can be harvested for part of their mass. But, only two (Novus and Hierarchy) of the three (plus Masari) factions harvest. The third faction (Masari) relies entirely on secondary and tertiary sources of income. These are oil derricks (as in every C&C game), and income producing buildings (and units) as in Generals (I am referring to hackers, black markets and supply drops). In UaW no unit alone can produce income, only in conjunction with a building. This tertiary source of income, like the primary, is only available to two of the factions (Masari and Hierarchy), and in the case of the second (Hierarchy), it's kind of mixed -- it's paired with the mass drop super weapon, where you can harvest the mass dropped.
Out of the three factions, only Novus plays anything remotely like a C&C faction. Specifically, it has a touching point with the GLA faction from Generals in its overall concept ("hit and run", suicide bomber infantry, other kamikaze like abilities), and also its power grid feature in particular, which can be thought of as a generalization, alternate take, refinement or even technical evolution on GLA's (specifically, the GLA stealth general's) tunnel networks. Unlike the tunnel networks, which were actually portals, the power grid is an actual network. Every node on the network automatically connects to another within some distance from it, so you can e.g. build a power line from one edge of the map to the other, and the enemy can destroy a node in the middle to sever the connection. Additionally, the nodes are cloaked by default, and the lines between them are completely undetectable for opposing players -- they can detect a node, but never see how it connects to others. Units can travel over the network (initially, just infantry, and very importantly, harvesters), but it takes time (much less time than if they were traveling by foot though). You can actually see them become sparks or lights and move through the power lines. It looks very cool. A big difference from any C&C faction here is that Novus harvesters are automatically rebuilt for free, making the power network effectively do the harvesting, at least as far as the opposing player is concerned.
Finally the "tactical dynamics" system. Basically, you pick 6 techs out of 12 arranged in three streams with four tiers, a bit like spending promotion points in Generals, except more standardized across factions, and you don't earn them by kills, but by spending resources (making it more similar to Age of Mythology, from which I believe Generals took the idea). But really, it is a tenuous connection, as unlike Generals or Age of Mythology or BFME, or CoH, or any other game with this trope, these aren't call-in strikes or temporary global effects, but rather permanent global effects or ability unlocks (I suppose you had these too in other games), which actually makes it a lot more like teching in the Rise of Nations duology, the later Rise of Legends in particular (as the techs are specific to the factions) but with the important difference that not all techs can be active at the same time. The real twist is that you can untech and re-spec at any time, with the cost of buying the new techs you spec into and getting I think 0 (or in any case less than the buying amount) for the ones you spec out of. In any case even if you rightly think that the tactical dynamics system is the game's own novelty of sorts, in a descriptive sense, IMO it is closer to Generals' general powers than e.g. building based teching in a classic C&C, which is present both in this game and Generals as well. Speaking of which, another similarity with Generals is the fact that each faction has a primary, building based super weapon, with the difference being that in Universe at War there is also a faction specific secondary, not necessarily building based, super weapon (Hierarchy has an additional one on its science walker, though it's kind of a unit power, Masari's super weapon functions differently based on the current global "mode" the faction is in, and Novus, least interestingly, has a second, cheaper, minor super weapon building).
Back to the faction design, here is where the game is quite unique and unlike other games in the genre, except I suppose in following the general principle of asymmetry, where again out of all the C&Cs, it's closest to Generals. The other theme in the faction design is modality, though it's more or less prominent in each of the factions, which again, I suppose, has its roots in RA2, where almost every unit was modal.
I've already talked about Novus' power grid, which is their most distinguishing feature, but there's also the patch system (pick two global modifiers to apply at any one time), and the unit and ability design, which is where you find modality, specifically appearing on one of the three faction heroes and and the "tier 3" vehicles e.g. the walker vehicle has one mode where it moves at a reasonable speed and can deal (massive) damage, and another mode where it moves very slowly, can't attack, but instead extends a large hemispheric force-field around itself that can cover a medium sized formation. There's also complex interplay between abilities that's rare in the genre like the virus system, where Novus's basic flying unit can spread "viruses", which slow down or otherwise render less effective an enemy unit or hard point on an enemy unit, and also give visibility on that unit, making it a scout of sorts for the Novus player, but then, with a patch these viruses can shut down infected units entirely, and a certain hero unit has an ability to take control of infected units.
The Hierarchy faction make every unit production building (sans the one that builds builder units) into a gigantic mobile walker unit in and of itself, that has the ability scale terrain inaccessible to most other units, and crush almost anything, even buildings. These production "buildings" also have hard points which can be customized for offense, defense, special abilities, or churning out units. Units are produced individually, in pairs, or in groups of three i.e. it may take the same time to build three units as it does to build one (but ofc. you have to pay for all three units). The other twists to the faction are that their harvesters don't need to return to a building to cash in (as they are a building, really), and that their builder units build a very fragile glyph, after which the "building" (really unit, most of the time) drops in after some delay. Their basic infantry is very tanky, as is the "brute" infantry unit, while their lighter scout infantry and main battle tank have a "phasing" ability that gives them temporary invincibility. The basic Hierarchy unit I enjoyed the most were the modal defiler units, which either attack by spurting radioactive goo in an arc for obscene amounts of damage, or bleed radiation constantly to heal organic Hierarchy units and turn neutral civilians or organic enemy infantry into mutant slaves.
Finally, the Masari, take modality to the extreme, where the entire faction is in either a dark or light mode, drastically altering how units and buildings function and what their abilities do e.g. flying units don't fly in dark mode, and every unit gains a shield bar in addition to their HP bar. Masari vehicles and aircraft drop "avenger" units when they die, somewhat akin to the US faction's pilot units in Generals, except there is no concept of veterancy in this game (a shame, really!), instead their vehicle can be rebuilt at no cost by a builder unit. They're also unique in that they put an emphasis on builder and building micro. Firstly, builder units can boost production, upgrade or resource generation rates on already built buildings. Secondly, their resource generation building is also a nuke, and their radar building is a tower. I didn't play with Masari much (more on that in a bit), but they strike me as a very "Age of" inspired faction (the Olympian-Atlantian-Meso-American visual theme is telling -- even the tanks look like chariots without horses) that is meant to use their buildings offensively.
Let's finish talking about the game design with the campaign. The campaign is good, not great, but definitely good and paced really well as an introduction to the game, but with only one mission beyond that (i.e. only one mission I'd like to replay and get better at).
I played through the Novus campaign (and Human mini-campaign) twice (again more on why in a bit), and the second time around it was very easy, but the first time around it was just right w.r.t challenge, given that I was learning the game. The main source of failure for me was losing a hero, which is always a loss condition in the campaign, and can happen whenever you're not paying attention, especially in the Novus campaign as Hierarchy's defilers can really make short work of Mirabel and Victor, who are often in the thick of it, so to speak.
On the other hand, I played through the Hierarchy campaign only once, but am nevertheless convinced it would be very easy a second time through, as the only real challenge I had, beyond the learning experience, was the symmetric match up in the final mission. This mission required quick, aggressive macro to open with (I built 7 reaper drones i.e. harvesters) in order to quickly set up defensive fire bags, and then, later on, good micro on offense, as even after exhausting all resources and hitting the population cap, the enemy remained numerically superior. Luckily destroying the enemy outright is not a requirement for this mission, rather the objective is to escort your hero to a certain, very well defended location on the map, and then defend it yourself for (exactly) a couple of minutes. After that, the game teleports your walkers (they were dead at this point on my first attempt, forcing a restart) in formation to face off against freshly spawned enemy walkers, also neatly arranged in formation, facing your walkers, in a duel of sorts, after a cutscene plays out. But, again, all you have to do here is kill the enemy hero while not getting your hero killed. The second time through, I made sure to keep my walkers alive, retreated my hero immediately after the cutscene ended, and focus fired the enemy hero with my walkers for a very easy win in this segment of the mission. In many ways, the mission as a whole felt like any one of the number of well made missions in Tiberium Wars.
The final Masari campaign is in the "conquer the world" format, which is an instance of the "risk-like" over-game trope common in this era of RTS, except in real time (like Petroglyph's earlier Empire at War). I made very short work of the bulk of this campaign, because an immediate rush with flying units on the enemy's base worked for all but the final, well fortified Hierarchy territory, an assault on which scripts your invading army to red health bars. So instead of the usual base rush, I was forced to spend most of my flyers on defeating the enemy's own starting army, and then surrounding their base with the remnants of my fliers, cutting their access to resources, while I built up my own invasion force. Rewinding a little, I was able to build up my initial flying unit army in the over-game with impunity, as the AI is understandably rendered completely passive in what is obviously meant to be an introduction to the basics of this particular game mode (though they could have activated it after some initial conquests, I don't know why they didn't). The final mission in this campaign begins automatically when you conquer the penultimate territory in the conquer the world mode, and has you team up with Novus and a small force of Humans against a well built up Hierarchy AI player. My experience with this mission was that the Novus AI just sat there doing nothing except absorbing the majority of the aggro, which allowed me to build up a powerful force of late game units, and my super weapon, and overwhelm the AI in two successive offensives. That said, early on in the mission, there was a (perhaps scripted) double walker attack on my base which I just barely managed to deflect before it did any real damage.
Now finally onto technical and artistic matters.
The music is amazing, probably one of Frank Klepacki's best efforts, which is saying a lot as his soundtracks are all great (I don't know how to emphasize this, so bolded for attention -- everyone should listen to the soundtrack). Likewise the unit voices are good, they're entertaining, in-character, well acted, and unabrasive (Dawn of War, in contrast, has good, entertaining, and in-character voicework, but it is very abrasive after a while). Of note are the narrators which are robot, angry alien and oracle child. The game supports directional audio through EAX, which is always a welcome feature. Visually, I really like the design for each faction's units and buildings (standouts are ofc. the shiny big red walkers of the Hierarchy, the golden, radiant Icarus-like winged flying units of the Masari, and the Japanese style mecha (as opposed to clumsy non-sensical Western style mecha) hero(es) Victor and Mirabel (Victor is the mecha, Mirabel is the pilot) of Novus). The game, thematically, as a whole is a great RTS take on War of the Worlds, the X-Files and 50s UFO tropes, from the conquest and exterminate-the-weak ethos of the Hierarchy, to the ubiquity of Holstein cows on the maps, to how civilians on the same maps react to both the malevolant Hierarchy and the benevolent Novus with panic and fear ("run for your lives" they scream, as a cute little recycling bot beams away the roof over their heads). On the technical visual side of things, while 3D around this time started becoming too "effecty" and busy for my tastes, as opposed to the earlier cleaner look of 3D games due to API limitations, this game avoids that issue for the most part, even more so than its Alamo engine predecessor Empire at War, which was also quite clean but had an overly strong bloom effect. The anti-aliasing options also worked for me without the need for any external driver fiddling. The story is complete, very simple and amusing -- I enjoyed it. The unit descriptions and other in game text is great.
To conclude, I don't know how the game holds up in multiplayer or against the AI in skirmish or conquer the world mode. It might, it might not (kind of expect the latter due to the game's obscurity, I mean there *must* be a reason right? I am ready to be surprised here) -- after all, I only got an overview of the game's systems, controls, and faction design as introduced (and *only* introduced) by the competent, but not fulfilling campaign. But the strength of the game on these things along make it at the very least worthy of a play through (which should take only two or at most three three hour sessions). I hope one day in a decade, maybe two, there's a community for this game, because it really is quite great. And to think back in the day I lumped it as the other 2007 big robots TA clone RTS (the main one being Supreme Commander, which captured a much bigger player base, so it must have been better right? Yeah I know) due to its cover art and some screenshots I saw (it's not at all a TA clone, it's a Generals successor) and kind of ignored it, never even putting it on my backlog.
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How to play this game today? Easy.
1. Obtain a retail DVD or a good image of the retail DVD (there's a .mdf and .mds image of it on archive.org -- it's a "scene release" that's just an image of the retail disk paired with a separate a no-cd fix that you don't need to and shouldn't use). Installing the game also installs GFWL.
2. Remove GFWL and use XLiveLessNess instead. Just grab a release from the link and extract it to wherever you installed the game such that xlive.dll ends up in the same directory as the game executables UAWEA.exe and LaunchUAW.exe -- doing so will make the game ignore your system GFWL install, hence why removing it is not strictly necessary. In no circumstances should you use the latest GFWL (which you may have installed beforehand along with some other game), as that makes UaW lag in singleplayer (I suspect a "phone home" API call is timing out) in a game ruining way.
3. Optionally install OpenAL and plop the DSOAL dlls (dsoal-aldrv.dll and dsound.dll) into the game directory for emulated EAX through OpenAL.
4. Finally install patch 2 only. Do not install patch 3, as while patch 3 does, surprisingly, make some big changes to the campaign -- it adds the tactical dynamics system to the Novus and Hierarchy campaigns, from which it is absent in earlier patches -- it breaks the transition between these two campaigns, and, since campaigns are locked on a fresh install, and I wasn't able to find information online or see any obvious configuration file or whatever where I could unlock all the campaigns (perhaps in the registry somewhere, or perhaps it's a GFWL thing XLiveLessNess handles somehow -- I didn't look), you won't be able to progress the game. Another note here is that while patch 2 saves are forward compatible with patch 3, vice versa is not true. So, anyway, once you finish the campaign with patch 2, you can install patch 3 if you want, it does seem to fix some things (although apparently it breaks some others, according to a few things I read online), or you can continue with patch 2. I don't know enough to make a call.
