Star Wars: Empire at War (2006)

The Good
Finally I have converted Mon Mothma to the evil side...I mean the dark side and I had long foreseen this.

MY forces were scattered through the tiny,dusty galaxy of 43 planets, but I have log passed over their incompetence of holding battles and supervised with my servant, Vader, all their operations; that the path to the dark side of the force!

Even if I got bored at some times, at destroying space stations and various cannons and people's homes, the price was finally paid off after 2 days of BitComet and another of crack finding. Now my mission has been accomplished.

I was never so satisfied since Rebellion first came with its 200 planets and diplomacy /sabotage model which unfortunately cannot be found here.Here lies the path to the dark side of the Force!

Truly this is the Galactic Empire! Truly the enemy is a rebellion and not another empire with ISD's alternate names.

The Bad
Well,despite the great realism of this game, great graphics, great feeling of Star Wars, there's still room for improvement: no diplomacy, spying is rather silly, no sabotage, few planet slots, so the whole thing still looks grossly diminished:

There are no fleets of hundreds of ships with tens of thousands of fighters, like in Master of Orion 3, no ship free-modeling, (after all, they had to respect the franchise), no complicated strategy options like in Call to Power, no hundreds of troops in a battle,just a few at the same time, deployed through the reinforcement points.

The computer cheats: he always knows the exact location of your troops, has no need of reinforcement points to deploy its own troops and if you choose to auto-resolve a battle, you will lose 5 times more than in actual combat.

The Bottom Line
The best Star Wars strategy game to date: with great realism, ships have accurate number of weapon mounts, the ratio is accurate (Death Star costs 20k credits, one Stormtrooper squadron just 52, which is made of 2*5 troops, so one costs 5 credits), troops are realistically overpowered over armor which can crush them, heroes are well balanced, a little bit too overpowered, though (in reality terms), but it cannot be compared to Rebellion strictly in strategy-smartness terms.