I finished the Rebel campaign and it was fine. There were too many escort missions. And I question the wisdom of making me play a stealth mission in an RTS. Still, it was fine. I could list a couple of quibbles with the plot - like, I never got the impression from the movies that Han Solo worked with the Rebellion prior to meeting up with Luke Skywalker, and the final battle had you attempting to beat the Death Star, but it was really just an escort mission where you protect the NPCs who do it off-screen, but you know what, you don't play RTS games for the plot. You play them for the small-unit tactics.
Now, I'm no aficionado, but so far they seem pretty good. I could probably squeeze more efficiency out of my units by developing my micromanagement skills and deploying my units' special abilities more frequently, but even without that, the strengths and weaknesses of the different unit types make force composition an interesting puzzle. And the separation of economy and unit deployment into two different phases of the game does make battles less frantic and more driven by positioning and forward-thinking. The only problem I've been having with it so far is in the various campaign chapter breaks, where a whole new bunch of planets is brought into play and the enemy suddenly has a disproportionately large fleet capable of threatening multiple planets at once. But even then, after the first wave dies down and I'm able to proceed more deliberately, it proves to be pretty enjoyable.
That being said, I've been avoiding a lot of potential RTS battles by selecting "auto-resolve" whenever possible. This is an objectively terrible idea, because I lose between 5-10 times as many units to the game's battle-resolution algorithm as I would if I just played the battles out manually, but since it only takes a second to get through, and since I always build up to my unit cap between battles, it works out as a lot easier in practice.
It's probably a bad idea in the long run, though. I have a feeling I'll get through the Imperial campaign far too quickly, and have to find something else to do for 3 or 4 hours. Luckily, I still have the DLC campaign to try, and if that proves to be too short, I can always attempt a randomized Galactic Conquest.
I wouldn't rank Empire At War among my favorite games, but I'm pretty sure I have this one in the bag.
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