Emperor: Battle for Dune is Westwood’s first 3D RTS game and the sequel to Dune II (1992). Emperor: Battle for Dune follows the story of Frank Herbert's classic Dune universe where noble Houses fight for control of the scarce spice Melange and ultimately Emperor. The game lets you assume command over the military forces of any of three distinct factions, Ordos, Atreides and the Harkonen, that are fighting to gain ownership of the desert planet Arrakis and its invaluable resources. To make game more various (especially in multiplayer), Westwood has added five different Sub-Houses to choose from : House Ix, Fremen, Sardaukar, Guild and Tleilaxu.
Emperor: Battle for Dune features a full 3D engine complete with 3D terrain, complex vision and lightening features, polygonal units, customizable camera views and all the cool stuff that a good 3D engine offers. I can say the game graphics very impressed me, though I have read some websites where slammed the game for having bad graphics. I don't agree with them, the graphics are totally awesome!! I don't think any other 3D RTS game has so detailed animations of the units. Also camera control is very well done. It takes a few minutes getting used to but then you'll be moving/rotating/zooming the camera with ease. The sound effects and unit voices are pretty well done, the explosions sounds pretty explosive and the units sounds real cool too. Also each unit in Emperor has its own unique voice that it'll speak in response to your orders. I found more audio surprises during the playing, for example the Freemen Fedaykin Warrior has a thumper which he uses to attract worms!
The single-player campaigns aren't the same like older Westwood games. Instead of fighting a series of must-win battles until the final showdown, here you wage war on a dynamic map. At the begin, the world map is divided into House controlled territories and you can only attack certain regions after completing a mission. That mean from there, you decide how to proceed, which sector to attack or you'll be forced to defend your territory against enemy invasion. In addition, there are different objectives on each map. Once a mission is complete you won't always get a tasty cutscene to watch. The Movies and cut scenes are probably reason enough alone to buy the game :) Multiplayer plays very much like Westwood's other RTS games, just Emperor: Battle for Dune playes more defensively than other Westwood games. The game stresses unit combinations! Use them or loose them :)
For optimal performance, I strongly suggest you to play this game on powerful system such a Pentium >1GHz, lots of RAM and GeForce/TNT2 32+ MB. But some normal P3 500MHz, 128MB & GeForce/TNT2 16MB should to be OK too. The game looks quite good even with the graphical detail at a minimum (fortunately).
So what to write more? :) Emperor: Battle for Dune is an excellent designed and visually impressive RTS game that provides many hours of fast-paced battles in both its single-player and multiplayer modes. Definitely buy it if you have a good fast PC. ......Seems I'm going to back to play this Emperor baby - I want finish it badly! :)

Some goodies :  The Harkonnen intro movie (10.5MB), Atreides intro movie (8.9MB), Ordos intro movie (11.6MB), Ordos Theme mp3 (3.6MB), Harkonnen Theme mp3 (5.2MB)