InterfacePage 5
Dark Reign 2
by Nelson “Admiral” Hernandez
In keeping with its predecessor, the interface for DR2 is also very good and allows you to do everything from setting rally points to patrol routes and adjusting unit behavior to several different shades of aggressiveness. Probably because they wanted to show off the graphics as much as possible, the display of the interface is quite unobtrusive. They might have gone a little bit too far in that direction, because the mini-map is too small to be really helpful, and the colors on it look pretty similar so it is difficult to make out terrain features.
The other points of interest in the interface are panels showing your war factories (so it is possible to make build orders regardless of where you are on the map), and a squad manager that displays the status of the first five squads you have assigned. Simply double-clicking on the factory or the squad in question moves your viewpoint there.
Time for an assertion of sea power
You can queue an unlimited number of build orders, but be careful, because there is a limit to the total number of units you can have at one time, probably to keep the graphics from slowing down. You can recycle structures but not units, so if you’ve built a collection of units that won’t be useful for the purposes you have in mind you’ll have to kill them off somehow if you want to build something more appropriate. In one scenario I found myself in the worst of all situations, with a massive fleet that I had used to secure control of the river in the center of the map. (They don’t call me the “Admiral” for nothing.)
But with that mission accomplished and an amphibious assault called for, I now found that the sheer number of my now-useless ships was preventing me from building anything else. Unable to recycle part of the fleet and unable to destroy my ships in action because I had wiped out the opposing navy and coastal defenses, I was severely limited in the number of units I could build for action on the other side of the river. I managed to win, but only very slowly. Despite this story I found that most of the time the unit limit is not a problem.
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