Play by Play - Star Wars: Rebellion
By Brian • 27 May 2025
- Year
- 1998
- Platform
- PC
- Notes
- Known as Star Wars: Supremacy in the UK. Is this a beef? Please, no hard feelings, friends!
Time to dig into a game I played a lot as a kid, but never really played correctly. Well, two games, actually, but only one of them is a video game.
As a fresh teenager, I was a fan of Star Wars Rebellion (the 1998 PC strategy game, not the 2016 tabletop game of the same name), but I was a much bigger fan of the Star Wars Customizable Card Game made by Decipher. By luck of my booster pack draws and strategic trades with my friends, my card selection favored the Dark Side. My collection included Darth Vader, Grand Moff Tarkin, General Veers and a bunch of imperial walkers, and a fleet of Star Destroyers. Some generic, and some of the named ones, as well, like the Tyrant and the Avenger, and even Vader’s super star destroyer, Executor.
As such, my decks all centered around overwhelming power, but little strategy. Rather than use action cards to debuff my opponent or give myself tactical advantages, my goal was to achieve victory by brute force and intimidation, much like the Galactic Empire from the movies! In reality, it was mostly because the rules of the game were complex, and that was all I knew how to do—buy more cards, add more technological terror to my deck.
Fittingly, I played Rebellion in roughly the same way. I played as the Empire and built a giant fleet of Star Destroyers and terrorized the galaxy, conducting orbital bombardments on any rebel planet I came across. I had a Death Star, too, but despite my policy of widespread, wanton destruction, blowing up an entire planet was apparently one step too far, and so I never did it. It was just there, again, for intimidation purposes.
Beyond that, I didn’t know how to play. If a rebel planet had shield generators, they were often, like in The Empire Strikes Back, capable of withstanding any bombardment. If orbital bombardment failed, I didn’t know what to do, or didn’t have the patience to do it. Where sabotage of the shield generators or surface assaults with ground troops were perfectly cromulent options, I either didn’t know how to do those things or hadn’t read the manual or something, and instead just whisked my fleet off to the next planet to bombard it. Needless to say, I never won the game, lacking the finesse and nuance necessary to conduct a proper galactic takeover—a disgrace to the imperial cause. I can only assume my in-game character clattered to the floor alongside Admiral Ozzel on some star destroyer upon failing Lord Vader for the last time.
Suddenly, in the year of our Lord 2025, a bizarre nostalgic need to fire up Star Wars: Rebellion and play it in earnest for the first time in 27 years took me by surprise, a presence I hadn’t felt since...? I’ve been rereading some of the Star Wars novels from the 90s over the past couple of years, and watching plenty of Star Wars adventures on Disney Plus with my family. Some shows and films (and novels) are better than others in the franchise, but I kind of don’t care. I’ll watch or read any of them. I think I’m just a fan. What a crime, right? I’m a man of impeccable taste. That being the case, I suppose it’s no surprise that I would begin dredging the depths of the Star Wars game library, as well, and the pull of Rebellion became irresistible. What lessons had I learned over the decades? Could I now conduct myself as a competent military and diplomatic leader on a galactic scale? Could I adopt subterfuge and espionage as acceptable alternatives to all-out military might? Let’s talk about Star Wars: Rebellion and see if I can at last restore freedom to the galaxy....
First thing’s first—I’m playing as the Rebel Alliance this time around. In my old age, given the choice to play as good guys or bad guys, I always go good guys. Playing as bad guys? In this climate?! I have to deal with enough bad guys in real life to ever want to play as one voluntarily. Thus, I am accompanied by C-3P0 and R2-D2 here at the rebel command center or wherever this is. They’re ready to keep me informed about the goings-on around the galaxy. Threepio is happy to offer advice, as well, but I turned that off pretty quickly on account of the arrangement becoming too unsolicited. Are you surprised? He’s also able to do some management of troops, fleets, and resources for me, but it turns out I’m too much of a control freak to allow that for long. Video games: helping me to identify my character flaws since 1987!
I need a fun experience and I’m an old guy with kids and not a lot of time on my hands, so I’m playing on easy mode in a small galaxy. The small galaxy only has 10 sectors, as opposed to the 20 sectors of the large galaxy. Hey, here for good time, not long time—I don’t have 400 spare hours or however long it might take to win this thing in a large galaxy. The idea is to settle uninhabited planets and sway as many populated systems as possible to the rebel cause, while building facilities, harvesting resources, and amassing troops, ships, and personnel along the way for defense and/or to conduct missions against the Empire. Rebellion is what’s considered a 4X strategy game, the 4X meaning explore, expand, exploit, and exterminate. I haven’t played very many strategy games of this nature, and I really don’t know if I’m playing the game well or not. Military units are built and controlled at a macro level—troops are measured in regiments, starfighters in squadrons. Starships exist individually, but typically act as part of a larger fleet. The speed of the game can also be adjusted, from Very Slow to Fast. I keep it on Very Slow when performing actions, but bump it up to Slow when I want time to pass. Usually notifications from the droids pile up quickly enough on Medium speed or higher that it overwhelms me, so I usually drop back to Slow or Very Slow in short order. Even in the small galaxy, I’m concerned about whether or not I’ll have the bandwidth to manage multiple sectors’ worth of defense, upkeep, and expansion. I guess I can fall back on Threepio, if need be, but either way, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.
I should note that this definitely feels like a title with a limited budget. Aside from a handful of cinematics and some minor gestures from the droids, most of Rebellion’s graphics are static and feature a lot of reused assets. Nothing wrong with that—the graphics don’t impact what is turning out to be pretty compelling gameplay, overall. The whole game takes place in this control room with my droid buddies, so as you might expect, the excitement is limited and requires at least some use of the imagination. There is a real-time strategy space combat component to this game, but I find it so unenjoyable and tedious that I always choose the option to simulate the space combat, instead, and I’m grateful to whichever product designer saw fit to include that option in the game.
As the rebels, my goals are as follows:
- Capture Emperor Palpatine
- Capture Darth Vader
- Take control of Coruscant, the imperial capital.
I’m sure those guys are pushovers and that it will be no big deal. I also don’t want these things to happen:
- The capture of Luke Skywalker
- The capture of Mon Mothma
- The destruction of the rebel headquarters, which is mobile, unknown to the Empire, and assigned to a random planet somewhere in the Outer Rim. For the record, my headquarters is on Ord Pardron. READERS. Do NOT tell the Empire my headquarters is on Ord Pardron!
Rebellion picks up immediately after the destruction of the first Death Star at Yavin IV, and it begins under immediate duress. Threepio warned me at the outset that the Empire now knows the rebels have a base on Yavin IV and are likely to attack, so my first action was to move most of my forces out of the sector entirely, which was probably overkill, but I haven’t played this game in so long, I can’t remember what I’m dealing with here and didn’t want to get wiped out in the first 15 minutes. I moved them all (except for a couple of army regiments and X-wing squadrons, which I left behind to protect some mining facilities) to Kothlis, a rebel system in the Sluis sector. My personnel all got there very quickly compared to the ships in orbit, as they traveled with Han Solo. There’s a fun mechanic that allows Han and anyone traveling with him to travel “on the Millennium Falcon” (although the ship doesn’t actually appear in the game as a functional unit), which I believe can travel twice as fast as anything else in the game. I think this abandonment of Yavin was Rebellion’s way of easing me into the perpetual stress and second-guessing of every decision made in the game. Of which there are many. I may not be the right audience for this.
From here, I decided to set up shop in the Sluis sector and put all of my personnel to work. Personnel are the Rebel leaders or other characters of note, and can be assigned missions such as diplomacy, recruitment, espionage, sabotage, research, and more. My diplomats—Princess Leia, Jan Dodonna, and Vanden Willard—set to work on convincing the neutral systems to join the Rebellion. I sent Luke Skywalker to recruit more personnel with his high leadership skill. Wedge Antilles can research new ship designs, so I asked him to do that. And, a special mission for Han and Chewbacca: to incite an uprising on Sullust, a world under Imperial control, but with a population sympathetic to the Alliance. This is a trick I picked up watching a Let’s Play on YouTube to relearn all of the game’s basic commands: if I could liberate Sullust, it would likely cause a windfall of support across the sector, and convince most, if not all of the other systems in the sector, to join the Alliance.
Despite Han’s high leadership skill, he and Chewie weren’t empowering enough to start an uprising, so I did the next best thing: build a small fleet to blockade the planet, then use Han and Chewie to sabotage the Imperial garrison. With the garrison out of commission, control of the planet reverted to the Alliance, and with it, the remaining neutral planets in the sector also joined our cause, my first big victory of the game. Granted, this probably took like 100 days of in-game time, as I had to build ships for the blockade, train troops to defend the planet after ousting the Empire, and so on. I could prattle on and on about all the steps involved, but it’s not that interesting.
BUT, I do have one story about building and training units. It concerns a bug stemming from foolishly trying to play a 1998 PC game on a 2025 PC. The user interface of Rebellion is dated and clunky on its own, but I found that when I went to build or train units, I could only access the selection at the top of the dropdown menus, so either an Alliance Dreadnaught for ships, or an Alliance Army Regiment for troops. At first, I thought that maybe these were the only units available to me at the outset and I had to research the rest, but as I watched more of that YouTube Let’s Play, I found that I should’ve had access to more options. I went digging and found that if I left the game window in the top-left corner of my screen, instead of moving it to the middle of my screen as I had been doing, the dropdowns would work as intended. Ope, sure enough, that fixed it, so I guess I can deal with the minor inconvenience of the game window being stuck way up at the top-left of the screen to play a fully functional game.
On the topic of sabotaging that garrison, this is the kind of nuance my playstyle lacked when I was a kid. Everything depended on overwhelming power. Star Destroyers, and as many of them as possible! I knew the option of sabotage existed, but I didn’t understand how effective it could be. Rather than put a ton of unnecessary resources into a fleet capable of nuking the planet from orbit and risk causing the entire population to hate me for accidentally destroying civilian facilities, I just sent in literally two guys to wipe out an entire garrison, and they pulled it off! How effective and efficient! Knowing subterfuge can allow me to shunt more resources to system defense in lieu of a gratuitously large attack fleet leaves me a little more at ease, but just a little. I have a feeling when this Empire hits back, they’re going to hit hard.
Taking the Sluis sector amounted to some of the more fun and frenetic moments of Rebellion thus far. Every decision felt important and high-stakes, like the future of this fledgling rebel alliance truly depended on the right choices. That being said, Rebellion has its slow moments, as well, focusing on infrastructure and making sure I have enough troops and fighters to keep systems well defended while still having enough resources left over to also be aggressive when I need to. These processes are more lulling, and it’s easy to forget all the things I need to do to keep this whole operation running smoothly. Before I know it, an Imperial task force enters orbit around a planet that I forgot to properly defend with fighters or toops, and I have an invasion on my hands. It’s the same reason I was never any good at competitive real-time strategy games like Starcraft—I get overwhelmed with indecision or just forget the basics in all the excitement and end up making a huge mistake.
Anyway, with the Sluis sector under control, I turned my attention to massing troops and ships, both for defense of the sector and expansion into others. I also started making the same moves simultaneously in the Dufilvan sector, home of Ord Pardron and the Rebel headquarters. No systems in this sector were under Imperial control, but all of them besides Ord Pardron were either neutral or uninhabited, so I sent Mon Mothma to sway the inhabited worlds with her unmatched diplomatic prowess, and troops to the uninhabited worlds to settle them. I also sent General Dodonna out to the Orus sector (home of Tatooine, Bakura, Ryloth, and some of the other most remote worlds of the Outer Rim) to recruit more systems to build more mines and refineries and set up my infrastructure for future fleet-construction and troop-training.
I dunno, dudes. All this military action and strategizing is really prompting quite the moral dilemma within me, even as the Alliance. As my sphere of influence grows, I question whether I am committing the same sins as the Empire, even though I’m particular about my targets and trying not to commit war crimes. There are no winners in war, only losers, right? But on the other hand, the Emperor is a total scumbag and a manipulator and was utterly calculating and deceptive in his rise to power, so let’s proceed carefully, but with full intent to jettison him into the nearest sun, shall we?
I know it won’t be easy. I think I might be off to a good start, but the Empire is bound to strike back, right?
Really, at this point in the game, I’m having fun, but I find myself somewhat paralyzed by decision. There are so many choices to make. Expansion seems to be vital, but every system must also be defended, and how thin can I spread those defenses without a catastrophic collapse of my territory? There are certainly too many worlds to defend against one roving Imperial attack fleet, so perhaps if the Empire comes a-prowling, counterattack is the best option? Be right back, gonna test this out.
Thanks for reading, and see you next mission!
