...is apparently how long humanity fought the Covenant over Harvest. It is not, gratefully, the amount of time you'll have to wait for Halo Wars from Ensemble Studios to come out, since supposedly the game is now set for a release sometime in Spring 2009.

So, a little less than one... long... year.

Xbox360Fanboy has the latest Halo Wars trailer, which follows in the vein of the first in showing no gameplay whatsoever, but focusing on cinematic visuals, of the kind more appropriate for a game that actually uses those kinds of visuals. You know, a shooter, and not a strategy game.

TeamXbox also has the trailer and new screens, while the official site has 12 new shots in an "E3 2008" gallery.

UPDATE: I've added those shots into Rampancy's Halo Wars gallery.

This trailer also replaces the original score of the first trailer, which was best described as trite and lackluster, and instead inserted the familiar strains of Marty's "Halo Monks".

Also, despite "Contact Harvest" by Joe Staten saying that Brutes were the primary foot soldiers in the first assaults on that colony, this trailer once again only shows Elites-- no other Covenant units are shown.

It's also difficult to reconcile the idea of a 5-year battle over a single world with everything the Halo series has told us about human-Covenant engagements. While the addition of the Spartans into humanity's troop mix gave them parity, if not an outright advantage, on the ground, we're told that the Covenant always retained air superiority, and since ultimately most colonies were wholly or partially glassed, this was always the deciding factor.

So the story of Halo Wars will have to come up with some good reason why the Covenant wait five years before glassing Harvest, or for some reason choose to assault it without ever glassing it.

One of those shots shows a good look at some of the UNSC... well, there's nothing to call them but mechs, since that's what they look like. Frankly, the devs can go on all they like about how the mechs aren't Spartans, aren't as strong or fast or dangerous as Spartans, and play a different role on the battlefield than Spartans... and it just doesn't matter worth a damn.

You can't look at one of those things in a screenshot and not think "wow, if a Spartan is this good and only a bit bigger and taller than an ODST, then that thing must be awesome. Its visual presence on the field demeans the Spartan, and I don't see that being something that can be explained away.