When it comes to the multiplayer game Well, you'll hardly notice the difference. One notable difference though, is the option to call upon metaphysical powers. With a temple and a powerful priest you can bring forth such spectacles as volcanoes, earthquakes and tornadoes.
Wonders also play a very major part in the spiritual side of the game, with buildings such as the Tower of Babylon and Library of Alexandria helping to reveal the enemy strongholds and to convert enemy civilians.
Although we've been informed that the A1 has yet to be finalised it's nice to see most of the units have a brain. Unit path-finding is good, and military types appear to know their stuff when it comes to battle positions - they even have the good sense to retreat when being pasted. There are also four different behaviour patterns to choose from including guard mode, patrol mode, aggressive mode and defensive mode.
Our personal favourite is the 'explore' icon that unsurprisingly sets your selected unit wandering off into the wilderness. So, if you've had enough of manually exploring fog-of-war, you can understand what a stroke of pure genius this particular option is.
Even panicky farmers seem to have lost their usual simple view of life by adopting a brave 'never say die' attitude that keeps them glued to fields in all but the most violent attack. We only have one problem with the units at this stage of development and that's the way they keep getting lost behind buildings. But, it's a simple problem and should be easy enough to fix.
By far the most striking thing about EE is the whole atmosphere. The music varies depending on the epoch, and along with the graphical changes occurring throughout the game there's a real sense of purpose to the proceedings. EE also hints at a unique rawness that AOE never managed. The liberal use of blood and the ability to zoom right into the action helps of course, but there's something else there that we can't quite put our finger on So, with a couple of months to go before release Empire Earth is looking and feeling good about itself.
Our only major criticism at this point is the blatant lack of originality, but if Stainless Steel Studios is sacrificing that for good old fashioned playability, who are we to complain? Although Empire Earth bares many similarities to Age Of Empires, its one defining difference is that you can zoom right into the thick of the action.
But can you really play from this view, or is it just a flashy feature that will look great but be useless in terms of gameplay? Having spent the best part of a week playing the Beta, I have to admit it's nearly impossible to play from this view. However, it's pretty quick and easy to zoom in and out, so the best thing to do is issue your orders from the standard overhead view and then zoom in to take a quick look at the carnage, which you have to admit, looks pretty spectacular up close.
There has to have been a time - perhaps when you're waiting for that bus that never comes or when your mind is drifting while you're talking to the world's most boring person - that your thoughts have turned to what could possibly be the perfect computer game. While this is subjective to a large degree, there are certain game concepts that just cannot be argued with. One of them is a game called Civilization which is arguably the most original and addictive game ever created.
However, while RTS games are undoubtedly more exciting than their turn-based counterparts, they have never managed to display the sheer depth and complexity of the mighty Civilization.
Civs graphical simplicity allowed it to give gamers a huge and diverse amount of choices in which to play the game, and a technology tree that RTS games could only dream about. It appears to be obvious then, that any game that could marry the timeline and complexity of Civilization with the edge-of-the-seat excitement of an RTS game, would surely be the perfect strategy game, or at least as damn close as you're ever going to get.
That hypothetical game has finally arrived, and its name is Empire Earth. Empire Earth takes you from prehistoric times right through to modern times and beyond, covering every important stage of human evolution along the way. It's mighty ambitious, and the developers have not skimped in terms of diversity of units and technology as you are taking on a massive tour through human history. You'll discover the obligatory mass slaughter along the way that only the human race would ever think of imposing upon itself at every opportunity.
In terms of look and feel, you will be on familiar ground right from the moment you load up the game and dive into the prehistoric era. In fact it's not unfair to describe it as AOE with a lot more epochs and a lot more units, so similar are the two titles. This, as we all know, is no bad thing. This one of the best RTS games we've ever seen, so any game that claims to be AOE with knobs on surely can't be a bad thing, right?
Well, yes, and no. While there's nothing particularly wrong with 2D strategy games, we have come to expect proper 3D in just about every genre these days, and it's something of a shock to find that Empire Earth, although 3D, has ditched its free-roaming camera and instilled a fixed-angle view, although you can still zoom in and out. This has obviously been done for gameplay reasons so you don't get lost while you're swirling around but its looks suffer accordingly.
And, the problem we have with EE is not purely aesthetic. You'll often find yourself swirling your mouse round to look behind buildings, only to remember that you can't. Almost imperceptibly, 'true' 3D has become as important to gameplay as it has to aesthetic prowess, and while it's not an insurmountable problem in EEs case, it's certainly jolting for the first few hours of play.
The only redeeming feature in this particular area is the ability to zoom in very close to units so you can see the amount of detail on them. This is more or less a novelty feature however since you never actually play the game from this viewpoint, and unless you want to play the game with no clue what the enemy is doing, you will play with the camera zoomed as tar out from the landscape as you can get.
Apparently, a 30 camera is fully supported in the code but didn't make it into the final product. Technically then, EE does itself no favours. However, once you get beyond the game's technical limitations, there is much to enjoy.
At its core, EE is basically a very simplistic real-time strategy game. Build, explore, fight, it really is that simple. Unlike most games of this ilk however, EE takes you through many eras of time, and the units and buildings you create all change to reflect the time period you are playing in. As was the case with AOE, there are only a few resources to collect in the game: wood, stone, iron, gold and food. All these resources are needed to create your buildings and units, and in time-honoured RTS tradition, you will find yourself collecting these resources while at the same time attempting to crush your opposition with military units.
It's a winning formula, and in fiFit's a much more appealing one since you get a mind boggling selection of units to play around with. From prehistoric times right through to the Nano age, you will get what at times seems to an endless supply of new vehicles and ground units of all shapes and sizes.
Imagine AOE taken way past its tour epochs to its logical conclusion with futuristic warfare and you pretty much have EE in a nutshell. For this reason, it's supremely playable and totally engrossing for the length of time you spend playing it. Our only reservation is its long-term appeal. We went from the first epoch right through to the end of the game in just two days, at two different difficulty levels.
Either we are unbeatable at strategy games, or the designers made it too easy to upgrade from one epoch to the next I suspect the latter - Ed. There is no doubt that if you like real-time strategy games, you will not be at all disap ointed in EE, but unless you want to play with the pre-defined scenarios and campaigns once you finish the game 'proper', you may feel a little short-changed at the length of time it takes you to complete it.
That said, Empire Earth is a very solid RTS with a huge amount of depth and variety in terms of units and buildings. Even if you only play it for a couple of days just to get through all the different epochs, it's worth the asking price for that alone. The background of this epic game is the very history of warfare on Earth itself. From the early days of man in prehistory circa , BC to the Nano age stretching into the 23rd Century, humanity has always been at each other's throats.
In Empire Earth your goal is to not only explore your world for the resources necessary to survive and thrive, it's to build a mighty empire and the armies need to protect and expand it. Starting in pre-history you must advance through 14 historical Epochs before reaching the Nano Age where nanotechnology constructs the first Cybernetic warriors.
Any hardcore, or even casual, real-time strategy fan is going to pickup Empire Earth's strong resemblance to Age of Empire II: Age of Kings almost immediately.
The graphics are similar, the interface almost identical and, to a degree, the play itself seems to mimic AOK , as well.
But try playing your first game with the same strategy that made you master in AOK and you'll be in for quite a butt-kicking. As in AOK you will spend a large amount of your time searching for and collecting different types of resources.
Heck, with the exception of an additional item, iron, the resources are identical. Again like in AOK , you just hunt around for piles of the stuff and then start your citizens to work digging it up or chopping it down. A major difference in the gathering aspect of EE is one you'll find echoed throughout the game; it's more complex. To speed up your gathering you can build a settlement, which allows you to drop off your stuff there as opposed to trudging half-way across the map, back to your town center.
Empire Earth 3 free. It was released on November 12, for PC. Each of these epochs represents an age within history. In Empire Earth, the last two ages Digital and Nano Ages are set into the moderate future at the time of release in In the Art of Conquest, a third future age, the Space Age, is available.
It deals with space colonization. Each epoch brings new technologies and units. Although each of the epochs encourages different tactics, Empire Earth wisely keeps base building and resource gathering consistent. This is particularly important because even though the game ostensibly shows unit stats, it relies heavily on an under-the-hood system of unit trumps. Empire Earth, on the other hand, literally requires half a dozen flow charts to explain the unit relationships.
Some of these are fairly silly. Why is a galleon more effective against a battleship than a frigate? Why are cavalry with guns more effective against other cavalry than infantry? In the final epochs, it breaks down into an arbitrary sci-fi slop. Assaulting a castle with knights and trebuchets.
For such a derivative game, Empire Earth does have a few nice twists. As in Age of Empires, you can build wonders of the world for an alternate victory condition. But like wonders in Civilization, each one actually gives you an advantage. This is a great incentive for defeating other players and it means bonuses that increase your limit can give you a significant advantage.
The number of citizens that can gather resources from each source is limited, so competitive economies will have to expand across the map. This greatly discourages turtle-style players. But on the whole, Empire Earth plays a lot like a hundred and one other real-time strategy games. It tries almost nothing new.
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