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You can't possibly saticfy everyone....

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 15 / 15
Date: December 25, 2001
Author: Amazon User

....Although this game does a really good try!
I first heard of this game last summer, and ever since, my live mainly consisted of waiting for EE to finally hit the shelves.
When I spotted the game in stores, I bought it immediatly and hurried home to install and play it.
I am so very glad I did!

Good heavens, this game is great! It delivered just about everything it promised, and much, much more. Usually I end up dissapointed when I have been looking forward to certain game for such a long time, but this one is an exception to the rule.

Empire Earth seems to me like an attempt to please everyone who likes RTS, and to attract a few people who are more into the Age Of Empires and even Civilisation style games. Although usually, games that try to please everyone like that fail misserably, but EE actually pulls it off! This game has everything worth having in an RTS game! It is easily the most diverse computer game I ever saw.
If you are fond of RTS in, for instance, the Roman Era, no problem! we can arrange that! Prefering a good laser battle over throwing spears at each other? Fine, just access the appropiate era. Just about everything between throwing rocks and throwing the A-bomb is there, and you can play it however you like. If you want to you can limit gameplay to one or two (or three, or whatever) eras, or you can try and build an Empire of your own from before the Stone Age to well into the 22th century.

Off course, in addition to all the praise, some critism too, is in order.
For one, especially with the two (pretty good) editors available, EE sometimes almost seems more like a piece of software to make your own RTS game than a real game. Especially because the "random" map single player games and the campaigns are pretty hard. Even with the difficulty setting turned to "easy", the AI gave me the ride of my life! (Of course it depends on you wheter you consider this a good thing, or a bad)
Second, not everything works flawlessly (not yet, anyway). "Gigantic" size maps made in the editor, for instance, are not always playable. I assume this sort of thing will be corrected in the upcoming patches.

Overall, though, I consider this a great game. One of the few that actually delivers all it promises. For the rest, the graphics are good, the gameplay awesome, and the untis well blanced. Furthermore, despite its "Civilisation"-isch toutches at times, you won't loose a lot of time with boring mining and micromanagement. Buy it! just buy it!
Only make sure you have one heck of a computer to play it on, otherwise, you'll end up playing in slow motion.

Age of Whatever You Want

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 17 / 19
Date: February 22, 2002
Author: Amazon User

History fans rejoice - Empire Earth takes the basic concept from Age of Empires and extends it from the dawn of time all the way to modern times and beyond. Never have I gotten such a sense of the march of technology and a true arms race against an enemy - this game has over 200 units from every era in history, including pre-historic, the Bronze Age, Middle Ages, Napoleonic, both world wars, modern times and beyond(robots and time travel). You can play through history or focus on one period in time- each "epoch" is a complete balanced game in itself, and there are 14 of them total. In fact, Empire Earth is so similiar to Age of Empires that you might wonder if the same people made both games - and you'd be right, the lead designer was the same. The interface, units, sound fxs, even resources are all very similar to the Age of games. That's a good thing, unless you are burned out on AoE.

This game is entirely about combat, so don't come expecting a real-time version of Civilization 3. There are 4 campaigns, but the real fun is in the multiplayer and computer skirmishes. In these games, you can either choose a "tournament" game, in which both sides rush through hundreds of years of technology, or a more focused game with only a few eras of advancement, say from WW1 to WW2. Whatever you choose, you can set the starting era and the ending one. A great touch is that all maps are randomly generated, and they've included a wide assortment of map-types to fit your style - islands, plains, mountains, mediterrians (inland sea)...

Gameplay-wise, nothing much is new here - you still must micromanage your town and economy, and send troops blindly at the enemy if you hope to win. Where EE is different from the rest is that it has SO MANY upgrades to its basic units - infantry advances from cavemen to laser shooters - and some basic types are eventually outdated, like archers and cavalry eventually are replaced with tanks and rifles. The march of time is merciless, you MUST win the arms race to win the game, so the sheer need to constantly research is something new that could not be experienced in any other game.

I was surprised one game when the computer probed my lines with a "balanced" assortment with units, and after I had a hard time eliminating the catapults, it sent an army of 30 siege engines and utterly wiped me out. The computer actually learned from my tactics and changed itself accordingly. It changes it's attacks pretty regularly, actually, which is a nice change from the AI in some RTS games, which seem to be able to do all things perfectly, at once. The AI in Empire Earth attacks like a game of chess, moving one thing first, then another, attacking you but leaving itself open for counter-attack afterwards. The give and take in this game is very saticfying.

The graphics are 3D, and can seem kinda bare until you witness hundreds of units on the screen at once and realize everything in this game is King-Sized. I liked the scope of the technology, but wished for more of a Civilization-type tech tree, in which one advance leads to the next. As the game is now, the player simply researches a new "Epoch", and once he/she gets there, they are granted access to build anything and everything in it. Nice, but it tends to make opponents very similiar. Otherwise, a great game.

This game will define the strategy genre for years

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 35 / 52
Date: May 31, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Shock is the only word to describe Empire Earth. When I visited the booth located near the entrance to the PC wing at E3, people were running back and forth amongst the eight monitors setup exclaiming "It's the same game!". One screen showed prehistoric clubman fighting it out, the second displayed a gigantic siege setup in the middle ages, the third brought Napoleanonic units into the mix, and the last screens displayed the World Wars and the Future. Amazing! Empire Earth is the culmination of Age of Empires, Age of Kings, Cossacks, Red Alert, and Starcraft brought into a beautiful 3D world. You better pre-order this game early, as it will be flying off the shelves once word spreads.

This is a great game!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: August 31, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Don't listen to those folks saying the computer cheats and you can't win. I won today, after several attempts (I think five). This game is far more complex than CIV III, it requires patience and strategy and planning. If you don't measure out your troops to your citizens and follow through on advancements at the university and within all the other elements, the computerized opponent will come in and wipe you out. One key is building secure walls around your town as soon as you're able, so that the computer opponent can't get through (and repairing them when your opponent attacks). There are many different elements that you need to pay attention to throughout the game to keep on top of things, but that makes the game so much more intelligent and challenging than CIV III (and I liked CIV III too). I found in CIV III I could win the game almost too easily, and could do so without fighting. In Empire Earth you HAVE to fight and you have to consider your military, along with your citizens' harvesting of food, minerals and wood. I particularly like that your priests can "convert" enemy troops and have them turn around and fight against their former allies. It's a great game, really; if you're interested in complex strategy and excellent graphics, try this game. There are so many options, it's infinitely playable over and over again.

Over-Compensation for Poor AI

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 16 / 21
Date: May 18, 2003
Author: Amazon User

BOTTOM LINE: This game has tremendous potential that it simply does not live up to.

The Age of Empires series is a tremendous testament to what can be done with real time strategy. Microsoft stuck with their level of excellence in the realm of computer games with this series. Empire Earth is an obvious addition to this series of games, unfortunately, done through Sierra this time. Sierra is notorious for enforcing release date deadlines with their developers, and quality is usually the first thing to suffer. This game remains virtually unpatched (a patch was released to fix a problem with multiplayer, that was it)

However, to state the positives. The graphics are excellent. As far as design, the potential is excellent. It's the familiar resource-collecting, structure-building, population-growing, military training sort of game that the AoE series created so well. Basically, gather resources to build up a good empire, and take out the other players (human or computer) The tech-tree is good, the potential for strategy is good.

The AI is ridiculously stupid. A huge advantage has been given to the computer players (i believe building costs for computer players are around 5% that of a human player) and the computer is given the default ability to cheat.. ie, advance in epochs at whim, because it is losing. This leads to a game that is unbalanced, with the computer playing doing things tremendously impossible in relation to the human player.

Through some tricky maneuvering you can disable the computer cheating, and then the game becames amazingly easy and unchallenging.

Overall, good concepts, great graphics, good to play once or twice, and then quickly becomes either boring or stupid.

Stick with the "Age of.." games

An RTS that raises the bar!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: March 19, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I gave Empire Earth five stars even though it is not a perfect game. But it is a great game, and it is damn close!

Designed by Rick Goodman, the lead designer of Age of Empires, Empire Earth is closer to being Age of Empires III than Ensemble Studios' (the Developer of the series) newest entry Age of Mythology. Each of the original Age of Empires games allowed you to play through four epochs (ages) of world history. Empire Earth allows you to play through a total of 14 epochs - from prehistoric through the Nano Age (two epochs beyond current human civilization).

The play of the game is extremely similar to Age of Empires, and players of that game should be able to jump into this game with very little learning curve. New players to either of these games may find the game complicated and overwhelming at first. However, Empire Earth compensates by having a great tutorial that will have you playing without ever having to read the 238 pg manual as well as having multiple difficulty settings that allow the player to customize the game to their skill level.

The game ships with four campaigns - each taking place within a few handfuls of epochs in world history. The last campaign takes place entirely in the future so is completely fictional. The campaigns, while fun (and better than those found in Age of Empires) are short at 6 missions apiece (although some missions may take several hours to play).

The real meat of this game lies within the skirmish and multiplayer modes. Skirmish is exactly like multiplayer except there is only one player and the rest is made up of computer opponents. Empire Earth features the same great random map elements found in Age of Empires which really add to the replayability of the game. While in the campaigns you only play through a few epochs, in multiplayer and skirmish mode you can choose to play through all 14 if you wish. This can make for some extremely long games (one of mine lasted over 15 hours), but if you don't have all day to play the game will let you save and comeback later (yep even in multiplayer). In addition, the game even auto saves the game regularly so you don't have to start over if one player crashes four hours into the game.

The units (and their are many of them) are extremely well balanced. The game utilizes a 'rock-paper-scissors' philosophy with units that prevent overly typical strategies like build-as-much-as-you-possibly-can-of-the-most-powerful-unit-in-the-game-and-lay-waste-to-the-entire-map. In the beginning, it's rather simple - shock units beat archery units which beat piercing units which beat shock units. Later it becomes more obscured, but common sense should prevail (ie anti-tank guns beat tanks, etc..).

The game plays well over the net. Massive amounts of units can cause lag, but this is more often because a player's computer isn't powerful enough to process the information rather than to bandwidth. I regularly play online game with two of my buddies and up to five computers (making eight player games) over my 56k connection while using voice-over-IP (Roger Wilco) and lag is minimal. Be prepared to have your video card taxed however. The game plays well on my machine (Athlon 1Ghz w/Voodoo 5 256Mb RAM) so users with similar set ups or better will have no worries.

The past couple of years has seen the market flooded with real time strategy (RTS) games that have been mediocre at best. Empire Earth is NOT one of those games. I would not hesitate to say that this is one of the best RTS games since Blizzard released StarCraft and may easily steal from WarCraft III's (Blizzard's newest RTS) glory.

If you've ever enjoyed an RTS and your system can handle it, then by all means pick up Empire Earth. You won't regret it.

...reviewed Empire Earth

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 17 / 23
Date: March 11, 2002
Author: Amazon User

... Empire Earth
A review by Topbob

Ah, we all know the Age of Empire tittles! And once Age Of Empires II came out, it sold so many copies, you couldn't find it at your local [store]. Now, there is a new tittle from the producer of Age Of Empires, and they game it the name, Empire Earth. Why such a bold sounding name? Because you aren't back in the Middle Ages any more. No, you not in the future. You're in both and all ages. "An Epic Conquest Spanning 50,000 Years" You start all the way back in the prehistoric ages, up to the Nano Age. So, you're covering a lot of time in about 7 hours. And, usually "Villagers" now known as "Citizens" can't live fifty thousand years, but hey, it's a game, right?

Game Play:
The Empire Earth engine is basically the same as the AOE2's engine, so returning fans won't half to learn a new language. But going back and forth though playing World War 3: Black Gold and Empire Earth, it gets kind of confusing. Nothing you'll half to worry about though. Just like the AOE2 engine, it's great and one of the best Strategy games engine. But there are some improvements to the engine, and they are very distinct and useful. Like, you can know select many, many more units instead of just forty. Which is very useful if you're in the Nano age and need to stop those nuking bombers before they strike. You also have quick select buttons that you can set to quickly select buildings. So while your controlling you army to go help out your pathetic ally that is getting wiped out by the hundreds, you can just push the button and make more while your still in the battle grounds. Another thing I noticed is, the music changes when ever some one attacks some thing, funny thing is, you will be over your "Capital" (Town Center) and suddenly hear battle music. Oh, it was just a Citizen killing some hippo to eat. The computer is also improved, smarter. You can point to an area where you are attacking an enemy and need some back up. (Although, you might want to think ahead, it takes the computer so time until the units come) Or where you are getting attacked and don't even have one military unit to counter attack, the computer will come right to your aid! They also improved the scenario game play greatly. You can move the camera all around to make things more intense then just displaying text that says: "Watch out! The enemy is coming! Look!" And you can zoom way and even select it to be in letterbox so it's "Official" looking. I mean, it's nothing like Metal Gear: Sons of Liberty's movie seances, but it's the best system for strategy games. The graphics have also improved. Trees will sway back and forth, and every thing is 3-D, but that lags up even pretty fast system, like me, having 256MB of RAM, and a GeForce 2 MX video card, it still will lag if I have a large army on the screen. It improves much more if you change the tons of graphics settings, but the game won't look as good.

Features:
There is soooo many new features to Empire Earth compared to Age of Empires 2, I don't have a clue where to begin. So let's just begin with random map options. One of the down sides is, there is not many maps to chose from, you have a choice of only seven maps, Continental, High Lands, Large Islands, Mediterranean, Plain, Small Islands, Tournament Islands. That is it. Of course, it looks different each time you play it, but it's the same map type. I think this is a bummer, I was expecting a huge long list of wonderful maps to appear when I opened that window, but no. Sadly we must stick with seven random maps for now. Maybe in some expansion pack for EE there will be more. If there is even one. You know how in AOE2, and better yet, the expansion of AOE2, The Conquerors Expansion, they had a whole bunch of civilizations? Ha! Forget civs! That's right. Another down side to Empire Earth is there is no civilizations to choose from, you just get all the units in random map games. But, now you can make your own custom civilizations, but not many people know how to make buildings in 3-D programs and same with units. That was one of the really cool things about AOE2 is each player had their own buildings that looked different then the other teams! Now you must settle with the same looking buildings for all players. Of course, they look different when you change ages. Hey, at least they got that down. And, you have the normal settings for Random Maps like in AOE2, the resources. But they changed these. Now, if you set them on high, not more of the resource will appear, but the value of each one will increase much more, like you put it on Standard - High, each tree will be worth 500 wood, and the gold mines will me 30,000,000. So, no running out of resources even in 8,000,000,000 year games. Starting Epoch (age), of course, there is much more than AOE2 ever had. Fourteen, Prehistoric, Stone, Copper, Bronze, Dark, Middle Ages, Resistance, Imperial, Industrial, Atomic - WW1, Atomic - WW2, Atomic - Modern, Digital, And Nano Age. That's a lot of ages to go though! You can cover them all in about five hours, if you're good and fast. But, games can go on forever if you let them. My first game, I still have not beaten, and I've played it for more then thirty-six hours. The game seems to get harder and harder the better technology you get. You can also select what age you want the game...

The Game I always wanted to play...

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 11 / 13
Date: January 02, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Sorry, only have a few minutes before I will need to return to the game. Let me try to do this quick.

This game covers ALL of history broken down intoo 14 different epochs. All the epochs play differently, from Cavemen towing logs to bash down wooden towers, right through Bronze armed Roman Centurions charging on horseback, past the Castle strewn ages of the Vikings, and then into the smoke clouded battlefields of the 17th and 18th centuries, soon, the early tanks and bi-planes of the first World War show up, then through WWII and the modern day with Cruise missiles and flamethrowes, M1 Tanks and snipers, followed by a future with mechanized 'bots routing steadfast human infantry with specilaized powers that create electrical storms or time warps...'n more!
I don't really have the space to mention Prophets and their powers: Volcanos, hurricanes...
I don't really have the time to go into Heroes: letting Napolean or Caesar lead your armies.
I don't have words to describe how fun it is to plan your city with Temples or Hospitals covering all your people just right.

I don't have the words to tell you how deep this game is.

There are 14 Epochs in all...14 different games to play.

Play on-line vs. your buddies or play some really fascinating historical Campaigns or do like me and just keep trying to beat the smartest Computer player I've ever played against.

The huge random maps create new mountain ranges and Oceans that make the game fresh every time.

For those inclined the Scenario editor looks to be able to re-create any kind of Campaign a player can imagine, be it from the past, present or the future. People are already making them availble on-line. The replayability is endless.

Did I say this was the most involving, interesting, deep, exciting and plan old FUN game I have every installed on my PC?

It is.

Must go return to the game now. I've done all I can for you people.

Solid offering from veteran developer

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 10 / 12
Date: April 07, 2002
Author: Amazon User

This game was pretty well done, I thought. The editor was especially fun to play with. While not as many new maps were created as one would hope, there are a few decent maps on the internet for download. The bugs people talk about, they were eliminated within 3 weeks of the release of the game, which was 6 months ago. However, I didn't have any major problems. If you have problems, download updated patches for all of your major computer game hardware (graphics card, sound card) and the latest patch for the game.

The part about hitting the computer hard enough that I read in another review is exactly opposite of what the computer will do. Having played around 10 full games, (which lasted forever), the average number of buildings I destroyed per game was about 400-600 and the average number of units I destroyed was about 1000-1200. The problem is that the computer keeps a reserve of about 25% of their total resources. Once certain buildings are destroyed, their civilians have an annoying tendency to evade all of your forces and hide while they search for new places to rebuild. As a result, you will find yourself destroying a small section of their base, and once you are finished, finding that it's been rebuilt in a whole new area. Walls also take forever to destroy. As in Age of Empires, the emphasis is on the buildings, and not the units, thus you will find that much of your units are uninteresting alone but fun when mixed with other units--but you'll still realize that they don't have any special abilities other than attacking and moving in different ways (you can set their attack and move behaviors in-game). The buildings also take quite a while to destroy. There are some noteworthy units, however. In some internet polls, I saw that the very first and the last epochs were the least favorite of all 14 available time periods, but the modern age was the most favorite, and with good cause. There are many fun units to play with in the modern era, and I usually find myself playing this era most of the time. You can build M1 tanks, bazookas, helicopters, nuclear bombers, and aircraft carriers, to name a few. Other time periods you might find yourself playing in a lot are the Copper/Dark Ages, the Middle Ages, and the Industrial Age. The robots are nice.... but could've been done better. Most of them were dull and seemed like copies of the tanks seen in the world war 1, 2, and modern eras.

One reason I would recommend this game is the single player campaign. Judging by the difficulty of using the scenario editor, the work done by the developers on the single player campaign is laudable. It's 1000x better than the boring Age of Kings campaigns, which played exactly like regular random map games. The missions in Empire Earth are exactly that--missions. You have real goals that make sense, map triggers, cool dialogue, and a story.

Many people who reviewed this game here probably tried to play games with unit limits of around 200-300. It's tempting to want to build huge armies, but these games aren't much fun as the emphasis on individual units is taken away, and most battles become long and drawn out as reinforcements come in as readily as old units are destroyed. When you play with unit limits of 50-75, however, you immediately make the player care. Now they are vulnerable, now each unit matters, now base defenses will be attacked more.

Some of the problems in this game are noticeable right at the start of a random scenario. Resources are too easy to come by, and never deplete. Buildings seem too powerful. Base defense also seems to hold the enemy at bay for too long, again, allowing your troops to be replaced as quickly as they are destroyed, creating long, drawn-out battles. Wonders seem limited in use in games where you are allied with computer players, as your allies are programmed to automatically swarm lots of their military units around your wonder in order to protect it, leaving no units to attack the enemy computers (and you'll wish the computer allies did attack more frequently). Graphics are pretty nice, especially if you notice the attention to detail like individually modeled missiles from the modern ages, and arrows from the medieval ages that are more than just straight lines. You'll find yourself wishing you could zoom out more, however. You will also need a hefty amount of RAM to play this game. I have 256MB, not much, but reasonable. On games with more than one computer player, I find my system slowing to a crawl within 15 minutes of playing from lack of RAM. My estimate is that you'll want 512MB to be comfortable playing with more than one computer player (and you will, as you can choose to ally with computer players at the random scenario selection screen).

If you can stand the fact that when playing random map games, the unit limits should be no more than 75 or so per player, then you should consider buying this game. With more than 75, unit tactics, the highlight of the game, will diminish and you'll be deadlocked with the computer for hours on end.

Good beginning

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 7 / 7
Date: December 26, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Empire Earth is a lot of fun. Let me start with that. Its span is enormous and requires you to change your strategy when moving thru Epochs. That is a big challenge. It is also very well balanced. There is not a single strategy that will always work in a given Epoch. There are no single unit types that are the ones you must create to win. If the enemy has a certain type you can always counter with a unit that is well suited for the task.
The computer plays very well in single player mode. It is not a given that you will beat it even at the Easy setting, in fact I have only beaten it a few times and I have had the game for a month now. The multiplayer support is fairly well implemented and works well as far as I can tell.
It does have bugs and the multiplayer interface is rudimentary. There is no market where you can trade a resource that you have alot of for one that you need which I thought was a good feature of Age of Empires.
I am sure that this will be a very good game once the next patch comes out and I am looking forward to the first expansion set.

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