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Too slow to be playable

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: December 01, 2001
Author: Amazon User

On a 500 MHz PIII w/ 256 Mb mempory and the latest drivers from the OEM, this game was simply too slow to be playable, even with all their suggestions for best performance. Mouse movements were incredibly jerky and imprecise. In some cases the mouse had nearly 1 full second delay!!!

In addition the game essentially ignores all the hit, attack, speed, range, etc. combat factors in favor of a ridiculous rock/paper/scissors system. No matter how well trained and researched a unit is or how big an advantage it has in combat factors, it has no chance against a unit of the wrong type. A single swordsman can easily take out two elephant archers despite having only 1/6 the hit points, 1/4 the attack factors, and no range. One would expect the archers to take him out before he got close enough to do any damage at all!

The graphics are great for buildings and scenery, but they are awful for anything that moves. Land units are so small on the default zoom that you have to click them to find out what they are. To visually recognize the unit type for the r/p/s system you must zoom in to just a few units.

Standing orders (Guard, Hold) are often ignored as units rush off to attack the enemy as soon as it is in sight. For some reason the default targeting matches your units against those where they are at a disadvantage in the r/p/s system instead of attacking the units where they would have an advantage.

In addition the formation controls do not allow mixed units to hold a specific formation (e.g., archers in the rear) when moving on the enemy. The units move based upon speed, so any initial formation is quickly shredded. So your fast units routinely outrun their cover and end up attacking a superior force by themselves. And they engage the wrong unit types when they do, just to make it truly suicidal. Fortunately the AI is not too bright so if you can set up a standing formation in the enemy's path, they will obligingly walk right into it.

Your Warrior Hero is usually unresponsive when you need him to boost morale. For some reason he decides to not move at all just before a battle. You select and right click on a location and he just sits where he is. You kind of feel like putting your foot through the screen.

Bottom line: by the time I got through the tutorials and half way through the first campaign I gave up. It has the potential to be a lot better than AoE, but until the performance problems and bugs are fixed it is not playable.

Too much copy guard

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 5 / 8
Date: May 11, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I purchased this game, loaded it and tried to run it only to find
that the copy guard on the CD is so strong that when I try to start the game it rejects the CD. Sierra technical support finallly admited that they went overboard this time with their copy guard protection and some CD ROM drives will not work with the CD in the game. I have one of those drives (72x Kenwood). Contacting Kenwood did no good as they refuse to "Crutch" Sierra's problems.
This is a true example of the term: "Buyer Beware"

Empire Earth is the f.....g greatest!

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 11
Date: January 09, 2002
Author: Amazon User

It's like age of empires with 12 different ages, but a lot better ! Its great! My tip is that you get to the Nano age as quick as you can. It's futuristic mech-like robots kick butt against the other epochs!

Dont believe the hype

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 11 / 28
Date: October 24, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Ok I know theres 50 reviews up here with 4 or 5 stars already, that always makes me curious when the game hasnt even come out yet. Yesterday I downloaded the demo with my DSL and after an hour or so of anticipation I was able to play. The demmo consited of a 4 tutorials and 2 senerios. I have to admit at first I was pumped for this game I thought it would be a cross between a new type civiliztion game and age of kings. Unfortunatly from the demo it's not as good as either of those two. Frankly I am suprised that a company would try to pass of something that is obviously an Age of Empires type game a year or so after AOE has been out and not have it be at least as good as AOK. Now I am not an age of kings fanatic but I just dont see how this offers much more. You may get more building types and some speacialty stuff and get to go through many ages, but the graphics are worse in the sence that to see all of whats going on everything is so small and frankly unit graphics just dont meet AOK standards. Also units move relativly fast and they are not as ballanced as AOE units for instance your 10 shortsword men will be cut down by 10 javeliners in a heartbeat without doing the slightest dammage to the javeleners. There is a whole unit type combat system that forces you to fight certain units with only other types if you dont wished to be completely slaughtered, it's a somewhat reasonable system in theory but in practice it's entirely to black and white. You also have heroes, but they are rather bland to me. combat takes an imence amount of micromanaging which wouldnt be bad if there were not a huge number of fastly moving units all over the place. Also AI is not nearly as good as AOK.
Sadly this game isnt up to my expectations, I will be buying Civ 3 most likely and I am downloading the Star wars battle grounds demo which uses the ensemble engine with star wars universe. Also there is age of mythology coming out next year.
overall its an ok game but if you dont have Age of Empires your money would be better spent there.

Horrible tech support

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: February 22, 2002
Author: Amazon User

I can't comment on the quality of the game because I was never able to run it. I have a very common configuration (Dell PII-450mhz with 128 velocity video adapter)running XP. This game is not compatible with this system. I have been attempting to contact their technical support for weeks but have received no response. I only recently learned that my particular video adapter (very common) is not compatible with this game in XP. It is amazing that they would have not worked this out prior to release. If you buy this game, I hope you don't have any technical problems because you will not receive adequate technical support.

Better than Age of Empires 2

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: April 25, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Before I bought this game I used to play Age of Empires 2 and i had tons of fun with it for about 6 months. It was also very educational and teaches strategy. But once I got bored of Age of Empires 2 I was reading a gaming magazine and I saw an ad of this game and it looked amazing. I had a lot of spare cash so I decided to go buy it and when I came home from the game store at 8:00 PM and installed it I wasn't too excited, I don't know why. But once I started playing I still didnt feel excited and I thought that I would stop playing and go to bed in a few hours but no matter how much I tried I couldnt stop playing because I HAD to see the next age. After getting to the Renassaince age It was 5AM and I was too tired to go on so I fell asleep. The next morning I woke up adn went to work. When I got back from work I opened up a can of beer and a bag of chips and started playing Empire Earth for about 6 hours and with a full time job thats a pretty long time to play a game for. The next few weeks I continued the same cycle but after about a month my boss said that he was going to fire me if I didnt shape up so I played for about 4 hours a day instead of 6 but the amazing thing is that after playing so many games, Empire Earth was the only game that I actually became ADDICTED to and it was amazing. The singleplayer mode has a great replay value and multiplayer mode has about infinite replay so you will never get bored of this game. Although it is not as educational as Age of Empires 2 because AoE2 focuses on one specific time period for a long time but this game doesn't focus on ONE time period for that long even though this game has about 5 times as much different time periods as AoE2. This game is also mostly historical FICTION unlike AoE2 and it has futuristic battles too so those aren't even historical but the real point is that this game more fun than AoE2, and actually I think it's more fun than ANY RTS game ever! If you are into real time strategy then buy this game, its a must. If you aren't then you should give it a try ^^

Crushing Good Fun, yes, yet somehow troubling

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 5 / 9
Date: January 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Empire Earth is an extraordinarily well put together game from almost any objective, "within the genre" perspective, as other reviews have mentioned the unit balance and combined arms aspect is excellent. The challenge factor is very high, and it's difficult to get much ahead of the AI in the normal game mode. You can have a LOT of units in exsistence all at once, and I often found myself wishing I could deputize other players, for example, to command my navy or helicopter fleet while I led the army or managed the economy. The game is a ton of fun, addictive, and will get inside your head.

And yet. There's no real way to negotiate with the computer players, and the goal of the game is either wonder construction or utter conquest. I almost always chose wonder construction, and the computer attacked my wonders with godawful savagery. When you're able to defend the wonders or crush all the other non-allied players, you win, and that's that. The creators of the game are either just looking to make a game and not a world sim, or are Machiavellian, zero-sum worldview security nuts of the Cleonic stripe. I eventually stopped playing the game altogether, because I couldn't deal with the endless war and the fact that the game gives you no way to make a lasting peace with your enemy. I feel this limited the game's replay value, and I wonder what the implications are, if such games are influencing a large number of people's worldview. We live in a troubled world ourselves, and we need to believe that peace between many nations is possible. Sadly, in Empire Earth, it is not.

Fun, but hard.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: December 12, 2001
Author: Amazon User

Comparing this to the Age of Empire series:

1. In this game, you get to focus more on your military, and less on building your civilization. For example, you don't have to build houses, and you increase production by "popululating" town centers with villagers as opposed to having hordes of villagers all over the screen.

2. Ironically, this game is designed so that you progess through the ages more slowly than AOK. So there is no -resource gathering just to advance- as in AOK. You must build a military in every epoch or you'll be over ran. As a consequence, it's not really plausable to play a game with all 16 ages. But you can pick the starting and ending age of each game.

3. The graphics are better than AOK's in some ways, and worse in others. The infantry units in AOK are MUCH better, but the battleship (and other units) in this game are much cooler. There are also explosions and lots of blood in combat which is really fun to watch.

4. The grahpics of the units in the later ages is much better than the earlier, but the game get's really busy with so many ranged units.

5. The AI is much better in this game than AOK. The computer will continually launch suprise attacks on you, and go right for your villagers.

Much better than Age of Empires

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: February 13, 2002
Author: Amazon User

Empire Earth seems like it's a sequel in the Age of Empires series. Seeing as how the lead designer used to work for Ensemble the assumtion seems reasonable.

Empire Earth is a lot of game, there are 14 Epoches to progress through: and this lead to some VERY long games if you choose to allow every epoch. The single player campaigns (of which there are four) are very diverse and range in skill level. The game also comes with an amazing scenario editor.

Since Age of Empires I and II cover the same time periods as Empire's early epoches, most players will probably find the later epoches more enjoyable. All-in-all Empire Earth is an excellent game, definately worth a look.

Dont Listen to Other Reviews

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 3 / 4
Date: August 29, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Don't listen to the other people reviewing the game. They obvious dont know how to run the game the right way. If it is to slow, turn the resolution down. This makes it run faster and it still has great graphics. This game is the best real-time strategy out there. There are tons of units and epochs to travel through. Empire Earth has the greatest replay value ever because the maps and computer is different all of the time. Also, the multiplayer invironment is the best it can be. You can challange people from all around the world. The people who are saying the game is too hard obvisously shouldn't be gamers at all. My advise is to definately BUY this game. Try it and you will see how much fun it is.

P.S- If you are going to review a game, make sure you play it first instead of bashing it without trying it.

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