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Great game

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 6
Date: December 31, 2003
Author: Amazon User

This game has some of the best graphics on the market today. The framerate is awsome, no chopping in the gameplay, and a great assortment of textures. Saying this I do have a few problems. the game is an improved Empire Earth. It shouldve been sold as an expansion if anything. Another thing is the small amount of units your able to choose to build. The timeline is somewhat short but nonetheless this is an awsome game. A must have for fans of the genre. When completely zoomed in the detail is amazing and the reflections of boats oin the water is mind blowing. the AI is impressive also. I own rise of Nations and am somewhat skilled at the art of war on that game. Being able to easily defeat the enemy on easy I moved the dificulty level up to medium, not knowing that within five minutes the enemy would be running a muck in my capitol. Empires takes care of this flaw with ten levels of difficulty ranging from Jester to Emperor. If your a RTS fan, waste no time go out and get this game.

Seen it before

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 8 / 11
Date: August 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is a pretty fun game if you like Age of Empires, Stronghold, Lords of the Realm, etc. While I had fun with the game, it really offered very little new to the genre. The graphics were ok, but certainly not cutting edge. The AI offered a decent challenge. This game is ok to play if you have already gone through all the top games like Warcraft, Total War, or any of the games I have mentioned above, and you need a strategy fix.

An excellent game - Mostly.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 6 / 7
Date: July 28, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game is quite engaging. I spent several months completing the pre-defined missions which are quite interesting. The game has a few bugs that need the patch to be applied. In terms of strategy, overall the complexity is a 6/10. More realism could have been programmed in. For example in the Patton missions, it is possible to take a few rangers (two) and wipe out about 100 German troops, artillery and the pill boxes. Fuel constraints only come into play during the later missions. Fuel supply lines should be a part of all games. Anyway these are small complaints - the game is a lot of fun and better than AOE series in many respects.

How can France win a WW2 Random Map against United Kingdom

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 12
Date: April 27, 2006
Author: Amazon User

Set a Random Map, choosing France and make the computer choose United Kingdom, pick the Highlands or Plains map (not wise going against England by sea), set 2000 max pop, both ages at WWII, Huge size, "Action" type of game, check "Reveal Map" and pick Difficulty = "Officer". After winning at Difficulty = "Officer" level, tried the same approach at "Commander" level, and won as well, sure this time was a little harder.

If, based on years and years of playing RTS games, you start building a powerful, well protected main base around your City Hall; chances are that you are going to be crushed sooner or later, by endless waves of tanks (tank-rush), commandos and aircraft. More deceiving, in this case, will be the fact that several of France's advantages rely on defensive resources, like pill-boxes, powerful low profile bunkers garrisoning until eight infantry units, and cannon towers that can be reinforced by garrisoning until five infantry units. So, when you start building up, you will be biased to a rather defensive strategy.

But your main disadvantage, if you focus around your city hall, will be the shortage of gold. Each mine has max supply around 5,000 gold units, if a bomber or cannon costs you 250 gold units, and you have 4 or 5 mines, max, near your city, just do the math. Your country will be soon defenseless, because lack of money.

After hours and hours of trying and failing, several nights wasted until 2-3 am in the morning (with the subsequent nightmare to get to work next morning), last night I decided to use a new approach, which I explain below. I won with it, twice, not just once, in less than two hours each game.

Start putting the initial available peasants (5) to build a farm and produce food. Then, you can call another 4 peasants from the city hall, because you have some initial stocks of food. Send these 4 new peasants separately to 4 gold mines in the middle of the map, neither close to your city nor close to the opposed edge of the map, just pick 4 gold mines in the middle zone and command the peasants to build settlements near them. You will have wood just for the 4 first settlements.

In the meantime, your initial 5 peasants have produced some food already, so keep the city hall calling as many as possible new peasants. The next wave of peasants, 3-4, use them to complete the labor force needed by the farm (8), and send a couple to collect raw food from some apple tree near to the city hall. Do not waste time and labor chasing animals for meat. You will see a lot of them, just ignore them. Now you will be able to keep calling new peasants relentless.

Next wave of 4-5 of them, send it to chop wood to the nearest forest around your city hall, when stored 50 units of wood, send the next new peasant to build a settlement near the farthest and unoccupied possible gold mine. Keep doing this until you have about a dozen of gold mines opened and working.

Then, command next new peasants to build a new second farm, after this one completes its labor force, command next half dozen of new peasants to chop wood, and after that, send all other subsequent new peasants to the already opened mines, reaching 5-6 peasants per mine, prioritizing the farthest ones. You can leave untouched the 3-4 gold mines close to your city, just in reserve.

At this point you'll have a good inventory of food, gold and wood, more than 1,000 units each, more or less.

From the farthest (from your city) working mines, pick 2 of them, conveniently located at each flank, right and left, from your city. Command the miners to build a barrack, an artillery depot and an airport surrounding the existing mine settlements. When they are done, send them back to mine gold, and start recruiting armed forces, as fast as you can. In the beginning, call only basic infantry, AA & AT artillery and 10 fighter's aircraft for each airport. Start with AA first, because chances are that first enemy raids will be airborne, this way you will be able to defend your base, counting on AA and basic infantry, which has the ability of fire their rifles on planes.

In the meantime, keep recruiting new peasants, sending them to complete the 5-6 labor force for each working mine, send another batch of them to join the lumber force till you reach 25-30 lumberjacks, and then put the next wave to carve stone, in the nearest stone mine around your city.

Go back again to the 2 initial armies. Keep building until you reach about 30-40 infantry, 5-10 AA and 5-10 AT cannons each. After this, call 3-4 big cannons from the A Depot. In the airports, deploy 5 bombers after the fighters are done. Make the workers build a second airport in each base. Repeat the 10 fighters-5 bombers process.

Go back to the city, command a bunch of workers to build the armory and the university. When done, launch both available improvements in the armory. Assign the Attack improvement to the AT cannon, and the Speed improvement to the bomber. To do this, select any deployed bomber and it will start flying from the airport, when it shows up, click it with the improvement icon. From the university, you will need only the Faster Healing improvement.

After building the armory, you'll have available specialized infantry. Recruit 5-10 grenadiers and 5 flamethrowers for each one of your two armies. Command your workers to build Tanks factories in each base, and call a radar truck and 5-10 motorcycles for each army. Do not bother deploying (French) tanks, they are almost useless. In the meantime, second airports will be aircraft ready.

You will have to accomplish all above in less than one hour, so you have to think and click fast your moves.

Finally, the decisive moment has arrived. Send each army to forward advance, in aggressive mode, to the edge of the map in front of it, but slightly converging and the center point of the border. The targeted zone shall be the core of the enemy region. Command all your aircraft to support land forces, setting rally points at the same place as of the ones of the armies. Try do not get engaged at first with enemy live forces, but rather try to destroy key buildings.

After this, keep recruiting infantry, motorcycles, AT and AA artillery. When stone and all other materials inventories reaches 1,000 units, send a bunch of peasants to build the French wonder.

When the Wonder is built, use generously its Healing, Heroism, Army Recon and Lend Lease powers. Using the last one you'll build a reserve army close to your city.

Launch the second wave of land armies (third and fourth, so far) to the dangerous points, where the enemy forces are more concentrated, and keep replacing the lost aircraft in the airports.

Keep recruiting the basic units: infantry, AT & AA and motorcycles. Start sending them separately in Explore mode, so they can cover the whole map, killing enemies wherever they find them.

When peasants are done building the Wonder, put them to build the max possible number of airports near your city. Deploy aircraft ASAP in them, and start sending the planes individually, also in "Explore" mode, soon the whole map will be under your faction color.

In the meanwhile, keep an eye at the older mines, chances are that at this point, they will be exhausted. Assign the idle peasants to chop wood and/or to open new mines, in the reserved spots near the city.

Any time soon, you will be surprised with the message "You are victorious", so much enjoyable after you have been ignominiously defeated so many times as I was.

This strategy also proved to be successful playing with Germany, instead France. However, with Germany, there are a few differences about how to start. Send all initial available citizens to build a settlement near to the apple tree and gather food from it. Recruit all possible new citizens, and send another 2-3 citizens to the food tree, until reaching 5-6. Keep recruiting citizens at max possible rate, and send the next bunch of 2-3 to the middle of the closest animals (deer, elks, buffalos, etc) herd to build another settlement there, after finished the building, they will start immediately the hunting. Now that you'll have food supplies secured for a while, start sending the new citizens to the available gold spots in your half of the map and command them to build settlements. After opening 8-10 gold mines, send the next citizens to build a settlement for wood chopping. Before the apple tree is totally depleted, is the time to build a couple of farms, and you'll need wood for them.

Also, build the Tank factory from the beginning in your advanced bases, and reinforce each assault army with a couple of King Tiger tanks. They will be invulnerable against enemy tanks and infantry, but do not make the mistake of sending them alone against the enemy. They will be an easy prey for enemy aircraft. Fact is, you can't send unattended German land armies as farther and faster as French's, because the AA issue. Germany does not have specialized AA mobile artillery, as France or United Kingdom do have. With Germany, you have to deploy mobile AT artillery, and then, when needed you can command an AT unit to immobilize and convert to AA, and then, in any moment, you can bring it back to AT and mobile function.

Result is that when your ground army is in motion, they almost will not have any protection against enemy aircraft, because German infantry is not as good as French's or English's at shooting planes, due to the short range automatic weapons they carry. Then, you will be obliged to personally drive your army and be aware of when is needed to switch AT units to AA. Still, there is more, many times you'll need both AT and AA because you will be attacked by air and ground, so you will have to decide in the field which artillery units will perform as AT and which as AA.

For better economy, you can lower the cost in 25% of any unit, using the available improvement in your armory. The King Tiger tank is very expensive, at 800 gold units. You could be thinking of apply this "make it cheaper" power to it, but at 600 gold units, it will be still expensive, and besides that, recruiting them is very high time consuming process. The Germans have another powerful unit: the Mortar infantry that will deal a lot of damage to the enemy and has a long range, at a relative low cost. If you lower the cost even more, the expected ratio damage/cost will be better yet. A large group of these units is especially good shelling enemy buildings and defending a stronghold against ground attacks. But, it's defenseless against aircraft and at close range, so they need to be mixed with another infantry and AA - AT artillery.

Apply the Aerodynamics improvement to your fighter aircraft, and the Speed improvement to your bombers. From the University, you'll have an Instant Healing power, blast improvement for mortars and cannons and a couple of other tricks. One of the latter is the power to lift the Fog of War in any desired section of the map, but you can use it just once. If you are lucky to discover a massive concentration of enemy buildings, you can follow the discovery by launching a V-2 rocket, assumed you have already built the rockets base. You will be amazed when you see the damage that only one rocket can inflict to enemy buildings.

Rocket is a mass destructive weapon, with a very long range. Problem is that you can't fire it in Ground Attack mode. You need to point it to a specific target, which can be any building, under your line of sight.

The German Wonder is very useful if the game takes too long after your gold mines have been depleted. It supplies small but steady gold shipments to your treasure. So, send some citizens to build it when you have the chance, and it will be very useful keeping you able to deploy new forces along the way.

A great historical RTS game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: November 16, 2003
Author: Amazon User

Empires is the RTS game I've been waiting for. I loved games like Starcraft and Age of Empires, but the recent batch of games just hasn't done it for me. The different civilizations and different ages really gives the game a lot of depth. I'm really enjoying playing multiplayer online with my brothers and my friends. If you've been disappointed with other recent RTS games, look no further.

Very, very good game

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: December 30, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Ive played Aoe 2 and the new one, Aoe 3. Ive played many Rts's and i have to say this one is my favorite out of all of them.
Every civilization is completly differn't, and has it's own strengths and weaknesses. Very cleancut game, and fun!

Example of ww2 civs:

Russia: Uses hordes of crappy units to over come opponent, can rush good in deathmatch, but can be countered. Russia also has snipers that one shot kill infantry also.
Germany:Overpowered units (Example: king tiger tank, mortar cannons) germany also can shoot V-2 missles at people.
France: Can use sabeteurs to blow up stuff, france has to use alot of stragety to win. Their wonder generates things to use against your enemy, (example: burn down buildings, etc)
Mainly france uses alot of stealth tatics to win.
United States: Has a good airforce(B-29nuke bombers)and P-51 mustangs, but the B-17 bombers suck against ground units due to the not so wide radius. United states also has aircraft carriers to launch fighters at sea.
United Kingdom: Has units that can swim through water, and blow up buildings (SAS operativs) Has stealty commandos, has overpowered bombers. And the UK has very very good AA guns.

This is all for the ww2 age, dont forget the other ages before ww2 ( ww1, imperial age, gunpowder age, medieval age)
Even thought it has all these ages though, peopel dont really play them all. Hardly any one palys medieval-WW2. Usually its WW2-WW2 or imperial-imperial.

PS. Don't listen to people who say this game lags, this is the most lag free RTS game ive ever played online. (I have 768mb of ram)

Okay, but needs a lot of improvement

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 7 / 11
Date: January 08, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This is an okay game. There are some ideas that make it interesting and enjoyable to play, but otherwise the game is not worth buying. There are different countries represented at different epochs, and you have to chose which country you want to be as you progress through the game. I think this is an innovative idea and makes gameplay interesting. The three campaigns let you use some different strategies besides collect resources, build an army, attack, rinse, repeat. Also, each team has strengths and weaknesses, although other games have touched on this, E:DOTMW brings it to a new level. Each team has completely different units and technologies. This makes the game very interesting, and playing each team is a unique experience.
Despite the positives, there are many more negatives to this game. Although many people tout the graphics as innovative, the graphics in AOE II were pretty much the same. The AI is pretty stupid. For example, workers will sometimes get trapped between some buildings and the "edge" of the map or a group of trees. Mistakes like these were almost non-existant in AOE II. The campaigns need some serious story-line revamping. They start out interesting, but it seems like the story writers ran out of ideas and so just ended the stories without really resolving them in the same exciting fashion they started them in. The "random map" feature and multi-player ability is just like every other RTS on the market. Build up an army as quickly as possible and fight with it, rinse and repeat. The game is also lacking on units and entire countries. For example, Japan is not included in the World War I or World War II eras. Navies have no option to build destroyers to battle submarines. The USA does not have Iowa battleships during the World War II era. I'm sure that these "oversights" were done on purpose to make room for an expansion, but until there is an expansion, it is a serious lacking in the game. This is an addictive game, but has little substance. My recommendation is to go out and buy AOE II used and play that.

This Game has Technical Problems

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 6 / 11
Date: August 01, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Forget this game if you have an NVIDIA GeForce 4000 or higher video card. You will get a C++ Runtime Error every time the game loads. Activision is aware of the problem but has no solution. After two days trying unsucessfully to load the game, I threw it out!

EMPIRES RULES

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: April 09, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Empires dawn of the modern world is the best. The graphics are amazing. Say if you choose Germany to use, you would be able to get the tanks, soldiers, and airplanes that they use. You can even see the signs on them that show you your Germany. You can pick from the strongest nations like Russia, Frane, U.K., U.S., Germany, Korea, and much more. You can only get five nations for each time period. But it's total fun. You can only get Medival through WWII. But still you should get this game because it's awesome.

Empires Dawn of the Modern World

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 6
Date: August 20, 2004
Author: Amazon User

Empires Dawn of the Modern world is a great game. The
gameplay is easy, the graphics are very good, the sound/music
is just perfect. The campaign is very fun and very nicely made.
There are three campaigns in the game, about the life of Richard
the Lionheart, Captain Yi Sun-Sin, and Gernal George Patton.
Each campaign is different and each they are set in a different
age. Richard the Lionheart's campaign is about the english and
the french battling in a war for the french throne. Captain
Yi Sun-Sin is about the Japanese invasion of Korean. Gernal
George Patton's campaign is about the how the US fought in the
European front in WW2. All is very fun and is historically base.

The mutiplayer for the single or online is very fun. In the
single ramdom map, you choose a civilization, an age, the map,
and either action or empire building. Action is fast and is all
about military. Empire building is longer and you must build
large empires or you shall see enemy unit in your base. You can
also choose to have a deathmatch which you are given alot of
resoures is a all out attack upond your oppenent. You can build
wonders (one olny) and protect it until time runs out. Online is
the same but olny the host do all the stuff I saided. It is
better becaues you have tactics, and coordinates attacks. I have
never played online, but I seen it with my friend playing it.

The ages is the olny thing that I have a camplain about.
There are five ages, medival, gunpowder, imperial, WW1, WW2.
IN the imperial age, when you go to the next age, you have to
choose a different age because that civilization is not a majar
power in the WW1 and WW2 age. It should be change.

Overall it is a good game to play for RTS gamers. Buy it!

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