Empire Earth

aka: Diqiu Diguo, EE, Empire Earth: 500.000 Jahre Menschheitsgeschichte in einem einzigartigen Spiel, Empire Earth: An Epic Conquest Spanning 500,000 Years, Empire Earth: An Epic Conquest Spanning 500,000 Years of Human History, Empire Earth: Une fabuleuse odyssée à travers 500 000 ans d'histoire de l'humanité
Moby ID: 5374
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Description official descriptions

Age of Empires is set in the past, Command & Conquer explores the future, but up to now there was no real-time strategy game that covered the whole breadth of human history. Empire Earth fills this gap and lets you wage war with everything from prehistoric stone thrower up to futuristic battle-mechs.

Empire Earth’s mastermind Rick Goodman was lead designer of the original Age of Empires. Similarities are thus hardly surprising; in fact, his new game can be considered a 3D version of its predecessor. Despite the graphical leap, the game’s look and feel are very familiar - AoE fans will feel perfectly at home. The perspective is fixed in an isometric view, camera management is not required. In your quest to crush the opposition, you build settlements, collect five resource types, recruit troops (land, sea, air) and, well, fight battles. Unit improvements are no longer researched in buildings, but can be bought at once for each unit type. For example, you can increase your tanks’ hit points, attack value, armor, speed and range separately -- for a price. It's your choice whether to spend your income on a huge army, or on an advanced one. Throughout the campaign, you also earn civilization points for heroic deeds; you can spend these on general unit improvements, e.g. reducing your archers building time by 30%, or making your citizens 20% faster.

The game’s four campaigns span the entire history of warfare: conquer the Mediterranean as the Greeks, lead the English from the middle ages to the battle at Waterloo, change history by making the Germans victors of the First and Second World War, and finally create a Russian empire in 2025. The campaign missions are heavily scripted and contain quite a few adventure elements; for example, you must lead William Duke of Normandy safely through enemy ambushes. As the scenarios focus on a set time frame, you don’t advance through the 14 epochs (from the Prehistoric Era to the Nano Age). In skirmish mode and in multiplayer battles, however, you may lead your people from caves into skyscrapers.

Spellings

  • 地球帝国 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

167 People (164 developers, 3 thanks) · View all

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 83% (based on 32 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.4 out of 5 (based on 66 ratings with 9 reviews)

A really good idea, good effort, but just short of the finish line.

The Good
The fact that it has 12 eras to play in which is really fun because you can practically transition from any RTS era to another (even sci-fi fantasy which is in the later ages). They finally put controllable airplanes in a major RTS game which is good because I love my squadron of bombers. Fighting in the modern era is really cool too because it makes you understand modern war tactics. Aircraft carriers are fun as well, but are sadly still disproportionate to other things on the map. For example a villager is as big as tall as a tank and an airplane is the size of a horseman. But the game is fun non-theless, it possesses a 3d landscape that you can zoom into during the game (there is really no reason for this but they added it to the game and its fun to use ocassionally). Having a hero in the game is fun too except for the fact that you have to trigger his abilities, its not automatic like in Warcraft III. Watching the midieval armies fight is fun too, and I like the buildings they drew for that age/era, they are authentic looking. Having snipers is cool too, thought it would be nicer if they laid down. Lastly the WW2 artillary is awesome! Sadly there is only one artillary unit, but you can supplement that with airplanes.

The editor is good in this one too, you can practically make your own detailed campaigns and movies! Yeah you can actually make those in-game movies you see in all the RTS games, though it is rather hard to learn with all the triggers and all.

The Bad
The transition from era to era is really sketchy which makes sense because human techonology changed so drastically so its makes sense. But I do recall that the Roman legions were more powerfull than the barbarians and that doesn't really happen in the game. The lack of more units makes it kind of annoying to because you want to totally experience an Era/Age when your playing and you only get a glimpse of it before you advance and go to the next. Eventhough there is a variety of units to play with in Singly player, in multiplayer everyone has the same units (there are no set civilizations with their own units). Although there are civiilizations in a sense, you have a 100 bonus to spend on your custom civilization and give your people special advantages like faster villagers or faster airplanes. Or you can pick from the preset civs which is just preset bonuses not really the civ (although it does almost match the people's military tendancies but that is irrelevant, because people would have better planes not the same planes that are faster!). Anyway, single player levels are really long and somewhat boring. The future ages make no sense with walking robots because it would be way more efficient to have the have wheels or fly and its hard to distinguish between them because its just an army of shooting robots (except one with a sword). The first ages are really useless too, fighting in the prehistoric age is really bland because there are only 3 land units to pick from, and a raft with a guy hurling rocks. They could have been more creative then that really! Oh, and what's up with only six people to a mine? I wanna mine gold damnit! Other things that are missing is cruise missiles which I really wanted to use, missile silos in multiplayer, more helicopters, any sort of long range missile too (scud for example), being able to alter the landscape with your army would also be a really positive revolutionary step which would have made this game really good (imagine being able to make bridges or ditches).

The Bottom Line
Well to tell you the truth I was going to get a job at SSS and I talked to Rick Goodman the head of the company and he told me his dreams and aspirations for Empire Earth. To tell you the truth the ideas in his head sounded like a splendid game, but I think when they actually made it, it fell short of his invisioned glory. Maybe with better artists and more production time they could have made it a really good game. But the sad reality is that Empire Earth gets boring pretty fast, after you've seen all the eras and have gotten frustrated trying to figure out how to advance (which I still don't exactly understand 'til this day) because there is either a need for another town center or building or more military units and its not written down in the manual either. Also the multiplayer can only go so far. It's too rigid in my opinion and winning in the modern age is easy. Make some anti tank guns and a huge group of bombers and bomb everything the enemy has. Add one or two B-2's and you've got yourself a win almost guarenteed (that is unless the other guy hasn't done that to you first).

If you want good strategy games that came out the same time as this one that are better you should check out Warcraft III which is very good, or Age of Mythology which is good.

Windows · by Thiago Oliveira (85) · 2003

Good idea, not perfect.

The Good
Before I start I just want to say that I'm reviewing the game WITH the patch. It is needed to play multiplayer, and multi is the only way (more on that later).

The multiplay is by far the best part of this game. The idea that a game can go all the way from prehistory to the nano age is a good idea. This wide range of ages gives you quite alot of units to play with. They are basically broken up into three sections: pre-gunpowder, gunpowder, and tanks/cybers. Each section requires different tactics, mostly because you have to gather resources in different ways. One thing that helps this game is the random age start, as it injects a bit of randomness. With it you cannot just do one thing every game; you have to be able to play in each section.

There are five different resources: food, wood, iron, gold, and stone. Only six citizens are allowed to gather from any one resource patch at a time, however this doesn't really hinder anything, as they gather at a nice speed even in the start. The gold, iron, and stone patches have so much in them that I have never seen one run out. You will probably never encounter a shortage in anything you need, if you manage it right. This type of economy makes it easy to focus more on your military, which is really the fun part in this game.

Practically every unit has a counter, with a couple notable exceptions. One exception is the spearman in stone age. The only way to beat a bunch of spearmen is with your own spearmen. However, that is really the only weak point. Tanks, for example, are countered by anti-tanks, which are in turn countered by infantry, which is countered by tanks. In the early gunpowder ages the gunpowder units can be countered by the cuirassier, a heavy cavalry. However, halberdiers are a good unit for killing cuirassiers. It's all give and take.

The graphics are nice, being in 3d, but it doesn't really add anything. You can also zoom in if you want (but not if you want to win).

The Bad
Even though it does have so many ages, chances are you won't play in more then two in one game. If you age up too fast you won't have near enough military to fend off an opponent who has been working on that. The units in one age don't really have that great an advantage over units in the age below, unless it's at the breakpoints (first gunpowder, first tanks). You'll NEVER play a game that goes from prehistory to nano, unless that's exactly what you set out to do, and everyone co-operates. It would also take at least an hour and a half to do.

The AI is simply terrible. Now, every AI in every RTS game cheats, but this AI cheats so much. I think they just gave up trying to program the AI in how to correctly gather resources. Instead, it seems to just get loads of free resource deliveries. You could kill every single citizen, and stand outside the AI's capitol killing every citizen that comes out, and it will STILL make citizens, it will STILL make units, and it will STILL age up at a rate reserved for people who are booming. Another problem with it is that it doesn't know when to give up and resign. This forces you to hunt down and kill every last unit it has. If you let a citizen get away it will just keep making stuff with those free resources.

The multiplayer server itself is crap. There is technically a spam filter, but all it does is delay the spam for about three seconds, it doesn't actually block it. There is a way to ignore people (/i "playernamehere") but it's not in the manual anywhere I can find. Someone who beta tested EE told me. Even so, the chat still lags, especially when someone starts to spam. The filter only lags it up more.

The list of people in the room isn't alphabetized, and when you have eighty people in a room and you're looking for one person, it can get frustrating really fast.

There's another little annoying bug that affects some people. If you alt select a team, or double click a team icon to zoom to them, then start to scroll, the screen will jump back to that team a second later. This makes it quite tricky to jump to a team then have them attack something nearby, as by then the screen will have jumped back and you'll have clicked somewhere behind the team. In the heat of battle this is a Bad Thing.

The single player campaigns aren't worth mentioning.

The Bottom Line
Bottom line, if you can tolerate the chat problems, and don't encounter any bugs, this game is worth it. You'll never need to bother with the single player campaigns or the AI, which is half of the problem. If you're looking for a fun multiplayer game, you might want to consider Empire Earth.

Windows · by Dr. Elementary (273) · 2002

Empire earth

The Good
So nice real time strategy game

The Bad
One game is too long and can be more than 30 hours

The Bottom Line
Often the same way to win against IA is to build towers evrywhere

Windows · by adamo · 2023

[ View all 9 player reviews ]

Trivia

Epochs

The 14 Empire Earth epochs are:

  • Prehistoric Era (500,000 BC)
  • Stone Age (10,000 BC)
  • Copper Age (5000 BC)
  • Bronze Age (2000 BC)
  • Dark Ages (0 AD)
  • Middle Ages (900 AD)
  • Renaissance (1300 AD)
  • Imperial Age (1500 AD)
  • Industrialization (1700 AD)
  • World War I (1900 AD)
  • World War II (1930 AD)
  • Modern Era (1950 AD)
  • Digital Era (2000 AD)
  • Nano Age (2100 AD)

Server shutdown

The official online servers were shut down on 1 November 2008.

Awards

  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – PC Game of the Year

Information also contributed by Sciere

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by -Chris.

Additional contributors: Unicorn Lynx, jean-louis, Patrick Bregger, Plok.

Game added November 19, 2001. Last modified March 22, 2024.