With the emphasis on combined arms attacks, unit formations become an
important tool -placing a wall of spearmen to protect you archers significantly
improves their chances against swordsmen. It appears at first that Empire
Earth provides help to players in this regard by allowing them to assign
formations to groups of units. Unfortunately, formations are used to
specify the general layout of troops at the end of a movement order. While
moving, the units head to their destination at a variety of speeds and resemble
a mob more than a military formation. This leads to two problems.
The first is that if the units are attacked along their route they are
completely spread out and especially vulnerable if attacked by a unit type with
the advantage. Second, if ordered into combat, a large formation may
arrive piecemeal, allowing the enemy to survive the assault, or at the least
have adequate time to respond to it.
In addition to military units, players also have access to priests and
prophets which are created by building temples. Priests have the ability
to convert enemy units. Once converted, the unit comes under control of
the player owning the priest. Prophets are powerful units which have the
ability to summon calamities onto opposing players. These include plagues
to kill off enemy units and earthquakes and firestorms to damage and destroy
structures. Players can protect themselves from enemy priests by
constructing universities and from prophets by building temples. Each of
these create conversion or calamity free zones around the structures.
Prophets are an interesting addition to the ancient ages, when units of mass
destruction just did not exist. However, they seem oddly out of place in
the modern ages, where players can drop an atom bomb and then follow it up with
a divine volcano.
Empire Earth makes use of 3D graphics that give the game a nice look.
Most maps feature rolling terrain and translucent seas, and the unit animations
look nice. The game's camera can be zoomed in (rotation is not
supported), but players will rarely use this feature. It is too hard to
control the often large amounts of units at your disposal in a game of Empire
Earth when the camera is zoomed in. Also, the units do not look very good
at the highest zoom level; they appear blocky and the textures used
for the units' features look downright odd. Another disappointing thing
about the unit graphics is that there is no difference in look between the
various civilizations in the game. The 21 different civilizations in
the game have various unique bonuses, but all share the same set of structure
and unit graphics. The only visual difference between the civilizations is
the highlight color used to distinguish unit ownership. Not all of the civilization
bonuses are applicable to all eras, so players should choose a civilization from
the era in which they will be playing the game.
Speaking of civilization bonuses, the game does allow players to customize
the civilizations by spending points on bonuses in a wide variety of categories
including combat, production costs, and citizen efficiency. To keep any
player from gaining too strong an edge in any particular category, each bonus
selected causes the cost of other upgrades in the same category to rise.
This ability to create custom civilizations is a nice feature that allows
players to tweak their civilization to fit their strategy or style of play.
Empire Earth is not an easy game, nor is it a game for those new to computer
strategy gaming. The AI is a very tough opponent and plays the game very
well, providing players with some stiff competition in the random map
games. It is also not a short game. Resource gathering is a slow
process further hampered by a six citizen per resource site limit. While
in theory it is possible to play the game from prehistory through the future,
the slow resource gathering rate, high cost to advance between the ages, and
lack of any kind of market or resource trading mechanism make it easy to spend
over an hour within a single age. It is unlikely that many players will
want to try this for other reasons, though. The early ages are not very
interesting when compared to other strategy games available, there is definitely
a sense of "been there, done that." It is in the middle to late
ages that the game truly becomes interesting. The number of unit types
available increases in these stages and opens up a much larger set of strategic
options.
In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 85%.
This is not a game for those new to strategy games - the challenge and
complexity make Empire Earth too much to digest for these players and it may
easily prove to be frustrating to them. Strategy veterans will not be too
impressed with the game's ancient ages, but will appreciate the game's challenge
and variety of units in the later ages. Most players will probably prefer
to play the random map games under tournament rules, since the pace of resource
gathering and advancement under the normal rules may prove to be too slow for
them. The tournament rules option provided by the game
increases the resource gathering rate and reduces the cost to advance to the
next age, providing for a faster and more aggressive game.
System Requirements: 266 MHz Pentium II CPU; 32 MB RAM; 4 MB
Video RAM; 4x CD-ROM; 450 MB Hard Drive Space; Mouse.
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