The AI on your side isn't much better and will require constant babysitting on your part. Pathfinding is pretty scattershot with lost units a constant issue and movement through bottlenecks a complete nightmare. In battle things are even harder to control as you need to constantly reissue the same attack orders again and again to keep your troops under any kind of control. For example, you may see a couple of cavalry units approaching during a battle. No problem, right? Just select the pikemen that you've hot-keyed into a group and send them at the cavalry. Well, on their short march to meet the cavalry you'll see one pikeman change his mind and start attacking a hut, another two run after some archer they just spotted, one or two start running in circles, and if you're lucky a pikeman actually approaching the cavalry. Every attack is like this; you need to constantly click on your desired targets or your units will do something on their own and they are poor decision makers. Managing larger battles is just about hopeless. More often than not you'll just send everyone in and wait for the dust to settle.

The game is not just hampered by the AI, but there's one poor design decision after another at work to annoy you. Resource gathering is thankfully automated, but you need builders to create and structures. Finding your builders can be tricky once you've built up your base a bit though as there's no "idle builder" button in the game. Seriously, how long have strategy games included this feature? It's been years. And then there's the poor map design. Each map is like a nightmare maze of cliffs, rivers, and impenetrable forests. Moving your army across the map to find the enemy base requires constant backtracking as you find one dead-end after another. Making things even more annoying is that the passable slopes and fordable river sections are hard to discern from those that are impassable. You can walk right past the only way to reach a part of the map and not even know it. I also found it annoying that the camera did not zoom out nearly as far as I would have liked. This also contributed to the difficulty in finding a way through the maze-like maps. Lastly, for some reason the units' acknowledgements are all one-liner jokes (and sometimes two or three liners). It's bad enough that you have to listen to pikemen continually tell you that they've always wanted to spearhead a movement or builders mention that they've just drilled a hole in their hands, but it's just plain torture to hear the same lame puns and bad jokes over and over and over again.

This year has seen the release of several high quality strategy games which makes the rudimentary and flawed gameplay in Empire Earth III really stand out, and stand out in a very bad way. It's hard to imagine any strategy gamer not being disappointed with the gameplay in Empire Earth III; you're far better off finding Empire Earth II at a bargain price or better yet picking up one of this year's other major strategy game releases.

In The End, This Game Hath Been Rated: 48%. The Empire Earth series may just end with this whimper of a game.

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