Like its predecessor, Empire Earth II (EE2) lets you lead your civilization all the way from the dawn of time through the present and into the future. As you move your way through 15 epochs, you begin by battling with sticks and stones and eventually work your way up to lasers and nukes. With such a large scope you can probably guess that EE2 is a pretty complex game. While EE2 adds a significant number of tools to help aid your imperialist plans, the series still remains one best suited for RTS veterans looking for a complex and challenging game.

Although it follows the basic RTS model – peasants gather resources and build structures to create military and special units – EE2 has far more depth than your typical RTS game. Depth often translates to complexity and that’s the case here, as you’ll learn the first time that you try to jump in and play the game. If you skip the tutorials and jump right into the game, you’ll find that you can control the basics of the game without any trouble by simply relying on your experience with RTS games. However, you’ll soon find the interface to be quite complex and you may feel like you’re in over your head pretty quickly. It’s not that the interface is not well-designed, there’s just a lot too it. The Space Shuttle probably has a pretty well designed control panel but that doesn’t mean that it is easy to sit down and figure it out. Even if you do play through the tutorials you’re going to have to put some time in to get up and over the learning curve, but at least you’ll be rewarded for your efforts with what is probably the deepest and most feature rich RTS game to date.

There's a lot to manage in Empire Earth II.

Just by sheer numbers alone you can see that it will take a long time to master EE2. There are over 300 unit types in the game spread out over the 15 epochs. In addition, there are 14 different civilizations, each with their own unique set of bonuses and special units. There are also unique tech trees for each epoch broken into four categories, for a total of about 180 possible advances in the game. This all provides for practically boundless strategic options that will keep the game fresh and unpredictable for quite a while. The number of epochs also means that you get a number of different strategy games rolled into one. Play is different when Bronze Age armies clash than when it is when Napoleonic armies square off, which in turn is quite different than lightning-quick modern warfare.

Not only are there a lot of units available, there will often be a lot of units in play at once. Unless you’re good at multitasking under pressure and can make full use of shortcut keys you may just find things to be overwhelming at times. Coordinating attacks while keeping up with unit production and making sure that the resources are flowing in is a full-time job, and things get even harder to manage when diplomatic overtures from other players or the AI start rolling in and alarm bells start going off on the strategic map due to enemy attacks. Even some of the seemingly straightforward scenarios are surprisingly complicated to manage. For example, the D-Day invasion scenario requires you to coordinate the loading of hundreds of infantry and armored units onto transports while softening up the beach defenses with ships and aircraft, followed by the need to reform all of those units into a manageable attack force after unloading them on the other shoreline. Making things even trickier to manage, the game sometimes experiences slowdowns when there are a lot of units engaged in battle – even on the 3 GHz machine with a 512MB video graphics card that the game was tested on for this review.

The game’s developers must have realized that they had a pretty complicated game here, because they’ve added several tools to help manage everything. The first is the citizen manager, a screen that lets you move your citizens between different harvesting and construction duties without the need to track down each individual citizen on the screen and then hunt down the nearest resource. This tool works well when your empire is small and compact, but runs into an issue when you start entering the mid-game. The problem is that you don’t know where the citizens are located when using the tool. You may inadvertently set a unit to work on the other side of the map which at best results in a lengthy delay before the citizen gets to work and at worst results in the citizen becoming stuck on a shoreline unable to cross a body of water or killed on the perilous journey.

Page 2 of 2 »