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Empire Earth Review
Posted:
23/11/01 by Venom
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(41)
 Ok, so here’s a quick run down of Empire Earth for those who have had their head shoved up their ass or don’t pay attention to the gaming world. Empire Earth is the new epic real time strategy game published by the devil bastards at Sierra (maybe more on this on another day) and developed by Stainless Steel Studios. The gist of the game is this: You control a civilization in an Age of Empires kind of way through a maximum of 14 epochs utilizing about 200 different units. The box tells me that some cat named Rick Goodman was involved in the game and he helped make Age of Empires. I think this should impress me but severely hot women, beer, and large explosions are the only things known to man that impress me and this game has none of those. It only has moderate explosions.
Anyway, back to the game. So I went out and spent my cash on this epic, and epic is the right word for this game. It’s a BIG HUGE GAME (I wonder if I can get a kickback from Brian Reynolds for the promo). The sheer amount of detail and game length are staggering. The campaign “missions” start in certain epochs and there’s a reason for this; it takes a damn long time and a whole lot of resources to advance epochs. For example: I played a game for 4 hours last night and was just entering the WWII epoch, which means there were still 3 more epochs to go. Advancing to the next epoch takes literally thousands of each resource. The good news is resources are practically unlimited so it is easy to advance, but it just takes time and lots of villagers. Each mine (ore, stone, gold) and farm contains 300,000 units while each single tree on the map contains 500 units of wood. Normally this would result in players “turtleing” in their bases and playing defense. This will not work and here’s why: Siege weapons are VERY powerful. Much more powerful than towers and walls. So if you’re relying on your walls to protect you from siege mortars, cannons, tanks, and planes you’re going to get drilled in the ass. Another design feature included to try and limit “turtleing” deals with the process of advancing epochs. In order to move to the next epoch you must first build any two buildings (not including houses and towers I think). You’re basically forced to expand your empire as you run out of unique buildings by something like the 3rd epoch.
Anyhow, lets run through the elements of the game.
The Graphics
For the most part the units look good, at least when you’re zoomed out to the standard RTS distance. It is a little difficult to distinguish between the different ground units at long range however. Longbow men look like riflemen, snipers look like sappers, etc. This becomes an issue in battles, as you must use combined arms to win battles (more on this later). The closer you zoom in, the more distinguished the units become, until you zoom in too close. Then the units look bad. Just plain old bad. You can see where they tried to put details in the uniforms and faces of soldiers but it just doesn’t work. Up close the units are blocky with blurred details. I’d only recommend zooming up close to watch a big battle. The different units die in different ways and it’s fun to watch them spurt blood when they’re hit (stop staring at me! Violence is always the answer).
Other notable graphical enhancements include ships that bob up and down on the water, trees that sway in the breeze, dust that rises and swells from destroyed buildings, and blood that spurts from the units when they’re hit. The highlights of the units are the ships and airplanes. They look good and they die good. Plus they don’t have as many moving parts so they don’ look as crappy when you zoom in on them. Special shout out to the nuclear explosions, they’re pretty big, bright, and destructive though not as destructive as they should be. Stupid game balancing.
Overall I’d give the graphics a B+. Good, but there’s still room for improvement. If you keep the game zoomed out to it’s default distance, you’ll enjoy the graphics.
The Sound
Sound is probably the weakest part of the game. It’s not spectacular and it’s not horrible, it’s just there. Swords clash, cannons boom, muskets and rifles pop, buildings crumble, and arrows swoosh just as you’d expect them to. Unfortunately there isn’t much of a difference (if there’s even any difference) between the sound of a Dreadnaught firing a broadside and a Roman era battleship doing the same. I wasn’t alive to see either of these ships fight in real life, but I imagine they sounded quite different from each other. According to this game, a cannon is a cannon no matter when it was created. Each unit also has the old patented confirmation sounds they utter when clicked on and they scream satisfyingly enough when they perish. As usual this becomes a little tiresome after awhile.
The soundtrack is just like the sound effects. Standard and acceptable but nothing that makes me want to run down the store and pick up a few instruments so I can play along. After an hour or so I found myself turning down the volume so I could hear the TV better, though in my defense ER was on and it was a good episode. There was this big storm and all hell was breaking loose and Kerri had to go out in it and perform a C-section in a wrecked ambulance. Just like old school ER, none of that crap about the doctor’s personal troubles (except Benton, but he’ll be gone soon enough) just pure trauma. Excellently done. Now where was I? Oh yes, the sound track! To be honest, I don’t even remember it if that tells you anything.
Overall I give the sound a C. It’s just plain old average.
The Game Play
I’m just going to lump a bunch of crap in this section that I haven’t mentioned yet. An original idea this ain’t. It practically is Age of Empires 3 and I’ve touched on game play elements throughout so I’ll sum shit up here by talking about my experiences with the game and the things I noticed during the flow of play.
The really great part about the game is the wide-open random map games. There are a ton of different settings you can alter to try and give you a leg up on the competition as well as the standard game settings. With these options and the ability to create custom civilizations (when you do this, you get to apply certain bonus attributes to your civ such as increased attack range for archers or decreased build costs for ships, etc the list of attributes is VERY long and detailed) there’s an almost unlimited number of ways to play the game. Another nice thing to see is the area effect of buildings. Buildings aren’t just for building stuff anymore. They give you bonuses as well. Hospitals and docks repair units that are in the immediate area and temples protect your buildings from calamities called down by enemy prophets. Houses, in the meantime, are not needed to increase population limits. Instead they provide your troops with a morale bonus when they are close enough to the battle. This makes it even harder to attack an enemy base, as their troops will be even stronger.
Units
Let’s start off with the AI. Sweet jesus on a popsicle stick, the AI is hard to beat! And I’ll give you one guess as to why that is…that’s right the AI cheats worse than Andrew Golata. Now I’ve only been playing the game for a few days now so I don’t have strategy and tactics down pat, but even on the Easy level the AI will have you beat down like Chinese student by the Bronze Age. The AI was dishing out low blows left and right. Don’t leave a single hole in your defensive setup or it will be massively exploited, as the AI apparently knows the location of every one of you soldiers, buildings and defensive walls at all times. And this was on the easiest level. I can’t wait to bump in up a notch and have the computers stealth bombers come in and a level my crossbow men. It’s that big of a discrepancy between your abilities and theirs.
In my first skirmish game it was one on one, me against the computer. I set the game up so that we started equally. In short I got crushed. I wallowed along until the Bronze Age when the computer attacked and whooped me. See, unlike AoE, towers can’t shoot over walls. They will knock walls down to get to the enemy so it may be best to make your towers PART of the walls. Though I’m only guessing here. I didn’t know this and I had my towers leveling my own walls to get at the enemy. In the meantime the computer attacked the few holes I had in my defense screen and shortly thereafter I died. Not a good times. Bad times. Things were broken due to the quality of this game. The moral of this game was BUILD EFFECTIVE WALLS!! They’ll get knocked down later by heavy weapons, but without them the computer will run over you in the Bronze Age. Build the walls and towers and keep rebuilding them.
With my short intro to the game concluded (who the hell needs to play some lame ass tutorial mission when I can be getting my ass kicked in a real game) I set up another game. Realizing how badly I had been beaten and how badly the CPU cheated I set this game up a little differently. In order to help me win (I hate to lose to a bastardized computer) I stacked the deck in my favor. I set it up so I started with 20 villagers instead of the 5 I gave the CPU. 5 is plenty for the CPU. 5 is like an army for the CPU. In order to finish my mastery of fate I gave myself a CPU ally. This was the true key to the game. By watching my ally work (you and your ally share Line of Sight) I got to see just how bad the computer cheats. By the time my 20 villagers and me had built 1 “supply depot” and a barracks my ally had basic infantry units running all over the map and at least 5 buildings. It appears they work at least 3 times faster than you and start the game with unlimited resources. So now that my CPU ally was drawing the fire of the enemy I had time to sit back and develop and here’s what I noticed. Villagers are stupid! While I was having them build my walls they kept getting stuck. They’d literally build themselves into a corner where I had to kill them because they couldn’t go anywhere (though the scream of a helpless villager being killed by the god that is I, was enjoyable). Unit pathing, in general, is less than good.
I also noticed how fun the game was once you got into later epochs using more modern units. Maybe that’s just because the modern units give the game it’s own feel. They also make for a more intense game. I fought for 3 hours straight before I finally defeated the computer using nukes, aircraft carriers, and mechs. Explosions, death, destruction, and carnage for 3 straight hours…Excellent stuff.
Overall I give the game play and the intangibles an A-, fun but certainly frustrating until you get the hang of things.
Conclusion
Overall I give the game a B+. It’s very complex, but that just gives you lots of different ways to play it. It’s an old formula but it’s still fun to play. The most glaring problem comes with the computer players. It’s not that the computer is smart; it just cheats SO DAMN BAD. It breaks population limits, builds faster than you, and it can see every single one of your units and buildings from the start, and that’s just on the easy level. In the end I’d say play this game. This is destruction on an epic scale despite a few minor but aggravating flaws.
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