Tom's Comments: It's Age of Empires
2 with rampant feature creep. That's pretty much what you've got
here. If you're wondering how something works in Empire Earth
-- resources, combat, buildings, tech upgrades -- just assume
it's the same as Age of Empires 2.
But then there's a bunch of extra stuff: fourteen
eras, each with unique techs, units, and graphics; unit stats
that can be individually upgraded; controllable formations; spell
casting units that can zap enemies with hurricanes and earthquakes;
unique heroes that give their army bonuses; a global population
limit split between all surviving players; naval warfare with
subs; fighters and bombers with fuel limits; distinct wonders
of the world that bend the game mechanics.
However, the core of Empire Earth is also the stuff
you find in Age of Empires: rock/paper/scissors unit relationships,
priests who can convert enemies, healing, technology upgrades
to resource harvesting, peasants. Mainly peasants. Lots of peasants.
Swarms of the little guys. Most games of Empire Earth will be
decided by peasants. This is yet another RTS about economics.
Gold makes the world go round. And wood, stone, iron, and food.
Those nifty tanks and pikemen and dragoons are mere formalities.
To its credit, Empire Earth tries to force expansion
by limiting the number of peasants who can harvest a single resource
node. In theory, this means to get more gold, iron, and stone,
you have to spread out across the map. In practice, it means you're
going to spend even more time herding peasants.
As with Age of Empires, there are only vague differences
between the sides/races/empires/civs. Each "nation"
is just a list of modifiers, such as +10% to stone production
or -15% building time for tanks. Because you can also create your
own nation, Empire Earth seems to say 'ahh, screw it, just choose
your own modifiers'. But this isn't where you'll find the game's
personality. That comes through the different eras, each one a
sort of lively self-contained RTS. You can configure Empire Earth
to advance as quickly or slowly, but the march of time is this
game's most immediate appeal. It's always a thrill in Civilization
to be the first to discover gunpowder or flight. So it is with
Empire Earth's musketeers and biplanes.
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The interface needs some work to make all this sprawl
more manageable. But the developers have a good month or so before
they wrap it up and go gold. They're in the middle of an ambitious
beta program in which anyone who preorders the game gets to play
the beta online. Which is exactly what Empire Earth needs: a few
thousand people banging on it. I'm not sure it'll necessarily
help, because I can't imagine there's much hope for actually balancing
this thing. This will be the sort of enormously complex game that
brings out the cheesiest of the cheese.
But it's also probably going to be the kind of enormously
popular game that sells a lot of copies because it eschews innovation
for agglutination. On one hand, you've got business as usual.
On the other hand, you've got a lot of extra stuff clumped
on. The end result? An armload of game that lots of people --
including me -- will buy, no matter how overly complex, poorly
balanced, or baldly derivative.
