Greetings and today is an LGR thing I’m covering
largely as an excuse to immerse myself in it again.
This is Empire Earth, developed by Stainless Steel Studios for Windows PCs and published
by Sierra On-Line in 2001.
And back then, I was quite the fan of Microsoft’s Age of Empires games by Ensemble Studios.
I mean, I still am, but back then dude?
That series was my own personal messiah of real time strategy games.
So Empire Earth appealed immediately due to its aesthetic similarities, being a history-based
RTS where you begin in an ancient era and progress through time by harvesting resources
and researching new technology.
Then once I learned development was helmed by Rick Goodman, one of the co-founders of
Ensemble Studios and a lead designer on Age of Empires,
I was 100% ready to give Empire Earth a chance.
It certainly impressed on the packaging level, with a large gatefold box flaunting its art
assets and strategically-quoted praises from the press.
And inside it gets even better, with an inner cardboard box
holding an assortment of physical goodies.
Including a sizable technology tree that folds out to reveal a massive number of upgrades
over fourteen time periods, rightfully inviting comparisons to Sid Meier’s Civilization
in addition to Age of Empires.
The box also contains a convenient quick reference card covering the game’s dizzying number
of hotkeys and shortcuts.
And then there’s the instruction manual, a 240-page opus of information, with fifteen
chapters, multiple appendices, and craploads of subsections dutifully covering each individual
facet of gameplay. Fantastic stuff.
It’s almost anticlimactic seeing that the entire game is packed onto a single CD-ROM
holding less than 600 megabytes, but y’know, the early 2000s.
Speaking of which, ya gotta love this ad for those classic Alienware Area 51s.
Seems you got a hundred bucks off a Pentium 4 build, not bad.
Hehe, and my copy in particular also came with this printout from the previous owner,
revealing they’d had problems getting the game to run at all on their Dell Dimension 4300.
Sierra’s just like, “eh, shut down everything and check DirectX or whatever.”
Dude whatcha gonna do, you got a Dell.
Anyway that’s enough paperwork, let’s start up Empire Earth and explore half a million
years of human history.
It begins with the usual assortment of animated logos and intro cinematics, with the main
video showing a leader throughout multiple periods in time, each having something going
on with his right eye.
This guy, this guy, this guy, this guy.
Apparently depth perception is not a requirement for military leadership, so that’s encouraging.
After this is the main menu with options for single player, multiplayer,
game tools, settings, and [exit!]
Unfortunately Empire Earth’s official multiplayer lobbies were taken down years back, though
there are still ways to play online through fan-made servers like NeoEE.net if that’s
your jam.
But yeah, for this video let’s jump into the single player, which admittedly looks
a whole lot like Age of Empires.
You’re presented with choices for playing a random map, four campaigns, custom scenarios,
saved games, and learning things.
That last one supplies new players with eight tutorial maps guiding you step by step through
the most important systems and strategies.
Citizens construct all the buildings and gather all the natural resources that are necessary
for a civilization's survival and growth.
It’s good stuff, with fully-voiced narration and maps purpose-built to ensure that you
don’t get too far ahead of the tutorial by accident.
However, if you’ve played Age of Empires, or even like Command & Conquer or Warcraft,
then you’ve already got a general idea of how it’ll go.
There’s a central building acting as a base, you send out units to collect resources from
the map, construct more units and buildings using those resources, and progress things
by dedicating resources to upgrading tech.
Whether you’re playing a random map, custom-made scenario, or the main campaign, the core formula
changes little.
What does change are the individual goals for each map, ranging from basic survival,
to building wonders, to forging alliances,
to complete and total domination of everyone on the map.
Personally, I prefer playing randomly-generated maps and duking it out against AI players.
Even if the AI leaves, eh, a bit to be desired considering how much it tends to cheat, it’s
still an undeniably fun time for me.
There’s something sensationally appealing about beginning with a few basic units, an
unseen map, and a massive tech tree just itching to be researched.
No story, no waypoints, nothing getting in the way of me and my own individualized path
towards real time strategic world domination.
And Empire Earth is a prime choice for that kind of gaming, with its mixture of world
history and the game mechanics popularized by both Age of Empires and Sid Meier’s Civilization.
An RTS game where you’re allowed to advance yourself so far ahead of the competition technologically
is wildly captivating to me.
Where the enemy is still floundering around in a prehistoric era while you’re rolling
up in a squadron of tanks, helicopter gunships, and atomic age bombers, ready to nuke ‘em
back to the stone age.
[nuke ferociously detonates]
Except they were still technically in the stone age anyway
so you haven’t really done much except glean some kind of twisted catharsis
by way of technological overkill.
Whatever man, that stuff’s precisely my brand of enjoyment.
Taking real life history and coming up with your own alternate timelines through gameplay,
it’s pretty much the best.
And it’s one of the biggest reasons I continually return to the classic
AoE and Civ games, again and again.
But with those, you’re stuck choosing between two very different approaches to the same
idea And that’s where Empire Earth comes in.
Let’s start with the passage of time itself, which functions a bit more like Age of Empires
than Civ despite spanning 500,000 years.
There are no individual years stated, but rather multiple ages to progress through representing
sections of history, referred to here as epochs.
Each epoch provides the opportunity to utilize a distinct set of buildings, units, and technologies.
And you progress to the next one by accumulating the proper buildings and resources from the
current epoch and selecting it as an upgrade from your capitol building.
Of course, the effectiveness of each unit, building, or technology depends on your chosen
historical civilization, with each one boasting their own strengths and trade-offs.
There’s also the option to roll your own through the built-in civilization editor,
as well as opportunities to upgrade stat bonuses at certain points throughout time, a fun departure
from the classic Age of Empires formula.
Another one is the population system.
Not like, number of units, I mean the ability to populate certain buildings.
For example, placing citizens inside of a settlement will upgrade it to a town center,
and placing more citizens inside a town center will upgrade it to a capitol.
Same goes with granaries, which will improve the resource output of its resulting farms.
And once citizens are inside, they stay inside, making it a kind of upgrade as opposed to
the garrison system seen in Age of Empires II.
Populating buildings is especially important when expanding your empire since you can’t
simply plop down a fully-formed town center anytime.
You need at least five disposable citizens nearby to make that happen.
This means that sometimes, the more effective strategy is to accumulate and send in a bunch
of priests to convert enemy citizens instead.
They may not have the iconic AoE wololo going on, but they still have similar types of mystical
conversion powers at their disposal.
And religion goes further than that with the addition of prophets, which may be slow to
move and even slower to regenerate energy, but are massively powerful in their ability
to cause calamities.
Earthquakes, volcanoes, firestorms, malaria, plague, hurricanes, it’s awesomely crazy stuff.
Kinda feels like a precursor to what we’d get in 2002
with Age of Mythology, now that I think about it.
That is to say, it’s supernaturally ballbusting stuff
if you fail to adequately prepare yourself to handle it.
Which in this case means placing your own temples to counteract
any powerful prophetic nonsense.
Another world-changing addition arrives in the form of the world wonders, which serve
more of a practical purpose compared to the original Age of Empires.
They’re more in line with Civilization, where wonders provide stats bonuses to the
player that constructs them.
A few examples are the Library of Alexandria that reveals all buildings on the map, the
Temple of Zeus that allows your population to self-heal instead of relying on hospital
buildings, and the Pharos Lighthouse that lifts the fog of war from waterways.
Then there are hero units, available in both strategist and warrior types.
Who they are changes with each passing epoch, but they both provide extra oomph for your
armies by doing things like healing nearby units, performing battle cries, doling out
powerful attacks, and generating positive morale.
Yeah morale is a key component for boosting unit effectiveness in Empire Earth, so if
there’s low morale units die more quickly in battle and fight less effectively.
Certain buildings generate and boost morale as well, much like the citywide happiness
seen in Civilization games, only here it’s a nearby area of effect.
In fact, it’s the main function of houses in Empire Earth.
They don’t increase the population limit.
All of this comes together to create a game that feels like a hybrid of both AoE and Civilization
in terms of gameplay and aesthetics, while not becoming as complex as either one of them.
With so many epochs to go through and less time spent in each of them, you don’t get
as many unique buildings, units, and attributes for each civilization
as you do in the Age of Empires games.
Likewise, with the real time strategy focusing on individual units and buildings, you don’t
get the world-scale viewpoint of Civilization with its emphasis on city-states, diplomacy, and trade.
Rather, Empire Earth is a compelling in-between that felt downright refreshing back in the day.
The amount of time it covers is vast without being overwhelming, and the strategic systems
in play are simple enough to quickly understand
but complex enough that it takes a while to fully grasp them.
And I’ve largely only been talking about the randomized maps thus far, the campaigns
are a whole ‘nother thing!
Like I said earlier, I’m often one to head straight for the randomized deathmatch mode
or create my own custom scenario, get all comfy with a coffee, and simply play around
with the systems till I’m satisfied.
Empire Earth, on the other hand, has enough of a captivating single player campaign to
pull me away from the random seeds for a bit.
I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, but Empire Earth is rendered in 3D instead of the 2D
sprites that were still in use by both Age of Empires and Civilization back then.
It wasn’t the first strategy game to go 3D by a long shot, but Empire Earth was certainly
the first one I’d played that featured 3D in-engine cutscenes for its story.
Hehe, for better and for worse...
"My people! We must travel west to a hostile village called Troas.
From them we shall steal the secret of traveling upon the deep waters."
"The Government surely knows Volgograd is our stronghold, so we can expect them to send
forces here very soon."
"If we can successfully defend Volgograd and then destroy the Capitol in Voronezh, our
dreams of Novaya Russia will come that much closer to reality."
Ahh, 2001.
When the PC games industry was enjoying a new generation of 3D rendering tech and two
gigahertz CPUs.
Yet voice acting and in-engine cutscenes were still very much a work in progress.
But dang it, they tried! Hehe, yeah.
Empire Earth’s cutscenes and voice acting crack me up man.
Those accents. My word.
"What be your business in our fair town?"
"I am William, the rightful Duke of Normandy.
During King Henry's Invasion, Lord Toustain sought to take what is mine by birthright."
"Very well, young William. You shall have our help.
And may God be with us!"
Despite the... phenomenal voicework and high-fidelity character models...
Empire Earth’s campaign is still pretty darned splendid.
You play through a wide variety of scenarios both historical and fantastical, divided into
four campaigns featuring: the founding and building up of ancient Greece, fighting as
the English against France from the Battles of Hastings through Waterloo, taking part
in both World Wars through the eyes of German forces that eventually take control of the
United Kingdom, and finally playing a reconstructed Russian Federation with leaders that travel
through time to stop an invasion of the United States in the year 2098.
Again, it’s that mix of historical facts and alternate timeline absurdity going on
that makes Empire Earth so enjoyable
and I dig that they played with that idea in the campaigns too.
Even back in 2001, I’d already played through countless historical simulations that reenacted
epic battles and diplomatic struggles of old, so the option to take the reigns of an army
of giant robots and super soldiers with laser katanas was exactly what the LGR doctor ordered.
The fact that it was up against a somewhat believable real life scenario of the future,
with a historical past that looked exactly like our own otherwise, made it all more fun.
It’s the same reason I enjoyed Command & Conquer Red Alert so much.
Except that here, you can play as the Allied and Soviet forces back when they were cavemen,
all the way up through the age of nanotechnology.
Or even beyond that, if you got the expansion pack in 2002, The Art of Conquest.
However, this time around development was handed off to another team entirely: Mad Doc
Software, who before this worked on the Star Trek Armada games
and later became Rockstar New England.
So yeah, not a bad choice at first glance, but unfortunately the end result was.
Ahh, somewhat lacking by most accounts.
The drop in quality is immediately apparent when playing any of the three new campaigns,
with each briefing screen showing these awful isometric maps instead of the tailor-made
images showing actual details like you got in the base game.
I mean just look at this, can you tell what’s going on or where you’re supposed to go?
It’s like they just went into the scenario editor, zoomed out,
took a screenshot and called it a day.
Same goes for the cutscenes, which are of notably lesser quality in Art of Conquest.
Half the time there’s no voice acting at all anymore, and when there is?
Hehe. If you thought it was corny in the original game, you ain’t seen nothin’ yet.
"The Romans have refused your offer of tribute and refute our claim to settle here my King!
If we do intend to bring our people into these lands, then that addled brained idiot king
has got another thing coming!
This foolhardy endeavor will be answered with swords and blood.
In the Roman Governor's own words, my King."
This is a shame because the new campaign synopses are excellent.
You get to play through the rise of the Roman Empire under Julius Caesar, the Pacific War
through the eyes of the US in World War II, and a storyline set around descendents of
the Qin Dynasty colonizing Mars and fighting an interplanetary war for Martian independence.
Yep, this pack lets players enter the Space Age, complete with multiple spacecraft, orbital
satellites, teleportation technology, and maps set in space.
A great addition in theory, but once again it’s a bit of a letdown seeing as it’s
exactly the same gameplay under a slightly new skin.
Instead of water, it’s open space, and instead of watercraft and ships you get spacecraft
and spaceships.
To help sell the idea there’s a parallax effect going on with the starfield background,
and a rocky continental drop-off along the edges of land.
So yeah it’s all a ruse, you’re essentially doing the same thing as before, now with flat
floating land masses in space and your citizens are replaced with robots.
There are other additions like Civ Powers granting unique boosts, new civilizations
and unique units to go alongside them, and various tweaks to difficulty and gameplay
in campaign and multiplayer modes.
But yeah, being that the main addition is the spage age, it’s a bit of a bummer that
it doesn’t go too far beyond simply allowing certain maps to use spacefaring ships instead
of seafaring ships.
Ah well, it’s still worth messing about with the scenario editor and coming up with
some absurd situations.
Nothing like quite like having a group of prehistoric hunter-gatherers in space versus
an army of killer Mechs and Capital Ships.
[lasers, explosions, space nonsense]
Of course, having sold over a million units in its first
year on the market, the Empire Earth series didn’t stop here.
The original devs at Stainless went onto create Empires: Dawn of the Modern World in 2003,
a spiritual successor to Empire Earth.
So it’s a spiritual successor to a spiritual successor? Yo dawg.
Mad Doc continued the mainline Empire Earth series with a direct sequel in 2005, an expansion
to that in 2006, and a crappier sequel to the sequel in 2007.
After that though?
The series seems to have died on the vine for the time being, which is an absolute pile
of crap considering the continued attention Civilization and Age of Empires have received
since the mid 2000s.
Seems like there’s still an audience for this kinda game if you ask me.
And as charming as the original graphics are, I’d love to see Empire Earth receive an
HD remaster someday.
Or perhaps a proper fourth entry that returns to its roots of being, y’know, a good game.
Until then, the original can still be bought and played today, warts and all.
The Gold version packing the main game and expansion is sold on GOG, though in my experience
it requires some compatibility mode settings to get working properly.
But the light hassle is well worth it to experience this one, I think.
Empire Earth is half serious history, half cheesy sci-fi, but it all culminates in a
game that still isn’t quite like anything else.
[Empire Earth music plays]
And if you enjoyed this episode of LGR then check out some of my other stuff
I’ve done a lot more stuff!
Retro tech and computer games and y’know all the kinda related stuff is what I do here,
so stick around if you like this.
And as always thank you very much for watching!