Product Description

This real-time strategy epic by Age of Empires creator Rick Goodman, lets you control the development of your chosen race from the Paleolithic era to the futuristic Nano Age of the 23rd century. You can choose from some of history's best known civilisations, such as the Greeks, or evolve your own as you play by choosing from well over 100 unique attributes.

You can train more than 200 types of combat units and take advantage of the military savvy of some of the humanity's most notorious leaders, from Charlemagne to Churchill. You can fight them on the beaches, you can sink their battleships, by engaging in naval battles with more than 40 different ships, from 16th-century ships-of-the-line to modern aircraft carriers, or you can reach for the skies, with over 30 types of aircraft, such as Sopwith Camels, Spitfires, F-15s, Apache Gunships and B-2 Bombers. In the future you can even train colossal and intelligent 'mechs to ward off the alien invasion.

The game also makes good use of atmospheric effects and terrain, allowing you to take advantage of the cover of night in a stealth mission, or gain the upper hand by taking the upper ground. But military might is not the only way to win the day. Religion is also a good way of conquering enemy forces and you can surreptitiously convert an enemy's citizens with furtive priests and if you are feeling particularly Old Testament, you can instruct a prophet to invoke devastating calamities such as volcanoes, earthquakes and plagues. Empire Earth gives you great freedom to rule exactly how you see fit.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #22302 in Computer & Video Games
• Brand: Sierra
• Released on: 2001-11-23
• Platforms: Windows NT, Windows 98, Windows 2000, Windows Me

Amazon.co.uk Review
Taking Real Time Strategy games to the limits, Empire Earth hopes to tackle the mantle of the Age of Empires series, the Master of Olympus games and Cossacks all in one foul swoop.

Based on a similar design as many empire building RTS games, Empire Earth takes you from simply prehistoric man through the ages to the Nano age, via the Bronze age and the renaissance era.

Troops are controlled in the usual manner, and the game revolves around your management of your armed forces, be it air, ground or sea while at the same time making sure your citizens are harvesting enough minerals and food to keep the whole show on the road.

The truth be told, this is a re-make of all the popular RTS available on the market, offering campaigns, scenarios, multiplayer maps as well as random maps to get you straight into the action. The nice thing, however, is that you can take your tribe through the ages and watch the new technology as it is introduced and see how it fairs on the battlefield.

If you are a fan of the RTS genre then there are plenty of new gizmos and gadgets in this game to offer a new challenge--the Greeks have the help of the gods for example. If your new to the genre however, this offers as good a place to start as any and the training levels will be sure to get you into the action in no time. --Jason Denwood

Customer Reviews

From cave-man to space-man in 14 easy steps.
Spanning over 50,000 years of human development, Empire Earth is an expansive game to say the least.

Combining elements from Age of Empires and Civilisation, this RTS game falls into the familiar resource gathering/prodding the buttock of the bad guys style of play that will be familiar to anyone playing Microsoft's classic (Not Windows XP...)

Put across in processor hungry 3D (which isn't needed as the default camera is the only one you'll use), the game soon falls into the pattern of making a base, defending it, then going out to look for the CPU and burning it to the ground.

However, a few tricks are up the sleeves of EE, to brighten up what may have been a run-of-the-mill strategy game. The sheer volume of units available to play with over the 14 epochs of the game give it enough scope to satisfy the most hardened gamer, and allows you to play through all of the major historical events in Earth's history.

However, combat is a slightly dull affair, partly because that although the paper/scissors/stone style of combat means that you can use your head when you commit troops to the fore, its very difficult to distinguish between the units so you end of throwing everyone forward and hoping for the best.

The graphics and sound are both superb, and add greatly to the atmosphere of each epoch, although the difference between say WWII and the Roman epochs could be said to be little more than a cosmetic difference.

The inclusion of hero's also adds a new dimension to play, as is the ability to upgrade your unit along various different paths according to what role you want them to play.

Campaigns over various epochs are interesting and involving, as well as being quite informative to anyone will a passing interest in history, and they always throw up new challenges to change the style of play.

Overall then a good strategy game, with lots of interesting ideas to bring it up from all the usual dull and tedious RTS games that are drowning the market at the moment.

The next step from Age of Empires
Having spent many a happy hour playing Age of Empires online I was interested to see how Empire Earth would stack up.

The advance publicity promised a lot and I must say I was not disappointed in any way. RTS fans will be familiar with the usual create villagers - gather resources - build an army routine. Empire Earth presents this process with graphics and sound which are in a different league.

One point that may be of interest to people without the latest multi-megabyte pentium 4 computers is that I find the game runs fine on my Celeron 466mhz and 8mb ATI Rage Pro equipped machine. I find I can choose the highest detail level and have no problems running an 800x600 resolution.

THE Real Time Strategy game...
OK. I first got interested in Empire Earth a few months back when I was reading in an issue of PCGamerUK (great mag) about it. Being a massive fan of both the C&C series and the Age of Empires series the game excited me greatly. The scale of the game was just amazing.
I got on the internet as quickly as possible and pre-ordered a copy of Empire Earth... I eagerly awaited the 23rd November which was when the game was to be released here in England. When the day came I came down stairs and found a big cardboard box outside my door. I quickly ripped it open and then I had a very pleasant suprise: There was no DVD case!!! It was a box!!! An old fashioned PC game box!!! Oh how excited I was!!! I put on my free T Shirt right away and then opened the box. Along with the game CD there was a huge manual and loads of tech trees and unit specs. It was heaven. I glanced at the manual for a bit and then loaded up the game onto my wonderful beast of a PC. Being the experienced RTS gamer I am I thought I would get straight into a random map game. I went to the game setup screen and set the type of map i wanted and the amount of resources and so on. Then I came to which Epoch (or age) i wanted to play in. I COULD NOT DECIDE!!! Should I play in World War 2? Should I play with the 'Cybers' in the future. Well after along time of thinking I decided I would start right at the beginning in the Prehistoric Epoch. This was a very enjoyable experience. I made a little village and I marvelled at the animation when a little fisherman on his fishing raft spiked a fish and threw it behind him onto the raft. I was playing a map with loads of islands so i thought I would make a transport and a little army of club men and rock throwers. I did this and put my army onto the sea transport. I sailed it to the enemy island and had a little battle with some enemys. I also experiemented with the prophets who can summon things like hurricanes and Volcanos (the volcanos look so cool).

Anyway, eventually I got torn away from my prehistoric adventures by the need to go and have a mech war. So i did that. And it was 'kin amazing. Lasers shooting everywhere, gorgeous explosions, amazing sound. WOW!!!
I played for hours and i could go on for ages about the amazing units that litter the World War epochs and the middle age Epochs and every other Epoch, but u haven't got time, u have to go and buy this game now!!!

The scenario editor is also really cool. U can mix units from different Epochs so u can make really cool missions about Mechs going back in time and destroying the Roman Empire.

I do have one tiny complaint but it isn't worth anything. Do they really think that in the future people will still be mining iron ore with pick axes and wheel barrows?