Empire Earth 3

22.11.2007

However Empire Earth 3 does not provide so many peoples and ages on your travels through the millennia of human history as in the previous games. The previous 15 epochs are shrunk in EE3 to five (from ancient times through to the future) and allows you to choose from three groups, whereas you could previously choose from a dozen peoples to command. You can thus choose from the West, the Middle East and the Far East, over which you hold power in the new World Domination mode. This replaces the usual Single Player campaigns, and a coherent background story is thus also missing.

Your initial group selection does however have a weighty impact on the way in which you can begin your campaign for world domination. Should you select the West, you receive strong units which are tougher and can cause more damage than those of your competitors, although these are also more expensive. The maxim, quality instead of quantity, thus applies. At least in the first three ages, the opposite applies to the peoples of the Far East, where you must rely on enormous quantities of cheap infantry units to overcome your foe with sheer weight of numbers. In the Middle East, you will rely mostly on your superior cavalry, which succeeds thanks to raid-style, lightning-fast attacks and relies on being the most mobile of units.

Besides the economic and technological development of your civilisation, military conflicts are the main tool in your struggle for victory. The game play thus becomes dual-tracked, and while offering a round-based World Domination mode, also provides for real-time engagements in Battle mode. Your strategic genius is however called upon before your armies can fall into battle. It is up to you to decide where to despatch your troops. Do you want to conquer their beloved provinces, have their estates reward you with administrative or trading centres, or do you want to reach for an optimal technological level as quickly as possible - and thus achieve the step forward to a higher age? Then there are also the few provinces with research points which you will want to conquer.

You can see all of these tactical tussles for rank on the 3D globe display, which will strongly remind you of the divisions between the provinces on the board game Risk. As soon as you have positioned your troops, all open conflicts on the battlefield are played. Only then is the game round finalised. But before this is over and you can cash in the important resource points for world conquest, you must first prove yourself on the battlefield. Initially, you will only normally meet native tribes, but later you will meet ever more AI rivals around the planet and they will make your life difficult.

In Battle mode, Empire Earth 3 presents a fine vision, which is convincing in all of the details of the units as well as a varied landscape design. Equally important is the real-time play, which turns out to be a traditional RTS. So you shouldn’t immediately proceed to assault your opponents with your tiny squad of soldiers, but rather first build a base, collect raw materials and accumulate wealth. In the next step, you will amass production centres for your army units and equip these with technology where necessary, so that for example you can improve their firepower or increase their range. When you feel strong enough, you can then attack the foes on the map, or else first conquer more territory, so that you can improve the economic foundations of your colony.

If you are not yourself attacked, the moment of truth will still come eventually, and you will order your troops into battle. At this point, however, some rather dumb fun-spoiling issues arise, all to do with the partially botched route-finding of your virtual tin soldiers. It is admittedly beautiful to watch the way in which your soldiers manoeuvre into more or less meaningful formations. However it seems that they form a straight line as soon as it comes to finding the right route. All too often, the relief forces do not stay put, but march forward a few centimetres. The situation can thus only be salvaged through micromanagement, and each individual unit must be manually re-positioned until the knots are eventually ironed out. There are similar problems with the ships. These do not sail the world’s seas in a conventional manner, but also sometimes sideways, and in large formations the boats often get in each other’s ways. The boats sometimes accidentally get stuck in coastal areas, and can no longer then be used, which in this kind of product is naturally unacceptable.

Unfortunately the game develops overall with little variety and is rather old fashioned, even when developer Mad Doc Software tries to loosen up the game play with small extras a la "court the princess and win the favour of the tribe" or such as "save the Holy Land and win bonus points". The lack of any coherent story has as much of a negative effect on your motivation as the AI problems or the constantly repeated stupid sayings of the units, which one can fortunately switch off. It also is sometimes hard to follow the overview, as the camera angle does not allow you to zoom in enough. Nevertheless multiplayer fans will be glad to know that they can fight against up to seven opponents and that can be quite a lot of fun.