[quiet tapping] [punchy thudding] [loud bashing] [energy zapping and dying groans] Looks right to me. To put it simply, "Empire Earth" is like a super "Age of Empires". In a single game, you could go from leading an army of cavemen to an army of robots. The scale of it was insane. It did incredibly well at launch. Most reviews were good and it got a few Game of the Year awards, and, best of all for the studio, it sold over a million copies. It ended up getting a... spiritual successor, and then there were two sequels, but those were varied. Nowadays, you don't hear too much about "Empire Earth". The first game does have its fair share of problems, but that's not the issue here. A lot of people run into issues just trying to run the thing, especially the expansion. If the games don't freeze in the menu, there are other problems. This goes for the GOG version and physical copies. The way to fix it is so simple, it's aggravating. Let's begin. Some people on Windows 7 say they can run it perfectly fine with no problems, and other people can't. I tried it on my laptop, and I can't. The ways I could get it working on there wouldn't let me record it easily and had other problems. For example, check out Legolas. That's a fast arm... Everyone shoots at a Kenyan murder machine fire rate now. It does technically run, but it's nearly unplayable. You can use a free program called 3D-Analyze to force your pixel shaders to 1.1, which does work, but I can't record it. So that's good for a regular player, but not for me. There's a multiplayer patch called Neo Empire Earth which can fix it, but it has its own share of problems. I'll return to this later, but if you're on Windows 10, this won't automatically fix it anyhow. So I had to go on a journey. This is a real website. It's not a joke I made for the video. It's hard to comprehend exactly what I found, but I had to pass in the secret to beat aliens to be here. Now you would think that a website like this would be a dead end, but, I swear to God, the night after I went here, I had a dream or maybe a vision. I tried to run this game in every compatibility mode I could think of, except Windows 8. The game won't even start to run on Windows 8. So I thought "what the hell, why not". That fixed it perfectly. For both games. The graphics bugging out is easy too. Just set your acceleration to TnL and you're good to go. It won't work on real Windows 8, but set it to that mode and it works. So now that it's playable, let's start by looking at the graphics. For being a 3D RTS from 2001, it still looks very nice. Sprites typically age better than 3D models, so I thought it'd be a lot worse. It still can get rough, particularly with the character models. You can zoom in really far, and some look... OK. Others are downight terrifying. It appears to be a low resolution photo of a person smiling just stretched out. It's especially apparent in the cutscenes when you have a character speaking, and they're just... smiling. Seeing as this is an RTS game, it affects the campaign the most, but doesn't matter too much outside of it. Units have good, easily readable profiles from the top, and that's what matters to me. Even if you do zoom in more, it's usually fine. You'll know when you've gone too far. JOKER: "I'm the joker, baby!" JOKER: *inhuman laugh* What really impresses me is how consistent the art style remains throughout all the ages. You never have "that moment" where something looks way worse or looks like it was drawn by a different artist or just feels off. Seeing as there are 14 epochs in total, that's an incredible feat. It really reminds me of the phrase "the more things change, the more they stay the same". Units and buildings may change, but they're still recognizable. The maps even have a day/night cycle which, unfortunately, doesn't affect gameplay, but it looks nice. The visuals don't blow my socks off or anything, but they do their job right. With the sheer scale this game operates on, this could have been a disaster. I guess that's why I don't have a lot to say about the art style. It maintains the same quality throughout the ages, but the sounds are a little different. [sounds of ballistic weapons firing] [sounds of energy weapons firing and screams of dying] [clanking of swords and same screams of dying] The sound effects have a lot of stock sounds. There's a fair amount of effects made for the game, but it's hard to tell the difference between them. We're once again in the "this isn't great, but it's adequate" territory. There's a bit of irony with that when it comes to the music. For example, the main theme is amazing. ♪ Terra imperium ♪ ♪ Armipotentis ♪ ♪ Hostilis ♪ ♪ Formidabilis ♪ ♪ Sanguinis ♪ ♪ Aedifico ♪ ♪ Exploro ♪ ♪ Imperator ♪ ♪ Supera ♪ Then you have tracks like this which are less exciting. [a calm and uneventful tune] Don't get me wrong. It's pleasant, just not very memorable. Or so I thought. Years later, several television networks would buy up a bunch of these songs. History Channel, Animal Planet, CBS. The list goes on. If you want to hunt for it, there are certain episodes of Ancient Aliens that have "Empire Earth" music. So some of the background tracks were so dull and so inoffensive, that they essentially BECAME stock music. For years, I'd watch documentaries and start thinking about "Empire Earth" and thought I was going crazy. Maybe there are others out there who went through something similar, and now you know why. So, aside from the theme, there wasn't a whole lot that stood out. The voice acting, however, is phenomenal. [actor speaks with... insistent... accent]
YOUNG WILLIAM: "I come to you to make a plea for assistance." [actor speaks with... insistent... accent]
YOUNG WILLIAM: "If you consent to help, I shall reward you handsomely when I am Duke." [here the accent becomes even more stressed]
FRENCH KNIGHT: "Very well, young William. You shall have our help." [here the accent becomes even more stressed]
FRENCH KNIGHT: "And may God be with us." It's perfect. [this sounds like a bad Schwarzenegger impression]
COUNT HOICK: "What has happened? I'm losing control! The engine is dying!" [the actor sounds like he's zoning out a bit]
MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN: "No fear! It is shtupid after all, to die so needlessly a hero's death." This is the primest cut of voice acting ham you could hope for. It doesn't matter how talented they are, they are really trying with every line. Have you ever heard someone be aggressively French? AGGRESSIVELY FRENCH KNIGHT: "What be your biznesse in our fair town?" How about this? RUSSIAN SOLDIER: "Hah-hah! Now for some sport." WOMAN: *screaming* MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN: "Leave her alone, you shwine!" RUSSIAN SOLDIER: "Germans?! To arms, to arms!" There's more ham than a "Spirited Away" cosplay meet. This is the ideal formula for making your RTS lines memorable. Over-the-top voice acting. An offensive accent, or, just the wrong accent. Silly writing. All three of these ingredients blend together perfectly. Some of these lines have been burned into my brain, and I don't think I can ever forget them. COUNT HOICK: "Ja?" COUNT HOICK: "Sehr gut!" MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN: "Your target?" MANFRED VON RICHTHOFEN: "Of course!" COUNT HOICK: "Ja?" KALKAS: *gibberish* KALKAS: *excited gibberish* GOLLET: "A chest indeed! Dropped no doubt by an inattentive traveller. And look inside!" GOLLET: "A shiny sword, and cloth to bandage my wounds." CAVALRY OFFICER: "My Lord, the shmall forsh we currently have will be no match for Napoleon." CAVALRY OFFICER: "We musht enlarge our infantry and dragoon divisions and assemble a suitable number of cannon." GREEK CITIZENS: *ancient gibberish* So, looking at the presentation as a whole, it's pretty good. Colorful graphics of colorful characters are good at drawing you in and keep you engaged. Now here's what the game is all about. Like most RTS games, you want to gather, build, and destroy. The way resources are distributed is a little different, compared to other RTS games, like "Age of Empires". "Empire Earth" is all about preparing you for the long haul. A single tree can hold several buildings worth of wood. That's gonna take time to deplete. On the other hand, iron, stone and gold are near unlimited. A single vein can hold around 300,000 of each resource. That'll last the whole game. Food is a lot more limited. A single patch might only hold a few thousand resources, which will go fairly quickly. Animals only have a few hundred food. If you don't give them time to breed, you can hunt them to extinction. Same thing with fishing sites. Very limited. This changes in the third epoch, the Copper Age, when you can build farms. Now it's like ore. Virtually unlimited food. The farms don't need to be reseeded either. As long as they're not blown up, they can be farmed forever. Here's the kicker: only six people can work a resource node maximum. You can increase the rate by sending your citizens to populate a settlement. This turns into a Town Centre, which can make its own citizens. Plus, it gives bonuses to mined resources right next to it. So now it's more efficient. But you can do it again to turn a Town Centre into a Capitol, which is even more efficient. If you sacrifice 50 citizens in total, then you'll have the most efficient Capitol for your mining node. But as things get more expensive, you'll just want to go and capture more nodes. You can probably see where this is going. "Empire Earth" is a war of attrition. You don't exhaust your resources - you exhaust your people. You don't even need houses to increase your population. It increases morale, represented by the green dots, but that helps units resist damage. Just being in the range of an upgraded settlement building will give a tower a 50 percent resist to damage. This means that most factions have a home turf advantage. It's not quite the turtlers' paradise that "Supreme Commander" is, but it's close. You need a good variety of units to break a defense, and don't worry - there's a lot! The Gold Edition came with a tech tree and, well, look at it! This isn't for "Crusader Kings", it's for an RTS game. Taking it in all at once can feel kind of overwhelming, but, luckily, you don't have to deal with these all at once. The game has several tutorial missions to teach you with, so it's not that bad. Especially, if you've played "Age of Empires". There's a lot you'll find familiar. It's the same designer as the first game after all. There are the age old Priest units that can convert enemies. Then there are the Prophets. He doesn't convert people, but he's good at throwing malaria. He can also summon controllable hurricanes that make boats go away. You can set buildings on fire with a lightning strike and those fires will spread fast. He has volcanoes... the list goes on. Going back to the home field advantage aspect, building a Temple will protect an area around it from Prophets. If you don't want your people being converted, the University will stop that happening inside its boundary. If you don't build these, you'll probably regret it. I'm getting bamboozled. ONLINE PLAYER: "Oh my God, dude!" As for combat, the game starts very simply. It's rock-paper-scissors, on sea and on land. The game is very centered around these counters. For example: our humble Clubman here. He has no armor at all against spearmen. He can only upgrade armor protecting him from other clubmen. The Spearman has base armor from the get-go against them, but can upgrade into more. Armor and damage values increase throughout the ages, so this only gets more important. It just turns into guns and lasers instead of swords and arrows. You upgrade unit by just clicking a stat to spend resources. The upgrade applies to all units of the same type, and they have a limit of 10 points. Upgrading an aspect like range or attack can be 2 points a pop, whereas something like armor might only be 1 point. So your units can be much, much more effective at killing their counter. Which can get a little more complicated. Civilizations also have unit bonuses. There's even a handy builder so you can make your own and make your friends mad. So you could focus your civ towards a very powerful unit, but it'll still barely tickle its counter. This system might seem ok to you, but it leads into one of the game's biggest flaws: The AI. Besides the random maps, the game has four main campaigns to choose from. The Greek campaign is more of a second tutorial about illegally crossing oceans, and I don't ever play it much. The English campaign has a better variety of missions, but the ages it covers are more varied. When you complete missions or side objectives in a game, you get Civ points. These carry throughout the campaign, and it's a great idea. Do something more difficult now to make the journey ahead a little easier. This is fine if the setting stays the same. But if you're in the English campaign, where the setting jumps from Agincourt to Waterloo, those archer points are wasted now. You need every bit of help you can get. The non-Greek campaigns usually start easy, but then they have a spike of difficulty. The AI will suddenly have a lot of units. Fully upgraded, too. The AI in this game cheats, and it cheats hard. The best example can be found in the Russian campaign. It takes place in the dark, nightmare future of 2018. The story is a timeless classic: a man wanted by the authorities for having the tallest boots in all of Russia. You make some friends, fight off invaders. It's not too bad. The second mission was one I struggled with for weeks at launch. The campaigns didn't even have difficulties at launch back then. They were patched in later. So I set the game to medium and thought "Ah, that was 15 years ago. It can't be that bad". "You know, I have all this experience now". *S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bandit Radio* INNOCENT BYSTANDER: "Ahh!"
*S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bandit Radio* *S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bandit Radio* There's so many units, and they just don't stop.
*S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bandit Radio* *S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bandit Radio* *off-mic scream* THEY JUST DON'T STOP!
*S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bandit Radio* OFFICER: "We're under attack!"
*S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bandit Radio* I know we are.
*S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Bandit Radio* There are so many enemy ships in the harbor that they're causing a traffic jam. I'd love a Prophet to hurricane them, but Russia's Orthodox, and you can't do that. Most of the campaign is this. Non-stop swarms of enemies. The AI makes units for free, so you can't hit their economy. You just have to weather the storm until you can smash them. The AI also knows exactly what you're building and, most likely, where all your units are. They will immediately start building free counters to all your units. You can make all the strategies or cool spell-casting robots you want - it doesn't stop it. You're locked in. The best strategy is to build a death wall to catch all their units. Then you invest into the nuclear program until your problems go away. There's so little room for strategy, it feels more like playing a tower defense game. That's what happens when you give the AI a free pass. What's sad is the Russian campaign is the hardest, but also the most memorable. Grigor, the new Russian leader, gets a Gundam as a bodyguard, then he names it as the new leader of Russia. GRIGOR: "Who shall henceforth be known as Grigor the Second." PEOPLE NOT LIKING THE IDEA: "Wat?!" People don't like that idea, but you can't exactly tell the new guy "no". GRIGOR II: "Да?" GRIGOR II: "For the people!" So the robot has to defeat a coup, but the coup was a "just as planned" kind of thing. Then Grigor I dies. GRIGOR II: "Rest easy, my master. I will ensure your dreams do not die here with you." He invades China and then he starts to invade Cuba. Then, of course, he wants to wipe out a few million people, so a Russian general wants to stop him, and he's a cyborg by the way. So then he defects to the United States where a predator Polly Pocket tells him the only way to stop them is to go back in time. So you go back to the first mission on the other side. But there's nuclear bombers because Grigor II was already there, because he later made a time machine, but just went back before they use their time machine. So then you have to fight off the future using modern technology, and it's honestly a pretty fitting way to end the campaigns. This is giving you a taste of the random map AI. It cheats in units, resources, and knows what you're up to on every difficulty. It makes all the strategy completely one-sided. Sure, you can raid their mining camps, but it won't affect their economy. You'll be dealing with attack groups no matter what you do. It also doesn't give up or resign - it fights to the last man. The solution to this seems obvious: just play multiplayer. Well, the multiplayer never took off, like "Age of Empires" did, and I think there are two key reasons to it. The first big one is pathfinding. Let's do a comparison. Here's "Age of Empires 2" - look all this control I have. I can switch up their formation, move it half a second later, and they adapt. It doesn't matter how many units you have or how diverse they are - they move as one. You can organize and move them effectively. "Empire Earth" has nearly identical formations. A few more, in fact. But look how sloppy they are, trying to move into one. They do get it, but it takes significantly longer. Now, let's move them. And, they're kind of wandering all over. Let's move them around... ...and you see now, it's all messed up. It just doesn't have that responsiveness and smooth organization. Besides not looking elegant, the units can get in these traffic jams. The more units you have in a stack, the higher chance something will go wrong with their path finding. This makes it harder to sell as a competitive game. Ocean pathfinding is even worse, even in small groups. The other issue is the speed of the game. "Empire Earth" matches can go on for hours. With all those resources, you could fight on a long time. You can't just set aside a half an hour for a game. You need to set aside an evening. You could set a starting age for later, but a lot of the strategy is building up. And there are a few ages that feel like filler. In the second age in the game, the Stone Age, you can build a dock and an archery range. Compared to one epoch later, in the Copper Age, when you can build all of this. There's about three of these epochs that don't add a lot and just make the games drag on longer. The variety across all the ages is great, and progressing to the end is what makes it so fun. Going from cavemen to mechs in a single game. Getting gunpowder before your neighbors. Launching these first few carriers. That's what it's all about. If you're a fan of an era, you could play games centered around them in "Empire Earth", but you're missing out. You could just play an RTS game dedicated to that era instead of this one. But wait - what about the expansion? Okay, you remember the big tech tree? Well, here's the expansion. Check out the length of it. It's, uh, more like a brochure with no fold out. I don't have a stapler, but you could kind of staple it onto the end here. There we go... Okay, it's really bad. Art of Conquest was outsourced. It shows. It really shows. There are three new campaigns, and a lot of them just don't have any voice acting in the cutscenes. I was reading dialogue, so I thought it could be a bug, because there should be sound there. I looked it up and no - working as intended. Then you hear someone and wish it was quiet again. It's bad. It's bad bad. SHAKING ROMAN OFFICIAL: "Please spare Mediolanum!" SHAKING ROMAN OFFICIAL: "We have rejoiced at your great exploits in Gaul, and now that you have defeated Pompey's guard force, we are free to join you." NOW CALM ROMAN OFFICIAL: "If you show mercy, I will go with you to try to rally other cities to your banner.." Oof. The game finally gets a Roman campaign, and it's this. CAESAR: "I shall let my pets decide. Romulus, Remus, which of these envoys would you like to eat?" CAESAR: "To the other we shall give aid." I don't remember Caesar having pet tigers. But... what's happening? The worst voice work by far is the new units. Not even the acting - the production values. LEGIONNAIRE: "At your service!" LEGIONNAIRE: "To Elysium!" You can hear static. LEGIONNAIRE: "At your service, Tribune! Forward the frontier!" LEGIONNAIRE: "At your service, Tribune!"
LEGIONNAIRE: "At your service, Tribune!"
LEGIONNAIRE: "At your service, Tribune!" They even echo over each other. None of the old units do that. CENTURION: "Veni, vidi, vici!" CENTURION: "Veni, vidi, vici!" CENTURION: "Veni, vidi, vici!"
CENTURION: "Veni, vidi, vici!" CYBER NINJA: "Assassination software - online." CYBER NINJA: "I'll be the ghost in the machine." CYBER NINJA: "Hai!" The strangest offender is the new SAS unit. There's a lot that's strange about the model, but... listen to him. [actor sounds like a student trying to talk to a classmate during the exam]
SAS COMMANDO: "Affirmative." [actor sounds like a student trying to talk to a classmate during the exam] SAS COMMANDO: "Just give the word." SAS COMMANDO: "I'm on it." Huh. There are three new campaigns this time around. Shorter in mission length and the scale of the first game. The maps are actually a lot more interesting design-wise than the first game's base campaigns, but it's counteracted. Most missions are tedious. They range from playing Marco Polo to island hopping to... this one. The World War II campaign is probably the best, which misses the game's main selling point: the new 15th epoch. The Space Age. The campaign teases you with it non-stop. Even when you start on Mars, you're still not in the Space Age. Then you finally make it. You can make automatic farms. I guess that saves some population cap. Then you realize that space is just water re-textured. You can't have space and water on the same map. The spaceships are just the boats in different forms. This addition might have been neat if you could have water on the maps, too. And this form would just keep players separated until the end game. By removing all the naval options, that actually takes strategy away from the game. No attack submarines. No hunter helicopters. No nuke subs. No boats at all. No, thanks. Even without space, they did add a few civilization-unique units and some powers. You can even choose one for your custom civilization. But you might not know what a lot of them do, so, you got to dig out the manual. Or the guide. Wait, that was the wrong manual. The powers are astoundingly poorly balanced. The fact that someone O.K'd the idea for a Priest Tower just blows my mind. So the powers range from near useless to game-breaking. That's it. That's the expansion. This was about $40 in today's money at launch. Most people who checked it out went back to the base game. You can still find people playing multiplayer, but not with the game alone. You need to download Neo Empire Earth for that. It installs on top of the base game. A word of warning: my computer said there's a Trojan inside of it. Everyone I know who downloads it says that. Now, the guy who made it says it's a false positive. It does work without the spooky file, but I still don't like that. Yeah, it's a time-consuming game, even if you use tournament mode, but I still enjoy it. I really wish it got the HD Edition treatment the way "Age of Empires 2" and "Age of Mythology" did. Touch it up a bit, fix some bugs and balance things out, but most importantly - bring the multiplayer back. I'm pretty sure that Rebellion still owns the rights to it. I'd love to see it, but, I don't know how big the demand would be. It would be nice not to have to jump through hoops just to comp stomp. At the time of this video, GOG is selling it for two bucks and regular is for six, which is a great price. I didn't cover it in this video, but don't buy the complete series. 2 is okay, but by God, you do not want to play 3. Do not buy 3. That does it for this video. Tune in next time for the first mod video. Thanks for watching! I'm not sure what game will come after this, since "Elite" is in a bind. Again. Also, big thank you to all the benefactors! This week's questions will be moved into the next game review video. If you backed in June, your name will show up in July. Thank you! They're coming back for my Town Center, they're actually gonna smack it- [smack] Oh my God.
I was still pretty young when i played this but i loved it. I would spend days on a single match because its so damn hard to find all the base expansions of the enemy. Also, "we're under attack!" Gives me fucking ptsd that shit would go off non-stop
Loved Empire Earth when it came out. Practically consumed my life for a time. Makes me wish GOG would work on releasing Empires: Dawn of the Modern World. From what little I played, it seemed the next logical progression for the series more than the actual EE sequels did.
The fact that the Ai can spam units without worrying about cost makes a lot of sense now. I remember there being a cheat that let you build things instantly. So I'd try that to beat some of the campaign missions and within minutes then entire map would just be a sea of enemy units and buildings, and I'd be worse off than if I never cheated at all. That's no fun.
At least it was always fun to comp stomp in random match when the ai still has archers and you have meca robots
I'm a huge Age of Empires 2 fan, but to me Empire Earth was amazing. Oh, and Rise of Nations is pretty good too, and holds up very well.
Empire Earth also had the most ridiculously dramatic and fantastic menu music.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0Z8iUte8cIg
I enjoyed 2 quite a bit and played it A LOT with my friends. 3 was one of the first huge disappointments of my young life.
The Cold War campaign was my favorite. The Korean War mission was a ton of fun. You could push the North Koreans back out of the South and they gave you the decision to hold it or push into the North. If you pushed on then the Chinese started flooding in. Good stuff.
I remember playing ai matches where it would completely devolve into an hours long combination of tower defense and whack a mole. Tower defense because there was a literally unending line of nuclear bombers coming from their airports to my Central hub that could only be stopped by a mass of AA guns and a swarm of fighters. As this was happening I would send a fleet of five or more aircraft carriers to try and overwhelm their defenses and chase down pop up town centers. Incredibly entertaining when I played it back then but also kind of a grinding nightmare haha. Really enjoyed this retrospective.
Great video. I had no idea the game was so goofy. I vaguely remember this being drummed as some sort of challenger to Civilization(likely due to the different eras of civilizations and technology), but seeing it now, I doubt Sid & Co had much trouble keeping their position..
My brother and I used to play this game together all day, we had the largest naval battles ever on the small island maps, it was great.