Retro spotlight: Empire Earth

Age of Empires' lead designer left to form another company, and to make an even more expansive historical RTS in the process.

This column is “Retro spotlight,” which exists mostly so I can write about whatever game I feel like even if it doesn’t fit into one of the other topics you find in this newsletter. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

Real-time strategy games didn’t make their first appearance in the 1990s, no, but the RTS as we came to know it did. You can thank Westwood Studios for that, between the development of 1992’s Dune II and their subsequent creation of the Command & Conquer series. These modern and/or sci-fi titles weren’t the only one of their kind to emerge from this era of experimentation, however, as there were also games that borrowed a page from the turn-based Civilization. Ones where you’d begin at a distant past point in history, and then work your way toward the present, or even a future not yet experienced, from there. 

Age of Empires released in 1997, and was one such game. Unlike the sci-fi or fantasy elements found in the aforementioned games as well as Blizzard’s Warcraft, Age of Empires began with hunter-gatherers, and ended with you attempting to create the strongest Iron Age empire in the world — from 10,000 BC to the year 0 AD. It was intentionally limiting in this respect with good reason, as designer Bruce Shelly, who also co-designed Civilization, explained in an interview with Microsoft after the game’s release:

The rise of civilization is a big topic but one that starts at a very low level of technology and development. This works great for the resource gathering, building, and exploring aspects of the game. Our technology tree is historical and easily understood. There are a lot of interesting units in this time period, but no flying units. The absence of flying units makes our game more point to point. There is no vertical envelopment where enemies suddenly appear behind your defenses.

Age of Empires was made by a startup developer, Ensemble Studios, which was founded by Rick Goodman, his brother, Tony Goodman, and John Boog-Scott. Rick Goodman was the lead designer for Age of Empires, which ended up being a massive and influential success. Goodman would then leave Ensemble to form a new outfit, Stainless Steel Studios, and their first project would be Empire Earth, which was a refinement of the Age of Empires formula that also massively expanded its scope.

Whereas Age of Empires remained focused on a specific 10,000-year stretch of history, Empire Earth opened things up to 500,000 years. That’s quite the jump just four years after the release of Age of Empires, but it worked: Empire Earth began in a prehistory age, and ended in the nano age, 14 epochs later. In the prehistory age, your civilians can forage for food, or hunt wildlife with crude implements, or chip away very, very slowly at deposits of stone, iron, or gold, while chopping down trees with implements that definitely are not up to the task. A few structures can be built, but they, too, are very crude and look as if they’re about to fall over if there’s a gust of wind, and the military units you can build at this point are limited to “guy with big stick” and “guy who throws some rocks he found.” 

Rick Goodman’s involvement is touted right there on the box art, as well as the “500,000 years” of gameplay compared to Age of Empire’s 10,000. Image credit: MobyGames

You can then progress to the Stone Age after certain qualifications are met — more on this in a bit — and can build an archery range and a dock, for some crude ships that allow for you to fish or transport people, or to build a small defensive fleet out of  “guy who throws some rocks he found” into “guy who throws some rocks he found, but while on a raft.” Not everything is necessarily historically accurate here, but there’s an internal game logic to it all that makes progression feel like a genuine, rewarding thing.

Where the game truly begins to open up is in the Copper Age, as you can now build defensive walls, you can begin farming instead of living as hunter-gatherers, you can build stables, a hospital for improving unit health and also healing injuries, a university, and ships start to look a bit more like ships instead of some logs strung together. You can now build Wonders, which can grant certain boons and abilities — the Coliseum, for instance, raises the population capacity for your own civilization while lowering the pop cap for your opponents’ civs — but the building of them, at least against computer-controlled foes, sends them into a rage where they build and build with the sole intention of invading your territory and destroying that wonder. Build at your own risk in this scenario.

You continue to get these technological boosts, which result in more and more terrifying weapons of war capable of destroying structures and your enemies faster and more violently: the first one to get access to gunpowder isn’t guaranteed to win, by any means, but if they play their cards right, they can cause a ton of damage at this important historical juncture, enough that it might be difficult for their opponents to recover from with the speed needed. If they survive long enough, however, they’ll eventually get access to tanks, to aircraft, cyber troopers and nano technology that changes the nature of warfare.

Sure, the 500,000 years thing is a bit overblown, with 450,000 of those years coming in the prehistoric age — to Empire Earth’s… credit, I guess, the prehistoric age in-game feels like it takes about that long to progress out of — but we’re still talking about the stone age into a future set 100 years after the game released. That’s a massive leap and swing after Age of Empire’s intentionally curated 10,000-year experience that ends with Rome still on top.

Empire Earth added more than just years and epochs to the genre, though. A morale system exists within the game, and it’s manipulated by the types of special units you build as well as your military’s proximity to home. Your original settlement, a city center, has an area of effect, and by clicking on it you can see its boundaries. It can be expanded with the creation of new settlements that are eventually grown into city centers by permanently  populating them with citizens. A settlement starts with zero citizens, but when you hit 15, it’s a city center, and is added to the area of effect. For regular citizens, this means they work a bit harder, i.e., the resources they collect count for more than what they can normally carry when they drop them off in one of these locations, and for military units, they’re going to fight a little harder and more effectively. A colored bar underneath each unit pops up when they’re in the area of effect, so you’ll know just from looking without investigating further if the influence exists in the space a unit is in. It even shows up on defensive towers.

You can build one hero starting in the Copper Age, and until that unit dies, that’s it. Heroes can be upgraded into the hero of the next epoch, however, but you can’t change the type until they’ve fallen in battle or you decide to kill them yourself. Strategist heroes can heal nearby units while causing the morale of enemy units to drop — both important for invading someone else’s territory where your own empire’s influence doesn’t yet exist — whereas the Warrior heroes increase the morale of the units near them and are much stronger than their Strategist counterparts. Alexander the Great, Charlemagne, and the man the Rommel Myth is named for, Erwin Rommel, are examples of Strategist heroes in Empire Earth. Gilgamesh, Hannibal, and Napoleon are a few of the Warrior heroes in the game. There are also some fictional heroes to choose from, which makes sense, given you can’t have anyone born by 2001 as a leading commander of the nano forces of the 22nd century, but not all of them are future based. Dennis St. Albans seems like he’s supposed to be Douglas MacArthur, but for whatever reason Stainless Steel Studios didn’t name him that way, and the same goes for Travis Shackleford, who is so obviously supposed to be George S. Patton that his sound files have “patton” in the name. 

Empire Earth has 21 civilizations to choose from in the base game, and another two with its expansion, The Art of Conquest (which also included another age, Space). The civilizations have certain strengths and weaknesses relative to each other, and each have specific points in time where they shine brighter than others, but you can also ignore all of that and play with custom civs in multiplayer, allowing you to pick and choose your bonuses from the master list by spending the 100 points you have to put into these choices. Whenever you buy from a specific area — think tanks, or civilians — the price of the next upgrade goes up, so you can’t just decide that you’re going to make tanks more powerful and cheaper to produce while also increasing their build speed. Well, you can, but then you won’t have points left over for important things like stronger walls or more powerful defensive towers, or to boost your population cap, etc. You can either build a custom civ at the start of every game, or create and save them in the game’s menus and then just load one up at game time to save you some effort. 

As for the actual gameplay, everything is a balance between building up an abundance of resources for upgrades — unit upgrades, new technology upgrades, advancing to the next age with a massive payment of food, iron, and gold — and spending enough of those resources on the defensive structures and military units that will allow you to live long enough to see that next era. You don’t want to go all-in on an army at first, because you do need to create this underlying infrastructure to allow for more and more resources to be collected and banked, but you also need something protecting you, or else an opponent that’s decided they are going to roll the dice and go hard on a military force from the start is going to try to invade you. 

One thing that’s great about Empire Earth is that its three difficulty levels truly cover the gamut. The easiest one is easy for veterans of the genre and the game, but newcomers will find it’s a good way to learn, as the enemy AI is fairly merciful and lacks any kind of cohesive vision that will bring you trouble. It lets you mostly go through the motions of learning the systems and how the game works and is paced out, giving you space to test out some strategies and theories, without the constant threat of enemy invasion that the other difficulties include.

The normal difficulty level isn’t easy, no, and you will be tested by marauding forces early enough in the game that you’re left wondering if your enemies bothered building anything besides military units, priests to convert your citizens, and prophets that can summon earthquakes from the gods. Oh, right, you can build prophets that can pray for natural disasters like earthquakes and fires, but you can also negate those by building more temples, which have anti-prophet areas of effect. And you will want to do that, because dear lord, the enemy loves taking down walls and key buildings with earthquakes on this difficulty.

And then there’s the toughest difficulty setting. It is not for the faint of heart. It might not actually be for anyone. You see, in Civilization, if you play on the most difficult setting, it’s still a turn-based game: the computer isn’t moving faster than you, or more efficiently, unless it’s simply in terms of the decisions they make for their technology tree. In Empire Earth, though, the computer on the most difficult setting is absolutely moving with a speed and an efficiency that humans simply are not capable of. You’ll have just started building some things, and an entire army is going to show up at your door and destroy it all. This isn’t an exaggeration or hyperbole, either: it’s how the game works on this level.

Let me tell you a story about when I used to play Empire Earth on this setting on purpose. I used to frequent a LAN gaming place, and over time my friends and I were on good terms with the owner, who’d stick around and play games with us when he could. He loved an RTS, so I introduced him to Empire Earth, and we eventually decided we’d try to win a game on the hardest difficulty. To do this, we set it so that we were on a team together, beginning in the Copper Age when you could build walls and had access to more advanced military units, and facing off against just one computer civilization. We started the game and looked at the map to see who had the better resource deployment around their city center (it was me), and then my buddy here bailed on his settlement and headed toward mine, where I was already building walls around the area. As he was escaping into the gate I made in the walls, an enemy army was already trailing him. The walls and some defensive towers we built together rebuffed them, and we set about with our little cohabitation inside of these walls, building new layers of walls outside of these first ones so we could branch out to collect more resources and slow any advances. We basically built the system used in Attack on Titan, with the multiple walls and failsafes and defensive measures in place, to keep the neverending enemy forces from breaking in and ending our game. 

Had we started the game before walls could be constructed, we would have died almost instantly. It didn’t take an especially long time for him to get to the part of the map I was located in, but yet, even though this was the literal first thing he did in the game, by the time he got there, an invading force was on his tail coming to greet me. His settlement was already under attack at this time, as well, but it had been left there solely to slow them down. We had even set the computer to begin with just one citizen as opposed to our 20 each, as well, but it just didn’t matter. Empire Earth, on its toughest difficulty, is like Perfect Dark’s high-level bots that move with more precision and speed than humans are capable of, except in RTS form. It’s beautiful.

You earn Civ Points to spend by completing campaign scenarios, but they are also available if you choose custom civ in standard play. Image credit: MobyGames

Empire Earth is loaded with various game modes. There’s a learning mode, where the ins and outs of the games can be sorted out, but there are also scenarios based on various civilizations that require you to reenact, Empire Earth-style, various key battles and campaigns in history, from ancient Greece to England to near-future Russia. These campaigns have multiple scenarios each in them to complete, and if you dedicate yourself to them can take some time to complete. 

You can build custom scenarios to play, with you choosing every aspect of them such as units, terrain, and conditions, but obviously the story elements in the game’s built-in scenarios aren’t an option. The game had online multiplayer and could be played over a LAN, as mentioned, but if you didn’t want to bother with any of that and wanted to just fire up a game on a huge map against a bunch of computer-controlled opponents to see how well you’d do, well, you can do that, too. And even set teams before the game and lock them, or attempt to make friends with donations of resources in-game to get you there. 

There was a sequel to Empire Earth, but it wasn’t developed by Stainless Steel Studios, with Mad Doc Software — that’s Rockstar New England these days — at the helm instead. They would also develop Empire Earth III, which did not receive nearly the acclaim of the original or its first sequel. Rick Goodman and Stainless Steel Studios were, during this time, working on a game called Empire: Dawn of the Modern World instead. Stainless Steel Studios would shut down out of nowhere in 2005, weeks before their next game was reportedly set to go gold. Goodman would eventually state that the publisher, Midway, cut funding right near that expected finish line, when it turned out the game needed to have its release date moved back, causing Stainless Steel to have to shutter with the game unfinished: Midway would end up wrapping development on it themselves, and release it the following summer. 

While the servers for Empire Earth were shut down way back in 2008, you can still play the game to this day. It’s a little tough on newer versions of Windows to pull this off, since it doesn’t play nice with modern DirectX or certain security features, but you can still make it work by fiddling with some settings. If you do, you can also download a community-created patch and play on a community-created server that’s now 11 years old — NeoEE, or Neo Empire Earth, are the group responsible for the latter, while SaveEE initially got things going after the closure of the original servers by the Activision-acquired Vivendi. 

NeoEE continues to exist to this day, and it’s continually updated. Just a couple of years back, it received some significant overhauls to modernize the lobby and servers, and the game has been patched so it looks better on modern displays, as well. If you’ve never played Empire Earth, well, you still can: some parts of it are a little dated, sure, with the 3D graphics you see when zooming in certainly not at the quality you’d expect from a modern title. But the overall gameplay was built on the strong foundations of Age of Empires, with refinements and innovations that, like with Age of Empires’ own gameplay, have persisted in the genre or at least introduced new ideas to also be refined. There’s still a lot to enjoy here, but maybe save that attempt at the toughest difficulty for when you know the game in and out, and have a friend you can team up with.

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