It looks like this whole illness thing isn't going away any time soon, so again sorry for the wonky schedule - but I did have a couple of better days this week so I managed to dust this script off and put something together to tide you all over.
I think in your review, you've highlighted one of the main strengths of Empire Earth - the single player campaigns. They were so creatively designed, varied and well told. The best was the one in the future where you had to travel back in time to stop yourself, a wonderful idea. The missions of a campaign were always set in an age where you didn't realize the unprecedented progression in technology. And the mission design was as varied and creative as I have rarely seen in a game.
I wonder what if the combined American, Cuban and Novaya defector forces went back in time to the start of the Greek Campaign Going from Prehistoric Age to the Nano Age in Mission 1 is OP!
I think the main problem of EE is just that the AI sucks a lot. It only pretends to harvest resources, while not needing any to build anything, and very importantly for the topic of this video, AI opponents always tech up very close to when you do! Obviously tech levels aren't gonna feel impactful if there's so many of them so no single one of them can be super influential, but also, when playing against AI, that impact is deflated about as much as it can be, making you and only you pay with resources that otherwise could have gone into more military, for what is basically a reskin applied to both you and the AI.
I had no idea the AI worked like that, this explains so much! I'm used to the AI getting resource bonuses in a lot of early RTS games to balance out many of the shortfalls with early bot scripting, but now I'm reading up on it I've not seen one that is so detached from the actual game rules.
@@kaluventhebritish yeah, it's beyond silly. I even tested it once, before I could check on the internet, by playing a low-population game on a Planets map from the expansion (where no one can reach one another before space age), starting all the way in classical age. then I built quite a few temples of zeus (which steal max population from them and give it to me), compared to the 0 that the AIs built in aggregate, went full eco, exploited every single resource on my planet, and one of them still teched up to space age a minute or so before me, with like 1/5 or 1/8 of my economy. I remember feeling kinda insulted at the time.
Hard AI was completely broken. It's most obvious if you set an AI as a teammate and have low economy start. You start the game with 150 wood but the AI will go out and immediately build 600 wood of buildings, then train units out of them on top, all with 5 villagers. I don't believe it's possible to win a game against hard AI in a 1v1 setting due to this
There's just something so funky about the Empire Earth nuclear explosion animation. So white. So clean. So uniformly moving. It looked less like a mushroom cloud and more like a mushroom fart.
One of the coolest things in Empire Earth for me was the slow process or creating your empire to survive the Test of Time... I didn't know that there were so many people who disliked that feature... If the game have so many epochs it should be slow and difficult to reach a new epoch, so the player can enjoy the current epoch before advance it... this was really immersive for me, unlike AOE where you can go from the first age to the Last in less than 20 minutes
@@caiodias503 "Empire Eternal" will also have this feature in the future... one of the things I enjoy in EE 2 is the diplomacy system, you can even force another nations to become protectorate... when I played Rise of nations I aways put the "very expensive and slow" techs... i never played in the normal settings... its too fast and not immersive at least for me
I've not played that one before, but I see it's the same studio, same lead designer but a couple of years down the line. I'm interested to see that direction they took.
@@kaluventhebritish Dawn of the Modern World was the original Empire Earth 2, but released under a different name. Stainless Steel implemented into it all of the experiences & feedback they got out of Empire Earth, and DotMW would be the last game fully developed by Stainless Steel before closure.
@@Argacyan There's also Rise and Fall : civilization at war that is the last game Stainless steel made. It was "finished" by midway games after the editor refused to give them extra funding to finish the game with all the features they envisioned originally but it's still from them. Originally after DotMW which covers middle ages to WW2, they wanted to do a game in ancient times (Rise & Fall) and a futuristic game which was never materialized since Stainless steel went bankrupt at the end of Rise and Fall development
@@vincentdegheyndt3609 yeah, I still own a physical copy of Rise & Fall. Sadly my physical copy of Dawn of the Modern World got damaged right around when Cd's started getting phased out largely.
@@Argacyan Oh sad for your DotMW. I still own mine. Rise & fall is available in abandonware via a free to play version originally sponsored by the US air force. You need fixes to get it to work but can still be played
While I remember long nights of going through the epochs in a multiplayer game of EE1 with friends I think I prefer Rise of Nations more when it comes to Age of Empires but longer.
This game was too fucking hard. On a random map on the easiest difficulty starting in the prehistoric age, I couldn't so much as create enough villagers to harvest each type of resource before a horde of A.I. clubmen was already in my village killing them off as soon as they'd been created. I later learnt that, in fact, the A.I. cheats, possessing effectively unlimited resources. Don't even get me started on some of the campaign missions.
not only does the ai have unlimited resources, but the ai also has the map revealed so it sees everything that your doing. the ai building buildrate and unit buildrate is set 33% faster then you whatever unit you make, the ai immediately makes the counter to that unit if you had a wall of towers surrounding your lands and there was a small gap, the ai sends all its troops through that gap into your town i believe the ai also knows what building your about to build and its location, before you even start building it, same thing for knowing what troops your making before your troops spawn
It makes me very sad to hear such criticisms as something being "overly-complex" and the settlement -> town center -> capitol building being "clear as mud" when such mechanics are explained clearly and simply in the tutorial that you deride as "boring" (It's a tutorial. It's called investing time to learn something new.) The tutorials also explain the "rock paper scissors" mechanics. 13:00 "Long, quiet evenings at home with nothing else to do." Doesn't mastering... any video game require that? This video comes of as saying games like Risk or Monopoly are bad because you can't fully explain the rules and strategies and to someone in 30 seconds and wrap the game up in 30 minutes. "This game is bad because my friends can't figure it out." Yes, it's a game that requires some amount of thought and consideration.
Thanks for watching, sorry it made you sad! I'll try to explain. My problem with the way you create a new capitol isn't so much the three stages, but how you advance each stage and really that garrison mechanic as a whole. The game already has a perfectly serviceable mechanic for upgrading buildings: selecting one, clicking the upgrade, paying the cost and waiting for completion. I describe it as overly complex because settlements, town halls, capitols and granaries have a separate mechanic for no good reason. If garrisoning was a two-way process (so you could remove citizens if you needed them later but lose the bonus or upgrade) then it would make more sense to me as the extra complexity would be justified. You are right about the details being included in the tutorials, and I think that particular mechanic is explained in the 4th of the 7 or 8 learning scenarios. However, the tutorial is excruciatingly slow and hard to get though, with a huge amount of sitting there doing nothing while you wait for something to happen. Tutorials don't have to be boring, if well constructed they can be both fun and informative. The "long, quiet evenings" comment was just a reflection on the depth of the game, and to truly get the best out of it you need to be patient and take your time with it - much like you say.
@@kaluventhebritish "for no good reason" The reason is that the resources are limited, once you need more you spend food to make the mines yield more. Being able to ungarrison make the investment neglectable. Raiding(or getting raided) the mines becomes a tolerable setback, losing capitols is a tragedy that cripples the economy, if they were capable of take the citizens out of the capitol the only thing you would lose is a minute or two while you take away the workers and build the settlement again. Mines and farms have 300k resources there are like 2-3 (1-2 stone) golds and irons per player and you have just an amount of land to farm!
EE does suffer from a lot of poorly explained mechanics. Did you know that houses can be built for defensive buffs? Did you know that wonders do something? Did you know that you can upgrade units? Did you know that some campaigns can allow you to spend buff points on units that you'll later lose access to just when the missions get harder? It is a giant pile of ideas, some neat ones, but they don't all mix together. Then you got the Xpac which turboed the ammount of random stuff.
@@khankhomrad8855 it all comes in the manual, i learned all that by reading it. The civ points is your fairest point; english campaign loses access to sword infantry and ranged one becomes core in the last scenarios, german lose access to cavalry (kinda obvious tho), greek loses access to sword cavalry in the last 2 scenarios, one of the russian ones is all about cybers, none of them really get prophets except for like 2-3 scenarios for greek, one for british? none for russian (now that i think about it... i never made or attempted to made a temple in german campaign xD) Expantion was outsourced, and im pretty sure that beta testing was like 10 games between the developers and called it a day, asian campaign is unfinished AF, its does not even have a cinematic or even a simple line of text when you finish it lmao, i guess they suffered understaffing and/or crunch. Remember this game is kinda 20 years old and made by an small studio, its not an starcraft who could throw money at the development, everything is on the manuals for this game.
@ahuzel fair enough. However, not every edition came with the manual, and nowadays not everyone would know to go looking for one. I bought a legit copy of the game back in the day from a gaming magazine which was running a "best PC games" series or something of the like. No manual in sight so all I had to go by was what I could find ingame.
The best AoE-like RTS of its age, couldn't disagree more with this review. Of course, it is quite outclassed by its sequel, which is of the next generation of AoE-like RTS, though I enjoy both equally. It's a shame that EE3 sent the series into a grave. I always liked these games a lot more over Age of Empires, of which the best really is the third one. The main issue with Empire Earth, as I see it, is that it inherits all of the limitations of Age of Empires. How great of a game would it be, if it were more of a grand level RTS, as Supreme Commander was. Then, it would rise to be the best of the best of all RTSs. A game with the spatial and strategic scale of Supreme Commander, and the temporal and historical scale of Empire Earth. Well, one can always dream.
There's a similar problem with Rise of Nations, though to a lesser extent, as it has only eight ages. At a high level, even a non-rush, "boom" player will end the game at the Enlightenment Age at the very latest, before the new units and resources of the Industrial Age even show up. I think limiting it to, perhaps, five ages (Ancient - Classical - Medieval - Gunpowder - Modern) would have allowed the full scope of the game's design to be explored more frequently.
I used to watch quite a few high level replayes of RoN a couple of years ago and I always felt those games were very boring from a watcher's perspective. They were usually a dance of armies revolving around who could reach enlightenment first and capture the opponent's foward city. That's it. Players would resign as soon as they lost a city because of how snowbally the game was. That said, I loved playing RoN skirmish and I think the AI curbstomp aspect of the game is much more enjoyable than the PvP one.
Loved it as a kid, but when I played it again as an adult, I found that I was more in love with the idea of it than the reality. My main problem was the pacing. Everything just took soooooo long, especially in the early epochs when you didn't have that many economical upgrades yet. By the later epochs, the game turned out to be much more fun. In the campaign I would say the turning point was when you reached the Napoleonic era. From then on it mostly kept getting better. The Russian campaign was pretty cool, especially the idea of the last mission where you had to fight a higher epoch-enemy due to time travel shenanigans.
Me and most people would play in imperial age since you had there perfect counter triangle and it was fun to manage unlike nano age with too many robot units to learn which does what. 😋👍
Back in my child days i've played this game SO MUCH! It was long before Steam took note about how much time you spend in a single game, but, i think, i had spent something like 1000 hours only on EE... And yes, nonenthless, i must agree with you. It was maybe too much for a single title. I mean, even the almost perfect AOE2 somethimes struggle to manage all those stuff only in medieval era. But, maybe for me, this... being full of all those stuff was the very single distinction point of EE back in the days. Why? Becaus Empire Earth let you do anything you want. Anything. You could erase a bunch of tribesman whit a single mech, you could drive a Panzer in the against the horses of Genghis Khan... Or you could do the reverse. Whit the Editor, I had built up myself a scenario in which an alliance of tribeseman need to defeat the A.I. lead armada of Conquistadores... It was an hard challenge, an unfair and almost impossilbe one to beat. But i enjoied it. A lot. Even if it was broken, the A.I. cheated, and in the futuristic eras i don't undestood almost anything about laster protection and similar stuff.
Oh boy, something from my childhood😅 And I agree it did drag on a bit, but I did like all the epochs, it meant you could pit futuristic units against Spearman.
@LucasHenrique-it2io I guess that's the beauty of this game, it means many different things to many different people, and one person's problem is another person's paradise!
@@kaluventhebritish Empire Earth is harder for many people who consume a lot of pop culture. The Campaigns missions cover less well known events such as battles in WW1 instead of focusing only on WW2. Instead of the Crusades the game covers the rivalry between Great Britain and France. The game play addresses detailed techniques in warfare instead of sport. Example: the trident submarine requires a spotter, transports can't carry siege towers, the Hades robot can 'time warp' the 'anti-matter storm'. In 2001 creating a futuristic campaign about Russia instead of China demonstrates a sophisticated level of class.
@@kaluventhebritish well, saying that the tutorial is boring and bypassing the manual is kinda why you dont really know about the units' jobs. Also about the collection not being industrious and shit kinda get supported by your argument with the french quote; just look at sc2 where the workers do the exact same thing for 3 races, it just cant be more simple, you say the game needs more simplicity while you complain about the simplicity of the resource collection.
I very quickly learned that EE skirmish was only playable at my pace on Islands with walling the entire thing off before the AI built up enough to get past it, then literally turtling to the higher ages. Or also the day spanning skirmish of starting on asteroids where the AI and you cant even get to the other players until like, the last age, and choosing to start it in the stone age XD. Good times. Campaigns were the best mix though, and are really how the game is taught, as they focus on the specific "era blocks" and teach you a lot. EE is a good game overall though, and it must be treated in the context of being released in 2001. It was an era of nearly every RTS just being AoE or C&C and they all felt pretty much the same. EE did at least something different. EE2 I have no real concrete memories of, so I think it had that "okay" spot.. but.. oh boy Never play EE3.
Lol that thumbnail. Imagine the Paradox versions: "Hearts of Iron. Too much Iron, not enough Heart" "Crusader Kings. Too much kings, not enough crusaders" "Victoria 3. Too much Victoria, not enough 3" "Stellaris. Too much Stella, not enough rizz"
I agree. I enjoyed EE a lot for the first two campaigns, but on the latter epochs the amount of samey units is staggering. Having citizens gathering pumpkins together with robots it's funny but also completely break the immersion. That being said, I find it very curious that you chastise EE for having a bloated complexity (rightly so), while at the same time you celebrate total annihilation and its successors. I was always turned off by the sheer amount of units present in TA, which all looked very similar to me (the blocky graphics and lack of any info in the UI didn't help either). If that were not enough, the whole constructor1->factory 1-> constrctor2 -> factory 2 sequence is overwhelming and confusing. With four army branches we are talking about 8 different tech levels, each one with its own new set of units. Pure madness. By the way, who needs 2 whole tech levels of boats when you already have a fracton of planes? Sure you can add a transport ship and maybe a couple of gunboats, but that should be it. Granted, I haven't played much of TA, but it always felt just.."too much of...everything" and it always managed to push me away. I do appreciate it for being one of the few games that successfully capture the scale of an actual conflict. Still, having so many units and so many tech levels feels wrong in my book. I realize I'm barking at the wrong tree, but I thought you could find this comment interesting.
Thanks for your comment, I do find these things interesting. It's hard for me to make general statements about both TA and all of the successors as they vary so much, but I think the reason I don't find it so much of a problem is that most of the units in those games have vastly different characteristics and production costs. As a comparison in the Empire Earth archery line you have Rock Throwers, Slingers, Javelin Throwers, Pilum Throwers, Bowmen, Composite Bowmen and Longbow men which are all essentially the same unit with the same production cost but with progressively better stats. I think some of the reason why a lot of the TA-derived games feel so bloated is the decision to include amphibious warfare. If it stuck to air/land/sea you would just have 3 basic factories and 3 advanced versions of those - but the decision to include submergible tanks and bots, alongside hovercraft, seaplanes and supporting structures doubles the amount of factories, units and buildings the game has and can make it look a little overwhelming.
@@kaluventhebritish Thanks for the kind answer. It's nice to see that I didn't come out completely unreasonable! Holy crap I didn't even know about amphibious warfare! Nonetheless vehicle and bots are still different production line so it would be 4 branches -8 factories (sorry for nitpicking). Just to add a little bit to the discussion, I think what makes things more confusing/overwhelming in TA/successors: 1) all the units are robots/mechanical in nature and are basically "machines that shoot". The blocky and simple design (referring to TA, new games have probably improved this) blur the lines between the different units (I'm generalizing, but that's the impression) 2) lack of any unit information on the UI. If you compare it with starcraft, you have a clear feel for the unit you have selected. It helps that all the units are vastly different, but you also immediately have a feedback on how a unit attack, the name, the portrait, the health bar, armor, skills...etc. Of course more "massive games" do not have specific UI for units, but they have different ways to "solve" this problem: in C&C for example, a)units are aesthetically very different and b) they resemble real/realistic military units, so they are immediately recognizable. That being said, I enjoyed a lot your videos on BAR and they made me want to give it a try. Maybe once I get more the feel of the game I won't feel overwhelmed as much.
@@blackest3314 Interestingly, I had a similar experience with TA, but not Supreme Commander. I've been intimidated to try BAR or Zero-K as a result, but maybe I should give it a go.
Citizen thing aside I don't see how having the same units each epoch is a "bad" thing, it makes the game easier to learn and play which wouldn't happen if you had to learn a new mechanic or way to play your units every new era.
Really good video. I hope you keep doing this sort of stuff. I agree with you, it's true that this is the "defect" of this game. From my perspective this actually it's "premise". Age of empires, StarCraft, Cossacks, som
RTSs with ages should really focus on a specific timeframe, the early it is the bigger the frame it can get away with. I also think rts games should understand that the first ages will always be speedrushed, and unless you are attempting a rush most of the gameplay will happen in the last age, so you should make the ages so that the last one truly encapsulates the period you are aiming for. Age of Empires 2 for example fails here imo. For a game that is supposed to be set in the Medieval Period, it never truly encapsulates the period. The first age, "Dark Age" is more comparable to the stone age, people live in wood and leather huts and there is only a clubman unit, not only it doesn't represent the dark ages at all, it's an age where you are only supposed to build your economy and age-up as fast as possible. And just like that, Age of Empires completely skipped the first half of the Medieval period (475bc-1000bc) The second age, Feudal Age is alright, (although more comparable to the actual Dark Ages) The Castle age already gets into late medieval territory, with half the civs getting access to gunpowder weapons. And the final age is clearly in the early modern period, and ironically even later than Age of Empires 3's first age (A particular example of this is how Portugal's leader in Age of Empires 3 literally died before the hero from Age of Empires 2 was born)
I agree with your thoughts, although I think if a game was cleverly and carefully designed someone might be able to make a better go at it. Perhaps choices made and development undertaken during an earlier age could have impact on future ages, so rushing though them gives you a short term gain but going at a steadier pace could have long-term benefits. As you mentioned heroes, I always found Rommel to be an uncomfortable choice in EE. An ambiguous character for sure, but hardly as a clean as his myth made him out to be, and certainly one that spent many years absolutely devoted to Hitler.
A notable issue with the game that makes it harder to return to is simply the AI, the AI cheats on resources to the point it makes the style of game and such very limiting. it is interesting its a war of attrition on bodies and not resources but its still annoying as advancing an epoch does give benefits, it does make it too essential. I can praise the art design as you go through the eras with the phrase "the more it changes, the more it stays the same", plus some cool ideas such as animals that will repopulate themselves, huntable birds however I feel like some structures could have been reworked with the eras like at one point, the Archery range becomes useless after gunpowder and sort of wish it could have trained special grenade units.
Why not just play defensively? There is no tower limit in this game. You can defend an island pretty easily. I always did this when I decided to do a chilling game from age 1-15.
I am thinking of giving Empire Earth 2 a go, it looks quite interesting and the reviews aren't bad either. I didn't catch there was an Expansion for EE. I got the gold edition from GOG and it looks it it's all rolled into one game if you get it that way.
@@kaluventhebritish all it does, iirc, is add space terrain in a different map mode, like Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds compared to AOE2. You ain't missing much.
@@kaluventhebritish The expansion for EE is art of conquest and even with GOG edition, it's a separate exe file But honnestly it wasn't great so you didn't miss much
You'll probably have a good time with EE2, which largely ran on simplifying and streamlining EE1 into something a bit more compact and where it's a bit more reasonable to experience all the epochs in one game. It also toned down the AI *a lot.* EE3 is...just barely this side of racist in its attempt at stereotype humor, threw the interesting complexity out to import the treasures from AOE3/WC3, compressed the epochs down to 5 to try to match Rise of Nations but didn't deliver on differentiating them properly, and was so bad as an organic whole it significantly tanked the RTS genre. I look forward to those reviews!
I think instead of "Empire Earth" they should've just focused on the Futuristic periods since that's the most interesting part of the game in my opinion, even if it is the most simplest and shallowest design wise, infantry are too simple in the Nano Age, they should have had machine guns being replaced by Terminator-esque Minigunners like EE2, and the scenario-only Missile Troopers being reworked into being a combo of the Bazooka + Stinger units as a cheap dual-purpose anti-air and anti-vehicle, instead of being just a different looking stinger unit that appears in campaigns, and the bazooka-line just ending in Modern, and a Railgunner replacing the Sniper in digital as an anti-infantry stealth goon that can pierce multiple units in a formation. "Nano Earth" would've been interesting as though there were Sci-Fi RTS games, they were almost exclusively focused on Space, the closest comparison that could be made is Command & Conquer; though that was at the time mostly either WW2-alt history spinoffs or contemporary day post-gulf war inspired conflicts (though with magical radioactive space gems instead of oil) Having the game focus on futuristic conflicts would've especially been interesting with what could be done with the setting, and state of the earth at the time - states with advanced technology fighting over the last remaining resources, the struggle of nations to get into space whilst fighting battles around rocket launch centers, in a shitshow of an Earth ravaged by climate change and nuclear war; to justify why people have to rebuild city states and empires from scratch like it's the stone age (after all Einstein did say "World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.")
I fully agree with the problems, but I don't think it is only a matter of the scale, because Empire Earth II was, at least for me, a lot more fun than 1, and still had the scale ambition. I do think that in general it is a game in which campaings are far more interesting than skirmishes,
I hated EE at the time. It was a stinker compared to it's contemporaries. I don't understand the rabid fan base it has online (e.g. in these comments). I suspect it was the only game they owned at the time. I can't see how any one buying this game in 2001 would prefer it to: AOE2, C&C3, Homeworld, TA:K, C&CRA2, Majesty, Sacrifice, Battlecry, Battle Realms, Cossacks, Dune 2000 or Battle of Dune, Kohan all of which came out before it. The closest historical RTS is AOE2 and EE is a farce in comparison. Shortly after it came out we had Age Of Mythology too. The game was bland, controlled badly, had terrible AI, had a terrible UI (nothing is a better player experience than playing the intro Alexander campaign, opening up research and being able to put percentage points in rocket research) and looked really ugly, even for early 3d. I played the game a year or so after it first available and was astounded by how poor the game was, and went back to playing better RTS games instead. They should have abandoned the series in 2003 when Rise of Nations, the best base-building RTS ever was released. That showed the world how you _actually_ do a 4x-scale RTS game.
I get the impression that the people who were very fond of Empire Earth didn't love it for the standard gameplay, but rather as a sandbox for playing out ideas that they found cool or interesting. Nearly everyone that has great memories of it always mentions the custom scenario editor first and foremost, so I think this is a case of people using the tools the game provided to create their own fun.
@@kaluventhebritish defo. It's something very missing in today's game, except for block busters like Minecraft and Roblox. People like making their own stuff for games, but very few games let you do that easily now.
Imagine thinking age of empires 2 was better than EE. It was not. A single campaign alone blows AoE2 out of the water and there are 7. And don't even start thinking about the scenario editor that has its own scripting language. AoE2 does exactly 2 things better than EE, the first one is the fact that AoE2 has Bridges and the second one is the fact that Civilizations in AoE have their own units. On the other hand AoE2 has dogshit graphics, terrible fighting and everything else is absolutely mediocre.
It looks like this whole illness thing isn't going away any time soon, so again sorry for the wonky schedule - but I did have a couple of better days this week so I managed to dust this script off and put something together to tide you all over.
Estoy haciendo un mod realista de EE por si te interesa echar un vistazo 😅
WE ARE UNDER ATTACK
UUHHWWWEEEHHHH
I think in your review, you've highlighted one of the main strengths of Empire Earth - the single player campaigns. They were so creatively designed, varied and well told. The best was the one in the future where you had to travel back in time to stop yourself, a wonderful idea. The missions of a campaign were always set in an age where you didn't realize the unprecedented progression in technology. And the mission design was as varied and creative as I have rarely seen in a game.
I wonder what if the combined American, Cuban and Novaya defector forces went back in time to the start of the Greek Campaign
Going from Prehistoric Age to the Nano Age in Mission 1 is OP!
I think the main problem of EE is just that the AI sucks a lot. It only pretends to harvest resources, while not needing any to build anything, and very importantly for the topic of this video, AI opponents always tech up very close to when you do! Obviously tech levels aren't gonna feel impactful if there's so many of them so no single one of them can be super influential, but also, when playing against AI, that impact is deflated about as much as it can be, making you and only you pay with resources that otherwise could have gone into more military, for what is basically a reskin applied to both you and the AI.
I had no idea the AI worked like that, this explains so much! I'm used to the AI getting resource bonuses in a lot of early RTS games to balance out many of the shortfalls with early bot scripting, but now I'm reading up on it I've not seen one that is so detached from the actual game rules.
@@kaluventhebritish yeah, it's beyond silly. I even tested it once, before I could check on the internet, by playing a low-population game on a Planets map from the expansion (where no one can reach one another before space age), starting all the way in classical age. then I built quite a few temples of zeus (which steal max population from them and give it to me), compared to the 0 that the AIs built in aggregate, went full eco, exploited every single resource on my planet, and one of them still teched up to space age a minute or so before me, with like 1/5 or 1/8 of my economy. I remember feeling kinda insulted at the time.
@@droid-droidsson The Temple of Zeus grants self-healing to some units. That might be your problem.
Hard AI was completely broken. It's most obvious if you set an AI as a teammate and have low economy start. You start the game with 150 wood but the AI will go out and immediately build 600 wood of buildings, then train units out of them on top, all with 5 villagers. I don't believe it's possible to win a game against hard AI in a 1v1 setting due to this
There's just something so funky about the Empire Earth nuclear explosion animation. So white. So clean. So uniformly moving. It looked less like a mushroom cloud and more like a mushroom fart.
I always thought it looked like a power-up graphic from a early arcade racing game rather than a horrific wave of burning air death.
Empire Earth is not really an RTS, but an engine to create and play scenarios and campaigns.
I think that's a great way to look at it.
One of the coolest things in Empire Earth for me was the slow process or creating your empire to survive the Test of Time... I didn't know that there were so many people who disliked that feature... If the game have so many epochs it should be slow and difficult to reach a new epoch, so the player can enjoy the current epoch before advance it... this was really immersive for me, unlike AOE where you can go from the first age to the Last in less than 20 minutes
Nice feature for empire earth 2 to edit how cost next age, or rise of nations, both use the tech point as resource to advance in ages.
@@caiodias503 "Empire Eternal" will also have this feature in the future... one of the things I enjoy in EE 2 is the diplomacy system, you can even force another nations to become protectorate... when I played Rise of nations I aways put the "very expensive and slow" techs... i never played in the normal settings... its too fast and not immersive at least for me
@@LucasHenrique-it2io i tryed some mods like 8x costs for rise of nations, but most of times the bots dont load. I'm waiting for empire eternal too.
@@caiodias503 BR?
@@LucasHenrique-it2io tbm só li teu nome agora 🤣
This game walked so that Empires: Dawn of the Modern World could run.
I've not played that one before, but I see it's the same studio, same lead designer but a couple of years down the line. I'm interested to see that direction they took.
@@kaluventhebritish Dawn of the Modern World was the original Empire Earth 2, but released under a different name. Stainless Steel implemented into it all of the experiences & feedback they got out of Empire Earth, and DotMW would be the last game fully developed by Stainless Steel before closure.
@@Argacyan There's also Rise and Fall : civilization at war that is the last game Stainless steel made.
It was "finished" by midway games after the editor refused to give them extra funding to finish the game with all the features they envisioned originally but it's still from them.
Originally after DotMW which covers middle ages to WW2, they wanted to do a game in ancient times (Rise & Fall) and a futuristic game which was never materialized since Stainless steel went bankrupt at the end of Rise and Fall development
@@vincentdegheyndt3609 yeah, I still own a physical copy of Rise & Fall. Sadly my physical copy of Dawn of the Modern World got damaged right around when Cd's started getting phased out largely.
@@Argacyan Oh sad for your DotMW. I still own mine.
Rise & fall is available in abandonware via a free to play version originally sponsored by the US air force. You need fixes to get it to work but can still be played
While I remember long nights of going through the epochs in a multiplayer game of EE1 with friends I think I prefer Rise of Nations more when it comes to Age of Empires but longer.
This game was too fucking hard. On a random map on the easiest difficulty starting in the prehistoric age, I couldn't so much as create enough villagers to harvest each type of resource before a horde of A.I. clubmen was already in my village killing them off as soon as they'd been created. I later learnt that, in fact, the A.I. cheats, possessing effectively unlimited resources. Don't even get me started on some of the campaign missions.
Only way to survive was rushing stone and building as many towers as possible - and then run in circles with citizens :D Yea, it was kinda silly.
@@henrikfjellheim3861 just play islands
Or play with people... who actually do the same and everyone rushes clubmen lmao.
not only does the ai have unlimited resources, but the ai also has the map revealed so it sees everything that your doing.
the ai building buildrate and unit buildrate is set 33% faster then you
whatever unit you make, the ai immediately makes the counter to that unit
if you had a wall of towers surrounding your lands and there was a small gap, the ai sends all its troops through that gap into your town
i believe the ai also knows what building your about to build and its location, before you even start building it, same thing for knowing what troops your making before your troops spawn
Bro wants EE to be AoE
It makes me very sad to hear such criticisms as something being "overly-complex" and the settlement -> town center -> capitol building being "clear as mud" when such mechanics are explained clearly and simply in the tutorial that you deride as "boring" (It's a tutorial. It's called investing time to learn something new.)
The tutorials also explain the "rock paper scissors" mechanics.
13:00 "Long, quiet evenings at home with nothing else to do."
Doesn't mastering... any video game require that?
This video comes of as saying games like Risk or Monopoly are bad because you can't fully explain the rules and strategies and to someone in 30 seconds and wrap the game up in 30 minutes.
"This game is bad because my friends can't figure it out."
Yes, it's a game that requires some amount of thought and consideration.
Thanks for watching, sorry it made you sad! I'll try to explain.
My problem with the way you create a new capitol isn't so much the three stages, but how you advance each stage and really that garrison mechanic as a whole. The game already has a perfectly serviceable mechanic for upgrading buildings: selecting one, clicking the upgrade, paying the cost and waiting for completion. I describe it as overly complex because settlements, town halls, capitols and granaries have a separate mechanic for no good reason. If garrisoning was a two-way process (so you could remove citizens if you needed them later but lose the bonus or upgrade) then it would make more sense to me as the extra complexity would be justified.
You are right about the details being included in the tutorials, and I think that particular mechanic is explained in the 4th of the 7 or 8 learning scenarios. However, the tutorial is excruciatingly slow and hard to get though, with a huge amount of sitting there doing nothing while you wait for something to happen. Tutorials don't have to be boring, if well constructed they can be both fun and informative.
The "long, quiet evenings" comment was just a reflection on the depth of the game, and to truly get the best out of it you need to be patient and take your time with it - much like you say.
@@kaluventhebritish "for no good reason" The reason is that the resources are limited, once you need more you spend food to make the mines yield more. Being able to ungarrison make the investment neglectable. Raiding(or getting raided) the mines becomes a tolerable setback, losing capitols is a tragedy that cripples the economy, if they were capable of take the citizens out of the capitol the only thing you would lose is a minute or two while you take away the workers and build the settlement again. Mines and farms have 300k resources there are like 2-3 (1-2 stone) golds and irons per player and you have just an amount of land to farm!
EE does suffer from a lot of poorly explained mechanics. Did you know that houses can be built for defensive buffs? Did you know that wonders do something? Did you know that you can upgrade units? Did you know that some campaigns can allow you to spend buff points on units that you'll later lose access to just when the missions get harder?
It is a giant pile of ideas, some neat ones, but they don't all mix together. Then you got the Xpac which turboed the ammount of random stuff.
@@khankhomrad8855 it all comes in the manual, i learned all that by reading it. The civ points is your fairest point; english campaign loses access to sword infantry and ranged one becomes core in the last scenarios, german lose access to cavalry (kinda obvious tho), greek loses access to sword cavalry in the last 2 scenarios, one of the russian ones is all about cybers, none of them really get prophets except for like 2-3 scenarios for greek, one for british? none for russian (now that i think about it... i never made or attempted to made a temple in german campaign xD)
Expantion was outsourced, and im pretty sure that beta testing was like 10 games between the developers and called it a day, asian campaign is unfinished AF, its does not even have a cinematic or even a simple line of text when you finish it lmao, i guess they suffered understaffing and/or crunch.
Remember this game is kinda 20 years old and made by an small studio, its not an starcraft who could throw money at the development, everything is on the manuals for this game.
@ahuzel fair enough. However, not every edition came with the manual, and nowadays not everyone would know to go looking for one. I bought a legit copy of the game back in the day from a gaming magazine which was running a "best PC games" series or something of the like. No manual in sight so all I had to go by was what I could find ingame.
The best AoE-like RTS of its age, couldn't disagree more with this review. Of course, it is quite outclassed by its sequel, which is of the next generation of AoE-like RTS, though I enjoy both equally. It's a shame that EE3 sent the series into a grave. I always liked these games a lot more over Age of Empires, of which the best really is the third one. The main issue with Empire Earth, as I see it, is that it inherits all of the limitations of Age of Empires. How great of a game would it be, if it were more of a grand level RTS, as Supreme Commander was. Then, it would rise to be the best of the best of all RTSs. A game with the spatial and strategic scale of Supreme Commander, and the temporal and historical scale of Empire Earth. Well, one can always dream.
the guy likes EE2, where I lost tanks to swordsmen. Nuff said :D
@@cdgncgn imagine counters actually countering the line of units they are meant to do so?!
There's a similar problem with Rise of Nations, though to a lesser extent, as it has only eight ages. At a high level, even a non-rush, "boom" player will end the game at the Enlightenment Age at the very latest, before the new units and resources of the Industrial Age even show up.
I think limiting it to, perhaps, five ages (Ancient - Classical - Medieval - Gunpowder - Modern) would have allowed the full scope of the game's design to be explored more frequently.
I used to watch quite a few high level replayes of RoN a couple of years ago and I always felt those games were very boring from a watcher's perspective. They were usually a dance of armies revolving around who could reach enlightenment first and capture the opponent's foward city. That's it. Players would resign as soon as they lost a city because of how snowbally the game was.
That said, I loved playing RoN skirmish and I think the AI curbstomp aspect of the game is much more enjoyable than the PvP one.
This was my middle and high school.
Loved it as a kid, but when I played it again as an adult, I found that I was more in love with the idea of it than the reality. My main problem was the pacing. Everything just took soooooo long, especially in the early epochs when you didn't have that many economical upgrades yet.
By the later epochs, the game turned out to be much more fun. In the campaign I would say the turning point was when you reached the Napoleonic era. From then on it mostly kept getting better. The Russian campaign was pretty cool, especially the idea of the last mission where you had to fight a higher epoch-enemy due to time travel shenanigans.
Me and most people would play in imperial age since you had there perfect counter triangle and it was fun to manage unlike nano age with too many robot units to learn which does what.
😋👍
Wasn't really difficult. Minotaur = Anti Tank, Hyperion = Anti - Everything, Zeus = anti Robot, Pandora = Anti Infantry and so on......
Back in my child days i've played this game SO MUCH! It was long before Steam took note about how much time you spend in a single game, but, i think, i had spent something like 1000 hours only on EE... And yes, nonenthless, i must agree with you. It was maybe too much for a single title. I mean, even the almost perfect AOE2 somethimes struggle to manage all those stuff only in medieval era.
But, maybe for me, this... being full of all those stuff was the very single distinction point of EE back in the days. Why? Becaus Empire Earth let you do anything you want. Anything.
You could erase a bunch of tribesman whit a single mech, you could drive a Panzer in the against the horses of Genghis Khan... Or you could do the reverse.
Whit the Editor, I had built up myself a scenario in which an alliance of tribeseman need to defeat the A.I. lead armada of Conquistadores... It was an hard challenge, an unfair and almost impossilbe one to beat. But i enjoied it. A lot.
Even if it was broken, the A.I. cheated, and in the futuristic eras i don't undestood almost anything about laster protection and similar stuff.
Oh boy, something from my childhood😅
And I agree it did drag on a bit, but I did like all the epochs, it meant you could pit futuristic units against Spearman.
I do distinctly remember watching a full-on cavalry charge get stopped by a whole platoon of medium tanks the first time I played it.
many things you complain in this video are exactly the things that made me love EE
@LucasHenrique-it2io I guess that's the beauty of this game, it means many different things to many different people, and one person's problem is another person's paradise!
@@kaluventhebritish Perhaps most people aren't smart enough to enjoy Empire Earth!
@@carlmattson1213 I think that's called the "Rick & Morty Defense".
@@kaluventhebritish Empire Earth is harder for many people who consume a lot of pop culture. The Campaigns missions cover less well known events such as battles in WW1 instead of focusing only on WW2. Instead of the Crusades the game covers the rivalry between Great Britain and France. The game play addresses detailed techniques in warfare instead of sport. Example: the trident submarine requires a spotter, transports can't carry siege towers, the Hades robot can 'time warp' the 'anti-matter storm'. In 2001 creating a futuristic campaign about Russia instead of China demonstrates a sophisticated level of class.
@@kaluventhebritish well, saying that the tutorial is boring and bypassing the manual is kinda why you dont really know about the units' jobs. Also about the collection not being industrious and shit kinda get supported by your argument with the french quote; just look at sc2 where the workers do the exact same thing for 3 races, it just cant be more simple, you say the game needs more simplicity while you complain about the simplicity of the resource collection.
Best game ever. I would still play it today on a MAC too.
I very quickly learned that EE skirmish was only playable at my pace on Islands with walling the entire thing off before the AI built up enough to get past it, then literally turtling to the higher ages.
Or also the day spanning skirmish of starting on asteroids where the AI and you cant even get to the other players until like, the last age, and choosing to start it in the stone age XD. Good times.
Campaigns were the best mix though, and are really how the game is taught, as they focus on the specific "era blocks" and teach you a lot.
EE is a good game overall though, and it must be treated in the context of being released in 2001. It was an era of nearly every RTS just being AoE or C&C and they all felt pretty much the same. EE did at least something different. EE2 I have no real concrete memories of, so I think it had that "okay" spot.. but.. oh boy
Never play EE3.
Lol that thumbnail. Imagine the Paradox versions:
"Hearts of Iron. Too much Iron, not enough Heart"
"Crusader Kings. Too much kings, not enough crusaders"
"Victoria 3. Too much Victoria, not enough 3"
"Stellaris. Too much Stella, not enough rizz"
I never thought about that before but I could probably milk that format to death. That last one is video title gold.
Bro thinks EE is bad
Bro thinks EE is undercooked. He's right. That's why 2 was better, mostly.
Cringe
@@frauleinhohenzollernthat's a long name you got there
Bro is cringe
It’s good if you’re ten years old
I agree.
I enjoyed EE a lot for the first two campaigns, but on the latter epochs the amount of samey units is staggering. Having citizens gathering pumpkins together with robots it's funny but also completely break the immersion.
That being said, I find it very curious that you chastise EE for having a bloated complexity (rightly so), while at the same time you celebrate total annihilation and its successors. I was always turned off by the sheer amount of units present in TA, which all looked very similar to me (the blocky graphics and lack of any info in the UI didn't help either). If that were not enough, the whole constructor1->factory 1-> constrctor2 -> factory 2 sequence is overwhelming and confusing. With four army branches we are talking about 8 different tech levels, each one with its own new set of units. Pure madness. By the way, who needs 2 whole tech levels of boats when you already have a fracton of planes? Sure you can add a transport ship and maybe a couple of gunboats, but that should be it.
Granted, I haven't played much of TA, but it always felt just.."too much of...everything" and it always managed to push me away. I do appreciate it for being one of the few games that successfully capture the scale of an actual conflict. Still, having so many units and so many tech levels feels wrong in my book.
I realize I'm barking at the wrong tree, but I thought you could find this comment interesting.
Thanks for your comment, I do find these things interesting. It's hard for me to make general statements about both TA and all of the successors as they vary so much, but I think the reason I don't find it so much of a problem is that most of the units in those games have vastly different characteristics and production costs. As a comparison in the Empire Earth archery line you have Rock Throwers, Slingers, Javelin Throwers, Pilum Throwers, Bowmen, Composite Bowmen and Longbow men which are all essentially the same unit with the same production cost but with progressively better stats.
I think some of the reason why a lot of the TA-derived games feel so bloated is the decision to include amphibious warfare. If it stuck to air/land/sea you would just have 3 basic factories and 3 advanced versions of those - but the decision to include submergible tanks and bots, alongside hovercraft, seaplanes and supporting structures doubles the amount of factories, units and buildings the game has and can make it look a little overwhelming.
@@kaluventhebritish Thanks for the kind answer. It's nice to see that I didn't come out completely unreasonable!
Holy crap I didn't even know about amphibious warfare! Nonetheless vehicle and bots are still different production line so it would be 4 branches -8 factories (sorry for nitpicking).
Just to add a little bit to the discussion, I think what makes things more confusing/overwhelming in TA/successors:
1) all the units are robots/mechanical in nature and are basically "machines that shoot". The blocky and simple design (referring to TA, new games have probably improved this) blur the lines between the different units (I'm generalizing, but that's the impression)
2) lack of any unit information on the UI. If you compare it with starcraft, you have a clear feel for the unit you have selected. It helps that all the units are vastly different, but you also immediately have a feedback on how a unit attack, the name, the portrait, the health bar, armor, skills...etc. Of course more "massive games" do not have specific UI for units, but they have different ways to "solve" this problem: in C&C for example, a)units are aesthetically very different and b) they resemble real/realistic military units, so they are immediately recognizable.
That being said, I enjoyed a lot your videos on BAR and they made me want to give it a try. Maybe once I get more the feel of the game I won't feel overwhelmed as much.
@@blackest3314 Interestingly, I had a similar experience with TA, but not Supreme Commander. I've been intimidated to try BAR or Zero-K as a result, but maybe I should give it a go.
Citizen thing aside I don't see how having the same units each epoch is a "bad" thing, it makes the game easier to learn and play which wouldn't happen if you had to learn a new mechanic or way to play your units every new era.
Really good video. I hope you keep doing this sort of stuff.
I agree with you, it's true that this is the "defect" of this game. From my perspective this actually it's "premise". Age of empires, StarCraft, Cossacks, som
Nah this game is fun to play if you don't think too much
This is the best RTS ever, join us online with NeoEE
The first game ive ever played, still have a CD with it :D
RTSs with ages should really focus on a specific timeframe, the early it is the bigger the frame it can get away with.
I also think rts games should understand that the first ages will always be speedrushed, and unless you are attempting a rush most of the gameplay will happen in the last age, so you should make the ages so that the last one truly encapsulates the period you are aiming for.
Age of Empires 2 for example fails here imo. For a game that is supposed to be set in the Medieval Period, it never truly encapsulates the period.
The first age, "Dark Age" is more comparable to the stone age, people live in wood and leather huts and there is only a clubman unit, not only it doesn't represent the dark ages at all, it's an age where you are only supposed to build your economy and age-up as fast as possible.
And just like that, Age of Empires completely skipped the first half of the Medieval period (475bc-1000bc)
The second age, Feudal Age is alright, (although more comparable to the actual Dark Ages)
The Castle age already gets into late medieval territory, with half the civs getting access to gunpowder weapons.
And the final age is clearly in the early modern period, and ironically even later than Age of Empires 3's first age (A particular example of this is how Portugal's leader in Age of Empires 3 literally died before the hero from Age of Empires 2 was born)
I agree with your thoughts, although I think if a game was cleverly and carefully designed someone might be able to make a better go at it. Perhaps choices made and development undertaken during an earlier age could have impact on future ages, so rushing though them gives you a short term gain but going at a steadier pace could have long-term benefits.
As you mentioned heroes, I always found Rommel to be an uncomfortable choice in EE. An ambiguous character for sure, but hardly as a clean as his myth made him out to be, and certainly one that spent many years absolutely devoted to Hitler.
A notable issue with the game that makes it harder to return to is simply the AI, the AI cheats on resources to the point it makes the style of game and such very limiting.
it is interesting its a war of attrition on bodies and not resources but its still annoying as advancing an epoch does give benefits, it does make it too essential.
I can praise the art design as you go through the eras with the phrase "the more it changes, the more it stays the same", plus some cool ideas such as animals that will repopulate themselves, huntable birds however I feel like some structures could have been reworked with the eras like at one point, the Archery range becomes useless after gunpowder and sort of wish it could have trained special grenade units.
Why not just play defensively? There is no tower limit in this game. You can defend an island pretty easily. I always did this when I decided to do a chilling game from age 1-15.
You did not mentions about, Empire Earth has expansion pack game and Empire Earth 2 as well.
Maybe you can try out.
I am thinking of giving Empire Earth 2 a go, it looks quite interesting and the reviews aren't bad either.
I didn't catch there was an Expansion for EE. I got the gold edition from GOG and it looks it it's all rolled into one game if you get it that way.
@@kaluventhebritish all it does, iirc, is add space terrain in a different map mode, like Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds compared to AOE2. You ain't missing much.
@@youmukonpaku3168it also adds a few campaigns.
@@kaluventhebritish The expansion for EE is art of conquest and even with GOG edition, it's a separate exe file
But honnestly it wasn't great so you didn't miss much
You'll probably have a good time with EE2, which largely ran on simplifying and streamlining EE1 into something a bit more compact and where it's a bit more reasonable to experience all the epochs in one game. It also toned down the AI *a lot.* EE3 is...just barely this side of racist in its attempt at stereotype humor, threw the interesting complexity out to import the treasures from AOE3/WC3, compressed the epochs down to 5 to try to match Rise of Nations but didn't deliver on differentiating them properly, and was so bad as an organic whole it significantly tanked the RTS genre. I look forward to those reviews!
My gripe with this game is that its UI design is horrendous.
Can you send link dowload for win 10
I think instead of "Empire Earth" they should've just focused on the Futuristic periods since that's the most interesting part of the game in my opinion, even if it is the most simplest and shallowest design wise, infantry are too simple in the Nano Age, they should have had machine guns being replaced by Terminator-esque Minigunners like EE2, and the scenario-only Missile Troopers being reworked into being a combo of the Bazooka + Stinger units as a cheap dual-purpose anti-air and anti-vehicle, instead of being just a different looking stinger unit that appears in campaigns, and the bazooka-line just ending in Modern, and a Railgunner replacing the Sniper in digital as an anti-infantry stealth goon that can pierce multiple units in a formation.
"Nano Earth" would've been interesting as though there were Sci-Fi RTS games, they were almost exclusively focused on Space, the closest comparison that could be made is Command & Conquer; though that was at the time mostly either WW2-alt history spinoffs or contemporary day post-gulf war inspired conflicts (though with magical radioactive space gems instead of oil)
Having the game focus on futuristic conflicts would've especially been interesting with what could be done with the setting, and state of the earth at the time - states with advanced technology fighting over the last remaining resources, the struggle of nations to get into space whilst fighting battles around rocket launch centers, in a shitshow of an Earth ravaged by climate change and nuclear war; to justify why people have to rebuild city states and empires from scratch like it's the stone age (after all Einstein did say "World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.")
I fully agree with the problems, but I don't think it is only a matter of the scale, because Empire Earth II was, at least for me, a lot more fun than 1, and still had the scale ambition. I do think that in general it is a game in which campaings are far more interesting than skirmishes,
I'm looking forward to trying Empire Earth 2, I'm interested to see how a different development studio handles the same idea.
I hated EE at the time. It was a stinker compared to it's contemporaries. I don't understand the rabid fan base it has online (e.g. in these comments). I suspect it was the only game they owned at the time. I can't see how any one buying this game in 2001 would prefer it to: AOE2, C&C3, Homeworld, TA:K, C&CRA2, Majesty, Sacrifice, Battlecry, Battle Realms, Cossacks, Dune 2000 or Battle of Dune, Kohan all of which came out before it. The closest historical RTS is AOE2 and EE is a farce in comparison. Shortly after it came out we had Age Of Mythology too.
The game was bland, controlled badly, had terrible AI, had a terrible UI (nothing is a better player experience than playing the intro Alexander campaign, opening up research and being able to put percentage points in rocket research) and looked really ugly, even for early 3d.
I played the game a year or so after it first available and was astounded by how poor the game was, and went back to playing better RTS games instead.
They should have abandoned the series in 2003 when Rise of Nations, the best base-building RTS ever was released. That showed the world how you _actually_ do a 4x-scale RTS game.
I get the impression that the people who were very fond of Empire Earth didn't love it for the standard gameplay, but rather as a sandbox for playing out ideas that they found cool or interesting. Nearly everyone that has great memories of it always mentions the custom scenario editor first and foremost, so I think this is a case of people using the tools the game provided to create their own fun.
@@kaluventhebritish defo.
It's something very missing in today's game, except for block busters like Minecraft and Roblox. People like making their own stuff for games, but very few games let you do that easily now.
Fun game but the music .... 1 sound track on a loop is awful, especially once you realise
Imagine thinking age of empires 2 was better than EE. It was not. A single campaign alone blows AoE2 out of the water and there are 7. And don't even start thinking about the scenario editor that has its own scripting language. AoE2 does exactly 2 things better than EE, the first one is the fact that AoE2 has Bridges and the second one is the fact that Civilizations in AoE have their own units. On the other hand AoE2 has dogshit graphics, terrible fighting and everything else is absolutely mediocre.
It was such a disappointment, with lots of great ideas but it lacked something. Every sequel got progressively worse.
Rise of nations was definitely the better game
Hush child.
Brainlet opinion