Empire Earth 2: Should I get it?

[Jeivar]

Recently I've had an uncharacteristic itch to play a good pre-industrial strategy/management game, and today I saw a cheap copy of Empire Earth 2: Gold Edition. Is it any good? I haven't played the first one, or indeed any such game for almost a decade now.

I'd appreciate a brief breakdown of the good and bad. :smallsmile:

[warty goblin]

Empire Earth II is, more or less, Age of Empires on crack. It's very worker and economics focused, with lots of different resources some of which can only be harvested and used in certain epochs.

It's also pretty heavily focused on the tech tree, which is unfortunately rather boring, very much the +10% health to unit type X sort of deal. These basic techs however act as gateways to the more meaty epoch upgrades, which unlock new units, new buildings and so on.

There's some other features that I really wish other games would adopt. The worker manager makes assigning peasants to different resources extremely easy at a global level. There's a similar thing for military management.

It's probably not the best choice if you're looking for a game about the pre-industrial period in particular, since EEII's deal is that it covers pretty much all of human history, albeit at a fairly abstract level. It is however a pretty well done game for the most part.

[Mewtarthio]

I only really played the first game, mainly for the delightfully campy single-player campaign. You start off as a masked sorceror leading the early Hellenistic peoples to the promised land, and by the last mission you're a Russian defector with a cybernetic tentacle arm travelling back in time to kill mecha-Stalin before he was ever built! :smallbiggrin:

I played a bit of the second game, but it wasn't cheesy enough, so I kind of lost interest. Sorry I can't be more helpful.

[Jeivar]

Alrighty, thanks.

Is anyone else willing to chime in?

[Athaniar]

It's been a long time since I played either game, but I don't think they were that bad. Plus, you can create your own civilization. That's cool. If it's cheap and you don't have anything you'd rather get, buy it. Hm, maybe I should reinstall EE2...

I've only heard bad things about Empire Earth 3, though. Only three civs? Seriously?

[HerbieRAI]

The biggest thing I remember is the unit upgrades. If your playing a skirmish you get 100 pts to create your civ. You spend these points to basically upgrade units ex. tanks build time decrease, preists cost less. You can then upgrade the individual unit types as well. ex. after you build an axeman, you can upgrade there health, attack, defense and a few other things. You can only get a total of 10 upgrades, and it upgrades all you axemen. I don't think you can undo these though.

I liked the game, but I had already played age of empires extensivly, so it never got that much playtime.

[Athaniar]

If you create a civ you also get to choose unique units for early, middle, and late eras, unlike in the first game. However, the first game did have unique civ powers (at least in the expansion). Also, some of the UUs in EE2 aren't really that historically correct.