Empire Earth Ii
<div class="IPBDescription">A giant pile of crap</div> I walk into EB and I say to myself “I’m not going to buy EEII; I played the demo and hated it.”
Naturally I left the store with EEII.
This game managed to **** me off before I even installed it.
I knew it had some new features and what not so I decided to read the manual before I played the game. Well first I looked for my RON manual, but I couldn’t find it, so I figured the one that came with the game would have to do.
Before I go on a rampage about the unforgivable historical inaccuracies in this game let me first state that I was against the idea of putting civilizations into this game to begin with. I just can’t get into a game when I’m playing as America during the Stone Age fighting the god damn Romans.
So I’m reading through the manual and most of it is your average RTS jargon, then I reached the Civilizations section. In a blatant rip-off from RON every “unique” civilization has been given 3 “special” units, which are basically reskined and slightly improved versions of regular units. Of course this is only a crappy RON rip-off so instead of 7-8 unique units each Civ gets only 3-4. Here’s some of the gems:
To sum up all of Britain’s history we have the Druid, the light horse (which is a guy in a red coat wearing a pith hat) and the MI6 agent. Wow.
Out of all the memorable and unique devices of war created by America they chose these three: the Frontiersman, the Minuteman and the M18Hellcat (It’s a tank, and you might not know that because it’s a pretty god damn obscure unit of war to pick when you only have 3 slots to fill.) By the way the American Minuteman yells “FOR KING AND COUNTRY!” when asked to move somewhere. Yea.
For Germany they decided to go with the “Barbarian” (which couldn’t have been a more vague and half-assed choice) the Tectonic Knight, and Jagdpanther tank…yep.
Now it comes time to quote directly from the manual, I was reading about their Middle Eastern Civs and I see this about the Turks: “The Turkish attribute is Fortification. As evidenced by the famous walls of Constantinople, the Turks were masters of Fortifications.” Chances are if you have any knowledge of the Eastern Roman Empire you have just died of a massive coronary and continuing to expound upon this point further would be useless. Suffice to say this is a complete boldface lie written down in this manual as if it were historical fact. <a href='http://www.thehistorynet.com/mh/blconstantinople/' target='_blank'>http://www.thehistorynet.com/mh/blconstantinople/</a>
I could go on about just the manual but you get the idea, this game misses no opportunity to sodomize history.
So I installed the game, somewhat reluctantly as I hadn’t yet fully recovered from the manual. The installation went smoothly and was pretty quick, no complaints there.
I start up the game and the intro movie is pretty neat, and my spirits are starting to be restored. “Maybe this won’t be so bad after all” I foolishly think to myself.
After getting the settings just the way I like them I clicked on single player and decided to forgo the tutorial and dive right into the action. I click on the American campaign which interestingly enough starts off with the Spanish American War.
After a short movie clip I’m deposited in the jungles of Cuba and told to capture Santiago.
The first thing I notice is a 12-foot tall Teddy Roosevelt leading his army of lesser men with bolt action rifles that fire like sub-machine guns against “Cuban Guerrillas” wearing the same uniforms as my men except in a garish red rather then blue. I notice I have “machine gunners” wielding what appear to be BAR’s. I click on Teddy Roosevelt only to hear him yell in a voice that would scare John Wane “<span style='color:red'>MY BLOOD BOILS</span>!”
I quickly exited out of the campaign in sheer terror.
I decided to try a skirmish game to get a feel for what a normal game is like. The game does give you allot of options for customization, which becomes a big problem when you’re trying to find an online game, but for single player it’s great.
I played my first game with the weather effects on…big mistake. This is one of those ideas that seem really good on paper, but when it’s implemented it just sucks. Or maybe Mad Doc just sucks at making RTS games, ether one.
Most of the time it’s storming and the storms do more then affect your units they affect your ability to play the game. I can’t get my economy started when I have to fish through a never-ending sandstorm to find my citizens. God help you if you get stuck with a color that blends into the terrain during a storm.
The Picture in Picture is another idea that should be really awesome but isn’t. It just tends to slow the game down and I found myself rarely using it.
The Citizen manger is one of the only new additions I enjoy; it does in fact allow you to easily manage your citizens on a separate map. Which is good because if it’s storming (and it’s always storming) you won’t be able to find them any other way.
As for the game play it’s almost a carbon copy of RON, except much crappier.
They added some bells and whistles like “shore batteries” and “fences” but it’s pretty obvious where they got most of their ideas from if you’ve ever played RON.
Pretty much the only thing this game has that the old EE had is walls.
The graphics are startlingly unimpressive. A few units like the Submarine were done really well and make you wonder what happened with the others. Some of the infantry look no better then the stuff from RTS games years ago. They attempted a sort of photorealism look with everything in the game and it only worked well with the water and certain units. The buildings look bland and pixilated, and the 80% of the units bodies are covered in player color, so it really doesn’t matter how they were skinned.
The flora looks terrible, almost blocky; I have seen better trees on my game boy advance.
The resources all look alike and were clearly rushed and designed poorly. Gold is the only distinguishable one the rest are nothing by grayish-black lumps called stone or iron or salt pepper.
The use of Civilizations plays out so poorly in this game it makes me want to vomit. They really only use one Westernized style of buildings for every Civilization.
What you end up with are Koreans with European castle walls and universities held up by Greek ionic columns. Unlike RON which they stole much of their material from they were far too lazy to create a new style of buildings for each civilization which goes nicely with their theme of complete disregard for history.
Next they threw wonders for each Civilization group into the mix, because RON had it and damn it so well they, but there gonna do it in the ********* way possible!
If someone asked you to pick the three best architectural wonders from the whole of Western Civilization, which three would you choose? Would it be the Parthenon, the Brandenburg Gate, and the Pentagon? Not my top three but hey at least they didn’t throw them in as expensive do-nothings just to make it seem like the game had more features and depth…oh. These wonders do absolutely nothing of value in this game and the only time you will ever see them used is your opponent is new, or you have lost so badly that your opponent has resources to waste.
Speaking of opponents I logged onto the Multiplayer today around 7:00PM on a Friday evening you figure there must be at least 500 people playing a brand new big-name RTS right?
21 people, with 3 available games in the entire world were playing this game online…
Oh I have the patch…
Apparently this game is so unbalanced it isn’t even funny, I noticed that when I join an 8 person game, no matter what, everyone picks Japan…hmmm.
Oh well I don’t think this game is going to sell very well with BF2 coming out shortly and AOE3 on the way so I doubt we’ll be seeing another patch.
Bah I could go on but this is far to long as it is, to sum it up, don’t by EEII it’s a horrible game.
Naturally I left the store with EEII.
This game managed to **** me off before I even installed it.
I knew it had some new features and what not so I decided to read the manual before I played the game. Well first I looked for my RON manual, but I couldn’t find it, so I figured the one that came with the game would have to do.
Before I go on a rampage about the unforgivable historical inaccuracies in this game let me first state that I was against the idea of putting civilizations into this game to begin with. I just can’t get into a game when I’m playing as America during the Stone Age fighting the god damn Romans.
So I’m reading through the manual and most of it is your average RTS jargon, then I reached the Civilizations section. In a blatant rip-off from RON every “unique” civilization has been given 3 “special” units, which are basically reskined and slightly improved versions of regular units. Of course this is only a crappy RON rip-off so instead of 7-8 unique units each Civ gets only 3-4. Here’s some of the gems:
To sum up all of Britain’s history we have the Druid, the light horse (which is a guy in a red coat wearing a pith hat) and the MI6 agent. Wow.
Out of all the memorable and unique devices of war created by America they chose these three: the Frontiersman, the Minuteman and the M18Hellcat (It’s a tank, and you might not know that because it’s a pretty god damn obscure unit of war to pick when you only have 3 slots to fill.) By the way the American Minuteman yells “FOR KING AND COUNTRY!” when asked to move somewhere. Yea.
For Germany they decided to go with the “Barbarian” (which couldn’t have been a more vague and half-assed choice) the Tectonic Knight, and Jagdpanther tank…yep.
Now it comes time to quote directly from the manual, I was reading about their Middle Eastern Civs and I see this about the Turks: “The Turkish attribute is Fortification. As evidenced by the famous walls of Constantinople, the Turks were masters of Fortifications.” Chances are if you have any knowledge of the Eastern Roman Empire you have just died of a massive coronary and continuing to expound upon this point further would be useless. Suffice to say this is a complete boldface lie written down in this manual as if it were historical fact. <a href='http://www.thehistorynet.com/mh/blconstantinople/' target='_blank'>http://www.thehistorynet.com/mh/blconstantinople/</a>
I could go on about just the manual but you get the idea, this game misses no opportunity to sodomize history.
So I installed the game, somewhat reluctantly as I hadn’t yet fully recovered from the manual. The installation went smoothly and was pretty quick, no complaints there.
I start up the game and the intro movie is pretty neat, and my spirits are starting to be restored. “Maybe this won’t be so bad after all” I foolishly think to myself.
After getting the settings just the way I like them I clicked on single player and decided to forgo the tutorial and dive right into the action. I click on the American campaign which interestingly enough starts off with the Spanish American War.
After a short movie clip I’m deposited in the jungles of Cuba and told to capture Santiago.
The first thing I notice is a 12-foot tall Teddy Roosevelt leading his army of lesser men with bolt action rifles that fire like sub-machine guns against “Cuban Guerrillas” wearing the same uniforms as my men except in a garish red rather then blue. I notice I have “machine gunners” wielding what appear to be BAR’s. I click on Teddy Roosevelt only to hear him yell in a voice that would scare John Wane “<span style='color:red'>MY BLOOD BOILS</span>!”
I quickly exited out of the campaign in sheer terror.
I decided to try a skirmish game to get a feel for what a normal game is like. The game does give you allot of options for customization, which becomes a big problem when you’re trying to find an online game, but for single player it’s great.
I played my first game with the weather effects on…big mistake. This is one of those ideas that seem really good on paper, but when it’s implemented it just sucks. Or maybe Mad Doc just sucks at making RTS games, ether one.
Most of the time it’s storming and the storms do more then affect your units they affect your ability to play the game. I can’t get my economy started when I have to fish through a never-ending sandstorm to find my citizens. God help you if you get stuck with a color that blends into the terrain during a storm.
The Picture in Picture is another idea that should be really awesome but isn’t. It just tends to slow the game down and I found myself rarely using it.
The Citizen manger is one of the only new additions I enjoy; it does in fact allow you to easily manage your citizens on a separate map. Which is good because if it’s storming (and it’s always storming) you won’t be able to find them any other way.
As for the game play it’s almost a carbon copy of RON, except much crappier.
They added some bells and whistles like “shore batteries” and “fences” but it’s pretty obvious where they got most of their ideas from if you’ve ever played RON.
Pretty much the only thing this game has that the old EE had is walls.
The graphics are startlingly unimpressive. A few units like the Submarine were done really well and make you wonder what happened with the others. Some of the infantry look no better then the stuff from RTS games years ago. They attempted a sort of photorealism look with everything in the game and it only worked well with the water and certain units. The buildings look bland and pixilated, and the 80% of the units bodies are covered in player color, so it really doesn’t matter how they were skinned.
The flora looks terrible, almost blocky; I have seen better trees on my game boy advance.
The resources all look alike and were clearly rushed and designed poorly. Gold is the only distinguishable one the rest are nothing by grayish-black lumps called stone or iron or salt pepper.
The use of Civilizations plays out so poorly in this game it makes me want to vomit. They really only use one Westernized style of buildings for every Civilization.
What you end up with are Koreans with European castle walls and universities held up by Greek ionic columns. Unlike RON which they stole much of their material from they were far too lazy to create a new style of buildings for each civilization which goes nicely with their theme of complete disregard for history.
Next they threw wonders for each Civilization group into the mix, because RON had it and damn it so well they, but there gonna do it in the ********* way possible!
If someone asked you to pick the three best architectural wonders from the whole of Western Civilization, which three would you choose? Would it be the Parthenon, the Brandenburg Gate, and the Pentagon? Not my top three but hey at least they didn’t throw them in as expensive do-nothings just to make it seem like the game had more features and depth…oh. These wonders do absolutely nothing of value in this game and the only time you will ever see them used is your opponent is new, or you have lost so badly that your opponent has resources to waste.
Speaking of opponents I logged onto the Multiplayer today around 7:00PM on a Friday evening you figure there must be at least 500 people playing a brand new big-name RTS right?
21 people, with 3 available games in the entire world were playing this game online…
Oh I have the patch…
Apparently this game is so unbalanced it isn’t even funny, I noticed that when I join an 8 person game, no matter what, everyone picks Japan…hmmm.
Oh well I don’t think this game is going to sell very well with BF2 coming out shortly and AOE3 on the way so I doubt we’ll be seeing another patch.
Bah I could go on but this is far to long as it is, to sum it up, don’t by EEII it’s a horrible game.
Comments
I figured this would at least spark a little controversy...
BTW RON = Rise of Nations.
RON is the best rts so far though <!--emo&:)--><img src='http://www.unknownworlds.com/forums/html/emoticons/smile-fix.gif' border='0' style='vertical-align:middle' alt='smile-fix.gif' /><!--endemo--> .. (well historical rts)
the new ron game should be cool!
LONGBOWMAN SWARM!
(I had to edit this post six times to get it right. I suck.)
but yeah.. i remember back when i first played ee1.. that game was fun.. and it lasted forever... then it got boring.. and ee2 wasnt THAT much better.. but i still play it...
i really hate how everythings accent is american.. even if its the goddam stonage and youre japan...
and the military leaders who are freaking huge.. i hate it when rts' dont have any proportions at all... the tanks are like toys compared to the infantry.. and the buildings are doll houses.. the boats are... some sort of small boats.... ron was really close to getting this right... i dont remember liking rons boats though.. good thing you never use them.. oh the planes sucked too...
the weather sucked.. but you can turn it off.. so i guess i dont mind much... its not so much the actual rain.. but the random spheres of nonseeability...
and the resource piles.. also retarded.. cant tell if the resource is useful or not...
i dont really like the walls much.. i like being organized and therefore i like my walls on a grid type of situation...
meh thats all i feel like saying about this game for tonight... meh..
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IMO EEII is a step backwards from EEI.
EEI was unique in that it has no specific civilizations and therefore could cover the span of human history using generic units from each period without any of the messy glaring historical inaccuracies that make EEII so hard to play.
The core of EEI was the system that allowed you to create your own civilization with what ever attributes you desired.
Increased Battleship Armor 7
Increased Fighter Attack 3
Increased Ranged Infantry Range 4
etc..
Of course EEII scraps this innovative and unique system to make a rip-off of RON.
Perhaps they thought RON's success would be enough to propel the sale of this game, but even if they had at least matched RON, which they didn’t, forsaking the core system of your namesake is unforgivable.
I also wish the units would favour attacking whatever they are good against, so I don't end up with a bunch of swordsmen attacking the enemy knights (and of course being slaughtered), while my pikemen are busy with the enemy infantry (and of course, also being slaughtered).
I also wish the units would favour attacking whatever they are good against, so I don't end up with a bunch of swordsmen attacking the enemy knights (and of course being slaughtered), while my pikemen are busy with the enemy infantry (and of course, also being slaughtered). <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
These are problems common in most RTSs, though. I don't have RoN handy (left it at someone's house), but certainly as recently as Dawn of War, you get units favouring to shoot at unarmed buildings rather than enemy freakin' soldiers. Seeing vehicle counters attack infantry and infantry counters attack vehicles is pretty common. Same with stances; either they all run out at once, or they sit on their butts and risk sitting out of the battle. Hell, even in the Total Wars, archers will vainly try to kill heavily armoured units instead of the walking targets.
Complain in one of their official forums, however, and they'll attack you, shouting the battlecry of "More Micro Is More Skill! Less Micro Is Less Skill And Boring!" Bleh.
Total War seems to strike the right balance, IMO; you get freaking huge battles, but you still get some control. Making full use of my cavalry/shock troops/abilities is enough to satisfy my micro needs, while the massive wall of infantry is pretty easy to manage and entertaining to watch... especially when those waypointed cavalry units come crashing into their rear. Oooooh, yeah.
<!--QuoteBegin-Status Quo+--></div><table border='0' align='center' width='95%' cellpadding='3' cellspacing='1'><tr><td><b>QUOTE</b> (Status Quo)</td></tr><tr><td id='QUOTE'><!--QuoteEBegin--> Yes, but AoE in particular depend on the ability to use certain units to counter others. It's quite hard with so many units on the field and them generally not doing anything you want. I sometimes even pause the game and manually assign the units their targets, but that doesn't work in multiplayer and it slows down battles to a crawl. I refuse to believe that skill in a strategy game should rely on being a fast clicker rather than a good strategist.<!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
Same with Dawn of War; a lot of weapons/units types are hard counters. At least DoW has squads, though, making it easier to manage. A step in the right direction IMO; herding a hundred and one individuals is not my idea of fun.
My only real problem was that I couldn't create my own units. I'd love being able to create mixed formations of pike- and swordsmen. It was also quite annoying how the units never seemed to go where I wanted them to, but ended up somewhere around the area where I clicked. Kinda hard to create a line to defend your achers or so if your units won't go where you want them to.
As was said above it creates the perfect balance between massive battles and control.
More then that it is also a visually stunning and masterly crafted game with some of the best historical accuracy of any retail game to boot.
If you don't have it and want an RTS game I highly recommend it.
Although StarCraft was pretty cool, but thats probably do to the fact that all i played on it was battle.net customs...
ANYWAYS ALSO, MYTH II IS THE GREATEST STRATEGY GAME EVER. END OF STORY.
Rofl.
<b>Edit:</b> Oh, and I'm with Dubb on this one. Myth II: Soulblighter owns any other strategy game ever.
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I'm not saying RON was an especially great RTS, I enjoyed it for a time, but it seriously lacked replay value. It also had many of the annoying historical inaccuracies that annoy me so much, but they did a much better job of things then EEII. When I say that they stole things from RON I’m not defending RON or anything, I’m actually mad because I think the EEI format is much better then RON’s
You really do have to play EEII after playing RON to comprehend just how much they took. I mean even the loading screens are the same, the menu that you use to set up matches is the same, the way units build is the same, and the list goes on and on.
And when I say “same” I don’t mean “similar” I’m talking carbon copy, exact clone, mirror image etc…
My only real problem was that I couldn't create my own units. I'd love being able to create mixed formations of pike- and swordsmen. It was also quite annoying how the units never seemed to go where I wanted them to, but ended up somewhere around the area where I clicked. Kinda hard to create a line to defend your achers or so if your units won't go where you want them to. <!--QuoteEnd--></td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'><!--QuoteEEnd-->
The initial release of Rome wasn't as good as Medieval + Viking Invasion was. The Big Patch sorted out a couple of things, though; custom formations were one of these. In 1.0, arranging your army manually and then holding down alt and clicking to move would cause your army to make a huge scrum in one spot, so you had to use the standard formations (restrictive) or every unit (ugh) to get a decent formation. After the patch, holding down alt and clicking to move makes your army head to where you clicked, and setup exactly as you set out. They also try to keep formation while marching - cavalry move faster than infantry, which botches it up a bit, but nothing too bad. (Either you have an awful lot of cavalry, or very little.)
Just clicking to move does make them only go somewhere near the target, but you can just hold down the button and drag to set out where you want them to go preciscely, as well as set out their number of ranks and direction to face (both important, although ranks aren't as important as in previous games, sadly).
There are big problems in Rome, though. One is the restrictions on some units; for example, triarii only appear a good way into the game, which doesn't make much sense to me (they're Rome's spearman unit). There are imbalances; Rome starts off with great units, which then become utterly monstrous after the Marius Reforms. Egyptians are made from adamantium, and are as numerous as the grains of sand in a desert. Other factions get jack squat - unlock and try playing as the Nubians for a <b>man's</b> game. My biggest quibble is the AI Siege Bug, however; whenever you load a game, the AI breaks off any sieges it was conducting. Since besieging cities is the main way to expand, the AI is crippled if you save and quit too much. This is really annoying, since I'd like to think that my conquests come from good management, clever diplomacy and effective generalship rather than other empires being controlled by confused retards.
Incidently, check out <a href='http://www.rometotalrealism.com/' target='_blank'>Rome: Total Realism</a> for a good mod. You'll need the latest Rome: Total War patch, but it helps sort out some of the balances, IMO. (Big thanks to TheMuffinMan for pointing me to it in the first place. <3) They have a new version out soon, which should be awesome; more realistic units and recruitment is good.
My only real complaint with it is how many more regions they added to the campaign map. The game becomes rather difficult to manage after awhile, especially if your like me and hate to let the computer run your cities.
I wouldn't waste years of my life managing every city, or turn on managing AI on and risk losing - helllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooooo zillions of peasants eating up wages, reducing population and being crushed by marauding bands of boy scouts!
Homeworld 2 > all.
Homeworld 2 > all. <!--QuoteEnd--> </td></tr></table><div class='postcolor'> <!--QuoteEEnd-->
pfff
Battle Realms|TA|Heart of Iron II >all others