Military troops can be trained from perquisite buildings (such as barracks and stables), provided there are enough funds.
You have “Citizen” worker units (recruited from Town Centers or Capitols) that are used to gather resources and build structures. And that even now, it remains an alluring piece of work.Īt a glance, the gameplay would be familiar to anyone who’s played Age of Empires or its successors.
Nonetheless, it’s not for nothing that it, like the franchise it launched, was seen as a serious contender. The game didn’t quite live up to its lofty ambitions and was very much a product of its time, soon to be overshadowed by other titles.
The result is Empire Earth, released by Sierra Entertainment (as Sierra On-Line) for PC on November 13, 2001. Encompassing historical, modern and even futuristic elements, the resulting concoction would be relatively novel compared to its competition. In a December 2010 interview by IGN with both him and writer-designer Stefan Arnold, the goal from the start was to combine the best of RTS gameplay (like Goodman helped innovate with in Age of Empires) with that of empire-building (reminiscent of Civilization and city-builders like the Caesar games). It’s into this environment that Rick Goodman, one of co-founders of Ensemble Studios (and later founder of Stainless Steel Studios in 1997), sought to create an epic-scale RTS unlike what had been seen before. It had already seen the rise of several classic titles, including Command and Conquer, Starcraft and the historical Age of Empires series. At the turn of the 21 st Century, the Real Time Strategy genre was reaching its peak in popularity.