Despite its weaknesses, Empire Earth is one of the most enjoyable RTS games ever made.
The Bad: Cartoon like graphics and sound , some pathfinding issues, nearly useless diplomacy system, no makets & cheating AI.
From the creator of Age of Empires comes another enjoyable RTS game: Empire Earth. Now Empire Earth, unlike Age of Empires, has arguably the largest scope of any RTS ever made. Nearly everything from Clubmen to 22nd Century cybers is at your command. Another difference from Age of Empires is that this game is fully in 3D (although for reasons you'll know later, you might not want to get up close to your units). Because of this, you can experience massive battles in the game (up to a thousand units actually).
And speaking of battles, the objectives of a normal game are simple: build a base, gather resources, create a "Grand Army of the Empire", and seek and destroy your enemies. However, another way of winning a typical game is by building enough wonders to gain enough points for a wonder victory; once you build the appropriate number of wonders, a countdown will start and the enemy must destroy at least one of the wonders to stop the countdown or else the player with the most wonders wins. (The period between the countdown's start and finish is usually the time in the game when the AI will launch a full fledged attack on your civ; if the AI for some reason isn't able to get anywhere near your civ, it will usually build a massive army, ready to strike at your civ.) Anyway, as said eariler, Empire Earth's scope is vast. However, it's rare for a player to play through all the epochs in just one battle (it will take a veeery long time to do this the clean way). One reason why you often can't play through all the epochs in one game is the AI's desire to destroy you A.S.A.P. so it's better to play a game with a more limited scope (such as starting at the Digital Age and ending in the Nano Age). The wonders of Empire Earth, unlike Age of Empires, give benifits to the owning faction such as increased population capacity and self healing abilities. Besides the average soldier, players can recruit heroes which come in two flavors: strategists and warriors. Warrior heroes give a bonus in morale to any nearby friendly units while Strategist heroes can give nearby enemy soldiers a drop in morale and can heal friendly units but they aren't as strong as warrior heroes. Morale in Empire Earth is simply something that help decrease damage to units. Houses that are inside a town center's area of effect helps increase morale. Other buildings also have an area of effect (such as hospitals, temples, univercities). Units in an area of effect have certain bonuses (e.g: protection from conversion).
Empire Earth comes shipped in with four campaigns: the Greek campaign which takes place from the beginings of Greek civilization to the conquests of Alexander the Great; the English campaign which is divided into 3 parts: the Norman Conquest, the Hundred Years War & the Napoleonic Wars; the German Campaign where you must lead Germany during the two World Wars. The fourth campaign, unlike the other three, is a fictional campaign and has some reminiscence of the Red Alert series. In it, you lead Russia in it's quest to conquer the world, which ultimately fails. Speaking of failures, it's now time to talk about Empire Earth's weak points. First up is graphics. If you zoom in close enough to your units, you'll see that they lack in detail and how awful they look. If you thought the units look bad, have a look at their weapons. The hand held weapons all look like they are nothing more than cardboard cut outs. Another thing about the graphics is that there are no cultural differences (e.g: a Chinese soldier in epoch 5 would also look the same with a Greek soldier in the same epoch) in the way how buildings and units look. The sound of units are horrible and this is especially true of the earlier epochs. Although the music of the game sounds good, sometimes the music being played isn't the right theme for the current event. Another pitfall of Empire Earth is the pathfinding. In order to get from point A to B, units would sometimes take the long and dangerous route and sometimes would get stuck. The diplomacy system in the game downright bad. The AI usually doesn't change its hostile stance towards you even if you give them a ton of resources (at least in my case). Also, there is almost no way in knowing what kind of resources the AI wants. In Empire Earth, there is no way to buy or sell resources since there is no market what so ever, which during the right time can be bad. One more pitfall of Empire Earth is the cheating AI. In one minute, you have a massive base and in the next minute, you find out that the AI has a far larger base and army. I can't understand how on earth could they have gotten so many troops and buildings so fast. And thats what I observe when I'm playing in "Easy" difficulty! When I 1st played Empire Earth, I noticed that there are a few things in which made me believe the game wasn't as seroius as Rome: Total War or Cossacks: European Wars. One of this was the Star Wars influence in the game. The most obvious was the appearance of the Sentinels and Guardians. They looked more like Clone Troopers or Imperial Stormtroopers than "soldiers of the 21st century and beyond". Another thing which made Empire Earth less serious of a game is the depiction of prophets. I mean, these guys can call for volcanoes, earthquakes, plagues and fires. If this was SimCity, this is what I could have expected but since it isn't, it just made Empire Earth a little less realistic. The depiction of cavemen in the game made Empire Earth less realistic. IMO, I think the cavemen in the game were dumb as the dumb guys in cartoons such as SpongeBob Squarepants, which can be insulting to some. BTW, I almost for got one more thing. The game's scenario editor allows players to create scenarios that rival even the best scenario in the best campaign. As for the campaign editor, if you want to create a campaign, just simply put together scenarios which are related to each other, write a description of the campaign and poof! You've created a campaign. (Oh, you can also add descriptions to your scenarios as well.)
The civilization edtior alows you to create any civilization of your dreams (everything from the clans of Battlerealms to the Galactic Empire in Star Wars) in any way you want.
But despite the said flaws above, Empire Earth is still an enjoyable game to any RTS veteran. Wheather it's the vast scope of the game that attracts you or the possibility of creating the civ of your dreams or perhaps the idea of people able to call forth disasters, Empire Earth would not dissapoint you.