When real-time strategy games were just starting to flourish, it was common for a game's two opposing sides to be functionally identical, just with different art and sounds to tell them apart. Those days are long gone, but while historically themed games often feature unique units for their many different factions, and games like Warcraft III have had up to four unique sides, no historical game has taken as bold an approach as Stainless Steel Studios' Empires: Dawn of the Modern World. The new game from Rick Goodman, designer of Age of Empires and Empire Earth, will feature a number of civilizations that are significantly different from each other, all with unique military units, special abilities, and economic options. Now that we've seen the game in action, it seems that the developer has already made considerable progress on this ambitious game.

Empires is a 3D RTS game where each civilization is unique.

Empires: Dawn of the Modern World is Goodman's next step in refining the historical RTS genre he helped create. In addition to its ambitious civilization balance, it will feature all the elements that many find most satisfying about recent RTS games: epic-sized battles with room for nimble tactical control, a tech tree that spans a millennium of military inventions, and powerful special abilities that can turn the tide of battle. Stainless Steel's Empire Earth combined an incredible range of time periods, from the time of cavemen to a sci-fi future, but it doesn't look like Empires' concentration on roughly the last 1,000 years of history will make it seem any smaller in scale. For each civilization, there will be quite a variety of units and abilities at your disposal in each of the game's five ages, which start off in the Middle Ages and continue through the Renaissance's age of gunpowder, the imperial period, World War I, and World War II.

Stainless Steel has announced only four of the game's civilizations so far: the English, the Chinese, the Germans, and the Koreans. We saw the English in action during the medieval age, and some of the faction's advantages were clear from the outset. To set the scene, Goodman showed us an in-game cinematic of the English king giving a rousing speech before sending his troops into a battle during the Hundred Years' War. The subsequent mission showed the 14th-century English army at its most formidable, with classic troops such as swordsmen who can raise their shields to block arrows, heavy knights in full plate armor, and crossbowmen with a devastating ranged attack. But there are some more unusual secondary units, like a surgeon that can raise mortally wounded troops to fight again and the English citizen units, which can build spike traps that are invisible to enemies.

The game spans five epochs from the Middle Ages to World War II.

The medieval English army has a number of other key abilities. For instance, the English are known for their naval prowess. It's not necessarily that the English ships are all stronger, but there's always the ability to designate one as a flagship, which essentially makes it a superunit. If the enemy concentrates fire on the flagship and sinks it, the English player can move the admiral's flag to another vessel, which might help balance out uneven numerical odds. Another ability that takes advantage of the game's 3D terrain lets the English pour hot pitch down hills, which can form a defensive barrier or even take out a group of units at once. And while the trebuchet has made appearances as a devastating siege weapon in other games, the English demonstrate their early understanding of science with the version found in Empires. Not only is the English trebuchet great for taking down enemy walls and fortifications, but it can also lob a pestilence-laden cow carcass over walls, to the lasting detriment of the enemies on the other side. Later, a high-level ability called king's encouragement will also bring all the English units from across the kingdom up to full strength, and at the end of the game, the English player can look forward to unconventional units like the SAS commando.