Der Lieben
06-03-2005, 22:20
Last night, I got the idea to look up infomration on the sequel to an RTS game I reallyliked, called Empire Earth. To my great pleasure, I descovered that a demo had already been put out for the game that is to be released on the 26th of April. However, my pleasure qucikly turned to dismay, when I actually began to play. I will list my main beefs with it now:
1) The hud sucks. There are way too many buttons and clutter and the font for your resources is in white soits kinda hard to read.
2) The angle of view is horrible. The buildings are taller than the first and the view is lower, so it makes it difficult to see whats happening in your own base.
3) The weather effects ae annoying. While I thought it was a great idea for seasonal weather, they way overdid it. During a blizzard its impossible to see whats going on, which may be realistic, but I think this is one of those cases of painful realism.
4) Resources are collected too quickly. It seems like all you have to do is set some citizens on 1 mine of each kind and then you can build all damn day long as much as you want. In the older game, resources were much gathered much slower, introducing a greater measure of strategy.
5) Too many kinds of resources. Empire Earth intoduced iron, which I thought was a great idea. However, I thinkthis game went overboard by introducing saltpeter and tech points. It gets to be too much to try to manage all these and still plan something resembling a coordinated military assault.
6) The units move too quickly. While it is arguable that the units moved to slow in the first game, the definitely move way too fast in this one. They are kind of difficult to comand, and its way too easy to reinforce any attacking army almost immediatly.
7) The animations are incredibly goofy. Although some are very realistic and cool looking (soldiers reloading muskets), most of the running animations look like somehting out of a 1930s loony tune.
8) This may seem to be out of sync with point 6, but i believe that units build too slowly. It takes at least a minute and a half for a seige weapon to build. Takes maybe 45 secs. per horse. The barracks units seem to be okay, though.
9) Constructing buildings has never been more stupid. You can't build land if it has the slightest slope, you can't build some buildings in the vicinity of others, and you can only build so many units per territory (the map is divided up like a risk map, you control a territory by building a city center there.), and sometimes it seems like it won't let you place buildings for any reason at all.
10) There is not enough diversity of units. It seems like every building can only build two or three different types of units.
11)They took out many useful buildings. I loved the fact that one could build a grainery in Empire Earth, which came with 8 farms. Now we're back to the Age of Empires method of building only one farm at a time. Also, the hospital, which would slowly heal all units in its range, has gotten the axe as well. Basically, they took out everything that I thought gave the Empire Earth series advantages over the Age of Empires series.
There were several other little nitpicks, that I could list as well, but these were my main issues with the game. I sicnerely hope that they decide to change some of this stuff, before the actuall game is shipped, but I doubt it.
Any thoughts or comments?
1) The hud sucks. There are way too many buttons and clutter and the font for your resources is in white soits kinda hard to read.
2) The angle of view is horrible. The buildings are taller than the first and the view is lower, so it makes it difficult to see whats happening in your own base.
3) The weather effects ae annoying. While I thought it was a great idea for seasonal weather, they way overdid it. During a blizzard its impossible to see whats going on, which may be realistic, but I think this is one of those cases of painful realism.
4) Resources are collected too quickly. It seems like all you have to do is set some citizens on 1 mine of each kind and then you can build all damn day long as much as you want. In the older game, resources were much gathered much slower, introducing a greater measure of strategy.
5) Too many kinds of resources. Empire Earth intoduced iron, which I thought was a great idea. However, I thinkthis game went overboard by introducing saltpeter and tech points. It gets to be too much to try to manage all these and still plan something resembling a coordinated military assault.
6) The units move too quickly. While it is arguable that the units moved to slow in the first game, the definitely move way too fast in this one. They are kind of difficult to comand, and its way too easy to reinforce any attacking army almost immediatly.
7) The animations are incredibly goofy. Although some are very realistic and cool looking (soldiers reloading muskets), most of the running animations look like somehting out of a 1930s loony tune.
8) This may seem to be out of sync with point 6, but i believe that units build too slowly. It takes at least a minute and a half for a seige weapon to build. Takes maybe 45 secs. per horse. The barracks units seem to be okay, though.
9) Constructing buildings has never been more stupid. You can't build land if it has the slightest slope, you can't build some buildings in the vicinity of others, and you can only build so many units per territory (the map is divided up like a risk map, you control a territory by building a city center there.), and sometimes it seems like it won't let you place buildings for any reason at all.
10) There is not enough diversity of units. It seems like every building can only build two or three different types of units.
11)They took out many useful buildings. I loved the fact that one could build a grainery in Empire Earth, which came with 8 farms. Now we're back to the Age of Empires method of building only one farm at a time. Also, the hospital, which would slowly heal all units in its range, has gotten the axe as well. Basically, they took out everything that I thought gave the Empire Earth series advantages over the Age of Empires series.
There were several other little nitpicks, that I could list as well, but these were my main issues with the game. I sicnerely hope that they decide to change some of this stuff, before the actuall game is shipped, but I doubt it.
Any thoughts or comments?