Video Game / Earth 2150

The most known part of a Polish Real-Time Strategy game series developed by Reality Pump and published by TopWare Interactive and later by Zuxxez Entertainment who bought up TopWare's assets after the latter's bankruptcy in 2001. The series consists of four main titles and four expansion/mission packs.

• Earth 2140 (1997) - The first part of the series and the only 2D title, taking place sometime during an 8 year war between 2140 and 2148 between the United Civilized States and the Eurasian Dynasty, fighting over the last resources of the planet. It eventually received two additional mission packs, titled Mission Pack 1 and Mission Pack 2 - Final Conflict.
• Earth 2150: Escape From the Blue Planet (2000) - The second main title of the series and one of the first commercial full-3D games of its kind, although it was released later than Homeworld and Warzone 2100. The game has several features that distinguish it from contemporary Real-Time Strategy games, including active pause, a day-night cycle, weather conditions, customizable units, a global countdown in campaign mode and 3 factions (with the Lunar Corporation as a new side) with far more extensive differences than in the previous title, centered on a struggle to escape the imminent destruction of the planet.
  • Earth 2150: The Moon Project (2001) - A standalone Expansion Pack taking place contemporary to the main game, with a plot centered on the Lunar Corporation's attempt to develop a superweapon that could tip the balance of power on Earth via Orbital Bombardment all the way from the safety of the Moon. It expanded the armory of all three factions with a few new units and weapons including stationary heavy artillery, additional naval options, dedicated scout aircraft and balance changes to the existing units, running on a slightly upgraded version of the main game's engine.
  • Earth 2150: Lost Souls (2002) - The second and final standalone expansion pack, taking place during the final days of the main game. Unlike the main game and The Moon Project, Lost Souls abandons the branching campaign mission tree in favor of a linear plot chronicling the final desperate attempts to escape Earth. It does not add any new units or structures, but it runs on the same engine as The Moon Project to the point where the final patches for both games added multiplayer cross-compatibility between each other.
• World War 3: Black Gold (2001) - A prequel taking place 20 Minutes into the Future, running on an upgraded version of the 2150 engine. It depicts the beginning of an armed conflict between the US, Russia and Iraq over control of the world's oil supply which starts the world on the downhill slide into the state it ends in by the time of the chronologically later games. While keeping many of the same game mechanics from 2150, its campaign layout is more closer to 2140 than the later games.
• Earth 2160 (2005) - The final main title of the series (and somewhat of an Artifact Title since it doesn't actually take place on Earth), concluding the story with a war spanning across most of the Solar System. While dropping a multitude of gameplay mechanisms from the previous titles, it expanded the unit customization with Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors involving multiple damage and armor types, a more complex resource gathering system, restored the infantry units of the first game, added hero units with customizable weapons and armor and added an entire fourth faction, the alien Morphidians.

Unfortunately, the games' relative obscurity and TopWare's ongoing financial troubles, including bankruptcy in 2016, means there's practically zero chance for the series to be revived.

Earth 2150 is unrelated to Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 A.D.

As a whole, the series contains examples of the following tropes:

• After the End: The series begins nearly a century after World War 3 all but destroyed human civilization in 2048. Europe and South East Asia are mentioned in the 2150 manual as having taken the worst of the damage while the US got away with comparatively moderate devastation due to their SDI missile defense systems.
  • 2160 takes it even further by taking place after the destruction of Earth itself.
• All There in the Manual: The manual of Escape From the Blue Planet is quite extensive in describing the backstory and units of each faction. Black Gold, however, was panned by critics for giving little actual information about the in-game units beyond flavor text.
• Apocalypse How: In 2148, the Eurasians detonated several untested and extremely powerful nukes at the North Pole. This knocked Earth out of orbit. At the start of Earth 2150, when the first effects of this are noticed, it's estimated that Earth will spiral towards the sun in 180 days. Also of note is that the temperature is globally at winter levels at the start of the campaign.
• Artifact Title: Earth 2160 is actually set on Mars due to Earth having collided with the Sun at the end of the previous game.
• Artificial Gravity: The propulsion of all LC units and UCS aerial units in 2140 and 2150, both copied from alien technology.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: Hoo, boy. The ED is by far the blackest of the three factions, forcibly cyborgizing their own citizens to reduce their ration requirements, gleefully using LC prisoners of war as sex slaves in ways the girls don't survive for long and having absolutely zero problem with slinging nukes around. Compared to them, the UCS are much grayer with their only apparent sin being their decadence - but as the Lost Souls manual reveals, even they are not above converting handicapped soldiers into Wetware CPUs. Compared to those two, the LC are practically blindingly bright, but even they force their youth into whatever career path benefits the LC itself rather than letting them choose. By 2160 the LC is just as gray as the others by doing research into biological weapons and mind control, putting away those who protest on moral grounds into insane asylums, while some ED officers come across as outright heroic with their blatant disregard of state propaganda.
• Cool Bike: The UCS HellBike from 2140, armed with napalm grenade launchers, and the ED GAZ-49P Dubna from 2160 that can be armed with one of four weapons.
• Command & Conquer Economy: Played straight in 2140, averted in 2150 with the Headquarters building that can automate some tasks (research, unit design, building turret upgrades), then averted again in 2160 with hireable mercenaries who can take care of research, economy, production or even perform scouting for you if you allow them.
• Crapsack World: 2140 gives us a great example of this with the already devastated and post-apocalyptic Earth being ravaged even further by a decade-long war between the decadent UCS and the brutal ED, the latter of whom forcibly convert their own citizens into cyborgs and routinely execute the lazy. 2150 takes this up to eleven with the destruction of Earth itself. By the time period of 2160, even the formerly Wide-Eyed Idealist LC is doing highly unethical research they vehemently defend as necessary for their continued survival.
• Deflector Shields: Appear from Escape from the Blue Planet onward, mounted on units and buildings as a second "life bar" that only protects against energy weapons.
• Earth That Was: Earth 2160 takes place after Earth has fallen into the sun.
• Easy Logistics: Averted from 2150 onward by non-energy weapons having finite ammo, requiring periodic resupply. Played straight with everything else.
• The Empire:
  • Eurasian Dynasty, to the point where the Khan in The Moon Project looks like Emperor Palpatine from Star Wars.
  • Well, when your sociopolitical "hat" is basically combining the worst aspects of Soviet Russia and the Mongolian Khanate... it's enough if we quote the ED recruitment propaganda video:
    Your life depends on us: JOIN US OR DIE
  • The increasing political power of Artificial Intelligence turns the UCS into this.
• Enemy Exchange Program:
  • In 2140, critically damaged but not yet dead vehicles become disabled and can be captured with a repair unit. ED ion cannons can disable enemies on purpose without risking an accidental kill. Both sides can also capture enemy buildings by storming them with infantry, as well as fortify their buildings with infantry to hinder enemy capture attempts.
  • In 2150, ED ion cannons and LC electro-cannons inflict electrical damage that can non-lethally disable the target, allowing a repairer unit to capture it (and they do that automatically unless told otherwise). As long as electrical damage is not yet maxed out, the target will recover on its own after a while but if it gets fully disabled, only a repairer can get it operational again. Ion cannons are specifically designed for this, as they knock out unshielded targets in one shot and inflict no physical damage while electro-cannons require multiple hits and can fairly quickly kill the target by accident. There's no limit as to what can be captured, but LC buildings cannot be powered and production structures cannot build anything if captured by another faction. The ED is the only faction that can both disable and capture; the LC can disable but lacks repairers to capture, the UCS can capture but has no weapons that can disable.
  • The Moon Project introduces the Building Grabber special weapon whose only purpose is capturing buildings, without even having to paralyze them first. All factions have it.
  • 2160 mostly did away with this. LC Hackers can reprogram UCS robots at range given enough time, which can go into Awesome, but Impractical territory if you cannot defend them. LC psionic weapons can also brainwash enemy units, but they have an equal chance of turning them into a crazed, randomly-firing neutral unit as well. Also, the aliens have a unit named Gryllopian Brainer - huge, six-legged, walking brain - which can capture an infinite number of enemy units with frightening speed but it is absolutely useless against UCS units, aircraft and buildings. The UCS can also capture non-UCS vehicles by using radiation weapons to kill the pilot and replace him with their own.
  • Black Gold has the Russians being able to disable and capture enemy units by hitting them with nerve gas to kill the crew.
• The Federation: The United Civilized States was one, formed out of 12 former US states, before the de facto takeover by advisor AIs that turned out to be better at decision-making than the officials they were supposed to advise.
• Fog of War: Present in all games, but not visually depicted after 2140 (where the fog can be turned off altogether). In 2150, vehicles at night can turn on their headlights to gain longer sight range at the cost of making themselves more visible.
• Friendly Fireproof: Averted in 2140 but both averted and played straight in later games. Units have no problem shooting through each other with no damage, but structures can be easily hit and even destroyed by friendly projectiles if they happen to be in the way.
• Hero Unit:
  • Fang is such unit in the Escape From the Blue Planet LC campaign. If you lose him, game over.
  • Some hero units appear in Black Gold as well.
  • 2160 has plenty of such units, both story-only and neutral. Most of them come with their own vehicles, firearms and abilities.
• Imported Alien Phlebotinum: Some of the most advanced technology of UCS and LC was reverse-engineered from a UFO at Area 51 and an abandoned alien base on the Moon, respectively. The 2150 version of the ED ion cannon is also of alien origin, courtesy of an alien base in Australia.
• Invisibility Cloak: UCS Shadow technology, hiding all friendlies within range. Up until 2160, invisible units can shoot just fine without revealing themselves but from 2150 onward, units must turn their lights off in order to remain hidden at night.
  • In 2140, the UCS mounts Shadow field generators on dedicated unarmed vehicles. Defense towers and ED Screamer tanks carrying jammers reveal Shadowed units in a radius.
  • By 2150, the UCS not only has a building-mounted version, but also managed to downscale Shadow field generators to the point where they can be mounted on either Spider mechs as a dedicated Shadow unit or Panther and Jaguar heavy mechs without compromising their combat capability. The ED similarly managed to upgrade their Screamer jammers into both building-mounted and unit-portable versions, while the LC can mount detector units on their Phobos utility craft for detecting Shadowed units and the UCS themselves know how to counteract Shadow with unit-mounted radar antennas. Shadow generally works against the AI, but harassing it with invisible units too much will randomly result in the AI force-firing at one of the invisible units in question the same way a human player would.
  • By The Moon Project, the ED successfully reverse-engineered captured UCS Shadow field generators to develop the Ruslan stealth tank that can only cloak itself but can be a nasty surprise if the enemy doesn't expect it, especially if armed with energy weapons that don't require a still very much visible supply transport helicopter to reload them.
  • In 2160, the UCS once again only has dedicated Shadow units in the form of Salamander support mechs carrying OC-21 Shadow field generators. It can hide small army like in 2140 but unlike in the old games, invisibility is broken as soon as the unit starts shooting.
• Just Before the End: In 2150, Earth has been knocked out of its orbit by a massive nuclear barrage at the North Pole. The objective of the game is to get off the planet before it collides with the Sun.
  • Also present to a lesser extent in Black Gold, which takes place about 40 years before the nuclear war that devastates the world to the point seen in the chronologically later games.
• Kinetic Weapons Are Just Better:
  • Averted in terms of damage output in 2140 and 2150. Generally, kinetic weapons like cannons and missiles have superior range but inferior per-shot damage output compared to energy weapons due being mitigated by armor (energy weapons bypass armor), with some obvious exceptions like artillery. However, kinetic weapons also ignore shields, giving them a niche to excel in in the late game.
  • In 2160, the above disparity is mitigated by the fact that although all armor types reduces kinetic damage to some extent, the overall damage of most kinetic weapons has been increased to match energy weapons, nearly all weapons have a positive damage multiplier against specific target types and some kinetic weapons inflict shockwave-type damage which outright bypasses armor altogether.
• Kill Sat:
  • The UCS superweapon in 2140 and 2150 works by firing powerful plasma cannons from the ground and then directing the projectile with satellites.
  • In The Moon Project, the LC is trying to build a ring around a Moon designed to fire shots at Earth-based targets.
• A Lighter Shade of Grey:
  • The Lunar Corporation starts out this way... but actually getting involved in the conflict rather than watching it unfold from the isolation of the Moon kills that, fast. 2160 drives the point home when LC scientists are confirmed to work on chemical weapons.
  • Inverted for the Eurasian Dynasty in 2150, who are significantly darker and more evil than the other factions, and are only kept from being completely Black by the fact that they're fighting for survival just like the others.
• Macross Missile Massacre: Rocket launchers. In 2140, many units have them, chief of all being the UCS Big Mech that can fire 16 light missiles in one salvo. In Earth 2150, vehicles on the heavy end can mount several of these and upgraded version gain either a faster rate of fire (ED and LC) or bigger salvos fired at once (UCS).
• Mecha: The majority of the UCS' ground forces, delivered in Walking Tank, Chicken Walker and Spider Tank flavors and ranging in size from Mini-Mecha to Humongous Mecha the size of smaller base structures. Even their infantry are Terminator expies.
• Mighty Glacier: Heavy units for all sides from all parts of series qualify as this.
• More Dakka:
  • In 2150, the ultimate unit for each side has less armor and HP than mid-game units (buffed up to the same values in The Moon Project), but has two heavy turret hardpoints for twice the firepower. Arguably, the UCS has the most powerful defense building in the form of the Fortress, which can mount four turrets. The only other structure in the game capable of mounting the same level of firepower is the LC Main Base, which isn't even a defensive structure. Also, some heavy guns and the heavy version of the UCS light rocket launcher has a sub-hardpoint for mounting an additional light weapon. To put that in practice, one of the AI's favorite UCS unit designs in Lost Souls is a Jaguar mech carrying a heavy rocket launcher which is basically two gatling rocket launchers strapped together, plus a light rocket launcher firing salvos of 4 missiles at a time, plus another light rocket launcher in the other one's sub-hardpoint that fires in salvos of 3, resulting in a combined firepower of 9 missiles per salvo that can very nearly kill any air unit in the game in one salvo. Another frequent AI design is a Jaguar carrying a double-barreled heavy plasma cannon and two double-barreled light plasma cannons, resulting in a storm of green bolts that can tear the strongest shields apart in seconds.
  • The Moon Project introduces the Fat Girl, a new LC unit that can quadruple-wield light weapons once fully upgraded. What it lacks in caliber, it makes up for in quantity.
  • Many weapon upgrades follow the same philosophy: tack on another barrel and double ammo capacity.
  • This is the 2160 design theory behind the LC's ultimate ground vehicle, the Charon. The LC doesn't have the chemical weapons of the ED and aliens, nor do they have the bouncing energy beams of the UCS. So to counter this discrepancy in firepower, where everyone else mounts two heavy weapons on their ultimate vehicle, the LC has three heavy weapons and a small gun. The LC also do this with their defense modules for their towers, where they can stack multiple three-gun platforms on each other.
  • The UCS use this for their infantry. They have mini-guns mounted on their hands and while each individual shot doesn't match the energy rifles used by LC and ED infantry, the sheer amount of depleted uranium dished out make up for this.
• Multiple Life Bars:
  • The 2150 games have no less than four bars: health (obvious), shield^note soaks up damage from energy weapons until depleted, heat^note inflicted by laser weapons, maxing it out instantly kills the unit regardless of health; units will cool off on their own but buildings won't and electronics^note inflicted by ion weapons and LC electro-cannons; depleting about half of it will stun the target, fully depleting it will completely incapacitate the target and make it capturable by repairers. Each one can be set to display in the in-game options menu.
  • 2160 replaces the heat bar with a "mind" bar, only affected by LC and Alien psionic weaponry. Depleting this one will permanently mind-control the unit to the attacker's faction (unless the former owner mind-controls it back). Only appears on organic units or vehicles with a pilot - leading to the logical conclusion that the UCS is completely immune to these weapons.
• Nuke 'em:
  • The premise deals with a nuclear war in 2048, as well as a nuclear barrage that shifted Earth's orbit.
  • This is traditionally the ED's superweapon in 2140 and 2150. In both games, the UCS have an SDI Defense Center structure whose only purpose is blowing up incoming nukes before they impact. The Moon Project upgrades them to intercept UCS Plasma Control Center bolts as well.
• Post-Soviet Reunion: This trope seems to have happened twice, as the lore makes mention of a "Greater Russia" being involved in the "War of 2048"^note The intro to Earth 2160 claims instead that Russia went communist in 2008, and shortly afterwards World War III erupted. that wrecked the world and shattered all of the existing powers; in its wake, an alliance between a Russian force with an ambitious commander and a Mongolian nomadic tribe led to the creation of the Eurasian Dynasty, which eventually came to encompass all of Europe, Asia and Africa thanks to access to old Soviet military assets.
• Powered Armor: Androids and cyborgs are present in 2140 and 2160. Excluded from 2150 to get past Germany's "no video game gore" laws... and with the amount of firepower thrown around late-game, they'd just be in the way. Not to mention that ambient temperatures on the volcanic and lava pits tilesets are a bit too high to have a stroll outside.
• Prequel in the Lost Age: Black Gold, depicting how the US and Russia started the conflict between each other that down the line led to the nuclear holocaust setting up the setting for 2140.
• Reinventing the Wheel:
  • Played straight in 2140, where all technologies in the Research Center must be re-researched in each mission. Thankfully, the process requires no player action, just time until everything becomes available.
  • Averted in the 2150 campaign, which preserves research between missions. Additionally, each side has off-map main base (although in The Moon Project and Lost Souls UCS campaigns there a few standalone missions before the main base is unlocked). Units and money in this base are always preserved, those left in the mission area are permanently lost. To this end, the player is provided a special air unit whose purpose is facilitating transfers between bases. If the player had a mining operation going on when ending the mission, all remaining resources on the map are automatically transferred to the Spaceport offscreen provided there are no more enemy forces remaining on the map, letting the player proceed to the next mission without having to waste days from the campaign time limit waiting for the mining to finish.
  • The Moon Project and Lost Souls furthermore transfers any remaining money in the mission area back to the main base so that the player won't have to haul it over manually via the Landing Zone; mining the map bare and selling all structures except the Landing Zone will net you the highest possible gain. In fact, many walkthroughs and strategy guides recommend you to only build power plants, defenses and resource infrastructure in the mission area, producing and ferrying reinforcements solely from the main base instead of building them on-site. Aside from scripted events in the Moon Project ED campaign, your main base can never be attacked despite there being announcer sound files for all three factions for it.
  • In 2160, completed research is preserved from mission to mission. There is no main base like in the previous games, but any units with experience are automatically sent over to the next mission when the previous one ends, regardless of what kind of unit it is. Even ED pad-based aircraft is transferred over.
• Ranged Energy Weapons: Lots of 'em. Used because their ammunition does not need resupply micromanagement. They lose their superiority to conventional weapons once Deflector Shields (and in 2160, reflective armor) come into play.
  • Energy Ball: The UCS plasma cannon, capable of killing any unshielded target very quickly - and by the time heavy plasma cannons are available on the field, even shields won't help much. Receives an Anti-Air variant in The Moon Project, which is murderously powerful and fast-firing in comparison to other AA weapons.
  • Energy Weapon: The ED laser cannon. Deals direct damage in 2140 and 2160, heats up the target without immediate physical damage until explosion in 2150.
  • Lightning Gun: The LC electro-cannon. Unshielded targets that survive destruction may fall victim to a secondary Static Stun Gun effect.
  • Static Stun Gun: The ED ion cannon and the LC electro-cannon. The former is built for EMP from the ground-up. LC units suffer most when affected by these, because the LC does not have repairer technology to recover units from incapacitation.
  • Sonic Scream: The LC sonic cannon, an Area of Effect weapon. Useful against masses and doubly useful for being Friendly Fireproof. Triple if gravity bombs are removed from play... because the airborne Sonic Cannon mounted on LC bombers is not technically a bomb, despite being used in the same role and doing comparable damage.
• Robot War: UCS armed forces are made up entirely of machines and are controlled by an AI. ED uses cyborgs in 2140 and 2160.
• Shout-Out:
  • The name of the hacker that is fighting UCS is Neo. He is later captured and turned into an AI.
  • UCS infantry units from 2140 look like Terminators.
• Space-Filling Empire: UCS controls the Western hemisphere (North America, Western Europe and North Africa), ED controls the Eastern (Eastern Europe and large part of Asia) and LC is the sole proprietor of the Moon until The Moon Project, when the UCS launch an expeditionary force to the Moon.
• Tank Goodness:
  • The ED tanks. Even the smallest tank in 2150 is a simplified copy of the M1 Abrams, and things only go up from there.
  • There's also Fang's hyper-advanced tank. Justified since it's of alien origin and is one-of-a-kind until the The Moon Project, where the LC starts to field the somewhat inferior "New Hope" mass production model which isn't as durable but self-regenerates at a rapid pace while not fighting or moving around. Not to mention that despite the LC scientists' best efforts, they couldn't field the tank with anything other than the original plasma projectors, else the recoil would've damaged the already paper-thin armor.
  • Hover Tank: LC ground units, Fang's hovercraft and the Area 51 alien-derived Prototype drive on - you've guessed it - antigravity propulsion. Interestingly, early LC units are supposedly flight-capable when operating on the Moon but their lunar-spec engines turned out to be underpowered for Earth's considerably stronger gravity, hence why they only hover at low altitude. They don't actually fly on lunar maps, of course.
  • Walking Tank: Minus The Moon Project's Cargo Salamander and four units from 2140, every UCS tank analogue walks.
  • Spider Tank: The UCS Spider (2150/2160) and Scorpion (2160).
  • Chicken Walker: The UCS Spider (2140), Tiger, Panther, Jaguar, Lion, Kazuar and Salamander.
• Tech Tree: Research is a huge part of the game series and quite a number of technologies are dependent on the earlier root of a basic technology. For example anti-missile can be researched shortly after the first rocket launcher is developed but researching a helicopter rocket launcher can only happen if you finished research for the 2nd stage of a rocket launcher.
• Theme Naming:
  • Animal: UCS units. Most names are based on herbivores, wild cats (bipedal mechs), marine life (ships) or mythical creatures (combat aircraft).
  • Location: ED land units are mostly named after Eurasian landmarks and regions.
  • Famous People: The ED Kruszchev heavy tank from 2150. Kirov and Rasputin from 2160.
  • Religious and Mythological: The ED Thor and Leviathan from 2150. The UCS Gargoyle and Dragon also from 2150. LC units in 2160.
  • Stellar: Most LC units in 2150 are usually named after astronomical terms or celestial bodies, except the Thunderer (bomber), Crusher (superheavy tank) and Crion (mobile artillery). Units added in The Moon Project all avert this trope.
  • In 2140, most ED units have alphanumeric names. UCS names are mix between animal and alphanumeric for the most of time.
• Turned Against Their Masters:
  • One of the in-universe theories regarding what happened to the UCS Phoenix exodus ship. Subverted in that it turns out that the pilot AI actually decided to leave the ship orbiting in the Oort Cloud until the ED and LC had destroyed each other, keeping the human survivors in suspension and setting up massive factories to take over the Sol system for them. Pretty nice for him/her/it.
  • Seemingly played straight in Lost Souls with GOLAN, but ultimately subverted with the revelation that GOLAN was actually acting on orders from the leaders of all three factions to keep anyone left behind on the doomed Earth from following them and threatening the status quo.
• We Will Use Lasers in the Future: Present in every game sans Black Gold, to varying effect. In 2140, lasers have generally superior firepower compared to cannons and rockets, but their short range means laser tanks often die in droves before they can bring their firepower to bear. Plasma cannons, on the other hand, have both good damage and decent range, making them very deadly. Energy weapons in 2150 will bypass armor, often have special effects like ionizing enemies into paralysis, typically deal a lot more damage than conventional kinetic weapons and have unlimited ammo (barring recharge time). Even when the enemy gets high-end shields, your larger energy weapons can chunk their way through shields without much thought. The only reason to get kinetic weapons is for their greater range and for dealing with unarmored vehicles that have strong shields. This gets a much needed rebalancing in 2160, where reflective armor against energy weapons is available and and all energy weapons get significantly nerfed. Resupplying kinetic weapons also became much easier and safer. Additionally, weapons now have damage multipliers/penalties against specific target types, which goes beyond armor and shields.
• World War III: Happens in 2048 and results in the formations of UCS and ED. One of the reasons that LC created Moon colony was to allow some humans to escape from the fires of war.
• You Require More Vespene Gas: Credits and power are the resources in 2140 and 2150. 2160 has water, crystals, metal, and power, but lets each faction ignore one of them.

Earth 2140 and it expansions contains following examples:

• After the End: Begins almost 100 years after World War III.
• Artificial Brilliance: The original DOS version of the game was praised for the absolutely deadly AI, which sadly no longer works in the XP edition of the game and is only partially functional in the HD version.
  • On the battleground itself, units taking damage from fire they're standing in automatically move out of the blaze, ground units being strafed by aircraft will shoot back as the aircraft descend during every pass, even if their weapon can't normally attack air units and ground units blocking each other's path automatically try to get out of each other's way.
• Artificial Stupidity: Unfortunately, units in the game are also liable to act completely brain-dead at times.
  • Units ordered to directly attack one specific target completely forget about everything else. They no longer shoot at any visible enemy they see while moving towards the target, even if they're normally capable of firing on the move; they will stop the instant they get into range of the target and will neither evade standing in fire, nor move away to let the allies piled up behind them get into range themselves. Coupled with the mapmakers' love for cliff-surrounded pathways where only one or two unit can fit through at a time, it usually results in half of the player's army being picked off one by one while the other half is still trying to get into range.
  • Luring enemy defenders out into a prepared killzone doesn't work that well either because if an enemy unit gets killed just before its last projectile hits its target, said target acts as if its being fired at from outside its own range and breaks formation to attack-move to the now-dead enemy's location and back, resulting in it charging headfirst into the enemy's defenses by itself while the rest of the army stands and watches.
    • Units in general seem to randomly alternate between being completely passive and aggressively moving out of position to engage the first enemy they see. Heavily damaged units also have a habit of going berserk and shooting at even weaponless enemy structures without being ordered, potentially resulting in mission failure if the player leaves them next to a capture objective and looks elsewhere for a minute.
  • If multiple units are ordered to move somewhere, after arrival the entire unit spends a minute or so shifting around due to each individual unit in the group trying to be the one standing at the exact spot they were told to go to, pushing each other out of the way in the process. Infantry are especially bad at this, refusing to even auto-attack nearby enemies after arrival unless manually ordered to attack.
  • If multiple units are trying to move through a narrow pass where only one unit can fit through at a time, the instant the first unit enters the path, half of the squad instantly assumes the way is blocked and turn around to find an alternate way, even if there isn't one. Or worse, said alternative way is heavily defended.
• Awesome, but Impractical: Despite how much they're hyped in one mission briefing, ED heavy tanks with dual lasers and rocket launchers fall behind the other two heavy tank models in both range and firepower, causing them to die in droves while the other two bunch win the day.
• Boring Yet Practical: Heavy rockets. They outrange literally every other weapon in the game and can kill any unit in just a few hits.
  • ED Thunder helicopters. Due to how air units work in the game, a sufficiently large swarm of them can easily blow up specific structures before they get shot down.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: If a mission allows you to build a base, never leave it undefended while attacking the enemy base. 90% of the time, enemy units will walk into the map from the opposite direction and raid your base as soon as you approach theirs. About half of the time, said units will be infantry riding in a heavy air transport who will swiftly capture your nearest building and self-destruct it. About the only think that keeps it from being a case of Secret A.I. Moves is that many missions allow you to call in a reinforcement group yourself, something even the manual only mentions in the form of listing the shortcut key for it.
• Cyborg: All of the ED's infantry units are soldiers rebuilt into these in order to require less rations.
• Demonic Spiders: UCS Hellwind bombers. They are nigh-impossible to hit while moving, deal heavy damage plus splash damage if they reach their target and the mapmakers absolutely love to send a trio of them after your base while your army is away overrunning the enemy base.
  • Any enemy unit with heavy rockets, as well as UCS Spider mechs with plasma cannons. If you do not kill them first, they will make you dearly regret it.
• Enemy Exchange Program: Uniquely for the series, infantry can go inside non-defensive structures to capture them. They can also be garrisoned into friendly structures, which increases the amount of infantry required for a capture (each defender performs a Mutual Kill with one invader). Capturing the other side's production structures even allows you to produce their more basic units.
  • The ED even has ion cannons on infantry, heavy defense towers and heavy tanks which hit like a ton of bricks and have a HP to 1 effect on units, disabling them so that you can capture them with a repairer unit. In particular, using a Screamer vehicle to locate a UCS Shadow generator, capturing the latter and having it escort the Screamer allows the ED player to completely shut down enemy Shadow by having the means to see through it without being seen (and shot at) in return.
• Fake Difficulty: Whoever made the campaign maps for the ED really likes forcing the player to attack through narrow passes only wide enough for one unit at a time. It doesn't matter if you've got dozens of endgame units, they will always be picked off piecemeal. Getting to throw around nuclear missiles in the final few missions with reckless abandon will be a major Catharsis Factor.
• Fragile Speedster: UCS Gargoil fighters and both types of ED attack helicopters will die from a single well-placed him. Hitting them, on the other hand, is hard.
• Friendly Fireproof: Averted with every single projectile weapon in the game. Ten ED rocket-armed helicopters trying to shoot down a lone UCS bomber will result in the helicopters killing half of their own number with missed shots. Heavy rocket tanks/mechs trying to shoot down fast air units inside a base will happily blow up half of the base they're supposed to be defending. ED Shark attack boats not only three-shot kill each other in the back with their torpedoes, they can actually ram their own torpedo and blow themselves up if they start moving forwards immediately after launching!
• Game-Breaking Bug: The XP version of the game suffers from a variable overflow that completely breaks the AI. Units still auto-attack any enemies they see, but the AI never attacks the player outside scripted actions or even builds any units. When the HD version was released on Steam, the developers claimed to have fixed the bug but players quickly found that they didn't: AI opponents sometimes get "unstuck" once discovered by the player and regain functionality but otherwise remain passive.
  • According to a January 2018 post on the Steam forums, the developers are allegedly investigating.
  • In the HD version, the game has a habit of suddenly crashing to the desktop in the final ED Scandinavia mission if the player starts shooting at land structures with battleships.
• Glass Cannon: Large defense towers are surprisingly fragile compared to other RTS games, but the weapons mounted on them hit hard.
  • UCS Hellwind bombers. They are only marginally tougher than other air units, but their plasma bombs inflict massive damage.
  • Rocket infantry are just as squishy as any other infantry and consequently die in droves if shot at, but their rocket launchers hit just as hard as vehicle-mounted one, they are equally effective against infantry and vehicles (unlike other RTS games where such units usually suffer from Crippling Overspecialization) and they are very cheap compared to vehicles, so a Zerg Rush of them can quickly rack up kills. In fact, there's an ED campaign mission where you're handed two infantry training structures and a pile of cash, and ordered to go destroy two enemy bases. Your casualties will easily be in the hundreds by the time you win.
• Goddamned Bats: ED Storm gunships and UCS Gargoil fighters. Their machine guns inflict piddly little damage to anything other than infantry, but your rocket units are liable to inflict a lot of collateral damage in the process of trying to hit them while they're buzzing overhead.
• Guide Dang It!: The game does not have a tutorial whatsoever, although the first few missions function as one. Reading the manual is pretty much mandatory to be able to play the game and even then, it doesn't explain everything either (such as listing the ability to call reinforcements among the shortcut keys, but not even mentioning it anywhere else in the entire manual).
• Interface Spoiler: When you have units selected, mousing over any invisible enemy units on the map gives a regular arrow cursor rather than the movement cursor, or even the cannot-move-here cursor. The game will not let you move there, but it will let you force-fire there to hit and even kill the invisible unit in question. Not that useful against units under Shadow since they already give their position away, but you can easily find UCS submarines and hit them with complete impunity from the air, land, or even have a Shark attack boat force-fire on the water in the sub's general direction to abuse the fact that torpedoes keep going in a straight line until they hit something, regardless of how far that "something" was from the launch point.
  • Enemy minefields are similarly given away if you have a minelayer selected: even if the minelayer isn't close enough to the mine to reveal it, the mouse will still turn into the "disarm mine" cursor when hovering over the mine.
• Kill It with Fire: Napalm grenades are one of the UCS weapons installed on HellBike attack... well, bikes, and Tiger Hellmaker mechs. They are very deadly to light units and dangerous even to medium units.
• Nintendo Hard: compared to contemporary RTS games like Command & Conquer, Earth 2140 is liable to make the player tear their hair out in frustration. For many reasons, not all of which having to do with the enemy itself.
• Scrappy Mechanic: Oh, where to even begin.
  • Destroyed units spawn fire that's every bit as deadly to stand in as the one created by UCS napalm units. Light units trying to fight their way through a narrow position will often die from fires started by the deaths of their allies.
  • Rockets and heavy rockets do NOT discriminate between enemies and friendlies. Defending a position with large numbers of heavy rocket tanks/mechs/towers can quickly turn into disaster if an air raid hits, causing missed rockets to annihilate their own side.
  • Aircraft are Glass Cannons, but aircraft who are moving are pretty much impossible to even hit reliably. Even missiles that explode in the exact same map cell as the aircraft itself will flat-out deal no damage unless hitting from a very specific angle or the aircraft stops moving for even a split second. Those missiles will, however, hit whoever is under the aircraft instead. If a sufficiently large group of heavy rocket units are attacked by aircraft, they WILL wipe themselves out with each other's missed shots.
  • Damaged units losing movement speed is nothing unusual in the genre, but the extent to which units are affected practically guarantees that whoever gets struck with a heavy rocket or two will not get out of range before being killed by the follow-up shot.
  • UCS submarines are completely invisible until they attack and cannot be detected whatsoever prior to that, frequently turning naval missions into a frustrating game of find-the-last-sub.
  • Nuclear missile silos automatically give a targeting cursor when selected, allowing an inattentive player to accidentally nuke themselves simply by double-clicking on the silo.
  • Nearly every single mission is scripted to suddenly throw enemy units at your base as soon as any of your units reaches an invisible map marker. In the best case scenario, it's "only" an air transport bringing infantry to capture your nearest structure and self-destruct it. In the worst case scenario, it's a flight of bombers who proceed to dodge all of your anti-air fire and level half your base before you can react.
• Updated Re-release:
  • A Windows-optimized XP version was released in 2004, but sadly suffers from a Game-Breaking Bug, see above.
  • A HD version with widescreen support was released on Steam in 2013.

Earth 2150, The Moon Project and Lost Souls has examples of:

• All Your Base Are Belong to Us: Pretty much every time Neo shows up during a mission in Escape from the Blue Planet, he proceeds to jack every UCS unit on the map with zero warning.
  • In the Egypt mission of the UCS campaign, he flat-out crashes the alliance between the UCS and the LC by hijacking your units and sending them against the LC base to make it look like you backstabbed them. And no, you can't avoid that happening by pulling all your units out of the mission zone just before the scripted event happens; the alliance still gets annulled on the spot. Not being allied with the LC (if you fail to protect the LC delegate at the negotiations during India) won't save you from him either and his antics ultimately result in both plotlines converging in the Mozambique mission where the UCS is after Neo in particular.
  • During the LC campaign, refusing to betray the alliance with the UCS in Neo's favor results in him pulling this on your allies in the next two joint missions against the ED, frequently resulting in your ally getting completely wiped out and you having to complete the mission by yourself. Just like the in the UCS campaign, his antics irritate the UCS so much that they flat-out order the LC to track down and kill him in the name of the alliance.
  • Switching sides instead allows you to help him pull this off in Rio de Janeiro. The objective? Bring Neo into the enemy base. The result? This trope, including over a dozen robots with plasma cannons, all for the player to toy around with. Have fun!
• Amazon Brigade: LC military is entirely composed of women (as their entire faction). However, Fang, the hero in their campaign is a male commander, who was sent by UCS as part of the alliance.
  LC newscaster: "Hello, sisters. (Beat) And brothers."
• Armor-Piercing Attack: The LC's Crion mobile artillery, despite using an energy weapon, completely ignores shields to inflict tremendous damage. Earth 2160 would later change the Crion to make it a standard artillery piece that could fly, instead giving the unblockable attack to the ED's artillery unit.
  • The UFO unit in the Escape from the Blue Planet ED campaign's Area 51 mission also has a shield-bypassing energy weapon.
• Artificial Stupidity: The campaign AI is not programmed to take it into account that each map has limited resources, resulting in it aggressively throwing attack wave after attack wave at the player until it uses up its starting mineral field, at which point it proceeds to waste its remaining money endlessly trying to build mines on the player's mineral field.
• Artistic License – Nuclear Physics: The manual states the use of nuclear weapons, and the gigantic explosions near the north pole to knock Earth off its orbit. It's considered unlikely that nuclear weapons would shift Earth's rotation axis, and impossible to alter Earth's orbit by this method, even in large quantities.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • ED lasers, depending on the situation. Lasers can kill unshielded vehicles in the blink of an eye, but they take a lot longer to eat through shields than plasma cannons do, and they're almost useless against structures (because concrete doesn't heat up as well as metal does). Hence, use ion cannons against shields first if really required (stealing enemy units is even better after all). Note that the slower dealing with shields really only applies to the lasers mounted on small vehicles. Heavy lasers will rip through shields much faster because of their much greater damage and hyper-fast rate of fire, but they still have trouble against buildings larger than Small Towers.
  • The LC Weather Control Center is an even better example of this. It's the LC superweapon but it can only cause damage if the battle is taking place in the appropriate environment (either dropping meteors or inducing lightning strikes) and only if the superweapon is at full charge. Otherwise it only does things like make a strong wind or fog that inconveniences EVERYBODY on the map. A further strike against the Weather Control Center is that even when it's in a situation to do damage, its meteor or lightning strikes don't do as much damage as the ED's Nuclear Silos or UCS Plasma Control Center.
• Batman Can Breathe in Space: The ED can use their helicopters on the Moon, when playing skirmish or multiplayer. Averted in the single-player campaign, where the ED send some of their appropriated alien vehicles.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: Despite them being vaguely pacifistic and spiritual space hippies, the Celestial Council of the Lunar Corporation abandons the Lost Souls just like the ED Tsar and UCS President did.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Rocket launchers. Everybody has them, they deal a decent amount of damage, they have large magazines, they can shoot at ground and air targets alike (notably the only other weapon which can do this is the 20mm chaingun), they bypass shields, they can fit on almost all mounts, they rarely miss when upgraded, come in light and heavy versions, and the UCS even gets a light rocket launcher for heavy mounts, which can accept a sub-weapon - including a normal light rocket launcher for twice the amount of rockets.
  • In The Moon Project we have Eurasian Dynasty AA guns. These are just 20mm light cannons. They suffer from rather poor range and can't do close to the amount of damage that the UCS AA plasma cannons do. But the ED just might have the best anti-aircraft weapons in the game. Their weapons are hitscan and hit targets instantly. Enemy aircraft don't have that much health and never have above 50% armour, this makes them highly vulnerable to the ED AA guns' still formidable damage and rapid rate of fire. For the UCS, the shots from their AA plasma cannons are fast-moving but still take a bit of time to reach their target. As well, really strong shields on aircraft can soak a good amount of plasma shots and the AA plasma cannons don't have as high a rate of fire as the ED AA guns. So despite, the greater range and base damage on the plasma cannons, more enemy aircraft tend to survive against UCS anti-aircraft fire. The LC's anti-aircraft fire is just awful. They get the shaft with AA missiles that are slow-moving, so enemy aircraft often are able to get close enough to drop a bomb payload (including nukes from the ED).
• Bottomless Magazines: Averted. All units need to be constantly resupplied with ammunition. Only the energy weapons are infinite, but even then they need time to cool down and recharge if overused.
• Brutal Bonus Level: Sort of. The New York mission of the UCS campaign of Escape from the Blue Planet can only be unlocked by losing the Japan mission where you first encounter Neo, making it so obscure that a fair chunk of the playerbase isn't even aware that this mission exists. At the army composition the player has at this stage, the mission is Nintendo Hard, requiring you to defend three structures scattered around the map from three groups of Grizzlies that each massively outgun the player's entire army and attack all at once as soon as the mission begins, leaving no time whatsoever to even ferry over units from the main base. Tactical use of wall building to mess with AI pathfinding and destroying bridges is the only way to stall them long enough to get reinforcements - but if you do manage to stop them, there are no other enemy units on the entire map, the Grizzlies' sole source of ammo is completely undefended and once the Grizzlies themselves are destroyed, the map is practically a Disc-One Nuke in terms of harvestable resources.
• Cavalry Betrayal: You get to pull this, and in an Escort Mission even, in the Great Lakes mission of Escape from the Blue Planet's LC campaign if you decide to accept Neo's offer to switch sides. Doing so breaks off the alliance between the LC and the UCS, with the LC leadership ultimately concluding that the UCS was likely going to backstab them down the line anyway.
  • Not doing it, on the other hand, results in the LC subsequently ending up on the receiving end of this from the UCS twice in joint missions, courtesy of Neo hijacking their units. The third time, it's no longer unintentional on the UCS' part.
• Colony Drop: When the Earth's water supplies dry up too much for the LC's Weather Control Center to be able to call down lightning storms, the LC instead rigs it with a targeting system for meteorite bombardment. It can only be used on maps with Volcanic and Lava Pit tilesets, but the meteorites are not biased towards high ground like lighting, nor do they get absorbed by shields. Unleashing several at once is extremely effective and can completely wipe out a much larger area than ED nukes or the UCS offensive plasma cannon.
  • In The Moon Project, meteor shower is the only use for the Weather Control Center on Lunar tilesets, so the structure's building cost has been cranked up to 35000 credits, roughly the same as the other factions' superweapons, in order to keep the LC campaign from becoming too easy. Still, in the UCS campaign and the one ED mission taking place on the Moon, the LC makes liberal use of it.
  • Also in The Moon Project, there is an LC mission where a compact version of the targeting system is fitted onto the Fang and a repeating timer is displayed on the screen. Every time the timer runs out and the Fang is not underground, three meteor showers are fired at the Fang's current location, but the Fang is fast enough to haul ass out of the bombardment radius. The player has no base and limited forces, but the unlimited meteorites are more than enough to destroy the UCS bases in the mission area. It is widely regarded by fans as the Best Level Ever.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: 90% of 2150's campaign missions can be won by grabbing a resource patch or two, then camping down and staying on the defensive until the AI runs out of money. Averted hard in Lost Souls where the AI gets endlessly respawning free units out of nowhere in order to force the player to finish the mission before they run out on money! In Moon Project, the ED can easily win their campaign by making a STEALTH with an ion cannon and have it capture every ground unit on a level. Similarly the UCS can have stealth units pick off their LC enemies safely or they can use a transport to kidnap the most powerful LC units like the Crion.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: As expected of an RTS game, the computer starts with a lot more resources than the human player and is of course The All-Seeing A.I.. However, the computer can still run out of resources and won't get any more otherwise. Also at first, the AI units didn't have to reload, ever. This was patched later, especially since it made several missions impossible to solve without using cheats.
  • Lost Souls has the AI regularly receiving endless free units on nearly every campaign mission, specifically to prevent the player from simply waiting until the AI runs out of resources before knocking over their base with relative impunity.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: The general info in all campaigns is always "Do not rely on mass warfare, opt to save experienced units instead." While this is viable for the LC and UCS campaigns, seeing how they get the technology needed, for the ED it's a straight-up lie: the AI opponents always have the best available versions of units, always are several tech levels ahead (You got machine guns and tank turrets? They got grenades and missiles. They are using energy weapons? Yeah sorry, you don't get to use shields yet.) and always opt to use these two as soon as possible. Most ED missions can only be won by mindlessly spamming tanks and helicopters in the hope that the enemy will run out of resources sooner than the player - though to be fair, the ED campaign of Escape from the Blue Planet is significantly longer and more resource-rich than the other two.
• Cosmetically Different Sides: The only mechanic that all three sides share is ammunition supply and energy shields. The UCS and ED share base construction and vehicle production, but the similarities end there. The rest of the gameplay, on the other hand, differ greatly from faction to faction. Even common weapons are used ever so differently that you don't necessarily have a shared style of play.
• Cultural Translation: The Russian version of the game purposely translated ED mission briefings to be more in line with how Russian military works. Also, all sides were given new names to make them sound more neutral than the original: UCS became the Atlantic Union, ED was changed to Euroalliance, and LC became Children of Selene (Selene being the ancient goddess of the moon).
• Defector From Eagle Land: Fang defects to the LC because the UCS was in the process of converting all its members into A.I. robots. Neo also switched sides to the ED for the same reason.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment:
  • The in-game unit editor makes you able to customize your units by choosing the chassis, shield generator and weapon(s).
  • Then there's the 'newone'-cheat... which allows you to freely combine different chassis/buildings and weapons, cross-faction and without caring whether a weapon is actually suited for a chassis and the maximum of weapons that can be stacked. So you can have a Pamir light tank with a Heavy Plasma Canon with another Heavy Plasma Cannon on top with a Heavy Laser on top. Some combinations can actually crash the game. The cheat also allows building buildings underground...
• Destructible Projectiles: Rockets, provided somebody has an antimissile somewhere and said rockets are shooting at said somebody. The UCS and LC have also large anti-missile lasers to shoot down the ballistic missiles.
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: The fate of Earth at the end of game. The final LC campaign video shows Earth exploding mere seconds after their evacuation ship breaks from orbit. Same with the "game over" screen in The Moon Project and Lost Souls.
• The Federation: The United Civilized States was one before the de facto takeover by adviser A.I.s.
• Fragile Speedster: The ED's Cossack and the LC's Lunar and Meteor all die if they're so much as glared at, but all three are fast enough to outrun homing missiles chasing them if there aren't any terrain obstacles in the way. Especially notable are the Cossack which is a helicopter and the Lunar, which isn't even an aircraft to begin with!
• Guide Dang It!: Although 2150 has a proper tutorial for all factions, it still doesn't actually explain many game functions. For example, reading the manual is the only way to find out what the Screamer and the SDI Defense Center even do.
• Healing Factor: All LC vehicles have this thanks to advanced self-repairing materials, but the Fang and its New Hope mass-production version have it on steroids.
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: LC DAY 2 sounds like a heartbeat, albeit somewhat electronic and eerie like the rest.
• Homeworld Evacuation: This is the ultimate goal of all three factions in Escape from the Blue Planet, on account of the imminent Earth-Shattering Kaboom. Throughout the campaigns, you not only have to complete missions to cripple your rivals, but stockpile your excess resources in order to build a colony ship to carry you to Mars before the countdown expires.
• Improbable Weapon User: Transport aerial vehicles for the 3 factions can capture enemy ground vehicles with their skyhooks. This then allows them to drop the vehicle for a One-Hit Kill or place them safely in a spot where it'll be easy to capture and convert them to your side (this tactic won't work for the LC as they have no repairer to hack the vehicle).
• Instant-Win Condition:
  • In Escape from the Blue Planet, the campaign ends once you provide enough resources to build your evacuation ship, even if you're on a mission.
  • In one of Moon Project's LC missions, due to bad scripting: if at any point you ferry all your units back to your main base, even if you have a fully functional base with enough credits to hit the unit limit three times over, it's an instant game over the millisecond the transporter carrying the last unit disappears from the mission area. And no, you don't get any advance warning about this, only the mission failed debrief and the game over movie.
  • Similarly, the Amazon mission for the ED in 2150 is scripted to fail if at any point there is less cash on the map than needed for the objective. Thing is, only resource fields and your mission area credit pool are counted, the 5,000 credits you can put into the transport aren't. Which means that you might find yourself failing the mission by simply pressing one button.
• In-Universe Game Clock: The game has a day and night cycle, which has an impact on LC's solar power. The day cycle also counts down the time remaining before the planet burns up.
• Lady Land:
  • After a revolt against Corrupt Corporate Executives, women took control of the Lunar Corporation and reversed traditional gender roles to the point that LC armed forces are made up almost exclusively of women.
  • Subverted in that Fang is definitely male: numerous mission briefings address him as such and some even include attempts by women to hit on him. Then again, he defected from UCS.
• Not Playing Fair With Resources: Subverted, thanks to the patch, defying The Computer Isa Cheating Bastard. Formerly, enemy units never had to reload.
• Orbital Bombardment: The entire plot of The Moon Project revolves around Project Sunlight, an attempt by the LC to construct a superweapon ringing the Moon's equator, capable of accurately hitting strategic targets on Earth from lunar orbit. Both the ED and the UCS campaigns end with the weapon's destruction before it could be deployed to swing the war in the LC's favor.
• Orchestral Bombing: The game's soundtrack heavily samples from actual European classical music, primarily for the ED in-game tracks, post-game victory screen and cutscene background music.
  • The UCS victory theme is a small bit of Till Eulenspiegels lustige Streiche, Op. 28 from Richard Strauss.
  • The ED victory theme is sampled from the first movement of Schubert's Symphony No.9. The LC victory theme is another brief segment from the second movement.
  • The ED's second nighttime track samples the intro of the third movement of La Mort de Cléopâtre by Hector Berlioz, a 19th century French composer.
  • The ED's third battle track is sampled around a brief piece of Sacrificial Dance from Igor Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. The outro of the UCS' second daytime track also borrows from it.
  • The ED's campaign victory cutscene uses the outro of Handel's Worthy is the Lamb.
  • The UCS' campaign victory cutscene uses a shortened version of the outro of Dvorak's famous Symphony No.9, Fourth Movement.
• Panthera Awesome: The naming convention used for bipedal UCS mechs.
• Ridiculously Fast Construction: Played straight with UCS and ED. Averted with LC, who simply lower their prefabricated structures from orbit.
• Secret Weapon: The LC have the Moon Project which is a moon-based super-sized lightning cannon capable of hitting targets on Earth. Canonically they succeeded in building it and then used it to great effect against the ED, allowing for a rescue of large number of non-ED civillians.
• Sequence Breaking: Some missions in 2150 can be done with the mission objectives out of order. For example, the Alaska mission for the ED instructs you to raid a UCS mining operation, kill everyone at the site then beat back a hefty counterattack and hold your position against the enemy onslaught until you reach the target amount of extracted resources. However, you're not prevented from mining the field first, then demolishing the base (since the last building's destruction is what triggers said counterattack); doing so is far easier and less stressful, as not only you have as much time to prepare as you want, you can leave the destruction part to a single unit and pull out before the UCS reinforcements even spawn on the map.
  • The subsequent Canada mission is deliberately scripted to allow this. You're supposed to steal data from a computer located in the tunnels beneath an enemy base, after which your superiors would order you to destroy the base itself to stall the research. If you destroy the base first, picking up the data results in the objective debriefing noting the fact and skipping the destruction objective.
• Sex Slave: The ED campaign of 2150 implies that ED general Zugay Shakt treats captured LC forces as this. After the player fights off sustained LC attacks in the Amazon area while extracting resources, in a later mission the general thanks the player for the POWs from the Amazon mission and offhandedly mentions that "none of them survived the winter, but my boys really enjoyed the distraction!" Further reinforced in Moon Project when Shakt notifies the player during a mission that any LC POWs "are to be delivered to me in excellent condition" (and you get extra credits if you capture a group of LC vehicles).
• Shoot the Bullet: The antimissiles is to rockets as the energy shield is to energy weapons. Its usefulness varies from person to person.
• Siege Engines: All sides have artillery cannons for their vehicles (the ED also have mobile ICBM launchers) with the LC's Crion's plasma cannon being a Game-Breaker, but as of Moon Project and onwards, the factions also have building-sized artillery pieces of tremendous power and range that are defence emplacements for your base. Since you can put buildings anywhere, you can have these artillery buildings shelling an enemy base.
• Simple, yet Awesome: UCS Plasma weapons deal a whole lot of damage very quickly, and can be fielded within minutes. Being energy weapons, they're absorbed by shields, but the damage and rate of fire is high enough that you'll likely strip those shields off in seconds.
• Single-Biome Planet: Subverted initially (we are talking about Earth here) but gradually turns into a volcanic planet.
• Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: ED uses nuclear missiles as their superweapon. They are nowhere near as powerful as they should be, especially given that it was their nukes that managed to push an entire planet off its orbit. Also, the destruction of UCS nuclear power plants only results in a mildly annoying but not damaging nuclear explosion.
  • The in-game nukes are probably tactical, while the story nukes were strategic.
  • More specifically, the ED has three kinds of nukes: silo-based ballistic missile, vehicle-mounted ballistic missile, and helicopter-mounted unguided bomb (since nukes apparently don't work against aircraft). The latter is a bit buggy in the Lost Souls campaign as it has infinite research time. It may be a bug, but missile silos also gain experience: hit a big cluster of buildings and your next nuke might very well have twice the bang.
• Superpower Meltdown: Sort of. Units gain more range and firepower as they level up. The Area 51 UFO is no exception, capable of doing the entire mission for you if you micromanage it carefully. However, once it reaches maximum experience, the variables seem to overflow and it gets zero weapon range. Ouch. Corrected in The Moon Project.
• Super Prototype:
  • Sort of. The Fang vehicle is of alien origin while its mass-produced version, New Hope isn't. While the original has some 800 HP and regenerates noticeably faster than other LC units, the New Hope has less HP (120 without experience) than any other combat unit in the game and all of its attributes are inferior to the Fang... but it regenerates CRAZY FAST. As in, back to full health in less than a second if it's a non-killing blow. Add in that the sucker has 75% armor and it's nigh impossible to kill a New Hope without overwhelming firepower or numbers.
  • The Grizzly is this for the UCS. No unit in Earth 2150 can match the 3600 starting hit points that the Grizzly has and with 75% armor, it's not going down easy. Your mainline UCS cannot research or manufacture the Grizzly, though they can upgrade any weapons mounted and graft shields on it. The only advantage that the researchable Jaguar has over the the Grizzly is a greater variety of firepower, as well as the ability to mount an additional light weapon on some of the heavy weapon choices.
• Superior Successor: In Moon Project, early on the campaign the ED can find some old base sites that have the following unique ED units which you can capture - the Russilan AAR, Tank C 105mm and the Heavy Tank. You can't research or manufacture them, nor would you want to. Those three tanks are the predecessor to the Khruschev, but lack the Khruschev's heavy armour and ability to mount a variety of weapons (including energy weapons) with each tank mounting one specific weapon ever. That said, you can upgrade these to some extent if you have the applicable technology and they are pretty tough so they make good starting units when you have nothing better researched. After that, they're just scrap to be sold.
• Superweapon Surprise: The LC's sonic cannon is a modified sonic mining tool. One unit with a sonic weapon does minimal damage per shot and runs out of ammo quickly - however, sonic weapons are the only energy weapons in the game that do area of effect damage, allowing massed sonic cannons to wrangle entire grounds of enemies in very short order.
• Technological Pacifist: The LC used to be this, until they are forced to quickly learn the art of war in order to compete with UCS and ED.
• The Mole: Neo is an ED hacker who was originally a member of the UCS. He was the one that caused the rift between the UCS and LC by reprogramming UCS robots to fire on the LC. The UCS do pay him back in spades.
• Timed Mission:
  • While individual missions are not timed, all three campaigns of Escape from the Blue Planet have a 183-day countdown (36 hours when converted to real-time at default game speed), after which follows an Earth-Shattering Kaboom and a Non-Standard Game Over. In practice, only the ED campaign is long enough to actually risk running out of time and only if you take your time wiping out the enemy in every mission even if you're not explicitly ordered to.
  • The ED's Lesotho mission is timed. You have somewhere around three days until the UCS deciphers the captured silo's launch codes and nuke you to oblivion. You have until that time to destroy said base. Preferably by nuking them back, if you did the Algeria mission first.
  • Lost Souls also has a tricky ED mission where you have to capture the shuttle launch base. However, it is buggy because you CAN'T complete the mission in time so the timer is fake! More specifically, it triggers a failure message but the mission doesn't end and not even the patch corrects this... Not to mention that said launch base is a decoy, the shuttles aren't even there.
  • One UCS mission in Lost Souls is also bugged. Namely, the player is required to avoid contact with the enemy for a specific duration, then has a limited time to completely destroy an ED base, then has a limited time yet again to destroy an LC base as well. Failing any of the latter two timers is an instant game over... however, the game displays a bugged "translateTimeToDestroyLC" string instead of the final timer, so the player has no way of knowing how much time he actually has!
• Training the Peaceful Villagers: The LC's military is based on this. Originally just an ex-NASA outpost of scientists and workers, when Fang defected he had to train the LC how to fight. Turns out they were awful with most conventional weapons, so the LC ended up weaponizing their mining equipment which they were familiar with.
  • Lore background in the manuals reveals that this is also how the ED got started: a Russian officer who survived the nuclear war married into a Mongol tribe and taught them military tactics that allowed them to conquer their neighbors and establish an empire.
• Underground Level: UCS and ED can dig underground tunnels that can be used to sneak up on an enemy (and to find some artifacts or sabotaging your opponents in campaigns). LC can use tunnels, but can't build them, until The Moon Project, that is.
• Variable Mix: Each side is given a unique soundtrack with a list of songs for one of three moods: daytime, nighttime and war. Notably, a Song in the Key of Warning will roll when a player's units begins to sustain hits in a heated skirmish.
• Villain Ball: The ED went crazy with their nukes when they tried to stop the UCS advance. This caused the Earth to spiral out of orbit and set on a trajectory to the Sun!
• Weather-Control Machine: LC's superweapon. Calls down rain, snow, wind, lightnings and when the Sun's proximity make summoning precipitation impossible, the LC scientists rig it with a targeting system for dropping asteroids.
• Weather of War: Climate conditions don't usually have a powerful effect on combat: rain and snow reduce unit sight range and movement speed and the morning fog is purely cosmetic. However, strong winds massively decrease aircraft flight speed and even prevent landed aircraft from taking off, preventing resupply of units and structures with limited ammunition (since the supplier is an aircraft that must land at the Supply Depot to pick up the ammo) and potentially blocking factories (since the aircraft can't move without taking off, they can't move out of the way of the factory's exit).
• Weaponized Car: The LC's Fat Girl, the UCS's Cargo Salamander and the ED's Siberia are all basically hauling trucks that are repurposed for combat. They had guns mounted on them and their chassis reinforced. The Cargo Salamander is heavily armoured and the Fat Girl can be with appropriate research and can eventually mount enough guns to be a threat to main battle tanks.
• You Have Outlived Your Usefulness: In three out of four cases, alliances between factions in Escape from the Blue Planet end up in one side pulling this on the other.
  • In the ED campaign, attacking the UCS base in Egypt causes the local LC forces to propose an alliance. Your superiors agree... right up until the UCS base is destroyed, at which point they declare the alliance to be "no longer relevant" and order you to kick the LC out as well.
  • In the LC campaign, you start out allied with the UCS and later on get an offer to switch sides and ally with the ED instead. No matter whom you're allied with as you head into the endgame, securing the resources of Lesotho in a joint mission against the third side invariably results in your ally ignoring the treaty granting the area to the LC, attempting to kick you out under the excuse that they need those resources more than you do and ultimately annulling the alliance when your superiors refuse to back down.

Earth 2160 invokes these tropes:

• After the End: Following the destruction of Earth.
• Alien Sky: Whole game takes place entirely on other worlds in Sol system and beyond.
• All Planets Are Earthlike: Completely averted. All but two of all the planets, moons, asteroids and whatnot encountered are uninhabitable by humans. Of those that are habitable, one planet appears to be mostly covered in deserts, while the other is aptly named Eden. Although Mars is currently going through terraforming started by LC robots/drones at least few decades before the first part of the series.
• Artifact Title: Earth 2160 does not take place on Earth. Eurasian Dynasty and Lunar Corporation maintain their names despite the fact that neither Earth nor Moon exist anymore.
• Awesome, but Impractical: The mercenary hero units are this. They're powerful infantry units and come with a unique vehicles, plus they can enhance your research speed, production capabilities, resource gathering and units. But they're not only expensive (and you must pay them every time when their contract expires to keep them with you), they don't have any shields nor can they get one added through upgrading. So energy weapons will rip these guys apart.
• Big Damn Heroes:
  • Major Michael Falkner for LC Commander Heldin Ariah and her soldiers in Earth 2160 Eurasian Dynasty "We come in peace" mission.
  • Later, three Phobos hovertanks for Ariah and her companion in Lunar Corporation "Mars" mission.
• Bottomless Magazines: Averted, but only for ED and UCS. LC and Morphidians play this straight since their units and defences are using energy weapons (even if descriptions and visuals says otherwise).
• Cosmetically Different Sides: Absolutely averted. Each faction is radically diffrent.
• Design-It-Yourself Equipment: All factions minus the Aliens can choose a chasis, one or more guns, a type of armor,a type of motor, and an accessory (either Deflector Shields or a self-repair drone) and send the results into battle; or customize the goodies on the default model.
• The Dragon: Falkner appears to become this for Van Troff (although not willingly) in the Alien campaign but the final mission reveals that Rifkin was the real Dragon all this time.
• A Father to His Men: Major Falkner and General Taggart. Commander Ariah can count as A Mother to Her Women.
• Faction Calculus:
  • ED: Powerhouse, considering that they're a little too loosey-goosey with the WMD's (every vehicle can use chemical weapons).
  • LC: Fragile Speedster, Subversive (lots of light flyers and landspeeders, a few of which can be armed with a Mind-Control Device).
  • UCS: Jack of All Stats (Stone Wall modular defenses and structures; most combat robots can be armed with a gun for all occasions).
  • Alien: Gimmick (No production structures or research/Design-It-Yourself Equipment; all units are a further stage of the larval Mantian Lady's life cycle)
• Garrisonable Structures: Some structures and scenery elements can be garrisoned by infantry.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation: In Earth 2160, the LC's mass drivers are described in-game as being able to ignore armor, since the projectiles are actually teleported into the target. Actual gameplay, all armor types will reduce mass driver damage. In fact the LC are the worst faction when it comes dealing with different armor types.
• Healing Factor: All factions can install repairing modules in their vechicles after they develop them.
• Hired Guns: While there are factional HeroUnits like Major Falkner and Commander Ariah, there are heroes that can be hired by anyone. These mercenaries are Awesome, but Impractical, individually they're powerful infantry and they also come with a unique vehicle. However they're a constant drain on your resources as they take payment and every mercenary is unshielded and can't have one installed so energy weapons chew them up. Additionally their technology is incompatible with yours so you can't upgrade your mercs either.
• Hollywood Acid: ED chemical weapons. The anti-ground version is basically a hose the size of a tank turret while the anti-air version is delivered as a missile payload. If you don't happen to have anti-chemical armor, prepare to be massacred.
• It's a Small World, After All: At the end of Lost Souls, the protagonists state that they have no idea how accurate their space teleporter is and express doubts that it won't dump them out somewhere in the void of outer space, but with the Earth about to fall apart around them, they don't exactly have a choice in the matter. Comes Earth 2160 with no mention of anyone ever having made out of Earth after the three factions have abandoned it, seemingly supporting the idea that the teleporter had indeed malfunctioned or that they were simply Retconned out of existence. Then right in the middle of the UCS campaign, it turns out the teleporter worked quite well... too well, in fact: it massively overshot the intended destination and dumped the survivors into a completely different star system. The very same system the 2160 La Résistance passes through on their way to Eden, just in time to pick up their distress signal and save their hides from an idiotic ED commander.
• Mad Scientist: Professor Van Troff transfers/alters himself into an alien body and takes control of the Morphidian army beneath the surface of Mars, planning to exterminate humanity because... we're not sure exactly.
• Mechanically Unusual Class: Morphidians (Aliens) don't build bases; they evolve their units from Mantian Ladies and Replicatori UFO's. However, they can't research new toys or customize units. They are also the only race to use all 3 resources (While their ground units only need water, their fleet needs both metal and crystal. everyone else needs either crystal OR metal for their planes and tanks, plus water for their pilots).
• Neglectful Precursors: The Creators, whose technology is lying all around Sol, and its surrounding star systems. They created the Morphidians as a biological Von Neumann army, then basically left them buried on Mars after they were done, not caring how much damage the species could do in the hands of a Mad Scientist.
• Nerf: The 3 old factions get this to their superweapons. The ED have a much weaker ballistic missile, the UCS replace their Death from Above plasma weapon with a teleporting plasma time bomb and LC get two models of very tough flying saucers with powerful laser that can be shot down (though this could be considered upgrade to their old weather control centrer).
• Organic Technology: Morphidians in Earth 2160, although it's a little vague: since the Creators couldn't make them fly properly, they gave them a mechanical Von Neumann fleet. Even the ground units aren't fully organic: there's cannons, metal, electronic parts, all of them cloned, somehow, organically.
• Portal Network: Gigantic alien portals on planets and in space.
• Single-Biome Planet: Played stright with most of the planets/moons.
• Rate-Limited Perpetual Resource: Instead of mining credits like in single-player, they just arrive slowly out of nowhere in a multiplayer or skirmish mode. This gives a stronger advantage to Lunar Corporation players, who can deploy buildings anywhere without a builder unit.
• Regenerating Health: Lunar Corporation and Morphidians units have this.
• Recursive Creators: The Morphidians are a colony of organitek Von Neumann Machines. Lower forms, such as the Lady and Queens, can drink water to self-replicate or evolve into combat forms.
• Spanner in the Works: Falkner gradually becomes this to Van Troff as he repeatedly screws over Rifkin in the ED campaign.
• Standard Sci-Fi Fleet: While every human faction in 2160 has regular aircraft, the Morphidians are radically different. Since their creators couldn't find mutations that were powerful enough for them to fly, the aliens instead received nanomachines to build a self-replicating fleet with.
  • Replicatorus: the self-replicating element of the fleet. Can endlessly replicate as long as it has access to crystals.
  • Morphoratorus: can't replicate anymore but can rebuild itself into combat aircraft if it absorbs metal.
  • Postomor Fighter: produced in batches of four but even one can dominate every human air unit in the game.
  • Morphorator Light Cruiser: basic capital ship that averts Point Defenseless by having automatic laser turrets to shoot down incoming missiles. Can rebuild itself into more specialised forms if it absorbs crystals.
  • Postomor Heavy cruiser: replaces the light cruiser's universal energy weapons into a ground-only missile salvo that outranges all static air defenses.
  • Postomor Destroyer: has an even more powerful ground-and-air energy weapon and a whopping 4000 health plus point defense turrets. It's not called the strongest air unit (and strongest unit in general) for nothing.
• Tele-Frag: Lunar Corporation cannons and SAMs put their shots Just One Second Out of Sync (although still subject to gravity in the case of the Magneto Grenade), letting them phaze into enemy units before detonating them.
• Took a Level in Kindness: The Eurasian Dynasty. The LC's Moon Project fried the Khan and his psycho bum-buddies running the kingdom, while much of the lower class thugs were stuck on Earth during the evacuation. The surviving ED later had violent purges on Mars that further wiped out more of the old guard. This meant that the survivors of the ED that did go to Mars aren't nearly so bad as their predecessors, though they're still tyranical imperialists and very brutal. Major Falkner is a Token Good Teammate member of the ED, though he is still in the minority.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: The Lunar Corporation became bureaucratic feminazis though they're still better than the new ED.

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