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That campaign required you to know the strengths and weaknesses of every unit in the last two ages. If anything, the difficulty came from the restrictive pop cap, which was an omnipresent issue across all campaigns.
That's what I'm wondering about.
Rise of Nations had 8 ages to play through, with the Ancient and Classical ages passing by pretty quickly in the first few minutes of gameplay, and the average match lasting about an hour. So how exactly is Empire Eternal supposed to balance around 20 ages? Either certain ages are going to be brief speed-bumps or the ages are actually just bits and pieces of a tech tree players unlock.
Edited by SgtRicko on Oct 7th 2024 at 1:07:12 AM
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Yep. One notable issue with the first game was the absolutely, ungodly slow resource gathering rate in the first few ages making the next age prohibitively expensive if you simultaneously also had to spend resources on units to fight with and aren't having half of a 200+ pop limit filled up with citizens. And then there's the fact that several ages like the Dark Age do not unlock any new structures, but you still need to build two of something, just to unlock the ability to tech up. If you already have fully built and fortified expos and production ops, what's the purpose of building shit you don't actually need (and may end up flat-out nonfunctional in another age or two) but the game mandates you to waste resources on anyway?
That being said, I personally also dislike Rise of Nations having the opposite issue: aging up is just way too quick and fast, even if you explicitly pick the skirmish option that makes it slower and more expensive. Hell, the later techs (especially commerce) cost more than age advancement.
Edited by amitakartok on Oct 7th 2024 at 6:22:30 PM
This news is actually a few months old, but it caught my eye since it's a unique take on RTS naval combat. Dev-Log #1: Boarding and Debarkation Troops in Empire Eternal
Basically, in the earlier ages prior to gunpowder, your ships are more akin to troop transports, and whatever boards them can attack other vessels. For example, load up archers, and your ship will start shooting arrows. Load up spearmen or swordsmen, and they can act as a boarding party used to attack or capture enemy ships. Not all infantry can fight though; cavalry and civilian workers are harmless and will need to be escorted.
Oh, and you can build walls and gates too.
I played both Empire Earth and a bit of its sequel. The original was good, but its graphics were behind for the time, and other flaws became apparent over time. One is that civilisations were classed by epochs; they were playable in any era but there was one in which they excelled. And you were stuck with one for the whole session. Already a problem, and to make it worse the AI always chose one for the era in which the game started, so it was always the same half-dozen enemies I fought against unless I started the game in a later one. Also the mechs of the future era were both too fantastical and too similar.
I recall the campaigns in the base game being easy, only the Russian one gave me a challenge, and some were too scripted, feeling more like a linear RPG than anything tactical. It was the expansion that had hard campaigns. They still had scripted events, but these required the player to make quick choices and not just do as told. Some maps were huge, one covered all of Gaul, another the Mediterranean, and they felt like it. I never won the last scenario of the Roman campaign, and I would have never got past the previous one if it worked as intended (the boats from Egypt kept getting sunk, but it never triggered a game over). I would point to that expansion as how to do campaigns right for a real-time game, though its implementation of space travel I never cared about.
The sequel fixed a lot of these problems (mechs looking like machines, not human-shaped LEGO blocks), and is among few real-time games where I felt spies were well implemented, but it never caught me the same way. It felt like development was hurried in places. Like it had economic, military and political leaders, but instead of names from history like in the Civilization games they were actually called "Economic Leader", "Military Leader".
I'm more inclined to turn-based strategy games because they are more comfortable to manage but I might give this a try.
Stories don't tell us monsters exist; we knew that already. They show us that monsters can be trademarked and milked for years.
If anything, the primary difficulty in the first game's campaigns is that while the game was an RTS, they didn't actually let you play it as an RTS.
As in, many missions either didn't let you make more units at all, restricted how many you could have by only giving you a finite amount of one or more resource without being able to harvest more, and/or gave you such a low pop cap that even if there were resources you could harvest, you couldn't actually afford to have enough workers to collect then at any pace faster than a snail's without it forcing your army to be so small that any enemy attack could overwhelm you by sheer numbers.

Empire Eternal Steam Page
Inspired by RTS classics Empire Earth and Rise of Nations, Empire Eternal will have 20 eras to play through, ranging from the prehistoric age all the way to the near future with lasers and mechs. Kinda wondering how exactly are they going to balance making all of those ages viable to progress through in a single RTS session though, that's a whole lot of tech progression.
And I'm absolutely hoping it has something similar to Rise of Nation's Risk-style "Conquer the World" map. I played sooo much of it in my childhood.