Empire Earth

Empire Earth
Platforms: PC
Publisher: Sierra Entertainment
Developer: Stainless Steel
Genres: Strategy / Real-Time Strategy
Release Date: November 21, 2001
Game Modes: Singleplayer / Multiplayer

Still a peasant herding exercise at its core.

Empire Earth is an ambitious design, but only because it has so much stuff in it. There are fourteen eras, each the equivalent of an age in Age of Empires, ranging from prehistory to the hypothetical future. Each epoch has unique artwork and units. There are infantry, dogs, cavalry, archers, siege engines, ships, and eventually aircraft, tanks, and artillery, all in varying flavors appropriate to the epoch. There are spell-casting prophets. There are priests who convert the other guy’s armies. Each of the 200 or so units can be customized by upgrading one or more attributes: firepower, range, hit points, armor, and so on.


A wonderful Greek city. Or is it Roman?

There are technologies that improve your units’ stats or your civilization’s resource gathering. There is farming, foraging, hunting, fishing, logging, and mining. There are food, wood, stone, iron, and gold. There are 21 civilizations with specific bonuses. There are eight formations to put your units in. There are six Wonders of the World. There are four AI settings for each unit’s behavior. There’s a 3D engine. There are two victory conditions. And there’s basically one way to play – gather a bunch of resources!

Pseudo-Historical Tapestry

It’s as if all that other stuff just falls away, betraying Empire Earth as yet another game about resource gathering. The winner is almost invariably the guy who cranks out enough peasants (called citizens here) to gather the most resources and who most efficiently converts them into military units. There’s something profoundly disappointing when such a vast game ultimately comes down to herding peasants. This isn’t to say that there isn’t a lot of tactical variety in the way the units fight. There is, but in the end, it’s driven primarily by simple economics.

EE most immediately resembles Ensemble’s Age of Empires. This is hardly surprising considering Rick Goodman was on the design team for both. The interface, the subject matter, the unit graphics, the marketing, and even the title seem calculated to say “Hey, if you liked Age of Empires, you’ll like this, too!” Which is probably true. Although both games have a historical motif slathered over them like icing, Empire Earth eventually turns into a sci-fi battle bot arena with special spell powers like cloaking (Refractive Cloaking), unit shields (Diffraction Shields), mind control (Assimilation), and teleporting (Teleporting).

Empire Earth’s greatest strength is that the epochs play like different games. Pay a sum of resources and you can upgrade to the next epoch, unlocking new units and technologies. You can effectively limit games to one or two epochs by playing with standard rules, in which the cost of “epoching up” is so prohibitive you’ll only see two or three before the game ends. Alternately, you can play tournament rules, in which the epoch costs are reduced to encourage faster progression and more variety.


You sunk my battleship!

If you start at the prehistoric epoch, you’ve got a fairly tedious game with cavemen throwing rocks at each other. Then you get an Age of Empires clone for about three or four epochs. When guns and cavalry come into play, the game mechanics shift substantially. Then powerful artillery and machine guns dominate the battles, followed by tanks rendering cavalry obsolete. Then aircraft really shift the mechanics. Then a show-stopping nuclear bomb makes an appearance. Then the battle bots arrive and all pretensions of realism go out the window. Empire Earth ends with the defenestration of historical value.

Later stages of the game rely on more conventional combined arms attacks. Take out anti-aircraft guns with long distance artillery and follow up with bombing campaigns. Move in with infantry to kill your enemy’s citizens and cripple his economy. This works well enough with Empire Earth’s interface, which builds in nearly anything you’d expect in a real-time strategy game. One notable problem with the interface is that managing aircraft and naval units is like herding blind cattle. Combine an unwieldy system of separate waypoints for fighters, bombers, and individual planes with limited fuel for each aircraft and you’ve got stray airplanes everywhere. It’s a problem the enemy AI doesn’t seem to notice.

Rock, Paper, Battle Robot

Although each of the epochs encourages different tactics, Empire Earth wisely keeps base building and resource gathering consistent. Once you put up your walls, defensive towers, and basic unit-building structures, and once you’ve got your citizens going about their gathering, you can leave them alone and concentrate on military units. This is particularly important because even though the game ostensibly shows unit stats, it relies heavily on an under-the-hood system of unit trumps. Age of Empires did something similar, but it was limited to a fairly intuitive “cavalry trump archers trump infantry trump pikemen trump cavalry.”

Empire Earth, on the other hand, literally requires half a dozen flow charts to explain the unit relationships. Some of these are fairly silly. Why is a galleon more effective against a battleship than a frigate? Why are cavalry with guns more effective against other cavalry than infantry? In the final epochs, it breaks down into an arbitrary sci-fi slop. Let’s see, tanks are good against Pandoras, infantry are good against Minotaurs, Hyperions are good against both, and none are good against anti-tank guns except for Zeus robots. It’s almost pointless to show a unit’s stats when there are so many exceptions to whether an attack rating of 200 is better than an attack rating of 100.

The Kitchen Sink


Assaulting a castle with knights and trebuchets. It’s fortunate there’s no friendly fire involved.

For such a derivative game, Empire Earth does have a few nice twists. As in Age of Empires, you can build wonders of the world for an alternate victory condition. But like wonders in Civilization, each one actually gives you an advantage. There is an adjustable unit limit, but it’s a global figure split among all surviving civilizations. This is a great incentive for defeating other players and it means bonuses that increase your limit can give you a significant advantage. The number of citizens that can gather resources from each source is limited, so competitive economies will have to expand across the map. This greatly discourages turtle-style players.

But on the whole, Empire Earth plays a lot like a hundred and one other real-time strategy games. It’s a very old school game. It tries almost nothing new. But manages to add lots of good stuff to the old.

System Requirements: PII 400 Mhz, 64 MB RAM, 8 MB Video, Win 98/ME/2000

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Tags: Free Download Empire Earth Full PC Game Review


  1. x says:

    Naah, I disagree und the bad rating.

    I loved this game as a teenager because there is no super-unit against everything.
    In AOE II you can just build tons of paladins or war elephants and the enemy is fried.

    EE is immensely more difficult, and a real challenge.

    Especially if you play Multiplayer against multiple AI, this is the biggest challenge I even had in a realtime strategy game and it’s extremely hard to win even in medium difficulty.

  2. Don says:

    I loved this game and totally disagree with the review’s point about needing lots of peasants. That’s just realism. Logistics IS what wins wars in the long run so yes, you will do better if you build up your population and your industrial capacity. That lets you create more military units and with your spare resources you can do research and advanced your civilisation to the next level. That’s how it works in real life. This game is not just about brute force but involves planning how much to put into your defences, agriculture, mining, industrial development, research, military training and weapons development, intelligence gathering, combined arms operations etc, etc.
    If you just want a shoot em up play Doom, if you want a fantastic game that makes you think play Empire Earth.

  3. Epoxy says:

    How do I install this game? After extraction there is only .BIN file.

  4. robby says:

    I have successfully installed the game but when I select play game on the main menu, an error message pops saying “please insert the empire earth CD” . The CD is in the drive and it cannot detect it…any clues why ?

  5. You didn’t copy the crack my dude.

  6. Khang Tran says:

    Can windows 10 play this games. I tried so many links, installed finish then when I click to run, it has stopped working >”<

  7. farhan says:

    how to free download

  8. nostalgic says:

    so let’s say that I got the please install the empire earth CD, what to do ?
    please don’t direct me to the tips page I didnt really get what to do, If you could please tell me the steps to do that would be great

  9. Ruben says:

    Hey dude, would love to play this game again. But i have some problems with installing the game. There’s no program on my pc to open the downloaded file and i don’t really know what to do now.
    Any help?

  10. Read “A few quick tips for running games” – https://oldpcgaming.net/tips-on-running-games/

  11. Hitler says:

    From where I can get the crack ?

  12. DerGeraet says:

    neither daemon tool nor poweriso were able to launch the.BIN or .CUE file am I doing something wrong or is the download broken?

  13. azirty says:

    same no clu how to instal , power iso do not work on this bin file

  14. azirty says:

    find a way , if u have power iso just extract the bin file (dont mount it just extract)

  15. Kumar says:

    motherfucker your fucking BIN file did not work…Fuck you asshole
    u kill my times

  16. Rimantas says:

    Kumar, watch your toothless mouth and learn to read “Read this first!” in this great site. Also Google has all info about any files and programs for them, shithead.

  17. Ghost says:

    The cue file is written wrong, open it in notepad and change the name of the bin file reference to match the name of the bin file in the folder

  18. Tesla says:

    Great ! I’ven never seen that before. There are serious innovations here ! You can travel through ages ! Oh wait… you can do it too in Age of Empires. Priests can convert units ! Oh wait… they can too in Age of Empires. You can zoom in and out but it is useless. After 1 hour, you manage to gather 100 units of food. Yes, this game is sssssllllllooooowwwwww, I mean sssssslllllloooowwwwwww. Thank God, uninstall was faster.

  19. rohit says:

    how i downlaod a full version game for free please provide any link

  20. Debasish says:

    I am unable to download this game. Please share a link to download it.

  21. ThatOneDoomGuy says:

    Hey i just wanted to say thanks for all the good stuff! Its really appreciated.

  22. Kish says:

    I downloaded the file and extracted. But when I try to extract the BIN file with PowerISO, the operation crashes near the end. It says the application is not compatible with Windows 10. Do you know what to do?

  23. Mount MOUNT it dammit.

  24. Copernicus says:

    I installed the game correctly. It runs but then after approximately a mintue, everything gets stuck. Cant even get out of the game without restarting my laptop. Why is this happening ??? Please suggest a solution !

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