We don’t want this place to turn into Media Corner, so let’s get back to strategy games.

A few months ago, I had a chance to see a very early build of Empire Earth III. (I wrote up a preview in the April CGM). Since I wasn’t a huge fan of the other Empire Earth games, this was an assignment I took with low expectations. The standard operating procedure in sequels is just to pile more and more stuff into a game, and then shine it up.

Mad Doc is certainly shining it up, but they are cutting back on the stuff. There are only three factions based on rough geographic areas (West, East, MidEast) and there will be fewer ages to level through. All in an effort to heighten the distinctions between the nations and open up player choice. I was told that there might be templates within these factions (Germans would a tank track template, for example) but this was not a final decision and would certainly detract from what they saw as the strength of their system, player customization of the races.

The three factions are very different from each other, but now you can take one of these factions and tailor your advance through the ages to match your play style or your likely opponents. It’s a powerful design idea based partly on ceding power to the player.

Though Mad Doc would like to think that this is another brilliant and original idea (which it is), it’s also a step that Big Huge Games took with Rise of Legends, though Reynolds and Co. didn’t take it this far. Rise of Nations had a lot of quite distinct nations. Each played slightly differently, though, in the end, the experience of playing one or the other didn’t change from Maya to Nubia to Russia. So the pseudo-sequel went with three completely unique races with tech trees so deep and wide that you could relearn the game even within the Vinci branch. An excellent game of breadth along the Age of Empires model yielded to an excellent game of depth along the Starcraft model.

The peril of depth, though, is that it is hard to balance right. Game testers need to try a lot of possibilities and may not play a single build often enough to get a sense for how it breaks the game system. As uninventive as it is, the +1 Gold, +3 Horse Speed design allows you to take stuff away, too, making game balance a matter of math. (Not that it always works. Remember the Teutonic Knights in Age of Empires II.)

I really need to do a genealogy of RTS games to track when the desire to make each race unique finally won out over general sameness. These games can be grouped into families well beyond the direct descendant model, and it might be worthwhile exercise to track the cross-pollenization of ideas through the subgenre.

Anyway, I am actually and honestly looking forward to Empire Earth III. There’s still a little trepidation (I’m still not sold on the quest system in the campaign game) but Mad Doc should be given credit for doing some really radical redesign of a game that could have just faded away. And it can’t be worse than Star Trek: Legacy.