![]() One of the maps we were shown today demonstrated a quest where a native tribe asked for help rescuing a kidnapped daughter. Because the single player campaign is all about taking over the world and not scripted mission design, Mad Doc decided to add some flair by throwing in some quest like objectives. Entering a neutral territory will allow players to either destroy or ally themselves with these natives. Along with enemies, players will also come across native residents in neutral territory. For instance, one we were shown created roads which allow armies to travel across an extra territory in order to attack. Once researched, some of them will be passive bonuses while others act as "spells" that can be used to enhance or hinder. Global technologies can be researched in a certain number of turns on the globe map. Considering the number of epochs has been reduced down to five, it would be an especially short teching up experience by previous standards. The pace of teching up will be considerably slower in the global campaign than it will in skirmish or multiplayer maps so that campaigns don't reach the highest epoch and tech level after only a couple of skirmishes. Players will be allowed to keep the technology researched in each skirmish of the campaign to carry over into skirmishes in the future. As with other Empire Earth games, players have to increase their technological power in order to move on to the next Epoch, which opens up a whole new array of technologies. Also persistent across the global campaign are skirmish and global tech trees. There are some obvious balance challenges with this so we'll have to see how it all plays once we have some hands-on time with the game. Instead, they're playing with the idea of allowing players the chance to go into an insta-build version of the map after it's been conquered to lay down some construction in half the time. All of the buildings constructed in each battle will carry over, but Mad Doc is hoping to keep players from loitering on a map without killing an enemy in order to keep the game from dragging on while players build out their bases for the future. In this way, resources work a little more like Dawn of War or Company of Heroes allowing players to focus their energy on combat rather than economic management. A building like a mine will simply come with its own units that will go out and work at the resource site to collect resources automatically. The addition of resource nodes makes peon micromanagement a thing of the past. As with much of the rest of the game, Mad Doc has toned down resource gathering to keep things a little simpler. Likewise, resource buildings will have to be constructed at certain points to gather resources. Unlike EE2, EE3 requires that players construct a town hall on a specific point in each territory. Each skirmish map is divided into even smaller sections which, like Empire Earth II, require control in order to be built on. Each territory on the global map has a corresponding skirmish map. Once that happens, the game will move into real-time mode where they'll need to construct buildings, train units, and attack the enemy. Enemy territories can be attacked by any adjacent armies. Players will be able to see the territories that are controlled by other players or that are neutral. On top of that, there'll be a resource hit for units so the map won't become completely flooded right off the bat. In fact, the guys from Mad Doc have said that they'll likely go one up on that by making sure that invading armies have a larger cap to begin than defending armies so that they can have a chance of success. ![]() The number of units in defensive armies will be capped so that defenses remain reasonable enough that they can be beaten. Players can carry over armies from skirmish to skirmish as well as keep buildings that were constructed in each territory. As you might imagine, armies and territories will be persistent, much in the same way that they were in Relic's Dawn of War - Dark Crusade. Players will fight with AI over the single player campaign across the globe in a war for world domination. In this way, the map works like a 3D version of RISK. The globe is divided into several territories. For one, the game will now incorporate a meta-game which takes place over a globe. There were some very noticeable changes right from the get-go. We had read and heard some about Empire Earth III, but this was the first time we actually saw the game.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |