Wonders of the World

When was the last time you looked up at some huge man-made structure and really allowed the awe of it to wash over you? Sometimes it's tough in the scramble of modern life to really look at something like Mount Rushmore or the Pyramids at Giza or the Taj Mahal and just really let the wonder of them soak in. Sometimes wonders are so common that we forget how miraculous they truly are. Yet the monumental structures we create speak to us about the spectacular things we can do when we work together.

More than that, though, Wonders say something about the people who create them. They tell stories about a culture's values, what they hope for, what they fear, and what they cherish, and most importantly, they express a desire for immortality. The power of a Wonder is so great that even in times of war, one of the worst things that one culture can do to another is to destroy its cultural heritage by destroying its wonders. The Germans during World War II took special care to avoid bombing English historical sites, and the Greeks still haven't forgiven the Turks for the near-destruction of the Parthenon.

Age of Empires®, of course, had Wonders of the World that players could build, assuming that they had enough gold. These Wonders were expensive, but if you could construct them and defend them against enemy attacks for a certain period of time, you would win the game. This was the beginning of what I feel is an important and unexplored part of strategy games - alternate victory conditions. In Empire Earth we'll be taking this concept several steps further. Not only will Wonders of the World open up alternate paths to victory, but Wonders themselves bestow a variety of powers on the civilization that possesses them.

In fact, a Wonder may impact a player's strategy before it's actually constructed. In Age of Empires what was needed for the construction of a Wonder was gold, gold and more gold. Players will still be able to toggle that option in Empire Earth if they wish, but if a Wonder reflects the society that builds it, a player will have to alter their society to become the kind of place that could produce such an artifact. The Library at Alexandria, for example, was the product of Hellenic society's reverence for the written word and art and architecture. Producing the Library required first a sophisticated, literate class of people that could stock, staff and use such a structure. The culture needed to be both wealthy and peaceful enough to justify the considerable public expense of creating such an organization. The effects, however, were incalculable, spreading literacy and knowledge through a much broader segment of society than ever before.

This, of course, may change during the product's testing, balancing and QA phases, but this is the kind of thing we're going after. We hope Empire Earth will give you the kind of multi-layered strategy that strategy gamers have always clamored for.