City Building and Empire Building

Real-time strategy games have struck such a chord in gamers because they harness two of our most powerful emotional drives: the urge toward war and conquest, and the urge to build elegant and useful structures. Empire Earth will let you fulfill both of those urges. As in other RTS games, you'll use buildings to research new units and powers, but Empire Earth will also create strategic opportunities for the use and placement of buildings that you haven't seen before.

I've always perceived a weakness in the way most real-time strategy games implement buildings. Buildings and bases have merely been a means to the end of churning out military units. Turn-based strategy games, on the other hand, often have elaborate rules to simulate access to supply lines, warehouses, raw materials, construction and fabrication facilities, entertainment and research facilities, and transportation networks.

The high-level design goal for Empire Earth was to find an exciting and fun middle ground between these two extremes. But, how, we wondered, could we introduce the kind of strategic depth of a Sim City into such a fast-paced environment? More importantly, should we even do it? Could we add this level of strategy without sacrificing the fast, fun and exciting game play that gamers have come to expect from the best real-time strategy games?

The answer, we believe, is yes. In fact, it amazed us just how many new strategic levels could be placed into the game's city-building aspects without making the game itself significantly more complicated. In addition, as we began to work out what types of buildings players would be able to use in the game and what their powers would be, the whole game design began to come together in a way that it never had before. Don't forget, one of the most fun experiences we're trying to give players is the feeling they're truly building a civilization to last a half-million years. As we began to brainstorm, design and implement the buildings, we found that each element we put in the game opened up new strategic vistas.

One of the first things we decided was that the location in which a player placed buildings would be of critical importance in developing their strategy. Special buildings will have different powers and effects. Unlike in previous RTS games, players won't be able to just lay down a particular building and forget about it, because many of these buildings' powers are intimately tied to an area of effect. The obvious function of the Temple building, for example, is to train Priest units; however, Temples also provide protection from calamities (Acts of God).

So where do you place your Temple in relation to your units? If you place your Temple out of the way and just use it to produce Priest units, you're hardly getting the most out of the building. Should you place the Temple on the borders of your kingdom near a small outpost? That'll certainly protect your valuable units from conversion. Heaven help you if your opponent unleashes a calamity on the heart of your empire. Without the Temple there to protect your civilization, you might lose many valuable buildings. Of course you could build more than one Temple, but you'll have to weigh the resources needed. Do you really need another Temple or would the four catapults you could build at the same cost be more useful?

You can see why this new kind of base-building excited us as we began to work out its strategic ramifications. Suddenly the placement of your buildings will be as critical as the placement of your troops. We've taken another step forward in the evolution of the real-time strategy game, creating a better balance between conquest and empire building. Yet the system is still simple and does not place a drag on the pace of the game. What's more, since you place buildings with more care, you tend to make more natural, functional-looking cities.

Once we had decided how buildings were going to fit into the strategic landscape we were setting up, we had to get down to the specifics of what buildings we were actually going to place in the game. We did a lot of brainstorming, consulting our Empire Earth Strike Team, our fans on the 'net, history books and many other sources. Some of the buildings were no-brainers - or so you'd think - but with each building we had to balance a lot of things, like the amount of art needed, ease of use for the player and more.

In the end we came up with a small number of non-military buildings that provide important benefits to your civilization's nearby units and buildings. What's more, the tech tree allows you to steadily increase the influence of these buildings on the surrounding civilization. The most important thing, though, is that we feel like we've come up with interesting new buildings that will give players the opportunity to work out levels of strategy undreamed of in earlier RTS games.