Empires: Dawn of the Modern World

[RedShocktrooper]

Anyone played this old game from 2003? It's this RTS 4x game kind of like Empire Earth, and in fact shares a developer with the first one, Stainless Steel Studios (Mad Doc would handle Empire Earth from its expansion all the way up to Empire Earth III). It didn't seem like it got much love even though both the community it once had and the critics both thought it was pretty good, and I can personally attest that it's aged surprisingly well all things considered, and even have it running on windows 10 with next to no problems.

 

Probably what sets it apart from Empire Earth is it focuses on a smaller number of countries over a smaller span of time. Instead of from the stone age to the future, it covers the medieval age up to World War II, has three campaigns based around Richard the Lionheart, Admiral Yi, and George Patton, but because of the smaller number of nations and the smaller span of time they all feel different from each other.

 

Like, China for instance, they still build houses and stuff, but instead of building a proper stationary barracks and town center, both of these structures can move around like regular units. And they don't build siege factories, their citizens built their field weapons right there. Korea lacks an archer unit, but makes up for it in having the first air unit - a dude on a kite with a bow and arrow. These two countries are only available for the first three eras though, with France (focused mostly on stonewall defense as well as having infantry units who can walk through forests which is way handier than it sounds, also their farms are literally free and they don't need to build houses, while also being able to draft their civilians into whatever the basic infantry unit of the era is) and England (who instead of having to have a commoner build a structure, only need to have him initiate it while the structure builds itself and also having automatically collecting mining camps and food warehouses, which aren't as efficient as normal farms or mining, do free up workers for other tasks. Like logging). Once you get to the last two eras you change over to a different pool of factions which themselves all play differently, with the spam happy Russians who keep using their World War I units during World War II (in fact, the new unit coexists with the old one frequently), the middle of the road Americans who for some reason have no antiaircraft, and the Germans who have expensive but powerful units and even have a second grade of tank. Plus France (who also get invisible vans to act as scouts and have tanks that can just bulldoze their way through everything, even if it kind of doesn't make sense when it's the tiny Renault FT...), and England (Who have a thing for fire).

 

If you skipped that block of text, basically because it's only got five eras and nine nations (four of which are available in the first three eras, five of which are available in the last two, and four of which are technically just continuations of one another [Franks into France and England into the UK]) and means they're more than just the same core group of units with a a few stats tacked on.