Empire Earth III Interview

In an attempt to revamp their excellent real-time strategy, Empire Earth II, Mad Doc Software (also known for the solid expansion pack Dungeon Siege: Legends of Aranna), are now working hard on a third installment in the EE series. To satisfy our inquisitiveness, we caught up with members of the core team to check out how things are coming along.

Rain. Great. Can things get any worse?

Hovercrafts?

Talking to Matthew Nordhaus, Project Lead at Mad Doc, we discovered many interesting facets about this promising strategy. You can find out more about the game's cool-looking new setting, fresh unit design, enhanced AI, a new-fangled quest system, highly improved engine and more.

ActionTrip: A lot of things appear to have changed in Empire Earth III. Can you describe this new setting and the uncharted worlds that await players?

Matthew Nordhaus: We started with the base of every Empire Earth game: advance through time as you conquer the world. We based our units and technologies on historical fact, but we exaggerated things a great deal more than previous games. The best part of EEIII is that you actually get to conquer the world! The art direction is definitely a departure from the previous EE games, much more exaggerated. This makes the game very easy to play because you can see what types of units you are using: they all have large outlines that make them easy to identify. Overall, I think we had more fun with the game than we did before. Every unit has a historical basis, but we just took the appearance a little further out there. (Except the future units... some of them are just WAAAAAY out there... but you will have to wait and see those).

ActionTrip: What do you feel is the greatest improvement over the previous game (Empire Earth II)?

Matthew Nordhaus: The graphics engine. We added support for normal mapping, ambient occlusion, a brand new particle system, full screen effects and anti-aliasing, much higher texture resolution and more polys, Shader model 3 support and more. Suffice it to say the game looks great. We also focused on keeping the game easy to understand, to learn to play, and to look at (with our gorgeous new graphics engine).

ActionTrip: What are the main differences between the three available factions? How will players be able to create custom civilizations?

Matthew Nordhaus: There are three high-level regions: West, Far East, and Middle East. The west tends to be tech-heavy, the Far East builds lots of disposable units, and the Middle East are hit-and-run raiders. But within those broad categories there are many different ways to play each region. Ranged units, Melee infantry or even cavalry are all available. And yes, you can save off custom civs and use them in multiplayer against your friends or enemies.

ActionTrip: Visually, the game has come a long way since its predecessor. Are you guys using a new engine for this one?

Matthew Nordhaus: Although we started with the EE2 engine, at this point I would guess that just about every line of code in the game has been touched.

ActionTrip: Is there a chance you might switch to DX10 at some point during the development process (we understand you chose to stick with DirectX 9)?

Matthew Nordhaus: At this point, it seems unlikely. We are getting closer to ship date, and DX9 is doing everything we wanted.

ActionTrip: The AI in EE II worked very well. What are your plans for enemy intelligence in EE III?

Matthew Nordhaus: We have added the concept of low-level and high-level strategies to the AI. In most cases, this is to play the game as a human would. A high-level strategy might be Booming, or Teching, or Rushing. Within that goal, there are sub goals, like forward base building, resource defense, or raiding. The AI picks a high-level strategy (like Rushing) and then chooses which of the low-level strats it can use. Obviously, a rusher is going to raid you. But it also might forward build and there's a smaller chance it will use a base defense strategy as well, since it's going to have all its units attacking you.

In general, we ended up with a fairly flexible and very (very) good AI. It still doesn't cheat (unless you tell it to by setting it to Hard difficulty), but even our QA department, who tend to be the best players, are having a hard time beating it sometimes.