Empire Earth II: Gold Edition

I have a soft spot for RTS games that respect your brain, and Empire Earth II sits firmly in that category. Mad Doc Software took the sprawling ambition of the original and rebuilt it with tighter decision loops: the crown system, the territory mechanic, the Citizen Manager, the War Planner overlay. If your idea of a good session involves juggling saltpeter supplies in epoch 7 while queuing up tech-tree research through a university full of garrisoned citizens, this game was built for you. The core loop asks you to manage multiple resource types that change as you advance through history. Early epochs lean on wood, food, stone, and tin. Hit epoch 10 and oil enters the picture; by epoch 13 you are harvesting uranium instead of saltpeter. That resource evolution is one of the smartest things the game does, because it forces you to rethink your economic base every few ages rather than running the same optimised routine from the Stone Age to the Synthetic Age. Epoch advancement itself costs tech points generated by garrisoning citizens in universities and priests in temples, which creates a genuine pull between military investment and research investment. The crown system adds a third layer: be first to master an epoch's military, economic, or imperial path and you collect a crown granting strategic bonuses, but claiming it costs you faster age progression. That trade-off alone has driven dozens of my restarts. The 14 base civilisations (18 with The Art of Supremacy expansion, which is included here) split across Western, Middle Eastern, Far Eastern, and Meso-American groups, each with timed regional powers and unique units. The Greek Hoplite, for instance, is a straight upgrade on standard heavy infantry in ways that matter at epoch 4 but become irrelevant by epoch 11. That epoch-contextual asymmetry is interesting on paper and mostly holds up in skirmish play. Campaigns cover Korea, Germany, and America in the base game, plus Egypt, Russia, and the Masai in the expansion, each spanning multiple historical epochs with a blend of real events and alternate-history scenarios. The scenario editor rounds out the package for anyone who wants to build their own stuff, and the fan community at EE2.eu has maintained an unofficial patch that reached version 1.6 in 2025, restoring fullscreen compatibility on modern Windows and resolving DirectX conflicts. That community patch is effectively mandatory for a smooth experience. The criticisms are real and worth naming plainly. Official multiplayer servers were taken offline years ago, so the internet PvP that defined the game's competitive peak is gone. The unofficial patch restores some online functionality via custom servers, but the population is small. Balance was always looser than tighter contemporaries like Age of Empires III, and mid-game epochs can blur together visually. The AI is capable enough on higher difficulties to keep singleplayer honest, but it will never replicate the pressure of a human opponent who knows the crown system as well as you do. Newcomers should also understand that the game does not hand-hold: the tutorial covers basics, but optimising tech-point generation, reading the territory map, and timing your epoch jumps correctly are skills you build over many sessions, not one. For singleplayer-focused strategy fans who want an RTS with genuine late-game complexity and do not mind that the multiplayer scene is community-maintained rather than official, this Gold Edition is a well-preserved package. Its Metacritic score of 79 undersells how much texture is packed into a full epoch-spanning skirmish. Come in knowing what you are getting: a deep, occasionally rough single-player RTS that rewards the kind of player who reads the tech tree before placing a single building. Diego, Scout Team

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