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The game’s core promise is unmatched. You progress through 14 (yes, fourteen) epochs—from the Prehistoric to the Nano Age. Unlike Age of Empires , which feels like a guided tour of history, Empire Earth feels like you are violently elbowing your way through it.

The Tyranny of Scale: Revisiting Empire Earth: Gold Edition , the Strategy Game That Ate History

In the pantheon of real-time strategy games, there are the sprinters ( StarCraft ), the middle-distance runners ( Age of Empires II ), and then there is Empire Earth . To play Empire Earth: Gold Edition (which bundles the 2001 original with its Art of Conquest expansion) is not to play a game. It is to sign a 14-hour contract with insanity, ambition, and the single most audacious scope ever crammed onto a CD-ROM.

The pathfinding is infamous. A unit told to move across a bridge will instead take a three-minute detour through an enemy base, get shot, and then blame you for its incompetence. This leads to the game’s most famous meta-strategy: rushing to the Medieval age, building a single castle, and spamming "Hero" units (which are unkillable demigods) before your opponent has even discovered the wheel.

Let’s get the headline out of the way: Empire Earth is the only RTS where you can start with a caveman throwing a rock at a squirrel and, six hours later, nuke that squirrel’s descendants from orbit with a stealth bomber. It is absurd. It is glorious. It is also, at times, a monument to terrible user interface design.