Anyone play Empire Earth on here?

[Nitemare]

For me this has got to be the most flaky game I have ever tried to play


I had a time getting it to play at all(it would freeze and I would have to do a hard shutdown)

I finally get it to play after I have downgraded my video card as well as disable TnL and anti-aliasing, install the lastest activex..but whenever I leave it unattended or a couple of minutes into the game it will freeze again, and I will once again have to do a hard shutdown.

I've tried the game on both windows xp and windows 2000, set the game for stability vs performance and disabled the auto-save..

The game looks sweet and the graffics are nice and all but this is the most finicky and buggy that I have ever seen. Has anybody got this game to work and if so how?

 

[Electric Amish]

My friends and I play it all the time. We have Win 98 and Win 2k systems. Kyro II, Geforce2 GTS, GeForce2 MX, and Matrox G400 video cards.

It ran perfectly from day 1.

Do you have the patch??

amish

 

[SyahM]

no problemo here ... win XP pro, geforce2 mx 32 mb, Duron 945Mhz, Soundblaster Live! value ..

 

[Nitemare]

patch?

I've got a geforce mx card as well..what drivers are you using for the card?

 

[Electric Amish]

It's not my card, I'm not sure what drivers he's using.

There is a patch here.

amish

 

[GasX]

Is the multiplayer over a modem fun?

 

[Fausto]

FWIW- I've got a P3@868, GF2-Pro w/the newest detXP drivers (forget the #) and it runs smooth as glass with all the visual stuff pretty much cranked up. Running Win98SE by the way.

Fausto

 

[flavio]

The game runs great on my laptop with an 8 meg ATI Rage 128. Cool game to hold you over until Age of Mythology comes out.

 

[WhiteWonder]

it runs fine for me, but i don't play it that much

 

[Electric Amish]

<< Is the multiplayer over a modem fun? >>



Never played online, just on our LAN. Yeah, it's pretty fun, but can be long.

amish

 

[UThomas]

Empire Earth sucks. Here is my gripe: Unlimited resources. You can pull that off in a game like Total Annihilation (awesome game) b/c they had uber weapons you could build that were extremely powerful (and unblanced). But in Empire Earth, there are no super weapons; its too balanced. And add to that the fact that the computer cheats and you have unit caps... well, its just no fun. And that would be such and easy thing to change...

Thomas

 

[YBS1]

There was a thread on here not too long ago about this exact thing. I can't remember the specifics, but I know it had something to do with a known Empire Earth problem related to Hercules Game Theater XP sound cards. I saw in your system rigs you had one with the Santa Cruz card, I don't know if it would affect those too but I suspect it's possible, same chip and all. Sorry I can't remember more detail but maybe that will lead you in the right direction.

FYI...I have the Hercules and Empire Earth and the game was flaky as hell here too...I stopped playing it so I don't care.

 

[Electric Amish]

A friend and I both have Turtle Beaches and it runs fine. Never a problem.

amish

 

[GasX]

<< its too balanced >>

I never thought I would see that listed as a complaint against an RTS game....

 

[Double Trouble]

I play regularly with a group of friends.... we've played with 2,3, 4, 6 players with no problems. The machine configurations vary widely, but I've had no problems with it on my laptop (ATI mobility video card with 8 mb, XP home) or with my main desktop system (Tyan Tiger MP dual T-Bird, GF3 Ti200 video card, Santa Cruz sound card etc etc).

I know it's not much help, but it really sounds like there's some other problem on your system not, not the game. Are you able to play any other similar games on it without freezing and crashing? Have you tried moving around cards in the PCI slots to see if you might be having an IRQ problem? Maybe disable the serial ports in the bios (assuming you're not using them of course). Just throwing out some ideas to get ya going!

It really is a great game, very well balanced.

 

[Nitemare]

The specs of my current rig are:

1.2 266 TBird
128 MB PC2100 Crucial cas2
Hercules 3D Prophet Geforce2 MX 32MB
on board sound
No PCI cards
external Zoom v.92 modem
Toshiba DVD/CD player
Maxtor hard drives

I've tried it with both 2000 Pro SP1 and Win XP Pro
I've tried the detonator drivers 23xx, 21xx, 12xx, and the windows drivers 5xx. I've got all the latest patches for the motherboard including the audio one. Downloaded and installed activeX 8.1.

I've tried it with and without the No-CD "patch", so it is not the DVD player...

 

[UThomas]

"I never thought I would see that listed as a complaint against an RTS game...."

I never thought I'd say it. But:

unlimited resources + capped harvesting rate + no dominant units = no fun

Add in cheating AI as well...

Thomas

 

[Cerebus451]

<< unlimited resources + capped harvesting rate + no dominant units = no fun >>


First, had to chime in on "no dominant units". Once you get to WWII and the nukes start flying, there are some dominant units in the game. You can do some work to defend against the nukes, but if you build enough of them you can peel through most any defenses. Also, you do not have a "capped harvesting rate" in the game. If you don't have at least 3 iron mines working for you by the time you get to WW1 you are finished. You mentioned Total Annihilation, which has the same "capped harvesting rate" in that you can only harvest so much from the mines that you have, and the goal of TA was always to secure as many as possible to build as quickly as possible.

As for multiplayer working on a modem, that might not be so grand. I game weekly with some guys from work over the 'net, and we all have cable modems, and the game slows down to a crawl. It might just be my cable modem (I'm the one that always has a snail, and I'm on a different cable provider than the rest), but with a regular modem bandwidth might be an issue. I just switched to DSL and a quick test seems to indicate it was my cable provider.

On another note, this game is stable as hell. We've played dozens of games and have never had a crash, network drop, or anything. Every game has always played through till the end without a hitch. I have a GF3 card and have played under both 98SE and XP without any problems at all, though XP is noticably slower.

 

[flavio]

if your going to try multiplayer defianately use "Tournament mode" . The ages progress almost like AoE.

The computer definately cheats, but all that meanss is that you can't starve them out on resources. You must beat them down.