In place of several distinct civilizations, EE3 also reduces the number of playable sides to three: the “conventional” Western, the mobility-centric Middle Eastern and numbers-heavy Far Eastern factions. Thus, not only does it come off overly simplistic but almost as an afterthought.
Neither do certain details such as Tech Points being used only for “aging up” (without any other prerequisites), as well as the decision to have automatic unit upgrades for some troops and manual ones for others. Whether it’s having biplanes alongside jet bombers in the Modern Epoch, or Medieval bases looking like they wouldn’t be out of place in Warcraft III, the resulting strange mesh of caricatures fails to really do the series’ epic scale any justice. In practice, trying to cram thousands of years of human history into such a small number of eras works about as well as you’d expect. On paper, this would mean that the transition from one period to another (achieved by hiring “scholars” to gather Tech Points) is much more pronounced, making the jump both riskier and more rewarding. So instead of having mere cosmetic and minor changes through the eons, the game opts for consolidating these into Ancient, Medieval, Colonial, Modern and Future.
Previous Empire Earth titles, as reasoned by Nordhaus and Mad Doc Software in the same Gamespot article, were seen as too “overwhelming” and that it was becoming hard to tell one Epoch apart from another, among others. The vast Epochs the game’s predecessors were known for, for instance, have been reduced to a measly five. For in the developers’ efforts to streamline and simplify the franchise, they had somehow mistaken “dumbing down” for “less is more.” Neither would it be beyond the imagination to suggest that this game played a major part in killing off not only the franchise. To say that gamers and critics alike were stunned in the worst way possible isn’t much of an exaggeration.
Thus, Empire Earth 3 was released for PC on November 6, 2007. This did little to stem growing skepticism and doubts among fans, however, especially as the game’s launch drew near. Making everything much more distinct, streamlined and more significantly, simple. Believing that this and its accompanying complexities did more harm to EE2 than good, they instead opted to go for the opposite. According to lead designer Matthew Nordhaus in a 2007 Gamespot feature piece, the developers not only sought to create their own unique vision from the ground up – as he admitted, the project had “very little, if anything, from the original” as conceived by Rick Goodman and Stainless Steel Interactive – but also sought to do away with a “more is more” mentality that they’d been doing until then.
Fresh from the relative success of Empire Earth 2, Mad Doc Software and Sierra hoped to leave its mark on history as well through a sequel to that ambitious series. The latter half of the 2000s in certain respects bore witness to several excellent entries in the real-time strategy genre, even as the proverbial “golden age” was coming to an end.