Empire Earth Gold Edition

Lots of ages from the Prehistoric Age to the Space Age (The Art of Conquest). Has a ton of units, including heroes and prophets with powerful spells. You can create your own civilization with civ points to get some useful bonuses.

This is better than the second and third one. And its in my opinion the only good RTS out there except for maybe Star Craft and warcraft. Or War winds. The expansion pack was the only improvement that ever was good for this game. It was excellent. The only draw back is too many ages I guess but its all good. I spent hours and hours in my teen years playing this online and offline. The AI learns well but you can eventually out do it. This is the best of them. Better than 2 or 3. The sequels never did any good.

This game has some issues. New units you get in later epochs aren't explained at all in game unless there's a readme I missed so you wont know what they are capable of or what they're effective against unless you build one and see what it can do. I still don't know all the units that are good AA AFAIK which becomes a problem as I'll explain later. Its most egregious is its AI. Like many RTS games, the AI literally cheats by knowing where everything you have is. And I mean EVERYTHING. It knows where you have resource sites with no defenses, it knows where your big armor is at all times, it even seems to see where your camera is because having to deal with an AI that's decided to load up on nuclear bombers because they seem to always come in on my army (which the grouping of multiple selected targets is awful and way too spread out. You'll never see a large selected group on one screen) where I don't see them, the mini map is also not great because no matter what your resolution is set to it's displayed as a blocky representation of what's in the map. The problem with AA is that I still don't know what AA is in the last epoch that's not a slow-moving rocket launcher giving nuke bombers more than enough time to drop one on your entire army, and the AI LOADS UP on nuke bombers in endgame. On easy difficulty the AI is entirely unforgiving and doesn't give you much time to develop strategies and test them out before stomping you into the ground with its load of nuke bombers. If you're looking for a casual AI experience or a chance to learn the game on AI, don't get this one. The AI is terrible.

Fantastic game. You can say that the pathfinding is clunky and that the graphics are dated but those screwdriver arrows flying over a hastily-constructed stone wall as enemy cavalry circles around your new stone mine is an image still stuck in my head all these years later. The campaign is fun - and often challenging - and multiplayer with friends is a blast, especially when you start to diversify your troops through a long game. Buy it, get your friends to buy it and then nuke their cavemen with cyber commandos.

There where a few comments on the game which stated that it would not work. It is not true. My machine runs on Win11 and it works just fine even on an RTX GPU. I do not think I need to say anything about this strategical masterpiece.