YMMV / Empire Earth

• Awesome Music: The main theme in the first game.
• Creepy Awesome: Grigor II. A super-intelligent, terrifyingly efficent and absolutely ruthless AI and combat robot who leads Russia as the greatest conqueror in history of the world, takes over most part of the Earth in a Curb-Stomp Battle manner, orders genocide of millions without a second thought and has a nice robotic voice. If Molotov had not betrayed him, he would have ruled the world.
• Fridge Brilliance: in the Trojan War scenario, you're told when you go to Cherronesos that "the grotto is sacred to Athena" and she won't tolerate you hurting anything there, which is implemented by Calamities being thrown at you. Particularly, the area has a deer in it, almost certainly a reference to the myth of Iphigenia, which is otherwise omitted from this version of the Trojan War.
• Fridge Logic: Aristotle is seen studying plants used to kill rats and ward off disease. That this later allows him to cast the Malaria and Plague powers is somewhat logical, that he also gets the Earthquake and Volcano powers is not.
• Game-Breaker:
  • The Sniper Rush (investing heavily in expensive snipers early on in a modern age game and using them en masse to instantly kill enemy units in hordes) act like this.
  • Towers are also incredibly powerful and almost unstoppable except for otherwise fragile siege units and massing them can provide an impressive defense.
  • There is no friendly fire in this game. There are, however, nuclear weapons. Say hello to saving your armed forces from direct assault by nuking them, leaving your enemies destroyed and your forces strangely unscathed.
  • Aircraft carriers have a limit on how many aircraft they can produce... but it only applies when the aircraft are onboard. Send them all out, build some more, and it can still carry the old ones, evidently having infinite Hammerspace hulls.
  • Many units from digital to nano age are strong enough to fight alone, but the Paladin Cannon, the Colossus Artillery, the Titan Bomber, the Triton Sub and Furies definitely takes the cake, when there's building to destroy or a large group of enemies:
    • The Paladin Cannon and the Colossus artillery are slow siege weapons, but can attack towers from far away, thanks to their good range of respectively 10 and 14 (which means that an unupgraded laser tower can't hit them). Not only that, but the Colossus artillery can also deal splash damage with its bullets, killing most enemies in the range without a flinch. While the downside of not being able to shoot near the enemies may be difficult, an army of these two units can wreck havoc on an enemy.
    • The Titan bomber, unlike the aforementioned two units, is slightly faster, as well as being vulnerable to fighters and anti-air units/buildings. However, its 3300 attack is powerful enough to destroy a capitol and either deal massive damage or kill heroes as well. Not even the anti-air units are safe from it.
    • And then there's the Triton Sub, a nuclear submarine that can only be researched on the final age. While the unit can't defend itself from frigates or other submarines (as well as Sea King), its range is marvelous. Also, the Triton Sub is a nuclear submarine, which can attack land units and buildings from far away (considering its range of 24), helping transports reach their point of docking, and their rockets deal area of damage.
    • Furies are not to underestimate either. At first they seem a normal melee unit... Until you realize that its signature move is to self-destruct, clearing a group of enemies and damaging buildings that are in the blast area. And if you think that destroying it will prevent that problem, you will be greeted with an explosion that has the same effect as self-destructing. Oh, and the explosion are capable of damaging other furies you have, which can be exploited. The downside of self-destruct is that the furies will never return to field (as well as counting as two units), and that they don't hit air enemies, but requiring only 180 of food and iron makes the unit worthy for sacrifice attacks.
    • Boosting a Paladin Cannon, Colossus Artillery, Titan Bomber, Triton Sub and/or Furies on attack and/or range, and spending civ points on their attack, range and/or building time makes them even more destructive than before, turning them to a nightmare to fight. And if boosted on an editor...
  • Fortresses (not available in the campaign for obvious reasons) allow you to store units inside, which removes them from the population cap and later returned.
  • The first mission of the Roman campaign featuring Caesar lets you recruit a prophet. Unlike other missions where they're available but limited to one or two situational powers, this one has access to 5.
  • Missile bases had no counter whatsoever in the first game, sending unstoppable nukes at any visible enemy at any range, and only available in the editor. The expansion makes them available as a civ power, with the caveat that you now have to pay for the missiles (each of which costs more than a nuclear bomber) and can be countered with a dedicated, relatively cheap land unit. Sea units? Screwed.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • Hitting escape during a cinematic sometimes reveals the entire map afterwards.
  • Building four walllengths next to an enemy wall and building a gate incorporates the wall into your own gate. Destroy the gate, and the enemy now has a hole in his wall.
  • Bombards will sometimes react to map lag by forgetting artillery is supposed to fire slowly, and end up emitting a stream of cannonballs, so fast it looks like time lapse photography, and causing what can only be described as a Kill Sat that follows the unfortunate and soon to be very dead target.
  • Copying the campaigns from the original game into the expansion breaks the game in strange and unexpected ways, such as building a radar center in Ancient Greece, Glass Cannon bamboo towers in WWI, Russia sending Zeros in the 21st century, the AI sending Radio Men (weak attack, but has the ability to summon Marines three times) without ever using their ability or even Roman Senators, or simply by giving you access to civ powers unavailable in the original (mind-control towers, nuclear missiles, cliff-climbing infantry...). However, some missions become Unwinnable as you can no longer build a required unit.
  • As the expansion's satellites are considered planes for targeting purposes, they can be shot down by Partisans.
  • If assigning an unit reduced recharge time on 200% by a trigger, and repeat said trigger, it will attack very fast (going from units firing a large amount of bullets or rockets, to towers firing faster, to units attacking faster). However, most of the troops (most of them being close-range units) won't be able to fire or attack properly, as they have more than a frame of animation to deal an attack.
  • In EE 2, helicopter can be attacked by heavy infantry (machine guns) but not light infantry (mortars). Against a pre-gunpowder enemy, this still holds true: archers can't hit helicopters, but swordsmen and spearmen can.
• Ham and Cheese: Some of the voice acting is strangely enjoyable. The French dubbers were clearly enjoying themselves during every line of the French campaign.
• Harsher in Hindsight: In the first mission of the Russian campaign, the Ukrainian city of Donetsk joins forces with Russian rebels against government forces. This sounds quite less amusing in light of the ongoing Donbas war in real life where Donetsk violently rebelled against and seceded from the Ukrainian government in 2014 after receiving under-the-table support from across the border.
  • Ukraine later backing out of its support of Novaya Russia and seeking Western help also ended up as an unintentional parallel to real-world events: the aforementioned war was kicked off by public unrest in Ukraine at the government's decision to align with Russia rather than the EU, followed by the new government reaching out to NATO for support in an attempt to leave Russia's sphere of influence.
  • The notion of large amounts of Russian forces entering Ukraine was ultimately fulfilled in late February of 2022. Luckily for the Ukrainians, though, Vladimir Putin's forces haven't been nearly as successful as Grigor Stoyanovich's.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Despite the first game having been released in 2001, the Jackal Fighter in the Digital Age is an almost spot-on lookalike of the F-35 Lightning II, which first flew in 2006.
  • On the other hand, the plane's prototype X-35 first flew in 2000, just a few months before the game's release.
• Narm: The voice acting in the first game is wince-inducing.
• Narm Charm: Again, the voice acting, particularly the accents, which will veer into So Bad, It's Good territory often enough for some to actually enjoy it.
• Nightmare Fuel: Gollett (William's jester)'s face is, for all intents and purposes, The Joker's.
• Sequelitis: Kicked in for the third one.
• That One Level:
  • The second scenario in the Russian Campaign in the first game. Very few people were able to beat that without using a trick to create a duplicate of the scenario and activating the ability to cheat in it. In short: you have to destroy two of the three capitols, including the rebel's capitol. However, you're swarmed by enemies, including boats that will trigger as soon you decide to go in an area with docks. And once you destroy one of the three main capitols and have access to cyber factories, you have to deal with cyborgs. The first level, on the other hand, only has one major push against you by the forces in Voronezh after Grigor escapes the city and then you can attack them at your leisure, and the third is an outright Breather Level.
  • The second scenario in the Asian campaign is even worse, as you have to complete a long list of highly failable objectives on a tight resource budget while assailed by unlimited enemy reinforcements. At one point your citizens rebel and to make them stop you have to delete part of your military. Saving a region from economic collapse is hard.
  • The second scenario of the Greek Campaign in the first game, for one simple reason: you don't get any heroes. Almost every scenario of every campaign features a character who is your faction's leader and needs to survive through to the end. Usually, they're specifically Hero units, who are not only much tougher than regular units but also have a Healing Factor to improve their chances of survival, assuming you get them out of danger after losing a battle. Not so in "Warriors from the Sea": you have "Hero" units instead in the form of Pelops and his three sons, who are all just regular units that have been renamed. That means they're much more fragile than other important characters and you basically can't risk using them in any battle for fear that they'll be killed and immediately lose the game for you. By contrast, the first Greek Campaign level has no real threats in it—the city of Troas won't attack your village, and you can avoid any serious confrontation with the Dorians by just completing the final objectives of the level very quickly, making them an Optional Boss—and in the third level the Dorians again won't send a huge force to attack you while the Trojans are on the other side of the Aegean and won't be sending transports to intercept you.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Empire Earth 2 and 3 which, to no surprise, led to the death of the franchise. To elaborate:
  • Empire Earth 2 attempted to introduce a plethora of content and game mechanics (including a gimmicky minicam). While the end result remained at best well-done, it made gameplay more confusing and complicated.
  • Empire Earth 3 meanwhile tried to streamline the gameplay while expanding on the historical scope...only to wind up a significantly dumbed-down mess (such as removing a lot of what worked in previous entries) that pretty much killed the series.
• Tough Act to Follow: The very likely reason why the Empire Earth series died off is that they simply didn't know how to improve upon the success of the first game in a good way. That and the probability of heavy competition or the developers simply not caring enough to get essential feedback from the fans.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In one of the William the Conqueror missions, the battle against Harold Godwinson causes all your units to rush forward into the fray, making micromanaging a nightmare.
  • The AI, even by RTS/4X standards its cheating was infamously bad, which is not a thing one gets to say very often. It was so hated that when Rick Goodman gave an interview saying the AI was the thing he was most proud of, his resignation followed soon after, thankfully the editor lets you disable it. (and it's possible to port random maps to the editor to disable the cheating then back.)
• The Scrappy:
  • Almost every unit until epoch 7 becomes this when you reach epoch 8 or higher, as most of their attacks doesn't deal enough damage to be a threat. Worse still, they have no meaning of defending themself against air units, and their armor bonuses are useless.
    • On a related note, the Archery Range after epoch 7 amd the Stable after epoch 9, for the simple reason that they cannot produce units or be built anymore.
  • The Stinger Soldier is essentially a cheap and worse version of the Flak Halftrack and Skywatcher AA. It doesn't have enough attack to damage properly air units, doesn't have armor against guns, and worst of all, his range is pitiful. Even when upgraded enough, other alternatives outclasses it. What doesn't help, is that the Stinger Soldier is unlocked on epoch 12, where at that point, you'll have fully upgraded Flak Halftracks or Dardo Cruisers. Oh, and unlike those two units, who can be respectively evolved into Skywatchers AA and Sagittarian Cruisers on digital age, Stinger Soldiers doesn't have such luck.
  • Another infantry unit that is outclassed by another unit, is the Trench Mortar (which can be then upgraded to Heavy Mortar). Sure, it has higher health than the Artillery and Colossus Artillery, is cheaper to build, and is also faster... But aside that, its attacks have pitiful blast radius, which doesn't increase when upgraded to Heavy Mortar (in contrast to the Colossus Artillery, which trades armor against guns for an extra point in area of effect), requiring you to purchase the area of effect upgrade. Even worse, they don't have any bonus against infantry, making them useless (unless your unit limit is almost reached).
  • On maps that has no water, Sea King is this. Because there are no submarines to be built, the Sea King and Sea King II becomes a unit that can be used as anti-air fodder or exploration, effectively wasting an unit for mundane purposes.