You can play EE2 very aggressively (which I like) or very defensively
(my wife’s preference) the faster you attack the faster the game will
end or the faster you can beat someone into submission of an alliance, but
no matter how aggressive you are it’s always best to have a fall back
plan…. That fall back plan would be expanding. Taking territories is
vital to survival, the more territories you have the more resources you can
secure. Since a city theme is applied in EE2’s gameplay and you are only
allowed one city per territory, it makes more sense to keep expanding than
to sit in a corner and turtle, (Turtling is walling yourself in and building
tons of defenses), after all, if you only have 3 territories and your enemy
has 6 that’s 2x the tech points your enemy is getting (because you can
only have one university
and one temple per territory). Since the only real way to gather tech points
is to build universities and temples then populate them, turtling (while still
an option) is no longer as potent as it has been in other games. So now I have
my expansions but I’m not getting the resources needed due to lack of
mining locations, what do you do? Well there are certain regional powers, namely
the western regional power of Tribal customs, which raises all your gather
rates by 100% for 60 seconds with a cool down time of 300 seconds. This gives
aggressive players a much needed boost, but not enough to win the game, only
enough to semi-recover from a failed rush or maybe give the extra resources
to top off your army to ensure victory. Regional powers are a huge factor in
EE2, though I didn’t even know how to use them until I did some snooping
around and noticed the button on the interface for it. I wish I had that knowledge
during EE2 university, there would have been some hefty whoopins to hand out
had I known how to use them then!
As I was saying, you need tech points, tech points are needed to research
techs and advance through history; EE2 incorporates all techs into one area
this magical tech tree does the work of old researching methods. No longer
are black smiths needed to research techs to improve your units armor, you
can actually research those techs from the tech tree. This affords EE2 a depth
and customizability that has yet to be seen in an RTS. If you don’t research
a tech before you advance to a higher epoch you will never get to research
that tech again, but if you do research the tech it will be valid for as long
as you have “stuff” that the tech effects… i.e. if you research
tech to help improve bowmen that tech won’t be any good after you reach
the epoch that phases out bowmen.
You can also use temples for tech points, which are nice because on small
maps with few territories you won’t be able to build enough universities
alone to keep pace with your enemies. You also want as many tech points as
you can get as fast as possible so you can research techs and epoch faster.
If you research all the techs in 1 of 3 research lines “Imperial”, “Economic”,
and “Military” you can get these little things called “Crowns”. A
Crown offers you a chance to receive a bonus that you can pick out of many
bonuses related to that Crown. If your economy is running a little slowly and
you are afraid of losing the boom war you can quickly research all the techs
in the economy line and use its respective crown’s rewards to help out
your economy. It’s a brilliant system but could promote “if you
start to win you will win” which is bad. That’s why you are given
3 options for crowns instead of only 1, you can try for the economic crown
or perhaps the imperial crown but it’s not very wise to go for both as
this could slow your advancing and give an upper hand to your enemy. The only
obvious choice is to research your 6 mandatory techs and then advance, if you
want a crown you can go for it, but sometimes you’ll find that you just
need certain techs to help your strategy, and just it slows you down to research
enough techs for a crown. Great balancing was done to ensure a fair game even
though there are so many potential balance problems, Mad Doc obviously did
their homework on this one.
