Earth 2160 (PC)

This is now handled by the new addition, Virtual Agents, men and women devoted to your cause as long as you keep them supplied with money. Each agent, and you can have up to three, covers a subject – such as Pepper, he’s capable of building up a base for you as long as you keep him stocked with money. You bid for the Agents against the AI and other players in MP – Agents also remember their contract and will likely lower their fees if you’ve been a good employer, so they have the capacity of picking a favourite player and wanting to just work for them.

Agents also have relationships with each other, some hate each other, some like each other and some are downright weird. You’ll see as you progress through the game or play Skirmish or MP modes.

They also opted for a Modular Construction feature for the buildings, so that the amount of space required for a successful base of operations is considerably less. This is a really good feature I feel and makes playing the LC particularly interesting, as you can build a tower with various modules, allowing you to create dedicated buildings or a mixture of different modular segments.

You can add a number of additional parts to a main building, to increase the production output or even provide a landing platform for mining and resource collecting vehicles – this whole system adds an extra tactical level to the game, since you have to be careful what you do add and keep an eye on power levels.

Do you go for a whole stack of production modules, for vehicles, units and so forth…or do you scatter your production across a number of better defended structures – one hit to a full stack of production could lose you more than the building, it could allow your defences to fail and that’s the end of that.

Additional to 2160 there are now various kinds of foot-soldiers and infantry for each faction, the fourth faction, I won’t mention at all but I will say they share a similar nature to a certain race found in Ground Control II and leave it at that, no spoilers here not even a hint – if you want to find out about the fourth faction, you’ll have to get the game.

You will also notice that you can now research more than one subject, if you have more than one research building, so now you can truly set a priority to your tech researching – going more the way of defence or attack. Some parts of the tree are however held in check until you steal, find or buy the correct artefact, again meaning that you can choose to employ force or guile to get what you want.

As stated previously Earth 2160 plays in the traditional way of most RTS games, gather resources, build base, and smite the enemy. You do have an NPC that acts as your central character depending on faction, which is another addition drawn from previous RTS games. There’s the old adage: if it isn’t broke, don’t fix it.