Gameplay
Strategic
Earth 2150' consists of a mostly linear series of missions with occasional choices over their order or branching after a win or loss, with mission goals such as such as gathering resources, destroying all enemy forces, or defending a fortified position. A conventional campaign structure for the genre, except the campaign isn't won by completing the missions, but at any point the player has expended 1,000,000 credits (half that for the Lunar Coalition) on building the means to evacuate from their doomed world. Complicating this, credits, representing materials, are also required to construct units, buildings and weapons, and to conduct research.
The hunger for resources is present from the first mission on. Missions have finite resources in the form of minable ore, and the player must decide whether to retain them for use in the mission, or commit them to a transport building that gradually ferries them to the spaceport for evacuation. Regardless of mission objectives all credits, minable and on hand, will be gradually delivered to the spaceport if the player destroys all enemy forces and ends the mission with the means in place.
The spaceport is located at the main base, a separate map that persists through the campaign, can be switched to and from at will, can be used to build structures and units and conduct research, and has a vast air transport that can bring sizable amounts of units and credits to and from the mission. The main base has its own credit count and the player can shuffle credits to and from the spaceport, but any time the spaceport contains 10,000 it launches them into space, where they're considered spent on the evacuation and cannot be retrieved. Units brought to the main base are retained between missions, though total army size is limited by restricting construction of military units to a specific total credit value of all armed units currently on the field. This limit gradually increases from mission to mission. The player may opt to save money by building units at the main base instead of erecting factories at the mission site only to abandon them at the mission's end, but this is risky: the delays in fielding them may see the enemy gather more of the limited amount of resources, or even throw the player out entirely.
The game has a global time limit, although a very generous one. Separately, the terrain is scripted to change at the beginning of some missions: a frigid worldwide winter thaws and plants grow, only to die out as deserts overtake the Earth and bodies of water evaporate. Finally lava flows glow in a landscape of ash and entire oceans are gone from the globe on the mission selection screen. As the temperature rises the effectiveness of the heat-based weapons changes, navies are retired for lack of water to put them in, and the actions available for the Lunar Coalition's weather controller superweapon change.
The stand-alone expansion packs The Moon Project and Lost Souls returned to a conventional structure about winning a series of missions.
Tactical
Units can gain levels.
Factions
United Civilized States: The UCS controls North and South America. They live comfortably, having automated manufacturing, housework, and to a very high degree, all labor and government. The UCS is a demarchy: leaders selected by lottery fill a minimal number of posts for short terms, which has resulted in leaders who do what their AI assistants tell them to do. The chief exception was when a skilled programmer used his position to make changes to said AIs; glitching, the UCS was responsible for occupying the British Isles and starting the war of Earth 2140 that doomed the planet. As President of the United Civilized States, the player's powers extend to pursuing whatever military objective is ordered by the AIs. The all-robotic UCS military favors bipedal mecha on the ground and its air units float with antigravity technology reverse-engineered from a crashed UFO, and its mission briefings and other messages are laconic and emotionless.
UCS units are typically slow and expensive but durable and pack high firepower. For example, they have immediate access to the grenade launcher, a particularly powerful weapon in the particularly limited role of unguided ground strikes reliant on frequent resupply. The UCS gather resources with harvester units, and can do so rapidly if they and processing buildings are deployed in large numbers, but this is costlier and vulnerable to attack. During the campaign the UCS develops the plasma cannon, an extremely powerful energy weapon, stealth ("shadow") generators and flying, albeit slightly slower, harvesters.
Eurasian Dynasty: Essentially a revitalized Mongol Empire based in Russia and Mongolia, the ED has an industrial, Soviet theme. In the war of Earth 2140, they were responsible for the catastrophic nuclear strikes near the North Pole that disrupted the Earth's orbit and sent it spiralling towards the Sun. They use primitive technology such as tanks and helicopters, and have the most powerful navy. ED units are typically individually weak but cheap and able to be produced in large numbers, with their starting unit being the Pamir, a reverse-engineered Abrams with a one-man crew. ED mines prepare resources for retrieval by dedicated transports, successfully combining the LC's weakness of low output with the UCS's weakness of vulnerable unarmed vehicles. During the campaign the ED develops laser cannons, energy weapons which tear through most unshielded units by raising the target's temperature until it explodes, and ion cannons, energy weapons which stun units and leave them vulnerable for capture.
Lunar Corporation: The LC is a faction of matriarchal pacifists who have colonized the Moon. They're descended from a private spaceflight company that combined idealism for space exploration with exorbitant wealth from selling off-planet habitation to the ultra-rich during the march to World War III. They cut themselves off from Earth with the outbreak of the war, and although the population's adjustment to hard labor was very bloody, by the time of the game they've established a harmonious and peaceable society that frankly has no business trying to fight a war.
LC units are typically fast and fragile, and the LC tends towards being mechanically unusual and the odd one out, for good and ill; this is a nation that both possesses technological superiority and fields it in converted civilian vehicles, with weapons derived from mining equipment. The LC treats electricity as a map-wide resource in the style of Command & Conquer : its factories and defensive lines aren't susceptible to losing nearby power plants or transmitters. On the other hand it uses solar power, and must charge batteries every day if it's to have power by night. LC mines double as processing buildings, fully automating resource production. LC buildings don't need a construction unit, they're lowered to any explored location on the map, allowing the LC to place mining operations, fortifications, etc. across impassable mountains or behind enemy lines with little warning, but buildings attacked in the air plummet to their doom. Without constructors the LC forgoes terrain manipulation: they alone cannot tunnel, build bridges, excavate or level out impassable trenches, or erect walls (LC laser fence posts are a poor substitute.) The LC doesn't use a navy as its ground units are all amphibious, hovering on sea as on land, but without bridge building they can only cross water at natural landing points, including any natural choke points. In the campaign the player leads the LC in battle as a UCS veteran sent over in an alien craft, the Fang, in exchange for an alliance. Although losing this one-of-a-kind unit means instant failure, the Fang's weapon is capable of easily decimating any opponent it comes across — that is, until its ammo runs out.
Reception
The PC version received "generally favorable reviews" according to the review aggregation website Metacritic. [4] Brian Wright of GamePro was positive to its gameplay, graphics, soundtrack, and sound effects, but concluded that its complexity makes the game more suitable for hardcore players rather than the casual ones. [18] [a]
In the German market, the game debuted in 22nd place on Media Control's computer game sales rankings for November 1999. [19] It took 25th and 23rd in the first and second halves of December, respectively, [20] before dropping to 27th in January 2000 and 44th in February. [19] The game's sales in the German region had surpassed 60,000 units by May, a performance that publisher Topware Interactive considered acceptable, according to PC Player 's Udo Hoffman. He, however, noted that the game had been overshadowed by competitors Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun and Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings , and remarked that "in retrospect, the date of publication was poorly chosen". David Fioretti of the German retailer PC Fun cited the game's numerous bugs and Topware's reputation as a "cheap brand" as further reasons for its failure to achieve hit status. [19]
The game was a commercial failure in the U.S. [21] [22] CNET Gamecenter 's Mark Asher reported in early September 2000 that the game had sold 23,163 units and earned revenues of $873,855 in the country. He felt that this performance "can't be classified as a hit", [21] and with journalist Tom Chick explaining that it "didn't even hit PC Data's charts". [22]
The game won the award for Best Multiplayer Game at the CNET Gamecenter Computer Game Awards for 2000. [23]
