Introduction

In March 2005. Your's truly, One_Dead_Angel, with TheGoodEvil and Socvazius had the opportunity to attend the Empire Earth 2 University event held by Vivendi Universal Games. It fell to my task to give an account of my impression on the scenario editor and also discuss the moddibility of Empire Earth 2. This is also when I met Mokon for the first time, and he has since joined the staff at Empire Earth 2 Heaven and gotten into Game Modding. At the Empire Earth 2 University event Dr. Ian Davis, head honcho at Mad Doc generously offered an invitation to the modders and designers in the bunch to visit them at their headquarters in Lawrence to talk about Modding, and also answer any additional questions we had about the game. So again at the end of may, me and Mokon went to Mad Doc to get the sort of "post-graduate" lesson on Empire Earth 2's design, after "graduating" from Empire Earth University.

I will be describing in brief the overall features of the scenario editor, and highlight any features and tidbits I was privy to while attending these two events, for which I was lucky enough to get a run through from Mad Doc scenario designer John Cataldo.

Before we start, we all know how much people love eye-candy, especially when it comes to being able add them in their own scenarios. So I'll start this by showing two screen from the tutorials centered around a World War 2 scenario. Did someone ask about barbed-wire? Dragon-tooth Tank obstables? Pillboxes? Take a gander at this!

Did I forget to mention machine gun nests? Excited already?! Holla!

Starting a Map As Phillistine mentioned in his 1st impressions post, when you open the editor. Unlike in EE the editor in EE2 is displayed in the resolution you are current playing in. You can see from the picture on your right, that you get a basic flat looking landscape with some territory markers on top of it. You can start editing this map or generate a seed map by using the File->New menu option. From there you can set various parameters to create a more interesting seed maps to start with. There are three climate types of maps: Temperate, Arid and Tropical.

Unlike some other games, there doesn't seem to be a specific map type for an artic climate terrain. However, from what I can see, the 3 map type settings appears to be for determining the versions of eye candy objects that will appear in the game, such as what type of trees appear in the tree painting tool. Below the "New" option is the "Resize" option. This we will describe later in part 4 when we talk about altering the map in detail.

Seasons

The Season editor/setting would likely be used to turn each climate's terrain to a myriad of landscapes, including snow covered artic scene. This is a different method than using specific terrain types to portray different terrains. There are also more tools available to alter the color and texture of the terrain which we will describe later. So this seems to me a much better way to approach it, as it essentually allows the terrain to look essentually like anything you like without being confined to a limited set of terrain types. You can see how the basic landscape looks like under 4 other seasonal settings from the pictures below:

You may also notice a Time setting in the Season Preview window. This is used to set the lighting in the scenario. Afternoon and Sunset settings will cause the units and buildings to case longer shadows as one would expect. There are 6 time settings: Dawn, Afternoon, Sunset and Night, Spring and Winter. Applying these won't be visible in the editor itself however. You need to actually run the scenario for the lighting effects to be take effect.

File management

The interface is simple and straightforward menus make the whole thing easy and intuitive to navigate. Both Phillistine and I can agree on this point. As you can also see under the File menu, there is also an option to "Test Mission", that should be pretty self-explanatory. The "Open" option is used to load an existing scenario that was provided with the game, or scenario design projects you had been working on. The "Open Map" option is used to load multiplayer maps. The difference is that scenarios are only for single player, but "maps", which we will call Multiplayer maps, can be used in single player skirmish modes and multiplayer as the name implies. Also in multiplayer maps only military buildings and units are placed in the game as you designed them in the scenario editor, while civilians units and the city center are build according to the starting position objects you placed in the editor. Correspondingly there is a "Save" option and a "Save Map" option for saving your scenarios and multiplayer maps.

Importing Elevation Files

There are a couple of other options in the File Menu that are especially interesting. First, you can import elevation data into the map editor like in Empire Earth. The general procedure is to go to the NOAA website at www.ngdc.noaa.gov to download some map data and then use the "Import DEM" option to import that data into the scenario editor. We will describe how to import elevation data in detail in another section on this site.

Auto-Balancer

There is another option "Auto Balance". In some of their developer diaries, they mentioned a tool they used to test the balance of units against other units that they use for in-house testing. This feature will be described later, but it will surely be a valuable expert players to crunch the numbers to find the units that are most effective.