Industrial Deathmatch Strategy

Industrial deathmatch is probably the most straight-forward, fun deathmatch it is possible to play in a game. First of all, here's what your army should consist of: Napoleon (Gotta love the warrior heroes), a balloon or two, a sharpshooter or two, and then in about equal mass numbers, artillery, dragoons, and grenadiers. The balloons and sharpshooters are in there for sight range - very important. Artillery lose a lot of effectiveness if they can't see to the extent of their range.

If it's not custom civ, then pick the French. Otherwise, you should have a nice industrial custom civ planned out. The one I use distributes all 100 points amongst gun infantry, gun cavalry, and artillery. You should distribute your points about equal, but be SURE to get range and damage upgrades for everything, as well as area damage for the artillery. Rate of fire and others are also good. So now that you have your civ, let's begin the battle!

This depends largely on how many citizens the game starts off with. Usually, for deathmatch, it's 20, but not consistently. I'll outline a strategy assuming a 20 start; if the actual game turns out to be less, well, you'll just take a little bit more time.

The big mistake I see people doing is going all out military immediately while ignoring other stuff. Considering you have 15K food, you need to start cranking out a max number of citizens. So make a lot of settlements near good resources and populate them with five citizens. You should get about four to six town centers this way, and as you build each one, have it start pumping out citizens. This way you'll get a big amount of workers really quickly.

Next, it's time to start building. Have workers build six barracks, six siege factories, and six stables. Hot-key them separately by building-type and assign a rally point. Now you want to start pumping out grenadiers, bombard cannons, and dragoons. Spend almost all of your resources in this way. Meanwhile, you should of course upgrade your units: for the grenadiers and dragoons, get 2 range, 2 attack, and 1 health. For the bombard cannons, get 2 range, 2 area damage, and 1 attack. The bombard cannons are now killer - huge range and area of effect. Now you simply need to piece together the rest of your army: those hot air balloons, sharpshooters, and your warrior hero.

You should really have a lot of citizens by now if you're producing them like you're supposed to be. You should have all of the essential resources near your base maxed out with 6 citizens and a town center. Get a farm and collect from the forage patch. Since you start off with so much extra stone and wood, you might as well get some wonders. The really good ones are Coliseum (for obvious reasons), and the Temple of Zeus. Many people overlook the Temple of Zeus, but it heals units by a lot every few seconds. You will certainly win wars of attrition with this in place.

Okay, here's the critical stage you've spent the minutes of game time so far preparing for. You should be at the population limit and have the two essential wonders built. You can start on the Library of Alexandria if you can; otherwise, populate all the spare citizens into the town centers, cancel more citizen production, and max out your population points on your army. Now, assign your army to a hotkey, and put it into the shallow wedge formation. Now this next part is important. Whenever you move your military, always hold down Ctrl before right-clicking on the destination. This is the single most important tactic that most people don't realize. Ctrl+right click is equivalent to the attack-move command from StarCraft and other such games; it is VERY, VERY important. Also, while holding down Ctrl and the right mouse button, move the mouse around. You see you can set the orientation of your army. This isn't as important, but I still do it every time.

Okay, it's time to kill an opponent now. Your huge army of grenadiers, dragoons, and bombard cannons should be ready to roll over any opponent. In truth, the bombard cannons are the main strength; the other stuff is just there to prevent stuff from getting to them. So, as you attack enemies, remember to attack-move all the way through them; your troops will keep advancing into range until they are all dead. Meanwhile your bombard cannons will be killing everything.

There's not much more to it. With this strategy you'll win, guaranteed. I've never lost, not even the time it was three people versus just me.

Here are the few critical aspects you must remember to effectively make this strategy work:

• Pick a civ with range, attack, and area damage for the units we'll be using.
• Make sure to upgrade those stats on the units too; definitely don't go for speed or health, except on the grenadiers and dragoons, where you can get 1 click of health.
• Sight distance! The hot air balloons and/or sharpshooters are essential. If you cannot see farther than the range of your bombard cannons, you're seriously hurting your effectiveness.
• The Temple of Zeus is very powerful in this age. It heals all units very significantly. Get it, definitely.
• Remember, resource production is still very important, even in deathmatch. Your army will be good, but not invincible. You'll need the resources to rebuild. So as you're collecting the iron, gold, wood, and food, you can use it to replace any losses in your army as they are incurred, since you pretty much spend everything in the first place getting the army. Most deathmatchers don't bother with resource collection, so hence they really can only build one army, their first one.
• The attack-move command. If you see the enemy force, tell your battle group to attack-move about a screen behind them. Why? This way, the balloons fly over the enemy army, giving you excellent sight, and your units will never stop while enemy units are around; they will keep advancing to the point behind the enemy army you selected, and by the time they get there, all of the enemy's army is vanquished.

That's about all you should know. Good luck out there with Empire Earth! And if you ever meet me in an online game, Cyde, say hi, and thank me for the strategy =-D

	3/2/2002
	Contributed by:Ben McIlwain As an addendum to the above strategy posting, I'd like to offer some fun, alternative strategies. I've tried playing with all dragoons as opposed a mixture of dragoons of grenadiers, and it works pretty well. The advantage is that dragoons use food and gold and bombard cannons use wood and iron - so you max out expenditure of your resources this way. Another very fun strategy is to go all sharpshooters with a few bombard cannons. The huge advantage of sharpshooters is that the enemy doesn't see them unless they're pretty close to them (about a range of four). But the sharpshooters can have up to range 14 with all the civilization and unit bonuses, so they do a lot of killing undetected. Send your army of sharpshooters out together and they'll simply mow stuff down before it can get to you.