The third installment of the Empire Earth series leads you again through several different eras of Earth's history, present and future. Beginning in the Ancient World, you move through the middle age and colonial time to the modern days and the future. Each era features different technologies and different units.

But in addition to the normal skirmish fights, you can claim World Domination. Once you've chosen one of the three available factions (Western Regions, Middle Eastern Regions and Far Eastern Regions), you begin the game on the Earth globe, which is divided into several dozen provinces. At the beginning of the game, each province is neutral and is only inhabited by one or more tribes, so you need to either defeat those tribes or form a friendly alliance with them.

Once a province is under your control, you need to assign a role to it. Depending on what role you assign, the province will either produce one of the three available resources or be a place where you can recruit new armies. You can then move those armies around on the map in turn-based mode. But of course you are not alone on the world and the tribes aren't giving up their territory so easily either. So you will need to fight many battles.

Each of those battles are fought on the ground in real-time in normal strategy-skirmish. You build up your base, gather resources, recruit troops and fulfill the goal on the map. These goals range from just destroying all the enemies to convincing a tribe to join your cause with the means of diplomacy. Although the matches are basically played the same way as in their predecessors, there are a few changes. For example, the citizen manager and the Picture-in-Picture display introduced in Empire Earth II have been removed.