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caveat emptor

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 12 / 12
Date: December 06, 2005
Author: Amazon User

The only other RTS games I have played are Age of Mythology and the Titans expansion. I loved them both. The graphics in AOE3 aren't much better. Maybe I don't have them turned on to the best level yet though. I had the best graphics level turned on for AOM + T and had no performance problems.

I really like how you can handicap yourself or your computer opponent. In AOM I could always beat Medium, but I couldn't beat Hard half the time. In this one I can fix things through the handicapping so that I face a computer opponent between the Medium and Hard levels.

The biggest problem with this game is that even though two patches have come out as of 12/5/05 there are still major problems. I'm using version 1.02 of AOE3 at this point and can only play land only maps due to the bugs in the program.

I have three computers that meet the minimum requirements, but the game won't work on two of them. On the third, things freeze if I build a battleship of any type. I have the default graphics set (which don't look as good as those in the ads). I'm worried that if I go to better resolution things will get even worse.

I haven't played online but I have heard nightmares about how messed up the online play is.

This game will probably be very cheap after xmas when many who get it as a gift find out that it won't work on their system.

My recommendation is to buy it from somewhere where you can take it back if it doesn't work. Having the minimum system requirements won't guarantee you anything. People with really nice computers--far in excess of the minimum--are having problems as well.

They should have tested and fixed this thing for six months or more longer than they did. Version 1.02 is still in beta mode.

A solid addition to AOE!

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 12 / 13
Date: February 02, 2006
Author: Amazon User

This third installment into the Age of Empires series is still refined and solid. It has maintained many of the game's staple ideals but has managed to streamline it all into an easier to play ideal. The only weak point is in its obvious similarity to the past AOE games. Little fundamental material has been altered but the new campaigns and amazing graphics make it well worth buying.

The game play is the first thing to be altered. The basic use of the mouse and hotkeys to command men is sill in use. The buildings and such that can be created are also similar but now a plantation can be used to create gold and a factory can slowly bring in any resource. This makes the player less sufficient on natural resources. When resources or items are running low there is a new alternative. Each player has a Home City that can ship the player items that they might need. As the player progresses his Home City becomes able to send more and more items. This progression helps make the random games seem more significant. Other minor differences include using villagers to collect wood and gold without mines or camps. These annoying structures have been eliminated from the game. Stone is also no longer in use.

The graphics are absolutely amazing and redone with astoundingly smooth textures. The scenery appears to be painted in with vivid hues. It is awe inspiring. The second advantage to the new graphics system involves physics. The physics are real time and actually cause men and objects to fall and roll when acted upon. It's totally awesome to shoot a cannon at a building, miss and take out a nearby tree. The naval elements of the game have also been smoothed over. Ships are highly detailed and battles appear more fluent. The visuals are perhaps the games strongest point.

The only true complaint I have about the new edition is simple. It feels a lot like the old version. Some wonderful elements have been added but the basic idea is still the same. The lack of variation was a little disappointing to me.

Some extras are also included in the game. There is a new map editor which allows a person to construct a map and enemy to their wishes. The online play is outstanding and never seems to get old.

This balance of strategy and action never seem to get old. If you're a hardened fan I doubt you'll be able to resist and if you're a newcomer to the series this is a great place to start.

Very Disappointed

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 18 / 24
Date: December 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I love the Age of Empire series, so when I saw Age of Empires III, I bought it. British and French soldiers in the Great Lakes... cool. Big mistake.

I have a desktop machine that's less than a year old, a Dell Dimension 3000 running at 3GHz with 512MB of RAM, and Intel graphics controller, Sound Blaster Live, etc. blah blah blah. So I assumed that would be plenty of machine. It should be. It's a good desktop machine, and that should be enough. Well apparently that's not enough.

When you get more than a few soldiers, ships, and enemy soldiers, it grinds to a halt. A click takes 5 or ten seconds to be noticed and responded to, and by then in the heat of battle, you need to click someplace else. When you finally get an army big enough to do anything, the game is unusable.

And the graphics really aren't better, they're just different. Microsoft seems to have lost touch with who plays this game. If I wanted to buy a bunch of hardware just to play a game, I wouldn't do it with a PC. I'd get a game device. Maybe that's what they want. Maybe this was developed for a game system and just ported without considering what most PC users have.

I'm very disappointed in Age of Empires III.

Splendid graphics, but...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 10 / 10
Date: November 09, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Ok, I'll start with the graphics. I have high end PC (AMD 64-bit 3500+, Radeon X800XT 256mb, S-ATA Western Digital, 2 GB RAM) and there were no troubles with running the game at highest settings. The game is really beautiful - there are flying birds, crocodiles, the terrain is funny when you zoom on it. But for me this is the only good thing in the game. For example, why the **** you need that animated traveling steam engine? It does not change anything in the game. Only increases the lag in the game... You have many nations to choose from, but the final result is the same upgrades, almost the same units. I and one mate of me played the game over the LAN. He was with the Russians, me with the English guys. Practically, the only difference was that the Russians speak in Russian... I don't think that having the home town is big advantage. About the maps - I did not find random generated maps, which for me is big issue. I want to play every time on different maps. This gives me much more fun than to play on a map that I already know. And finally, when I wanted to uninstall the game it took me a lot of time just waiting to initialize uninstalling process. The whole process took about 3 minutes! In general the game lost the feeling of its predecessors. I don't feel it like AoE II. BTW, the same is with the EA II. For me much better are AoE II and the first EA. So, I'm going to sell my copy of AoE III and keep playing Empires Dawn of the Modern World.

Not really better than previous versions... (single player)

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 16 / 21
Date: October 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

There were two main issues I had with this game:

1. Story - Wow, the storyline was pretty boring from start to finish. And when will software developers learn they don't have to write bad exposition for the characters? The whole story revolves around three generations of a family that are trying to keep the water of the fountain of youth from a secret society. It could have been interesting if it would have delved deeper into the things it overlooked... like the actual journey to the fountain rather than just popping around the map between "scenes". Or, it could have delved deeper into shipping. Or a little more into railroads. Or trading. Or alliances. All of these things were part of the story, but they just basically made them useless in pretty much every sense.

2. Game design - some of the stuff from #1 are also here. There were so many things that made absolutely no sense in this game.
- I didn't understand the point of unlocking and decorating buildings in the home city. That was a totally useless feature. - The "game cards" feature offered some interesting things, but a lot of times the speed of gameplay was so fast that they were useless.
- As I mentioned in #1, navy, trading, scouting, railroads, alliances, etc really were superfluous in the game. They offered nothing.
- The settlers stand idle around, and you can't set them up to return to tasks they left.
- There are few commands for soldiers. You can't SAVE and return to soldier selections... a HUGE problem. I basically have to scour the map looking for soldiers... which really sucks.

I really think this game is a bust. You can find better games that came out 3 or 4 years ago that were more solid, and better thought out than this game. I realize a lot of hard work goes into designing games, but this would have been better developed for 8-10 year old kids who don't mind a terrible story and cheesy dialogue. I played and completed the whole 3-part scenario in 1 day waiting for something to happen and it simply never did.

2.4 stars.

AOE III-a let down

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 11 / 12
Date: April 06, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I have been an AOE fan since the early days. AOE II is one of my all time favorite games and I still play it frequently nearly seven years later. I only played Age of Mythology(AOM) once and I didn't like the game play. When I got AOE III for Christmas I was very excited to have another great game that would provide years of fun. I came to realize that AOE III was an AOM clone. I tried to play it in hopes that once I go through it more I would enjoy it more. Well that didn't happen, I finished the firt campaign and half of the second before I said this is dumb and put the game away. The economy is hard to manage, the fighting is so-so. The troops are not as easy to command. The home cities are kinda cool but I don't think they save the game. I was not that impressed with the graphics either, just didn't do it for me. Other RTS that I have played are as follows. I got Dawn of War right after this and have had a lot of fun with that. StarCraft and AOE II are also greatclassics. AOE III is a let down and a waste of money.

The greatest series of RTS games ever

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 14 / 18
Date: October 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I've been playing the Age of Empires series since it was released in 1997. Read my review of AOE2 Gold Edition for my thoughts on that game. To summarize, I am so pleased with AOE2 that AOE3 has an almost impossible level of satisfaction to beat..

This review will cover single player skirmishes (I haven't yet had a chance to do campaigns) and I will compare the game with some competing titles at the end. I will update this review in a couple months after I have more experience with the game.

(I own the AOE3 collectors edition; I highly recommend this if you are a fan - it has a poster, a really nice art book, DVD, music CD, and a dumbed-down strategy guide.)

My computer hardware is as follows: P4 2.5 Ghz, 512 Ram, 256 MB ATI Radeon 9200 video card....pretty much a standard system

Graphics - The game runs fine on my hardware. The graphics look really good although quick scrolling is a little choppy. I think the hardware requirements are vastly overstated as the game plays equally as well on my laptop with an integrated video card that is not supported by the game.

Player interface - If you've played Age of Mythology, the screen setup will look very familiar. Instead of a 2-D interace like AOE2, AOE3 uses a simulated 3-D display. Much to my dismay, the game does not allow the player to pick a map size. I like to play on very large maps but with AOE3 the map size is set to standard. That means there is not much room to search for the three resources - food, wood, and silver. (No stone in this version) The zoom on the screen looks very close, there is a setting in the Options to make the view further away which helps, yet it is still too close for my liking. My two biggest gripes about the game are the map size and zoom.

Gameplay - The addition of the home city adds another dimension to the game. With a home city the colony can request and send shipments. This can help you out by requesting food and people at the beginning of the game, giving you in turn a leg up on competitors. There is also opportunity to build alliances with the Native Americans. This alliance might prove to change the outcome of the game.

Units - buildings look very nice in AOE3. There are pretty much the same building available as in AOE2. One of the big changes is gunpowder units avaiable at the beginning. In AOE2, it required Imperial age research to get to that level. It looks like the game can be played with calvary, archers, gunpowder units.

Comparisons -
1. Rise of Nations - I think RON is the true successor to AOE2. I love the interface and gameplay. The only way I'm satisfied playing RON is to set it to have 4 levels and then the gameplay is extremely similar to AOE2 with better graphics.

2. Empire Earth - AOE3 feels very similar to EE. I think EE is an excellent game. It certainly is challenging almost to the point of being overwhelming. It has great graphics and a decent UI as well.

3. Empire Earth 2 - I've only played the trial version; I found it to be a very intense game that required so much thought I was overwhelmed. I'd prefer not to spend 12 hours preparing for battle. I will purchase when the price is less.

After I played my first AOE3 game, I found myself missing the interface of AOE2. AOE2 has a larger screen size and although the graphics aren't nearly as good, the play is satisfying. I'm sure that with time I will grow to appreciate AOE3 for it's innovlations but it's too bad that an exciting release is missing so many small yet important pieces that would dramatically increase my satisfaction with the game.

In summary, I recommend the purchase although I would also pick up a copy of Rise of Nations. Do not throw out AOE2 either as that game will have a place on my computer until an AOE3 patch or update comes out and addresses some serious shortcomings.

Inflated Price on Amazon

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 14 / 18
Date: December 13, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Last week Amazon was selling Age III for $37.99. Today the price have been inflated to $49.99. Best Buy Stores has it on sale for $39.99.

Age of Flop

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 20 / 30
Date: October 26, 2005
Author: Amazon User

A dissapointing letdown. Ensemble spent almost a year building up a huge hype, excitment. Finally when the much awaited sequel was released...it felt like a blow to the knees with a baseball bat (not to mention wallet). Don't spend $50.00 on this mediocre game. Being a fan of the Age of Empires series, and having all three including Age of Mythology this will be my final purchase for the Age series. I won't even consider the next series if one does come out. On the positive side, yes the graphics are visually stunning and the concept of 'home cities' makes for interesting game play. Other than that the game offers little else. As well the graphics are not anywhere as near the quality advertised with their screenshots. I have a 3.5 Ghz Intel, 1Gig of DDRAM, and a costly 256Mg DDR Nvidia Video card all with XP Pro, and the game still plays like a huge dissapointment..... Adios Ensemble.

Fun if you can get by its many faults

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 10 / 11
Date: December 17, 2005
Author: Amazon User

High points: Great graphics (if you're having trouble with the frame rate, turn down shader settings), wicked cool physics engine, mostly good unit balance (besides artillery), RPG-like home city element well implemented, great sound, awesome looking naval battles

Low points: Campaign isn't particularly fun, artillery is insanely overpowered, poor nation balance, terrible AI, towers are too expensive and are not powerful enough, teching is extremely expensive past age 3 and is not practical, maps lack size and adventure, some unit interface issues, bugs that really hinder the game (such as attack-move, which they apparently removed completely with the most recent patch), no custom scenarios.

Overall this is a pretty fun game if you can look past the many negative points, but only if you can. I strongly recommend playing a demo first.

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