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Age of Empires III, Best Game of All Times

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 6 / 8
Date: December 14, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I, as a veteran AOE player, I recognize this game as the best RTS game ever and as my favorite PC game. The game is set during the Colonial Age, following the Middle Ages which were present in AOE 2, and you are the commander of a colony seeking glory for your country in the New World (America).
I have sited many improvements from earlier AOE games which eventually make it another successful AOE Title. Some of its main improvements are:

3D World: Now the scenery is completely 3D, instead of being made of 2D Sprites; beautiful wilderness, gorgeous cities and grand oceans make the main part of these amazing 3D graphics.

Special Effects: Lots of Incredible special effects have been added, making the game really fun; now soldiers will go flying when shot by cannons, buildings will slowly go falling apart and then crash into the ground once destroyed and ships, once destroyed, come apart and sink into the sea. Also, if soldiers shot by a cannon are near a cliff, then they will actually fall from the cliff; the same happens with buildings, since if buildings are near a cliff and are destroyed, they will crumble apart and their pieces will also fall from the cliff.

Personalities: Now, when playing in single player, each computer controlled civilization will have its own leader or personality, these personalities are historical leaders (The French have Napoleon, the British Queen Elizabeth, etc). The cool thing about this is that these personalities can talk to you; in AOE 2, you would only receive typed words when a computer controlled civilization talked to you; now, you received the type message and you actually hear their voice. Also, they talk to you more often; if you destroy their Town Center, they say something ; if they eliminate your army, they brag about it; if you advance of age before them, they will say something against you, and so on. I think this of the more talks from the AI is excellent; before in previous AOE games, when playing in single player, I felt too lonely because AI players would never talk to me or because their taunts were to artificial or were always the same, they never varied; but now all of this has greatly improved Also, I like the addition of an advanced player chat; now apart from taunting and talking to your allies and enemies, you can do lots of other things: You can tell your alley whether to concentrate on economy, military or defenses; you can also tell him whether to train infantry, cavalry or artillery; you can ask for immediate resources or for your alley to send you resources through time and you can order him to send troops at a determined place of the map.

Home Cities: The most significant new feature of Age of Empires 3 most probably is the addition of the Home City Concept. When you start the game, you must create your Home city; you choose its name and the name of its explorer along with the civilization it belongs to. Once it is created, it starts off at level 1 with 0 XP. As you play matches, you gain XP by: Killing enemy units, destroying enemy buildings, gathering treasures, training units, constructing buildings, etc. With all this XP earned your Home City gradually levels up. Since your Home City permits you to ship soldiers, civilians, resources, fort wagons, factory wagons, etc. from Europe to America (Where you play the matches), as you level up you will be able to choose new shipment cards, which permit you to ship more stuff from your Home city. For example, lets say you start with only 3 Shipment cards: one that ships 3 musketeers, another which ships crates of 300 wood and another one which ships 1 Galleon; you win a match and level up; so you choose a new card which ships 2 heavy cannons and add it to your game deck. Then, in your next match, you can apply the cards you had before along with the new card, increasing your odds of winning. With time, you will greatly increase your Home city level, providing you with more powerful shipment cards. Also, when you level up you can choose new customizations, which add new visual stuff for your Home City, such as: New and more people walking, different building styles or building versions, permit you to see comments made by walking people, change the sky appearance, add fisherman and fishing vessels, etc. Whether you win or not a match, you usually level up and have new cards and customizations to choose. The idea of the Home city makes the game better and encourages you continue playing; it combines an RPG (Role Playing Game) with an RTS (Real Time Strategy Game), making the game really cool and really fun. This Home City feature is revolutionizing RTS gaming by implementing this combination.

Other new features include Native Tribes with whom you can form alliances, trade routes which give you free XP and resources; these trade routes can be upgraded so a train passes through them, enabling a faster gain of resources and free XP. Also there are more varied civilizations. In AOE 2, each civilization had only one unique unit (except 2 or so which had 2 unique units, one terrestrial and another naval), now civilizations number of unique units range from 2 to 5 unique units; also the civilizations have got cool unique abilities which differences them more from each other and at the same time maintains in-game balance.

In overall, I think this game is excellent; I highly recommend it to you, whether you have played previous Age of Empires games of other RTS games or whether you are new in the world of RTS gaming. I highly recommend you to play this game; give it a try, and see for yourself...

Buyer Beware -- You'll Need a New Computer And Then Some...

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 10 / 18
Date: January 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

OK, sports fans here's the low down. We live in a neighorhood of boys running from about 7 to 14 with a few outliers on each side. Unfortunatley, they are all into playing video games. So, when one kid got AOE III, they all had to have it. Here is what transpired from a parent's point of view. Now mind you, we live in a pretty affluent area. Everybody has at least one pc and there is almost always one pretty up to date, hot machine in each home. One of my son's friend's dad is an exec with Intel and gets every new technology there is, much of it for free. Despite this, not a single computer in the neighborhood would play AOE III without buying, at a minimum, a new graphics card. We are running a DELL Dimension 4600, Pentium P4 2.66 GHz with 512 MB of RAM. The graphics card is a NVidia GeForce FX5200 and we've got a 75 GB hard drive with tons of space on it. The drivers for the NVidia have all been updated per DELL instructions. We're up to date on MS Direct X using 9.0c. Bottom line: it won't run AOE III. Now according to the AOE III box, our system should be more than enough to run this game -- but it won't. I've spent several hours, includng a couple using DELL help and still can't get AOE III to run.
A neighbor up the street has a four-week old Fry Computer that is loaded. It wouldn't run AOE III and he took it back to Fry's. They had to install an NVidia PX6600 TD in order to run AOE III. That card is priced at $199.99 and Fry's is a discounter for those of you not familiar with them. That is just the price of the card and doesn't include installation.
So, I'm still trying to track down why AOE III won't run on our system. (This is one of those magic Microsoft moments when one is reminded just how fragile Windows is and how difficult it is to both diagnose and fix problems.)
The price of promised super graphics is that the authors of AOE III have not been forthright about just how hot a system one must have to run AOE III.
I'm hoping I've just overlooked something and I'm going to drag one of the Intel guys over here to look at what is going on, but so far AOE III has been a major disappointment. The fact that at least four of us in the neighborhood, with hot computers, that should easily handle the game yet wouldn't should tell you something and it ain't good.

Some technical issues is a understatement!!

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 13
Date: October 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Some technical issues?? - it would be nice if i could even install this game, i have owned and played pc games for many years, im not new to the pc world and this is the first game that will not even install, so i looked at the site for technical support in case there are any known issues, to find that an awful lot of people also cannot install this game, this should not have been a release, but a beta instead!! -

Just not Right

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 8 / 13
Date: July 11, 2006
Author: Amazon User

The First idea you get after staring at those gorgeous graphics, its "Wow this game Rocks!". But after playing it for the first two hours it seems to shallow. So it does each couple of hours into game play. If you are a hardcore fan of the Age of Empires franchise, you will be disappointed.

Lets start with the plot.
In simple terms...It sucks. For a plot, I imagined something involving the American Revolution or even the Civil War. But nah, they decided to make a cheesy about "the Well of Youth" where you have to destroy it with burning explosive ships. Unlike Age of Empires II, units kinda change when you advance era, but in the campaign of this game, when they pretend to be early on the discovery of the Americas, they simply swap them around with non-gunpowder using units from varios other nations/factions. They didn't even bother to change the name and/or the dialogue of those units when being clicked or ordered to move/attack.

Game Depth.
There aren't as many units as there where in Age of Mythology or Even age of Empires II. Boats are still not in the right scale to fit men. Sounds are scarce. Units in cut-scenes look clumpy.

It has however borrowed something from Age of Mythology. In that case fits perfectly in the topic, which is choosing a god to worship right before age advancement. Well, it did not go so well in AOE III now that you have to choose your governor. He will bribe you for example with 5 cows and 10 crossbow men. Unlike giving you thunderstorm and walking dead, god power.

In conclusion:
Other than graphics, this game has nothing revolutionary or even enjoyable.
Big RTS fan? Don't buy it.
Big AOE fan? Buy, to calm your nerves, calm already? Don't Buy it.
Casual Gamer? Buy it if you have a new computer

quite impressive

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: December 29, 2005
Author: Amazon User

i havent gotten addicted to an rts game since starcraft. i found the heros in warcraft 3 to be an annoyance. empire earth put way to much emphasis on unit variation, and a single game could last hours on end. i would play age 2 multiplayer over a lan, and it was way too simplistic. it took me about 2 games before i was able to beat anyone at my school.

when i first played age 3 i didnt like the home city feature, nor did i like the trading posts. but after a few more games, i must say i am very impressed. the ability to deliver shipments from your home city adds a huge amount of variety to the game. the more you play, the more experience you get, which in turns levels up your city. this allows you to unlock different cards, which you put in a deck and use in-game. you can make as many decks as you want, and pick which one to use during a game. i have 4 different decks: a rushing deck for a land map, rushing for a map with water, economic boom land, economic boom water.

while it may sound peculiar and unneccesary, this feature allows many different strategies to be used in a game. many times ive found myself thinking ive won a battle, when my opponent ships in a group of hussars to take down my infantry. the trading post feature also adds some depth. building trading posts give you more experience points to get shipments in faster. you can also use a trading post to ally with the native americans, giving you access to their warriers, be they horse archers, villagers, riflemen, etc.

overall, i found this to be a very entertaining game. it has some great new features which provide many different strategies to use. as for all the bugs and technical problems people on here have mentioned, i havent encountered any. i have an amd athlon 1.15GHz, 1gb ram, radeon 9600+, soundblaser audigy 2zs, which is pretty outdated by todays standards. i have most of the graphics features turned all the way up, and it runs fine. i also ran it with just 512mb ram and it worked fine, as well. if you are a fan of rts games, i highly recommend you try this.

Good follow-up

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 6
Date: June 08, 2006
Author: Amazon User

I am an old veteran of the AOE series, having played both previous titles extensively in single and multiplayer. The thing that distinguishes this series from other RTS franchises (say, C&C and Warcraft) are more or less as follows: Many more factions to pick from, more resource types & micromanagement, and the fact that AOE actually tries to be somewhat historically accurate.

First off, I must admit that I'm a big fan of the fast-paced action type of RTS, a la Red Alert. This is probably one of the reasons I enjoyed AOE 3. I really don't like micromanagement (Terran was my least favorite race in Starcraft) and in previous installments of AOE I often employed trade in the market very heavily, because I just couldn't be bothered to find another dumb stone (or whatever) deposit. AOE 3 goes a long way to reducing the typical micromanagement of the series. For one, there's fewer resources, and you don't have to build gathering structures. Just get some citizens, right click on the stone (or whatever) and they get to it. They also removed the need to carefully place things like farms, since resources don't need manual delivery.

The 'historical' single play campaigns in the previous games were, in my opinion, the biggest draw of the last two titles. Frankly, they were so boring it was a chore to play through them. The objectives were usually something on the order of 'capture 4 relics and move them from point A to point B,' or, when they weren't feeling particularly imaginative, 'kill everything.' AOE 3 pretty much flushes that down the toilet, and the campaign in this game is more or less a fantasy story. But the thing is, it's actually fun, and who plays computer games to learn about history anyway?

A few new features include the ability to build a deck of cards, which allow you to send goods, units, and upgrades from your home city. This is tied into an experience point system. You get experience for practically everything, including just being a warm body, and these allow you to spend the cards in your deck. You can also train up to five infantry or cavalry units of the same type at once, producing them as a squad. Adding more units to a squad in training takes no extra time, so this can in fact save your hide. Additionally, some warships can train infantry and cavalry while near a shore, thus acting as a mobile base. AOE 3 also borrows a Warcraft 3 concept, in that maps are scattered with treasure protected by guardians. Kill the guardians and you can collect the loot. There is also greatly reduced emphasis on defensive structures. Forts are high level cards, so you won't be able to farm stone like mad and have one up 10 minutes into the game. Most defenses and structures are weak, and go down quickly to concentrated attacks- especially by artillery. Thus you are compelled to build a balanced standing army, which I would say is an improvement.

The sounds and graphics are, as one would expect, top-notch. If you have a good machine, the detail gets truly fantastic, especially when artillery and naval units come into play. Unit balance is well done, though admittedly this might be due to the fact that many units are the same for all nations. As with most other RTS games, there is a pronounced paper-rock-scissors setup, although vast numbers of anything will generally get the job done.

What's there to not like about AOE 3? Well, the main problem is the number of races. Especially if you don't count the Native American sub-factions, there are way fewer than in either of the previous games. The factions in this game aren't really more or less distinctive than those in the previous ones, so this isn't a good thing. This is going to be addressed shortly in the upcoming expansion, however, so it's not a permanent problem.

The second issue is the graphics performance. AOE 3 seems to be heavily optimized for nvidia, and heavily un-optimized for ATI graphics cards. I have an ATI setup that runs The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion at 25+ FPS anywhere with max detail, but it sometimes drops into the single-digits in AOE 3 at the same resolution. Granted, this doesn't happen very often (usually in areas with tons of units and many doodads) but it really shouldn't happen at all.

Lastly, if you actually like the micromanagement and quasi-historical campaign of the previous games, AOE 3 will likely turn you off. The battles are more arcade style than what you would see in, say, Rome: Total War- emphasis on impressive visual effects rather than realism.

In my opinion, these changes were generally for the better, and though it does make AOE 3 a bit more 'mainstream' than its predecessors, the game is also a good deal more fun than they were. For one, those that couldn't stand the resource model and villager babysitting of the previous games in the series may want to give this one a try.

Fun but had issues...

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: May 18, 2007
Author: Amazon User

Pros: The RTS gameplay is good and, in general, the game was pretty fun to play here-and-there for a few weeks.

Cons: The game would crash every time I tried to switch back into the Windows environment with it still running (I have 2GB of RAM). The graphics are also nothing special compared to some other games of this vintage.

review Age of empires 3, by SL.

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: March 12, 2007
Author: Amazon User

I have always liked campaigns on strategy games, and the ones I have played on this game have a great story, it will keep you going, even if you are sick of playing, simply because you need to know what is heppaning next.

It is not hard to get into the playmode, but if you never have tried a Age of Empires game I will reconmand that you try the torturial games first, just to see the new things and the extension of this new game.

Really a fun game, great work with the graphic, and the 3D, I really like the water fights, they look so real, like when the canons hit, parts of the other ship get blown off, and make the game feel much more realistic.

How is this game rated 3 stars?

5 Rating: 5, Useful: 4 / 4
Date: December 30, 2006
Author: Amazon User

At the time that I am writing this, the average customer rating for this game is 3 stars. What in the world?

I'm not a gaming geek. However, when I was younger I enjoyed two computer game series the best. And that was Heroes of Might and Magic and Age of Empires.

In order for me to understand the game right now, I went back to the Age of Empires I days. I installed it back in my PC. The Hittites were my favorite, by the way. Played it for a while and it took me back. Took me back to the graphics and the gameplay that I had to deal with. It was still revolutionary back in its heyday. I then continued to play Age 2. Still enjoyable.

And onto this game, what a blast. I love love this game. I've been playing it for over four months now. And it's still exciting to play.

I could go on and unleash the floodgates of how great this game is, but I'll just discuss the shortcomings of the game.

1. Civilization inequality: Ottomans are given a bad beat. They have a special feature of free villagers. But the villager growth rate is painstakingly slow. And the costs of the Mosque take away from the Ottoman special feature.

2. Gold spread and colony economy: Gold mining has always been a staple in Age of Empires I and II. But I dont see colonists mining for gold in the Great Plains map. And there are alot of geographical maps that are known to not have a lot of gold. However, the dependence of plantations for wealth is fairly accurate. It doesnt say anything about the Home Country sending over a shipment of slaves to run those plantations though. (Age of Empires III XPack sidebar: Also it's bittersweet, playing a British colony and winning against the Iroqois or the Cherokee). I think a good way to have bolster an economy is creating tax technologies.

3. The revolution option doesnt come in till the Xpack: ...but at least it does come in. It's not historically accurate until colonists are allowed to revolt.

4. Mis representative screenshots: I dont think you'll have the same screenshots that they display on their websites unless you have the newest and best graphics card and CPU. And I have a fairly good, 5 months old, 100 dollar graphics card, and I'm not getting the same graphics that they are. The graphics are still very good however.

5. Computer ally tributing: There's a small problem that can be patched. There's a command that instructs the computer ally to feed you resources slowly. However, there is no stop command. So when the ally is attacked, there is no way they can recover since they give you all their resources as soon as they harvest it.

6. A better campaign idea: Instead of making a fictional storyline, why not highlight important battles of this time period or take a civilization out for an adventure. Something similar to Age 2. I think the campaign storyline is lacking and not very believable.

Well, it's a short list of flaws. I'm sure I missed a few. If you are reading up to this point, then thanks for reading my rant. If you are considering on buying the game, then play the trial version. Or visit your buddy's house who has the game.

Thanks.

Greatly Disapointed

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 7 / 11
Date: December 31, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Having played all the previous AOE title, I was much waiting this one, however I was greatly disapointed with the game and regret the decision to purchase it greatly... So bad that I am dumping all 5 copies I purchased on ebay before it becomes widely known how crappy it is.
1st. Newly improved graphics... wooo hooo, I do not know why gaming companies think this is the end all, perhaps for 3D shooters, but in rts it more about gameplay, and although nice, nothing revolutionary here.
2nd. If you loved AOEII and how you could feel the balance of the units and that this made sense and you could develop a stradegy around your units? Well kiss that one goodbye, the units attributes barley seem to matter anymore, going by the published properties of units and testing various one attempting to attack a computer oponents settlement, it did not matter what combo you use regardless, it seems very random and the outcome is haphazard and unpredictable. In other words you might as well send all villagers because the actual units no longer make a difference like they used to.
3rd. Promises of greater pop limits were a lie.
4th. Back to graphics, small maps, unclear markings for the edge of a map and expect many freezes or drops to a black screen while the game continues to run, while you try not to re-boot your pc... this has occured on 3 seperate modern systems.

Add that all up and you have a melon, another crappy release of what once was a great series which has not been perverted by the lets make it pretty and screw the gameplay bug that has bitten the game developers world.

for me it's sell the crap and back to AOE II until someone gets it right again, I will also NEVER trust ensemble again as I did so blindy with their promises and hype on this one.

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