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A successful installment in the Age of Empires Saga

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 293 / 322
Date: October 18, 2005
Author: Amazon User

When I sat down with Age of Empires 3 I was hoping for a little more - something new and refreshingly different (ala the Lord of the Rings RTS for example). There is a new feature, the Home City. The rest of Age of Empires 3 is the same as the previous games at heart, with some new makeup and some new units. Don't get me wrong, this new Age of Empires installment is fun and just as addictive as its predecessors, but also feels tired at the same time. If you still enjoy the previous Age of Empires games, you will likely enjoy this one equally.

It has been some time since I played the previous Age of Empires 2 but I remembered a simple, relatively clean interface. In Age of Empires 3 I was a little taken aback by the clutter of information, and juggling Home City shipments (and Deck Building) with what was happening on screen requires a lot of micro-management.

This new installment has some great civilizations and in this regard, the units are new and refreshing. In an Age of exploration and the shift from archeic weapons to gunpowder, you have a variety of new units, and a few units that are unique to each civilization to help set them apart. In addition each civilization has its own unique advantages (and disadvantages) that set it apart from the rest. This is primarily done via a new feature: the Home City and the shipments you are allowed to send from it. I liked the idea of the Home City, but wasn't overly impressed with some aspects of its implementation.

The new units are fun and consist of both modern (for the period) and archeic units giving you some flexibility in what you want to field - however don't expect their power to be equal. The cannon physics are really well done, you can track cannon balls throughout their flight and watch the havoc they bestow upon enemy buildings (which now fall apart in peices instead of as a whole) or the holes they punch in rows of infantry. The charachter animations on most units are really well done, and occasionally you will see them adjust their weapons for long range of short range combat (they throw burning items at enemy buildings instead of firing their highly ineffective muskets). I beleive that musketeers can also fix bayonets to make them more effective at close range, although I didn't notice a signifigant difference, mine continued to fire their muskets regardless of the range of the enemy.

There is another new feature in Age of Empires 3 in the form of an Explorer. He is a powerful unit you can use to explore the map (although any unit can still do his job). The Explorer can take damage, and fall in battle, but doesn't die. He can be rescued and revived. The Explorer has the special ability to deal with treasure guardians in one shot, but a hardy group of soldiers can also take down the treasure guardians without too much difficulty. The Explorer can retreive treasure found on the map and can also build Trading Posts (settlers can build them as well) - this is how you interact with the Native Americans. Building a Trading Post near a Native American outpost forges an alliance with them and you are then allowed to train Native American warriors which are useful because they don't count against your population limit - but they do have a population limit of their own (15 seems to be the norm). In a bizarre twist, the Native Americans are not hostile to these new invaders unless they are allied with one of your enemy players - intersting.

In summation, I did enjoy trying out Age of Empires 3. My initial impression was that the civilizations and corrosponding diversity in units and Home City shipments helped add some variety to the Age of Empires format, but also meant more added juggling. Even with the new ability to zoom in and out a little, I still found it difficult at times to juggle my units. In combat, my nicely organized ranks merged into one wave of units that were impossible to divide up and thus made tactics difficult. You can assign numbers (via Ctl+#) to a group of units to help this, but I didn't find anyway to assign formations to the units (you could do this in Age of Empires 2). When left idle long enough - seeemed to take a long time - my units did auto-arrange themselves into formation, but didn't maintain that formation during attacks. I wish they would have borrowed a little from another RTS game that allows you to train units in groups that are then treated as one unit. This would have made Cavalry and Infantry units that much easier to manage, especially in large numbers. In addition, in that same RTS game you can assign different unit types to merge together and form a new formation of units that is again treated as one unit. This greatly simplifies training units and then moving them about the map and maintaining formations for attacks.

I do look forward to spending a lot more time with Age of Empires 3 as I'm sure there is a lot that I haven't noted in my initial observations. I think the game is true to its heritage and I think that Age of Empires fans will flock to this new installment. However, I don't think that Age of Empires 3 delivers enough new variety in either design or implementation to steal away the fans of other RTS games that are working to reinvent and revitalize the genre.

Age of Fun

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 5 / 29
Date: October 19, 2005
Author: Amazon User

This game was fairly easy to play after a few levels I could hang 10 on it. It was nice gameplay set up and sweet graphics. The home city was a little confusing at first but I got over it. Definetely 4 stars !

The last "Age" game I'll buy.

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 34 / 39
Date: October 20, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Age of Empires III is a game I had waited eagerly to play for several years. Now it's finally here... but not at all what I expected from a Real-Time Strategy in 2005. It is a solid RTS title... it is also about four years behind the learning curve.

The game is stable on my PC (no crashes or lock-ups). The graphics are quite impressive, granted you have the very best equipment on the market. But the gameplay is stale, and I can best describe the tactical combat portion of the game as like... "driving a Winnebago-Camper through twisting snowy mountain roads with a 30ft boat in tow".

SINGLE PLAYER/MULIPLAYER:
This game was meant to be a predominately multiplayer-online RTS, with very small scale military battles, and games lasting around 20-30 mins. Great for the gamers who run, moderate or frequent the games cloistered community fansites, and have honed their economic build sequence for online play... a.k.a. - "spread-sheet gamers" (see EDIT below) . But AOE3 offers much less, in terms of actual gameplay, for the slower paced, deeper-thinking strategy gamer, or more importantly, the average gamer in general. In comparison, the previous "Age" games (Age of Mythology included) satisfied all three types of gamer.

Additionally, the single player campaign is no longer based around great battles or campaigns from history. Instead, much like Age of Mythology, you are put in the shoes of an innocent (and politically correct) by-stander to the campaigns events, who is pulled along against his or her will, through a sting of fictitious events, which occasionally has the fictional main characters crossing paths, or rubbing up against actual history. But for a "Historically Themed" RTS... there really is very little historical relevance to the single-player campaign.

EDIT:
"Spread-sheet" gaming in RTS's is not about knowing, it's about predicting. It is simply a logical subtractive process, by which it is posible to predict your opponents strategic options, provided you have collected the basic conditional variables in the pregame setup. The conditional variables are: map type, civilization and in AOE3, Home City level. Everything else on the "spread-sheet" is hard data which can be included or dismissed from the prediction, based on the known variables.

AOE2 had MANY more civilizations(like twenty with the expansion). AOE3 has a grand-total of only eight civs... 8 ! So while the individual spread-sheet page which outlines each civilizations strategic options, is slightly larger to accomodate the Home-City cards, the number of civs - and thus the total number of spread-sheet pages needed to make predictions, are fewer... by more than HALF!!

Once you know the variables: map being played, and more importantly, your opponents civilization choice and Home-City level, it is possible to quickly dismiss large portions of that civilizations spread-sheet page as "unavailible" or "unviable" strategic options.

Only when facing an opponent with a very high level Home City, does the ability to make "spread-sheet" predictions become at all complicated. This favors the "hardcore" multiplayer gamers who "spread-sheet" the game now, advance quickly in Home City level (opening up more varied, and more powerful Home-City cards)... then, those players can dominate. The "hardcore" players who run/moderate the fansites, and received the game before general release, have already created their spreadsheets and will use them to immediately dominate the online scene, and increase their Home City levels quickly. It will work out somewhat like an online RPG... there will be a small "in" crowd which quickly dominates, then there will be the more casual gamers... pwned... repeatedly.

yipee...

Outside of the graphics(which are just window dressing), the single, major innovation to this game IS the Home-City. AOE3 really was designed for the "hardcore", online multi-player style of gaming. This package does not offer any new dynamic content for the casual gamer, or especially the single-player gamer to enjoy, than the previous "Age" games had already provided.
-END EDIT

ECONOMY vs. COMBAT:
Nothing has changed in the basic Age of Empires formula... make villagers, collect resources, boom your economy, buy upgrades and destroy your enemy with some military. Nothing has changed that is, except the increased focus on the economic aspect of the game. They have added the "Home City" aspect, which, frankly adds little to the games overall enjoyment besides pulling you away from the battle-map for 2-3 seconds, every 3-4 minutes, to pick which small bonus you would like sent from your chosen European power.

The RTS genre is becoming heavily tactics based, and for good reason; the combat action is what keeps the average gamer coming back again and again. AOE3 on the other hand, has gone in the opposite direction... economy... period. Even the Home-City shipments of military units, are essentially an economic/production based function of the gamplay. Memorize your unit and structure build sequences, then hope your opponent (human or AI) can't click the mouse as fast you. Mean-while, the tactical combat portion of this game is unresponsive, lacks truly effective combat controls and is downright frustrating... even with the pre-release patch installed. The previous "Age" games just seemed to deliver tactical combat with much more efficiency and control than AOE3 has... regardless of the rest of the RTS genre.

THE GRAPHICS:
With more than about two dozen military units engaged on-screen, the frame-rate bogs down considerably on my PC --- [ Pentium4 - 7800GTX - 2G RAM... *Doom3 and Far Cry run great at highest settings*... but not AOE3 ]. I can choose to drop the Anti-Aliasing, Vertical Synchronization, and several other in-game graphics options just to get the game to run more smoothly, but then the game really does NOT look good... even by Real-Time Strategy standards. What kind of PC did they have in mind when they designed this game? Alternately... did they optimize the code at all??

THE SAD TRUTH:
The "Home City"... and very good graphics... that's about it. I really expected more from a "Premier" game developer like Ensemble Studios... especially with their "Marquee" title. With the technical and financial resources at Ensembles disposal, and given the 6 year hiatus from the "Empires" series, AOE3 should have been an all-around much better game... and to a much wider range of gameplay styles.

I'm sure it will ring up big numbers in retail this holiday season... but without some significant patching, for optimization and content, in the next two months... my copy will be in the "used" bin by January.

Brutal??...Yes. But it's business, not personal. I spent $50 (plus tax). Just business...

Lackluster, but not without potential

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 148 / 175
Date: October 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I agree with the other reviews citing this as being something of a letdown at first glance.

Edit for graphical update:
I originally found the graphics on this game to be lackluster. My system couldn't run it in remotely full detail and still be playable, so my game didn't look anything like the screenshots. So I did what any good gamer would do: bought a new system. Incredibly, even on a brand new fully speced out Alienware system with AMD 4000+ 64-bit processor, 2 gigs of RAM, and dual video cards (SLI, PCI Express) I *still* couldn't run the game in high resolution, high detail. It looks pretty but it chops when I try to scroll the screen. I think something is just plain broken with this game. Other games run awesome on the new system, but not this game.

Conclusion: you will never, ever play this game with it looking as good as it does on the screenshots. Yes, those are some mighty pretty trees but it's not going to be as pretty when you adjust down to Medium or Low quality textures because no reasonable computer system can have smooth gameplay with high resolution and high texture detail.

By comparison, LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth was quite attractive, even on my older computer. They aimed a bit lower but spent more time making lower settings look attractive and it paid off better in the end. I think the AOE3 team spent too much time perfecting high detail settings that most people can't use and not enough time on low/medium detail that most people will be forced to use.

Anyway, gameplay-wise, one bit of good news is the "home city" concept where you build your "decks". I'll disagree with another reviewer who suggested that AOE3 was designed for "spread sheet gamers" -- gamers who figure out how to win by calculating times and values on a spread sheet ahead of time rather than making tactical decisions on the fly.

Spread sheet gaming worked in AOE2 because you knew who and what you were facing. If you were the Spanish fighting the Goths, you knew exactly what you were up against. You knew every civilization advantage and weakness and could plan your strategy ahead of time accordingly.

In AOE3, this "deck building" concept amounts to a customization feature. When you see I'm the British, you still won't know exactly what to expect. Did I build my deck for lots of early, free troops? Did I build my deck for an early economy? How much effect did I add to my navy? You can't plan your spreadsheet if you don't have all the data, and you'll never know exactly what your enemy has in his deck.

I can also have multiple decks and I don't have to decide which I want to use until my first trip to the home city. Thus if I decide to wait, I can see your rush coming and pick my "counter rush" deck.

So in conclusion, while the gameplay itself is pretty much old-hat, very familiar from AOE2, I have hopes that this deck building system will give the game more longevity. The consistant winners won't be the spreadsheet readers, it will be the people who can quickly adjust their tactics on the fly based on what unpredictible thing the enemy is doing, as a result of this deck building system.

Hopefully, anyway. It's going to take a good bit of online gaming to find out how that really pans out.

Age of Ennui?

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 61 / 68
Date: October 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

Ensemble gave the venerable AOE series a makeover, a tummy tuck, and some clip-on nails. All of which makes it great for a one-nighter, but doesn't leave me wanting to take it home to meet the parents.

Here are some things that I like:

1) There's a catchy Howard Shore-y orchestral soundtrack with lotsa gypsy violin and choral drama.
2) There's some tasty eye candy--including llamas, coffins, fancy new buildings, and cannons that actually make people fall over--textured so ridiculously well that my computer couldn't handle it after I'd built things up a bit in the field and I had to take it down a notch. Best RTS graphics ever, though. That was obviously where most of the work in this project went, and it's undeniably gorgeous.
3) There's a passable (if totally, cartoonishly ridiculous) multi-generational campaign. This really goes more into the "what I didn't like" side of things, but I should mention that I kind of grudgingly enjoyed it at the time.
4) Even after all the hype, I like "Home Cities." They're good for continually helping to cheerfully remind you that you are merely a capitalist tool beholden to soulless imperialist overlords. You've gotta love the nerdly RPG-ness of it all (not that I'm complaining, but since when does an RTS award *experience points*, anyway?), as well as the fact that your hard work moving clumps of poorly-organized troops around in some of the lushest 3D RTS graphics to date is summarily dumped into an account that goes toward purchasing sweetly anachronistic "cards." Plus there's that wonderful experience of having the simultaneous feeling that you're getting something for nothing ("13 musketeers from London? Sure, I'll sign for that!") and that you've somehow "earned" your booty by... well, doing whatever it is you do in this game to earn XP. Kill and break stuff, I guess.
5) Small thing, but I LOVE that the resource gatherers work all day and all night without ever having to physically deliver their goods back to the town center! This moves things along quicker and makes them much easier to manage. So thanks for that.

Some things that I don't like:

1) The campaign. I really do appreciate the attempt to create an entirely new work of interactive "historical" (well, kinda) fiction, but it really didn't seem to have much to do with anything. You have to at least appreciate the attempt, but it was disappointing to have such an otherwise potentially great game marred by this overserious, all-too-easy series of quests. This 3-part story arc would have been fine as some kind of secondary isn't-this-fun campaign, but I was surprised and disappointed when I realized that I'd just finished the solo game over the course of a couple of evenings without doing anything even remotely historical. Sure, I met George Washington and Simon Bolivar and helped build some railroads, but the thrust of the story is mostly taken up with finding the Fountain of Youth and/or stopping various stock villains from doing same. (Yes, even up to the Jacksonian era.)

2) The familiarity. I immediately slipped into this game like a comfortable suit. A comfortable suit that I'd been wearing for 10 YEARS! Isn't there *anything* different we can do with this genre? Sure, the Home Cities are fun, the native alliances can mix things up a bit, and everything's generally more detailed. But nothing really feels much different. By the third title in a series like this, I would expect an experience as different from AOE as Civilization III was from its grandfather. But maybe that's just me.

3) The subject matter. OK, sure, it's impossible to do a historically accurate game set in the colonial era without offending somebody, either by sins of comission OR omission. To take only two examples: We all know that the plantations you have to build to provide a solid economic base for your battles would *never* have been staffed by happy white "settlers," just as we know that establishing "trading posts" with native tribes wasn't quite as easy as sending a single white man over to the nearest village to throw up a handy wooden shack. Of course I wouldn't *want* to play a completely historically accurate game in which "settlers" were cheap, black, and periodically arrived on very uncomfortable ships before being worked to death. (Some parts of our history--slavery, the Trail of Tears, the Starr Report--are best left un-re-enacted.) But... but. I don't know. I guess it's just that this game portrays a wildly different version of American history that I very much wish were closer to the truth. (The closest we get to anything like history in American-Indian relations is when our heroine's elderly native companian observes that he has "learned not to trust American promises," although this is thrown in so obtusely at such an unexpected time that you might miss it if you're not really paying attention.) It might be better to sell this as some kind of counterfactual "allohistory." Really, the most fun you could ever possibly have with this game would be watching Noam Chomsky play it. (Actually, that would probably also be about as much fun as anyone could ever have with Noam Chomsky, doing anything. So it works out.)

4) The interface. It's just not what it should be, which makes the kind of nerdly micromanagement of troops that RTS players live for nearly impossible. Instead of expertly managing formations and putting together killer unit combos the way you can in, say, "Rise of Nations," you pretty much have to form whatever CTRL groups you can and throw everything you've got at the enemy all at once to see what sticks.

What this genre needs is the be-all, end-all, nail-in-the-coffin masterpiece that will conclusively demonstrate the full potential of the "Dune II"/"Command + Conquer" style RTS in such a way that no one will ever want to make one again. (The so-called "Mozart effect" in opera, or the "Beethoven effect" in symphonies--no significant works in those genres were written for a very long time after each composer's death.) AOE3 is entertaining enough (and very nice to look at) but it isn't that game.

No official support for Windows 2000

4 Rating: 4, Useful: 8 / 18
Date: October 21, 2005
Author: Amazon User

If you run Windows 2000, be careful before you buy this game. Windows 2000 is not officially supported, although the game can be run. Web searches give any number of reasons from the developers: extra QA time, supposed DirectX incompatabilities, etc. I have been playing the demo version so far with no problems, but don't like that they insist on only using Windows XP with this game.

For some....great technical problems (i.e., BUGS!@#!)

1 Rating: 1, Useful: 15 / 23
Date: October 23, 2005
Author: Amazon User

WARNING: Bug-ware alert

After paying my $50 for this game, I loaded the three CDs required, rebooted my computer, expecting to play all night long.

Much to my surprise, I'd launch the icon to start the game, and it would give me an error and exit as it got to the main menu - each and every time. I made 12 attempts, still nothing. My computer is a 2005-model HP Pavillion with fast Pentium 4 and 1 GB RAM. Definitely should be able to handle this game.

Being resourceful, I found the technical support site. I wasn't too shocked to find a significant number of people who also had this problem too. And the publisher does NOT have any answers for them -- certainly not when or if it will be fixed. (They already have your money, and aren't giving it back.) I'm still awaiting my answer too! And I'm still out my $50, plus tax and shipping.

WARNING: Buy at your own peril. You won't get a refund. These people need to be held accountable.

Down and dirty...

2 Rating: 2, Useful: 11 / 15
Date: October 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

First off I'm an RTS/Strategy junky. You can keep your first person shooters and sports games as long as you leave me the RTS's. Unfortunately this one stinks. It's a complete step backwards in playability and fun. It does go forward in the graphics department but in the end that doesn't make up for a bad game. The thing that gets under my skin is that they shrunk the game. It seems like you are only able to control half the units compared to AOE 3. It reminds me of Warcraft and how Warcraft 3 just completely messed up that series. I guess I'll just hold me breath and wait for Supreme Commander.....

2 Stars if you play multiplayer games online

3 Rating: 3, Useful: 11 / 14
Date: October 24, 2005
Author: Amazon User

I played AOE2 non-stop for several years. This is yet another video game (PC or console) where playability was sacrificed for detailed graphics. Sure, it's cool to be able to zoom in and see your villager cutting down trees with his saw. But it's not cool when that comes at the expense of game playing and your computer resources. My opinion is that mass market games like AOE should not require users with relatively new computers to go buy additional graphic cards. I wonder how many thousands of copies of this are sold to people that can never use the program.

I long for the day when a gaming company releases a great game for a computer that was bought at least 2 years ago.

Here are my pros and cons as a long time AOE2 user.
Pros:
1. I like the home city concept very much. Not only is it historically accurate but it gives you another way to manage resources when you're stuck waiting and waiting for villagers to harvest their farms and chop wood. The long waiting at the start of these type of games gets old.
2. Certain fighting units are limited such as ships. This is a great advance because it forces your opponent to think strategically.

Cons:
1. Graphics come at the expense of playability. Particularly when you play online games start to get very very slow - even with DSL.
2. Graphics all look alike. In AOE2 you could easily and clearly see different between town center, market, barracks, stable, university, etc. etc. In AOE3 all the buildings look alike and have the same color. I literally have to slow down and sometimes drag my mouse over a building to see what it is. That stinks.
3. Gameplay is slower. Many commands take just a microsecond slower than previous versions. For example, when you click a building and then right click a gathering point. In previous versions, this was done instantaneously. Now, there is a slight lag. (My computer and graphic card are brand-new). In these type of games, you have to be able to react instantly. You can't wait at all or you're dead.

Also, if you play online there are many many bugs to be worked out. People drop out of games unexpectedly. Games don't launch. The game server drops. It's a major pain.

It's unfortunate but this game is a step sideways for AOE. It's been such a long wait for the new version and is more than a bit disappointing.

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!! -

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