Age of Empires III - Trial Version
I've been playing with the trial version of the upcoming Age of Empires III and I must say that I'm impressed. I kind of fell off the RTS bandwagon when my friends managed to dominate
me in Age of Empires II, StarCraft, and Warcraft III. The only RTS
games I've ever managed to even come close to holding my own are Total
Annihilation and Warcraft II. Maybe I just need to find some friends
who are not so darn good at RTS games...or go back to the old games and
refuse to play the new ones.
Back to AOE3
though. I really like the way this game has shaped up. I skipped Age of
Mythology so I don't know what improvements to AOE3 are from AOM and
what are unique to AOE3 so I'll just assume that AOM was exactly like
AEO2 and everything is new in AOE3 (It's my blog so I can do that.
Nyah!) I really like the concept of the home city and choosing what
cards (improvements, units, buildings (well, wagons that will build
buildings anyways)) you get to use during the course of a game. There
are a lot of different cards and I think they even vary between
races. Before the game begins you have to choose what 20 cards from
your deck you are going to play with. As your home city grows in levels
you get to choose more cards. Home city levels are gained by playing
the game and getting experience. During the game as you get experience
points you periodically get to play a card from your home city. The
faster you are gaining experience, the more cards you get to play. Very
nice system that has the potential to make playing the same race with
different sets of cards totally different experiences.
The naval aspect of the game has been improved as well. No longer
can you ignore the ships at sea for there is now a mortar ship that can
do heavy damage at great range. I was playing with 3 of them (the max I
could build) and was one shot destroying every building I targeted. The
ships also feel faster and easier to handle. You can also gather food
from the fish in the sea and coin from the whales. Oh yeah, I'd better
mention the resources. There are 3 resources in the game: food, wood
and coin. Of course there are multiple ways to get each one varying
from gathering berries, hunting wild game, raising sheep and cattle,
fishing, or harvesting crops at a mill. That is just food. Oh, you can
also get food from your home city (cards you can play) or from trade
routes. You can build trading posts on certain areas and they become an
infinite source of food, coin, wood, or experience(to get shipments
faster). The economy is large and diverse. The number of buildings and
units is also large and diverse. I'm not even close to knowing them
yet.
There is so much more going on with this game. The graphics are ok,
the 3D didn't seem to get in my way at all, I've forgotten most of the
keyboard shortcuts for playing (they might not be working though this
does seem to be beta since I managed to get units stuck (quite a bit)
and had some obvious graphic problems). There is no tutorial in the
trial (yet) so it took me a while to get back up to speed with what I
was doing. There are 5 levels of AI to play against: sandbox, easy,
moderate, hard, expert. I managed to kick butt on easy and moderate but
hard is proving difficult. It is enough fun that my interest in RTS in
coming alive again (until I play against my friends who will have
played the game once while I've spent hours with it and still just own
my ***(stupid *** filter (since when is the word s.m.u.t no good?))).
I have no idea when this is supposed to ship but judging from the
state of the trial version it shouldn't be too far off. Until then I'll
just keep playing against the computer and enjoying myself. I'm sure
that once this ships (or they come out with a multi player demo) I'll
be fool enough to play against people and have all the life sucked out
of me as I get squashed like an ant under an elephant. Damn you all for
being so good at these things! I think I should go install Total
Annihilation again...