Age of Empires 3

game is good....worth buying. It has a lot of things that change it from the standard AOE that make it good for Multiplayer. For example, you can only build a "castle" out of a kinda horse cart and you don't get that many. No more castle rushes. You can't build towers anywhere near the enemy base. And trade route is not longer based off of sending your caravans between 2 town centers behind the big bad defence wall of doom. It is now a caravan that roams betweem several "trading posts" that you have to go out and get as well as keep protected.

Looks good and I am definitely going to buy it.

 

Probably buying it.

 

I must say that I've been really impressed with the new graphics system in this AoE game... however, there are a couple of things that make me a little nervous. Certain features that existed in its predecessors have been removed, such as the choice to have towers and wall-types that are meant simply for scouting to be without weaponry; leaving the more defensible stuff for your main bases (this also includes the use of how many towers you could have under yourt control, which appears to have been shortened in this release).

Construction-wise, you don't seem to be able to cancel anything you start building, so you're stuck if you've put something in the wrong place. Also in the demo, if you look closely you see you can place gatehouses over supply routes, yet when you try this in Skirmish Mode they have neglected to make it player-buildable. Maybe it's in the full game, but if not it's just weird.

But the thing that I was pissed off the most about the demo was what you couldn't run it on. I have still one of the best desktop kits that's been out for the last year, yet it could only run the game once before it decided it couldn't ever run it again... yet it works perfectly on a laptop nearly 7 years less advanced! Again, maybe the problem is restricted to the demo, although that in of itself does not leave me with a lot of confidence in Ensemble's latest work, given you apparently need 3GB of free drive space for the full game.

Now, what did I enjoy in this release? Well there's the Research/Reinforcement Decks players can build before continuing a game or starting a new one; it isn't quite the same as the "all technilogies" plan in the past, but its customisation makes up for this. I also like the idea of these treasures the player can pick up, giving you provisions in food or other materials.

There are flaws but they've just barely balanced it our so far with a better engine and more interesting ways of building an army. I guess I'll have to see what the future holds.