Iron_Chef
First Post
Played Age of Empires III and it's pretty much the same old thing as before only not as cool as Age of Mythology. New features include heroes with special abilities and can gain XP to get bonus goodies/troops sent to your colony from your "home city" in Europe. You get to choose between two different upgrade bonuses (disguised as portraits of politicians but these have no meaning beyond looking pretty) each time you enter a new age, just like Rise of Nations. There are some changes to the trade routes (you can decide for the routes to bring you coin, wood, food or XP). And you can build trading posts to ally with native tribes if you feel the urge to build an army of blowgunners or medicine men...
The story is so lame and inappropriate to the historical setting. A secret international society (Illuminati) are trying to obtain the Fountain of Youth in Florida and the Knights of Malta seek to oppose them... *sigh* No cool politics or diplomacy. No way to alter the path of the storyline. And your hero is dull as a bag of bricks, despite his Scottish accent. You hook up with a sexy dual pistol wielding lady pirate and some other dumb allies to save the day. That's the single player campaign.
Now for the problems with the rest of it: You can't click on one button on the interface to find your idle villagers (they are dumb as dirt and just stand around if you're not careful). You can't garrison units in towers. You can only upgrade one tower from its basic attack.
Whenever I get into naval combat, the game drags to a pixel by pixel crawl that drives me crazy. The rest of the game runs fine, but the naval combat animations kill playability (one battle takes 10 minutes between 3-4 ships). That must be my laptop, rather than the game, but I see no reason to upgrade just to play it.
In short, if you loved the previous Age of Empires or Age of Mythology, this is almost exactly the same RTS game as before... only not as good. YMMV. Personally, I wanted more radical changes to the RTS format to keep it fresh. AoE III feels like half-measures that do nothing to advance the genre. As far as I'm concerned, RTS is now officially dead to me, barring a major pushing of the envelope.
The story is so lame and inappropriate to the historical setting. A secret international society (Illuminati) are trying to obtain the Fountain of Youth in Florida and the Knights of Malta seek to oppose them... *sigh* No cool politics or diplomacy. No way to alter the path of the storyline. And your hero is dull as a bag of bricks, despite his Scottish accent. You hook up with a sexy dual pistol wielding lady pirate and some other dumb allies to save the day. That's the single player campaign.
Now for the problems with the rest of it: You can't click on one button on the interface to find your idle villagers (they are dumb as dirt and just stand around if you're not careful). You can't garrison units in towers. You can only upgrade one tower from its basic attack.
Whenever I get into naval combat, the game drags to a pixel by pixel crawl that drives me crazy. The rest of the game runs fine, but the naval combat animations kill playability (one battle takes 10 minutes between 3-4 ships). That must be my laptop, rather than the game, but I see no reason to upgrade just to play it.
In short, if you loved the previous Age of Empires or Age of Mythology, this is almost exactly the same RTS game as before... only not as good. YMMV. Personally, I wanted more radical changes to the RTS format to keep it fresh. AoE III feels like half-measures that do nothing to advance the genre. As far as I'm concerned, RTS is now officially dead to me, barring a major pushing of the envelope.
