Age of Empires III: An Evolution in RTS

Skip the campaign but the stay for the skirmishing

Recently, I finished the Age of Empires III single-player campaign and I have played through a few skirmish matches. What follows are my impressions of the game on its own and in comparison with its predecessors, Age of Mythology and Age of Empires 2.

AoEIII does represent, as my title suggests an evolution in the concept of the real-time strategy game. Many reviewers have commented on this; specifically, I choose to use this term because of the implementation of the concept of the "home city." Before I played the game, this wasn't an easy concept to get my head around. Essentially, for single-player skirmish maps and multiplayer scenarios (I don't really have many comments to make specifically about multiplayer because I'm pretty much a 100% offline game-player), the home city and card shipment paradigms create a "meta-game," where the player can create as many different home cities and decks as (s)he desires to apply to whatever scenario may arise (e.g., if you know you are about to fight on a map that is mostly water, you can pick a deck that has a lot of naval improvements and unit shipments). If you're not familiar with these concepts, and you too are scratching your head about now, this is basically how it works: you pick a civilization from the available eight and create a home city; this city has a warehouse which can hold up to twenty "cards"; the cards represent improvements or extra units that can be sent while you are playing a skirmish or multiplayer game as that civilization; each city may also have multiple "decks" of cards for different scenarios (like the water-map example above), and you may designate which deck you are using in a given match when you receive your first shipment; shipments are earned in matches by gaining a certain number of experience points, which accrue from gathering resources, creating units and structures, collecting treasures, and, mainly, engaging in combat. The home city thus allows for some more complex strategies than would be otherwise allowed in the context of standard RTS play. This feature makes the game an evolutionary step forward in the design of RTS games.

Overall gameplay is compelling. Personally, real-time strategy games are my second-favorite kind of computer game, after Bioware/Obsidian-style RPGs, so I probably have a bit of genre bias. Nevertheless, the rush to get more cards and unlock home city customizations (tweaks you can gain through experience points that don't affect gameplay, but make your city more attractive and novel to look at) drives you to keep playing. If you've played any Ensemble RTS games before, and most everyone has, then you know the basic rock-paper-scissors counterpoints to the different unit types and basic gameplay has changed little from the two most recent titles in this line, AoE2 and AoM. The major differences include the following: 1) mills and plantations, buildings that generate food and coin, respectively, which do not have to be reseeded periodically like the farms in AoE2 but rather must be tended by settlers [peasants] like the Greek temples in AoM; 2) a lot more gunpowder weapons, as befits the later time period; and 3) the addition of Explorer units, who are not dissimilar to the heroes from AoE2 but who cannot actually be killed [even when hit points are reduced to zero, the Explorer continues to regenerate health and will spring back to life as soon as the Explorer is surrounded by friendly units] and is the only military unit that can collect "treasures" from the map [the treasures are akin to the artifacts that AoE2 monks could carry or retrieve but once a faction obtains a treasure, it belongs to that faction for the duration of play on that map].

AoEIII's single-player campaign tells the story of the Black family as they move to the New World from Europe, exploring and developing America. Specifically, the narrator (the last playable Black in the campaign, Amelia Black) tells her story and the stories of two of her ancestors, John and Morgan Black. Another Black, Stuart, appears in the second part of the campaign, but only in two missions as a nonplayable character and he is portrayed as something of an effete buffoon. In the middle of the 17th century, Morgan Black, a member of the Order of the Knights of St. John travels from Malta to Cuba to Florida in an effort to stop a mysterious group known as the Circle of Ossus from obtaining water from an area alleged to be the "Fountain of Youth." In the middle of the 18th century, John Black, his grandson, and his Native American companion, Kanyenke are also attempting to stop the Circle as it (this part didn't make much sense to me) attempts to launch an invasion of America using Russian forces. The action then moves into the early part of the 19th century, where Amelia recounts her adventures battling the Circle as it attempts to recover Spanish gold lost in Florida when Morgan defeated them.

The different story arcs are known as Blood, Ice, and Steel, respectively, and this is another mystery. The term "blood" could easily apply to any of the campaign segments, of course, and "steel" appears to be a reference to the significance of railroads in the last campaign, but "ice" only comes into play in the last few missions of the second segment. The names aren't really the only problems with the campaign. First, the campaign doesn't progress gradually to a higher level of difficulty, even within the individual stories. Missions vary widely in the level of difficulty and there appears to be no rhyme or reason in this. Second, the story is not the most coherent or compelling, and specifically, the idea of introducing magic "Fountain of Youth" water into what should have been a historical campaign seems a bit gimmicky, to say the least. Third, the teams or factions that the player controls in the different story arcs actually do not directly match any of the factions available in skirmish or multiplayer modes, which means that the player doesn't get a true feel for how these modes work, which in my mind is the primary purpose of a good single-player campaign. Campaigns should be designed to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of individual factions. Of course, I understand that this is probably linked directly to the design decision to create a campaign more like the story of Arkantos from AoM than the many and varied "hero"-oriented campaigns found in the Age of Kings (AoE2) and Age of Conquerors (AoE2x) games. However, unlike some other reviewers, I strongly disagree with this decision. While I think that strategy worked in AoM, I believe that it worked because the Arkantos campaign allowed the player to spend some time with all three of the available factions and frankly because there were only three factions from which to choose. One of the more enjoyable aspects of AoE2 is the ability to follow a story through one of the numerous campaigns and actually feel like you might accidentally be learning some history, in addition to having fun. This approach could have been adopted in AoEIII; Ensemble evidently chose not to put the effort into developing eight campaigns with eight "hero" figures, but surely it would not have been beyond its ability to do so.

On the whole, it's hard not to recommend AoEIII. Developing one or more home cities with multiple decks to fight against computer-controlled or online opponents is just plain fun. It may not be worth your time, however, to trudge through the campaign mode; you may be better served by reading a few FAQs online and playing skirmish and multiplayer games.

EDIT: (5/14/07) I discovered something rather annoying last week and when I went digging through the Ensemble Studios message boards, I learned that it was an intentional design feature that ES has no intention of changing. Specifically, it is this: if you save a skirmish game or custom scenario, thinking, "Hey, I'll pick this up tomorrow or next weekend," you may be disappointed. While you can load and finish the game, your home city won't get any of the experience points for it. So basically if you want to build your home city or cities through playing offline skirmishes, you have to play the game all the way through or the xps are not recorded. I don't know whether this feature was added to prevent some sort of cheating, but an ES rep stated on the boards how you could work around it by editing your home city file (stored in the game's directory in XML format). It just seems that if people really wanted to cheat so badly, they could just tinker with the files without having played the games to get the appropriate experience.

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