Age of Empires III: Complete Collection

Rating

This collection of the basic game and expansions is a good value for Real Time Strategy (RTS) game players. The War Chiefs expansion is ok, campaign short, and not a lot of depth. The Asian Dynasties Expansion is a lot of fun, three campaigns (Japan, India, China), with each nation having their own wonders giving them unique special abilities. The different nations are neat, but not having a United States colonial civilization to choose from in skirmish mode is disappointing, especially after playing the campaign game in War Chiefs. The campaigns are easier to complete and have less depth than Age of Empires II (AoE2). AoE3 campaigns were overall fun, but require much less strategy to win; build one small army to defend your base and when the large army is ready to go, overwhelm the computer.

The graphics have improved, but did experienced significant lag and even game freezing at times due to ship combat on the duo-core Thinkpad, even with all graphic options reduced to minimal levels. Other than naval combat, the game played well. Not sure why the lag occurred.

There are some improvements to the game play where a single large farm can be built and no need to worry about cueing or constantly checking if there is enough wood to re-task the workers to harvest food. The use of a home city for the campaign game is really neat with special cards to provide resources, upgrades, or units. Each nation has unique units and cards. The strategy of the cards is very important, does the player want to have early age villagers to gather resources faster or hold on for the late age military units for the end game battles? This adds depth to the game.

The basic resources are still wood, gold, food, with experience for home city improvement (cards). Experience is gained from killing enemy units, destroying structures, building units, and having a trading post.

The negative about the game is the combat options. The player no longer has the option for unit formations or commands such as defend ground or hold ground. Units will rush off when attacked and baited by the enemy. Worse yet, units will stay in large massed formations when attacking artillery units, to be blown apart. The player can not select skirmish mode or defend unit mode. Your healer will rush off and attack an enemy building or unit.

Another negative is artillery units being too strong to destroy and the targeting of units. Example would be attacking a group of enemy artillery units that are in marching order. Your cavalry can attack the artillery, but somehow, even the big siege gun, will be able to unlimber and fire, killing multiple units even though they are engaged in hand to hand combat against swordsmen and cavalry. Artillery does not cause splash or collateral damage to friendly units too. So if the enemy has their infantry attacking yours in hand to hand combat, their artillery will be able to fire through them and only kill your units, not theirs. This is a frustrating factor.

As we know in history, artillery units, when attacked in hand to hand combat, can not fire, also siege cannons, take a long time to reload and can not if the crews are attacked in hand to hand combat. But in AoE3, the game has super artillery being able to unlimber and fire multiple times, killing your units before being finally subdued while under attack the entire time. The siege cannons take a lot of damage to destroy too. This is a very frustrating experience that detracts from the game.

Given lack of combat formation / options and the lag time experienced in naval combat, AoE2 and Age of Mythology are still the preferred games. The massive battles with large armies between multiple players were a lot fun in AoE2 as each side slugged it out, but for some reason, lacking the same level of intensity and excitement in AoE3.

Unfortunately, Ensemble Studios was closed by Microsoft, which is not a good sign for us computer gamers. If Microsoft closes their only computer game developer, it becomes very clear that their focus is to make money from console games. The loss of Ensemble Studios means that we computer strategy game players will have fewer quality games to purchase and play in the future.

Thank you Ensemble Studios, your games have been fun to play and AoE3 was another enjoyable experience.