Product Description

Age of Empires III will offer gamers the next level of realism, with advanced battle physics and unparalleled visual detail.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #2087 in Video Games
• Brand: Microsoft
• Model: RJX-00016
• Released on: 2007-10-23
• ESRB Rating: Teen
• Platform: Windows XP
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .90 pounds

Features

• Stunning scenes
• Spectacular combat
• New game-play elements

Amazon.com
Age of Empires III: The WarChiefs is the new expansion pack for the best-selling real-time strategy (RTS) title of 2005: Age of Empires III. Both versions, included in the Gold Edition, will engage gamers of all ages and types in epic warfare in the Americas, where they will lead proud, playable native civilizations to expand their empire and fight for control of the Americas.

Features:

• Playable Native American civilizations. Lead one of three proud Native American civilizations, including the Iroquois Confederacy, Sioux Nation and Aztecs, to expand their empires and fight for control of the Americas. Each Native American civilization will have its own unique units, led by the powerful WarChief unit, buildings reflecting each culture’s architectural style, and a distinct approach to its Home City feature.
• Gripping new single-player campaign. Age of Empires: The War Chiefs will introduce a new single-player campaign that continues the saga from Age of Empires III. Play through 15 new missions with a rich story and a cast of characters that interact with real historic figures and events.
• Enhancements to European civilizations. The expansion pack will also provide exciting additions to existing European civilizations, with new Home City content, new units including new mercenaries, and new ways to look at your card deck.
• Extended gameplay. Experience more of everything, including new random maps of unique locations in the Americas not featured in the original Age of Empires III, additional native allies and units, more statistics tracking, and new ways to play.

Customer Reviews

A successful installment in the Age of Empires Saga
When I sat down with Age of Empires 3 I was hoping for a little more - something new and refreshingly different (ala the Lord of the Rings RTS for example). There is a new feature, the Home City. The rest of Age of Empires 3 is the same as the previous games at heart, with some new makeup and some new units. Don't get me wrong, this new Age of Empires installment is fun and just as addictive as its predecessors, but also feels tired at the same time. If you still enjoy the previous Age of Empires games, you will likely enjoy this one equally.

It has been some time since I played the previous Age of Empires 2 but I remembered a simple, relatively clean interface. In Age of Empires 3 I was a little taken aback by the clutter of information, and juggling Home City shipments (and Deck Building) with what was happening on screen requires a lot of micro-management.

This new installment has some great civilizations and in this regard, the units are new and refreshing. In an Age of exploration and the shift from archeic weapons to gunpowder, you have a variety of new units, and a few units that are unique to each civilization to help set them apart. In addition each civilization has its own unique advantages (and disadvantages) that set it apart from the rest. This is primarily done via a new feature: the Home City and the shipments you are allowed to send from it. I liked the idea of the Home City, but wasn't overly impressed with some aspects of its implementation.

The new units are fun and consist of both modern (for the period) and archeic units giving you some flexibility in what you want to field - however don't expect their power to be equal. The cannon physics are really well done, you can track cannon balls throughout their flight and watch the havoc they bestow upon enemy buildings (which now fall apart in peices instead of as a whole) or the holes they punch in rows of infantry. The charachter animations on most units are really well done, and occasionally you will see them adjust their weapons for long range of short range combat (they throw burning items at enemy buildings instead of firing their highly ineffective muskets). I beleive that musketeers can also fix bayonets to make them more effective at close range, although I didn't notice a signifigant difference, mine continued to fire their muskets regardless of the range of the enemy.

There is another new feature in Age of Empires 3 in the form of an Explorer. He is a powerful unit you can use to explore the map (although any unit can still do his job). The Explorer can take damage, and fall in battle, but doesn't die. He can be rescued and revived. The Explorer has the special ability to deal with treasure guardians in one shot, but a hardy group of soldiers can also take down the treasure guardians without too much difficulty. The Explorer can retreive treasure found on the map and can also build Trading Posts (settlers can build them as well) - this is how you interact with the Native Americans. Building a Trading Post near a Native American outpost forges an alliance with them and you are then allowed to train Native American warriors which are useful because they don't count against your population limit - but they do have a population limit of their own (15 seems to be the norm). In a bizarre twist, the Native Americans are not hostile to these new invaders unless they are allied with one of your enemy players - intersting.

In summation, I did enjoy trying out Age of Empires 3. My initial impression was that the civilizations and corrosponding diversity in units and Home City shipments helped add some variety to the Age of Empires format, but also meant more added juggling. Even with the new ability to zoom in and out a little, I still found it difficult at times to juggle my units. In combat, my nicely organized ranks merged into one wave of units that were impossible to divide up and thus made tactics difficult. You can assign numbers (via Ctl+#) to a group of units to help this, but I didn't find anyway to assign formations to the units (you could do this in Age of Empires 2). When left idle long enough - seeemed to take a long time - my units did auto-arrange themselves into formation, but didn't maintain that formation during attacks. I wish they would have borrowed a little from another RTS game that allows you to train units in groups that are then treated as one unit. This would have made Cavalry and Infantry units that much easier to manage, especially in large numbers. In addition, in that same RTS game you can assign different unit types to merge together and form a new formation of units that is again treated as one unit. This greatly simplifies training units and then moving them about the map and maintaining formations for attacks.

I do look forward to spending a lot more time with Age of Empires 3 as I'm sure there is a lot that I haven't noted in my initial observations. I think the game is true to its heritage and I think that Age of Empires fans will flock to this new installment. However, I don't think that Age of Empires 3 delivers enough new variety in either design or implementation to steal away the fans of other RTS games that are working to reinvent and revitalize the genre.

Lackluster, but not without potential
I agree with the other reviews citing this as being something of a letdown at first glance.

Edit for graphical update:
I originally found the graphics on this game to be lackluster. My system couldn't run it in remotely full detail and still be playable, so my game didn't look anything like the screenshots. So I did what any good gamer would do: bought a new system. Incredibly, even on a brand new fully speced out Alienware system with AMD 4000+ 64-bit processor, 2 gigs of RAM, and dual video cards (SLI, PCI Express) I *still* couldn't run the game in high resolution, high detail. It looks pretty but it chops when I try to scroll the screen. I think something is just plain broken with this game. Other games run awesome on the new system, but not this game.

Conclusion: you will never, ever play this game with it looking as good as it does on the screenshots. Yes, those are some mighty pretty trees but it's not going to be as pretty when you adjust down to Medium or Low quality textures because no reasonable computer system can have smooth gameplay with high resolution and high texture detail.

By comparison, LOTR: Battle for Middle Earth was quite attractive, even on my older computer. They aimed a bit lower but spent more time making lower settings look attractive and it paid off better in the end. I think the AOE3 team spent too much time perfecting high detail settings that most people can't use and not enough time on low/medium detail that most people will be forced to use.


Anyway, gameplay-wise, one bit of good news is the "home city" concept where you build your "decks". I'll disagree with another reviewer who suggested that AOE3 was designed for "spread sheet gamers" -- gamers who figure out how to win by calculating times and values on a spread sheet ahead of time rather than making tactical decisions on the fly.

Spread sheet gaming worked in AOE2 because you knew who and what you were facing. If you were the Spanish fighting the Goths, you knew exactly what you were up against. You knew every civilization advantage and weakness and could plan your strategy ahead of time accordingly.

In AOE3, this "deck building" concept amounts to a customization feature. When you see I'm the British, you still won't know exactly what to expect. Did I build my deck for lots of early, free troops? Did I build my deck for an early economy? How much effect did I add to my navy? You can't plan your spreadsheet if you don't have all the data, and you'll never know exactly what your enemy has in his deck.

I can also have multiple decks and I don't have to decide which I want to use until my first trip to the home city. Thus if I decide to wait, I can see your rush coming and pick my "counter rush" deck.


So in conclusion, while the gameplay itself is pretty much old-hat, very familiar from AOE2, I have hopes that this deck building system will give the game more longevity. The consistant winners won't be the spreadsheet readers, it will be the people who can quickly adjust their tactics on the fly based on what unpredictible thing the enemy is doing, as a result of this deck building system.

Hopefully, anyway. It's going to take a good bit of online gaming to find out how that really pans out.

Age of Ennui?
Ensemble gave the venerable AOE series a makeover, a tummy tuck, and some clip-on nails. All of which makes it great for a one-nighter, but doesn't leave me wanting to take it home to meet the parents.

Here are some things that I like:

1) There's a catchy Howard Shore-y orchestral soundtrack with lotsa gypsy violin and choral drama.
2) There's some tasty eye candy--including llamas, coffins, fancy new buildings, and cannons that actually make people fall over--textured so ridiculously well that my computer couldn't handle it after I'd built things up a bit in the field and I had to take it down a notch. Best RTS graphics ever, though. That was obviously where most of the work in this project went, and it's undeniably gorgeous.
3) There's a passable (if totally, cartoonishly ridiculous) multi-generational campaign. This really goes more into the "what I didn't like" side of things, but I should mention that I kind of grudgingly enjoyed it at the time.
4) Even after all the hype, I like "Home Cities." They're good for continually helping to cheerfully remind you that you are merely a capitalist tool beholden to soulless imperialist overlords. You've gotta love the nerdly RPG-ness of it all (not that I'm complaining, but since when does an RTS award *experience points*, anyway?), as well as the fact that your hard work moving clumps of poorly-organized troops around in some of the lushest 3D RTS graphics to date is summarily dumped into an account that goes toward purchasing sweetly anachronistic "cards." Plus there's that wonderful experience of having the simultaneous feeling that you're getting something for nothing ("13 musketeers from London? Sure, I'll sign for that!") and that you've somehow "earned" your booty by... well, doing whatever it is you do in this game to earn XP. Kill and break stuff, I guess.
5) Small thing, but I LOVE that the resource gatherers work all day and all night without ever having to physically deliver their goods back to the town center! This moves things along quicker and makes them much easier to manage. So thanks for that.

Some things that I don't like:

1) The campaign. I really do appreciate the attempt to create an entirely new work of interactive "historical" (well, kinda) fiction, but it really didn't seem to have much to do with anything. You have to at least appreciate the attempt, but it was disappointing to have such an otherwise potentially great game marred by this overserious, all-too-easy series of quests. This 3-part story arc would have been fine as some kind of secondary isn't-this-fun campaign, but I was surprised and disappointed when I realized that I'd just finished the solo game over the course of a couple of evenings without doing anything even remotely historical. Sure, I met George Washington and Simon Bolivar and helped build some railroads, but the thrust of the story is mostly taken up with finding the Fountain of Youth and/or stopping various stock villains from doing same. (Yes, even up to the Jacksonian era.)

2) The familiarity. I immediately slipped into this game like a comfortable suit. A comfortable suit that I'd been wearing for 10 YEARS! Isn't there *anything* different we can do with this genre? Sure, the Home Cities are fun, the native alliances can mix things up a bit, and everything's generally more detailed. But nothing really feels much different. By the third title in a series like this, I would expect an experience as different from AOE as Civilization III was from its grandfather. But maybe that's just me.

3) The subject matter. OK, sure, it's impossible to do a historically accurate game set in the colonial era without offending somebody, either by sins of comission OR omission. To take only two examples: We all know that the plantations you have to build to provide a solid economic base for your battles would *never* have been staffed by happy white "settlers," just as we know that establishing "trading posts" with native tribes wasn't quite as easy as sending a single white man over to the nearest village to throw up a handy wooden shack. Of course I wouldn't *want* to play a completely historically accurate game in which "settlers" were cheap, black, and periodically arrived on very uncomfortable ships before being worked to death. (Some parts of our history--slavery, the Trail of Tears, the Starr Report--are best left un-re-enacted.) But... but. I don't know. I guess it's just that this game portrays a wildly different version of American history that I very much wish were closer to the truth. (The closest we get to anything like history in American-Indian relations is when our heroine's elderly native companian observes that he has "learned not to trust American promises," although this is thrown in so obtusely at such an unexpected time that you might miss it if you're not really paying attention.) It might be better to sell this as some kind of counterfactual "allohistory." Really, the most fun you could ever possibly have with this game would be watching Noam Chomsky play it. (Actually, that would probably also be about as much fun as anyone could ever have with Noam Chomsky, doing anything. So it works out.)

4) The interface. It's just not what it should be, which makes the kind of nerdly micromanagement of troops that RTS players live for nearly impossible. Instead of expertly managing formations and putting together killer unit combos the way you can in, say, "Rise of Nations," you pretty much have to form whatever CTRL groups you can and throw everything you've got at the enemy all at once to see what sticks.

What this genre needs is the be-all, end-all, nail-in-the-coffin masterpiece that will conclusively demonstrate the full potential of the "Dune II"/"Command + Conquer" style RTS in such a way that no one will ever want to make one again. (The so-called "Mozart effect" in opera, or the "Beethoven effect" in symphonies--no significant works in those genres were written for a very long time after each composer's death.) AOE3 is entertaining enough (and very nice to look at) but it isn't that game.