I finished the AOEIII [Age of Empires 3] campaign yesterday and while it was fun, much funner than slogging through Dungeon Siege II [which I still haven't finished], it's hard not to think that this game could have been a hell of a lot better. It's very much like the previous games in the series, so if you've played the previous games you'll know what you're in for with this one. I found the graphics merely OK, not spectacular like some people have claimed, though that might have something to do with my older Ti 4200 graphics card.

New stuff with this iteration:

• villagers don't have to go back to the town center to drop off their gold, wood or food [which is nice, a welcome development]


• you accumulate experience points that you use to buy upgrades between scenarios and customize your city


• you get to use those upgrades in the form of cards that you can play during the scenario for extra goodies


• hero units with special abilities


• when you move from age to age it opens up new cards you can play plus a bonus for each age


• you can build trading posts with the natives and build native units


• railway stations that help accumulate XP or resources

The main innovation in this game is the home city screen where you get to play your bonus cards. The problem with the home city thing, as far as I'm concerned, is that you just get more "stuff", stuff that's already more than easy enough to get through the usual game mechanics - resource gathering, building units via barracks etc... I played on medium, so maybe I would have appreciated the home city concept more if I played on hard? And to be fair, a few of the cards were unique, like having my hero use balloons. Some cards help your units build faster, collect resources faster, some give you a bunch of new military units or a new town center wagon. They were a nice bonuses, but you could easily play the game without them. And the "customize your home city" thing has to be one of the most useless features to ever be introduced in a game. Between scenarios you get points you can use to unlock upgrades to your home city in the form of new buildings and city dwellers and such. Effect on gameplay? Absolutely zero. The only difference you see is in the way your city looks on the main menu screen. Utterly useless.

Like most RTS's, the pathfinding AI is pretty pathetic. I built a wall around my city in one scenario, leaving a gap in one spot for my army to get in and out from. After building up an army within my walls, I tried to send them out through the gap. They bunched up on the wall and stayed there, no amount of clicking would get them to move out beyond the wall. The only way to get them to move was to select a small group, send them out away from the wall, then grab another small group, send them out etc... I eventually destroyed a larger section of wall to get larger groups out, but of course that meant enemy armies had an easier time getting into my city. Another common RTS bug is still in this game - when you build a wall close to a building that produces units, the units can get stuck between the building and the wall, where the only way to free them is to destroy that section of wall, leaving another weak spot for the enemy to attack. They could easily solve this problem by leaving a buffer around each building for units to move around freely. But they don't, fuckers. In another scenario, I built up a very large army away from my city, then went back to do some maintenance at my town center. When I went back to my army, it was almost completely destroyed! WTF! I rebuilt my army, and then just watched it to see what was going on. The enemy would send a single unit out to draw off a handful of my men, then return to its city where its large army and the city's defensive buildings would utterly annihilate my small group of wayward units. Then it would do the same thing, again and again, until there was nothing left of my once formidable army. There is no "hold ground" option for your units, all you can use is a "defensive posture" which doesn't protect you from this tactic. The solution? Endless, tiresome micro-management. And it is tiresome; I can remember a small group chasing a bait unit back to the enemy, I lassoed them and sent them back to the main army. As soon as they got back to the main army, they turned right around and attempted to race off to their deaths once again. Aaaaiiieee! Little bastards! You can't change the way your army faces, like in Rise of Nations or Rome: Total War. Large battles turn into large chaotic blobs, all you can do is keep clicking and hope your side comes out on top. And you need to keep clicking, if you don't half your army will decide its heart isn't in it and quit fighting. I found the hero unit's special powers pretty useless, combat is too fast and chaotic, by the time I tried to use it, the battle was over.

The default interface on this game takes up way too much of the screen, you have to go into the options screen to get the minimal interface and turn on a bunch of options that should have been turned on in the first place. The game is zoomed in too far, even zoomed out all the way, it still feels cramped. When you load a saved game, it starts off paused. How do you unpause it? After hitting every key on my fucking keyboard, I found out it was the "Pause/Break" button. Since they don't let you control the game speed in any way, the pause key is used more than any other, so I remapped it to the spacebar. There is no way to change keymappings in-game, so you have to exit the game and edit some text files. You can issue orders when paused, but they don't give you much feedback usually, other than the "click" sound, so I found myself issuing orders when paused, unpausing to be sure they took effect, pausing again and moving to the next area that needed attention. Then there is the whole Windows 2000 fiasco. I choose to use Win2K because some of my hardware won't work in XP, plus I'm fucking lazy and poor. Anyway, when the demo came out for this game, it wouldn't install on Win2K systems, saying it wasn't supported. Of course, a workaround was found and it worked perfectly fine on Win2K systems. Then Ensemble, the makers of this game, promised that the full game would let you install on Win2K, but they wouldn't support it. Well, the full game comes out, and the install routine does an OS check and refuse to install on Win2K. By simply using "setup.exe /a", it will install on Win2K and plays perfectly fine. Although I think you need to do some registry hacking to get online play to work. What a bunch of crap, it's like MS is blackmailing you to upgrade to XP just to play their fucking games. Bastards!

Anyway, a good game, but nothing spectacular and doesn't move the genre forward one iota.