revisiting: Age of Empires III

I originally set out to review Age of Empires III with regard to its application of history, because quite frankly the mechanics behind the game hadn't changed much and the beautifully detailed graphics were nothing more than a smokescreen to obscure the shortcomings of the game beneath. Taking a period of time ripe with concepts that could be exploited for making an RTS with a deep economic system seemed so obvious. And yet Age of Empires III turned out nothing like that.

My disdain for the storyline in the single-player campaign and selective use of historical elements is covered in my review; there's no need to reopen old wounds. Instead I want to focus on what could have been done to make Age of Empires III better. I don't expect Ensemble to read this, but I wanted to get these thoughts down as a reminder to myself of why it was such a disappointment.

Playing skirmish mode regularly over the past month allowed me to become intimately aware of the game's inner workings far away from the contrived campaign. Though even with the Home City the game felt too small, too limited in scope. A larger map to be conquered, complete with trade routes and valuable resources, could have been used to add purpose to each battle. Considering that the goal in every game played in skirmish mode is complete annihilation of your enemy, once you take away the powdered wigs and muskets it's just another real-time strategy game. European explorers didn't come to the New World to fight a war, they came to get rich. This is by far the game's biggest oversight.

Age of Empires III is also incredibly hard. In a word: micromanagement. I'm all for building an Empire, but some tasks should be automated at the player's discretion. The Civilization series, and Rise of Nations, do this well. I shouldn't have to direct every single worker to collect a specific resource to keep them busy. If there are trees nearby, they should be cutting them down (Incidentally, wood seems to be the most important resource in the whole game). As a result, each battle is a balance between resource gathering, creating a defense to protect your assets, building up enough military to be able to strike back if necessary, or prepare for launching attack - a prospect that becomes less and less likely as you and your adversaries race through the Ages. It's funny, but the times I was able to beat the game's AI was in the Second or Third Ages, before technology had reached the point where it could be devastating and military units were still cheap to produce. As a result I often felt rushed, which is something I always hated about real time strategy. It becomes an exercise in learning shortcuts to churn out units one at a time, instead of formulating a cohesive and satisfying strategy.

There should have been more paths to victory, instead of the trivial pursuit of making war. I'm not kidding myself, though, because fighting to hold territory was a big part of the struggle for the New World for the Natives as well as the encroaching Europeans. But part of the reason was they had access to lucrative materials, land for agriculture - things that were worth their weight in gold (literally). So why couldn't I exercise my power through economics? Forgetting the whole "meta-map" concept for a second, what if I was in control of all of the resources on the current battle map? What if I had installed trading posts over all of the trade routes on the maps? The trading posts on a route in the game only give you XP to level up your Home City, and don't return any gold. It's a weirdly abstract reward for something that should be self evident. They should be bringing in gold, or at least raw materials! The Marketplace is also an underutilized structure, because all you can do is trade one resource for another. There's no need to get into the details of a trading simulation, but why such glaring limitations? One of the key aspects of colonizing the New World would have made this part of the game a lot more interesting, and opened up a whole new strategy based on territory control and economics.

I may have harshly judged the Card system, because it actually isn't so bad if you're in real need of a boost in materials or military units. However, I think the real strategy behind deck building is taking advantage of the unique cards to each civilization to give bonuses at key points during a battle. I used the French a lot, and found that their Cards relating to bonuses to Native units were extremely useful for building a fairly powerful army early on in the game. There are also some units you can only get as a result of having the associated card in your deck - the Field Surgeon, for example - but they seemed extraneous when you're in a race to build an army the fastest. While there are many options for "turtling" (I built an amazing looking base once, complete with fortified walls and guard towers), it simply leads to a technological stalemate as you reach the later Ages.

The upcoming expansion due this Fall has been named "The WarChiefs", and as I noted before will be introducing the Iroquois Confederation as a playable civilization. A recent interview at IGN with lead designer Sandy Peterson (that reads almost identically to one that appeared over a month ago at Worthplaying), says that "Ensemble has always tried to portray the 'underdogs'...In effect we are now giving the native nations full control of history. So in some ways we're empowering them." Except that they're not, because the Native civilizations are not being removed from the maps as villages that can be allied with. The new single player campaign still follows the fictional Black family of the original, but this time "hews much more closely to historical events. Thus, you will have members of the Black family involved in actual well-known happenings." Well, let me think about this for a second, because I'm not sure if discovering the New World was an actual well-known happening. But I could be wrong. So are we going to get Dances with Wolves or Pocahontas, guys?

A lot of reviewers love to throw around words like "wasted potential", but I think Age of Empires III is an ideal example of this qualifier. There is so much room for depth in this game, but it doesn't seem to go beyond the superficial elements of real time strategy; things we've all seen before and have long since grown tired of. It's a visually immaculate game, but that means absolutely nothing in the face of such disregard for its historical inspiration.