The Age of Empires series is one of the most popular, and one of the best real-time strategy franchises on the planet. It's Microsoft's 500 pound gorilla. Based on playing a limited Alpha build provided by Microsoft, the third edition should be a worthy addition to this venerable series. You never want to put a stamp of approval on obviously unfinished software, but the game, even in this state, is a heck of a lot of fun.
No More Stone Age
While AoE3 still follows many of the basic principles laid down in the earlier games, many significant changes have been made to the basic design. Perhaps the most obvious is the time period. No longer do you build mighty castles and recruit knights and other medieval units; in AoE3 it's all about the New World.
There are five "ages" in this edition: Discovery, Colonial, Fortress, Industrial, and Imperial. Basically you're going from the era of coon-skinned caps, slow loading muskets and swords to the days of trains and more powerful weaponry ranging from roughly the 17th to the 19th centuries. One cool little twist is that when you advance to a new age you get to choose a politician or a religious figure that brings with him (or her) a bonus of some kind, such as four free settlers or a new group of musketeers.
Using this time period, it just makes sense to use the New World as its backdrop. The game is centered on European nations who are trying to establish themselves across the pond. These nations include the Brits, French, Spanish, Ottomans, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Germans, and Russians. There are differences between each nation, obviously, but some of them are rather subtle.
The Brits, for example, get a new settler unit each time a new house is built. They also get a couple of unique units like the Longbowman, who is useful during the early stages of the game. This is pretty much how the nations differentiate themselves; playing one nation will certainly be different than the others but the differences are not extreme, which certainly helps to make the balancing a bit easier and more concise. This is not to say that you can use the exact same strategy for the Russians (who train infantry and settlers units in bulk) as you would the Dutch (who can build banks); just don't expect the differences to be enormous. However, there are tech advances that are nation-specific, and some are balanced with trade offs. One British tech advance allows them to improve their unit hit points, but at a cost in overall speed. This is a very good way to balance the nations; unlike a fantasy game where you expect wildly different races, in AoE3, we're talking about people, so the differences may be more subtle, but no less important.
In addition to the eight main nations you also meet Native American nations while on the new continent and you can form alliances with them to get access to unique units from civilizations like the Lakota or the Aztecs. You form these alliances by building trading posts on specific locations. A key part of the game will be finding and building these posts first so that you can take advantage of the Native American lore bonuses and units. In fact, one of the victory conditions can be set to controlling every trading post location; in this way they are sort of like the Relics in the earlier game.
London Calling
One key addition to the game is the idea of the Home City. You're in the New World on the king or queen's dime, and it's a fantastic idea to include the base of operations in the game itself. The new experience point system is tied directly to the Home City feature. It works like this: when you achieve nearly any kind of goal in the game, from constructing a new building to killing an enemy unit, you earn experience points. When you earn enough points you can go check out your gorgeous capital city back home to request new goods and services be sent to your colony. The things you can send vary from basic food supplies to top notch military units and technology advances.
There's also the added strategy of building a "Home City Deck". This "deck" is a custom built and allows you to predefine what kind of shipments you will be able to ship during the course of the game, and you can have up top 20 cards in your deck. You can take this deck online and play in skirmish games, the works. When you finish a game you can even upgrade your city to a higher level (100 being the max) which provides more cards from which to choose—the higher the level, the more valuable the cards. Your home city is like a character in a role-playing game in that it gets stronger the more you play and you have a hand in making the kind of city you want.
I personally cannot wait to go online with a fully loaded deck and a high level home city to see what players have come up with in terms of deck creation. This is an extremely nifty addition to the game to say the least. It's sort of like Age of Empires: The Gathering. It also helps to spice the games up a bit as different players, both AI and human, will certainly have different deck layouts and thus different shipments. For example, in a skirmish game, my Russian civilization had an advance in the deck called Polar Explorer, which makes the explorer unit (a powerful hero/scout unit) a bit better. In looking at the other AI players, the French had a card in the deck which allowed for stronger native warriors and the Ottomans could send cheap trading post improvements, which the Russians did not have access.
A Pretty Picture
There's no need to harp all that much on the graphics. You've seen the screenshots – it's a flat out gorgeous game. You can zoom the camera in and out to get a close look at your units and buildings, all of which are exquisitely detailed and animated. The Home City area is also amazing to look upon with glistening water and colorful landscapes. This is a fabulous looking game from top to bottom and while the style of the art looks similar to previous AoE games; its sheer depth of graphic detail is astounding with an enormous amount of terrain shifts, subtle nooks and crannies, chasms, etc.
