Age of Empires 3 Demo

By Cyrris

Age of Empires was the first real time strategy game that I was really addicted to. While I’ve been very much into other strategy games since, I’ve always held a great deal of respect for Ensemble Studios. Age of Empires 2 was great, and although I found Age of Mythology to be quite boring, I could probably attribute that to overplaying the previous Age games, and not giving myself enough of a break between releases. AoM instantly felt like stepping back into the same arena, but with different units and a 3D world.

Age of Empires 3, however, doesn’t feel like that at all. I think Ensemble has really hit their target with this release, giving the 4th Age game just enough of a new feel to appease even those like myself, who after years of Age gaming, need a slight change of formula to keep things interesting.

No-one was expecting a radical departure from the previous games in this series. While we were all right about that one, I was still surprised at the level of improvements the game does actually have. The attention to detail does a lot to bring each map alive. It’s the small things - like a flight of ducks in formation, or finding an Iroquois warrior stuck up a tree, waiting to be rescued. Even running on low detail still manages to bring a vastly superior game world to anything Ensemble has offered in the past.

Ships are no longer useless, poorly sized, brown barges. In fact I have to say the ships in AoE 3 are probably what I find the most fun. At first I built a British Caravel, about the same size as the ships you’d get in Age 2. Nothing special there. Then I built a Galleon for the first time, and saw it was twice as big as the Caravel. Awesome. Moving to the next age I was able to build a Frigate, and a Monitor, both twice as big as the Galleon again! It’s fantastic, and making a broadside attack is damn fun. Unfortunately neither of the two maps in the demo really give much room for naval battles, but it’s something I am very much looking forward to in the full game.

There are a host of other great additions, of course. Not requiring supply depots for your villagers removes a constant annoyance. Minutemen are bloody handy, and have saved my arse on numerous occasions. Want to tame a wild bear and have it fight for you? Go for it! Trade routes and native allies just add to the possibilities. The whole Home City idea is functional, useful, and makes the game more interesting. Plus, they make for attractive screenshots. The perfect addition.

I don’t need to tell you about the graphics though. The screenshots looked fantastic, and for me, playing the demo at similar graphical detail meant that I was looking at those same screenshots - about 5 of them per second. Thankfully the options allow for enough scaling that I was quickly able to get some smooth gameplay happening, albeit with a game that resembled the detail levels of Age of Mythology, or perhaps worse. My Radeon 9600 is definitely on it’s last legs, but I would say those with a Radeon 9800 or better will probably find the game quite playable at decent detail settings.

The game doesn’t seem to be without it’s shortfalls though. The physics engine was talked up quite a bit. To be honest I didn’t notice it all that much, and it didn’t seem to warrant all the hype that the developers tried to generate. Perhaps since Half-Life 2 I just don’t pick it out as it seems normal or mundane now. Perhaps in an RTS setting, it’s just less relevant. Either way it doesn’t make a big impact on the game. That said, destroying a building with cannon fire is nonetheless more satisfying than in any other RTS I’ve ever played.

What I find perhaps the most disappointing about the game is the AI. Particularly the pathfinding of your own units. It doesn’t seem to have gotten any better since AoM, which in turn I don’t recall being any better than Age 2. Getting your units through a bunch of trees can quickly become irritating, and this is the sort of thing I would have expected the developers to have solved by now.

Overall the demo itself feels a little unpolished. The campaign was boring and I think they could have included a better one to attract players. I also don’t understand why advanced formation controls were turned off by default. In every previous Age game these things have been outrageously important; surely the developers must know that. The GUI also seems overbearing and really robs you of screen space. A lot of it is just unnecessary spacing, too. It’s not exactly crammed with useful information. On that note, where can I find information about my current population limit? As it stands I have to just wait until I get an alert telling me to build more houses. Useless.

Unlike previous Age demos though, this one lets you go all the way to the Imperial Age in Skirmish maps. That’s the fifth and last age. No more stopping at the Bronze Age or the Castle Age like before. It makes me wonder why Ensemble didn’t do this with their previous demos - preventing your players from experiencing the best parts of the game isn’t much of an incentive to get them buying your stuff.

The last demo I downloaded was for Dungeon Siege 2. At 1.4 GB, it was hardly worth spending that amount of time and wasting such a large portion of my download limit. Thankfully the AoE 3 demo only weighs in at 345 MB, and I think it’s well worth it. Hopefully the full version will show some more improvements.