Little Emperor
After recovering the boxes with the software keys from an inconspicuous closet, I got a chance to try some of Dan’s games after all. The first item on the menu was Age of Empires III, for the following reasons, in ascending order of importance:
1. It got good reviews.
2. I already enjoyed previous AoE titles.
3. I bought my own copy of AoE3 when it came out, but couldn’t get it to run on my machine.
That last was pretty frustrating, so it was good to get a second opportunity. Now that I’ve taken a look, I have to wonder what all the fuss was about. Anyone familiar with the RTS generally will understand the basic pattern: buildings produce military units or upgrades; civilian gathering units collect resources with which to buy them; players fling armies at one another until in an attempt to hamstring enemy resource collection; eventually, the balance tips to the more efficient collector and producer, and once armed resistance collapses, the soft underbelly of the economic units is exposed and the game is effectively over. Anyone familiar with the AoE series specifically might find some of the hallmarks of that series missing.
The AoE line was never strong on innovation in the RTS genre; instead, it earned its kudos for polishing the genre to a mirror finish. While other games toyed with elevation or weird support units or complicated production networks, AoE chose to focus on basics, like designing pathfinding algorithms that actually allow units to go from point A to point B when ordered to, something sadly absent in a lot of RTS games. Where AoE did innovate, it was in the interface and fine-tuning the game elements: workers who would automatically begin gathering resources after building a warehouse, for example, or double-clicking to select all units of the same type as the target. Innovations like this were so simple in concept, and so simple to code, that gamers would slap their foreheads with each AoE game or expansion and think, “Why didn’t anyone ever do this before?”
That trend is reversed in AoE3. Instead of polishing someone else’s ideas, AoE3 strides boldly into new territory with the concept of “home cities.” Operating in the colonial era, it is only appropriate that your fledgling kingdom receive support from the motherland back in Europe (or elsewhere, in the less historical expansions). You earn this support through a variety of achievements that prove to your Old World sovereign that you’ve got what it takes to make a New World colony a going interest: found trade stations with the natives, recover treasures with your explorer, ship excess material back to the motherland, that sort of thing. When you earn enough brownie points, you get a significant payoff: extra settlers, a detachment of troops, a prefabricated fort or factory, raw materials, free technological improvements, unique units like the field medic—the list is huge. So huge, in fact, that you can’t earn all those benefits in a single game. You have to decide at the beginning of the game which ones you want available when the time comes. The process is likened to building a personalized deck in collectible card games: an aggressive player might select a lot of cards that give him free troops, to hasten the moment when he can attack, while a player who prefers to choke opponents with a superior military-industrial complex might choose defensive buildings and economic bonuses. AoE3 steals an idea from RPGs, as well as CCGs: you earn “experience” in successive games, unlocking more and better cards from which to design your deck. The idea is interesting, and received a lot of attention in critical reviews. I’m not sure just how big an impact it has on actual play; I found it easy to win without using a single card, much less “tuning” my deck into an unbeatable combination of bonuses. Maybe the idea’s impact is only felt in games between humans.
Which sort of brings me to the flip side of the new formula: the things that used to work smoothly don’t always work so smoothly any more. The AI got markedly less intelligent in this incarnation. Truly smart AI is tough in any game, so I don’t begrudge any designer a less-than-brilliant computer opponent. Still, I found I had to keep on my toes to beat high difficulty opponents in earlier titles, so I know Microsoft Games is capable of pretty respectable AI. In AoE3, I was able to cream two difficult computer opponents at once on the high difficulty setting before the first day’s exploration was over. Also missing is the smooth interface: the map is just too gosh-darned small for the buildings and people that inhabit it. While colonial-era battles did indeed occur on ridiculously small fields—the entire battlegrounds of the Battle of Lexington, for example, are preserved in a grassy triangle smaller than a city block—the larger military-economic struggles of the colonial era stretched over great distances. The designers fell so much in love with their own detailed unit graphics that they didn’t leave room for the terrain in which those can exist. Zoomed out to maximum, a half dozen buildings can fill the screen; zoomed in close-up, a single fortress does the same. Selecting units can be awkward when the box you draw around them repeatedly dips a corner into the mini-map, causing you to jump to viewing an area of the map far from the battle at hand.
The scale makes everything feel…well, small. Like Caesar IV and CivCity: Rome, both of which were supposed to take the beloved city-builder series to new heights, AoE3 manage to feel like a descent from epic history to toy soldiers. Sure, those towers and Napoleanic musketeers look great individually, but the entire French and Indian War feels like a street fight, the Thirty Years’ War like a neighborhood riot. Judging by the buildings and armies, Philadelphia and New Amsterdam (now New York) were only separated by a fifteen-minute walk. No wonder Washington found it so easy to surprise the redcoats; crossing the Delaware was as quick as walking around the corner of the local grocery store. It takes a lot of the fun out of the game.