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Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition |OT| Sail away, sail away, sail away...

Komatsu

Member
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Developer: Forgotten Empires / Tantalus
Platforms: PC
Price: $19.99/€19.99/£14.99
Release date: October 15th, 2020

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Players begin with a constructed town center or a wagon that will build into such, an armed explorer, and a modest number of villagers. Players explore the map and begin gathering resources used to build additional units and buildings and to research upgrades or technologies. Actions such as training units, constructing buildings, killing enemy units, etc., earn the player experience points. At certain experience point thresholds, players earn shipments that may be turned in for cards from the player's Home City, which can include units, upgrades, or resources. The game progresses similarly to most real-time strategy games until one side resigns.


In Age of Empires III, the player advances through technological "Ages", representing historical time periods; these provide access to greater improvements, units, and buildings. They include the Discovery Age, which represents the discovery and exploration of the Americas by Europeans and allows the player to explore and develop their economy; the Colonial Age, which represents the European Expansion into the "New World" and unlocks early military units; the Fortress Age, which represents the fortification of the European colonies, unlocks forts, and allows the player to have a more complete military; the Industrial Age, which triggers a strong economy, due in part to factories—advanced buildings that automatically produce resources or artillery—and unlocks all units and shipments; and the Imperial Age, which unlocks all buildings and upgrades, and allows you to send unit and resource shipments a second time. All Ages cost food and coin to advance to, except the Colonial Age, which only costs food. The price of age advancement is incremental but does not vary between civilizations.

Similar to the "minor gods" system in Age of Mythology, Age of Empires III uses a "Politician System" to grant bonuses on a successful advancement to another age. When the player chooses to advance to the next age, who is given the choice of two or more "Politicians" that provide them with a different bonus on choosing them. The Politician is given a generalized title from the period that usually reflects the bonus that it gives: for example, "The Naturalist" gives the player four cows, while "The General" gives twelve musketeers and one piece of heavy artillery. As the player's Home City increases in level, more Politicians are unlocked—at a rate of one for every ten Home City levels—up to level 60. [FROM WIKIPEDIA]

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Great OT, thanks for reminding that this was released. AoE II is one of the greatest games ever and I still play it to this day.

I never got to play the third one because at the time when it got first released my PC wouldn't even boot it past title screen.

Can't wait to try it out!
 

Komatsu

Member
Great OT, thanks for reminding that this was released. AoE II is one of the greatest games ever and I still play it to this day.

I never got to play the third one because at the time when it got first released my PC wouldn't even boot it past title screen.

Can't wait to try it out!

Can’t recommend it enough.
 

Hudo

Member
It really got a bad rep back then. It's a very good RTS that just tried something a bit different. I understand why many Age2 players where like "wtf is this shit?" but it's not a bad game at all.
I think this is vastly better than Iron Harvest, which was a disappointment for me...

I do hope they do Age of Mythology: DE next or even an Age of Mythology II after they're finished with Age 4.
 

HE1NZ

Banned
Looks pretty good. Prepurchased it day 1, but probably won't play anytime soon. Still have to finish a ton of AoEII campaigns and Red Alert Remastered.
 
I'm hearing a lot of bad about this from old time AoE III fans. Unpolished, buggy, bad optimization, ruined artstyle due to a lack of a cohesive graphical improvement, worse UI. Worse AI? That is remarkable.

I'm curious to see some feedback from this thread before jumping in. Maybe i'll wait a while after they make a couple of patches addressing these issues.
 

HE1NZ

Banned
I'm hearing a lot of bad about this from old time AoE III fans. Unpolished, buggy, bad optimization, ruined artstyle due to a lack of a cohesive graphical improvement, worse UI. Worse AI? That is remarkable.

I'm curious to see some feedback from this thread before jumping in. Maybe i'll wait a while after they make a couple of patches addressing these issues.
I'm sure they'll patch it all. They support these games very well. Even AoM got an update this summer. I think the biggest issue right now is that ships don't break parts when damaged like it was in the original.
 

pr0cs

Member
Played through 4 'story' missions last night and was entertained. I probably should have gone through the tutorial before jumping in since I was pretty rusty and only recently played AOE1 which this game does have some different controls from.
  • Graphics are fine, I have no idea what people are complaining about, maybe because I didn't play on the original but they look good to me
  • Performance is good, I need a new GPU but my 980 runs the game at 4K well enough that I haven't thought of switching, not that you need high FPS for a RTS anyway
  • Voice acting is all fine, didn't really get far enough in the game to get any real impressions from the story in itself
  • I forgot that AOE doesn't have any sense of a rotating camera. I was constantly losing NPCs behind buildings and whatnot so I had to bind a key to toggle 'non-moving' toons. I really hope the new AOE has a rotating camera as RTS games without it feel ancient
  • Maybe I'm just a dummy but why can't you see which units you have in your ships. Several times I forgot which ship I had loaded with units and had to force all of the boats to dump units because I couldn't recall which ship had my peeps
  • Sound effects are really good, especially artillery explosions, sounds wicked on my HT setup

Overall I was itching for a new gamepass title to play, something a little slower paced after Doom Eternal and this definitely fits the bill. Recommended
 

Bullet Club

Banned



Join Alex Battaglia for an in-depth look at the new Age of Empires 3 Definitive Edition - plus a detailed look at the crucial 2D to 3D transition point for the real-time strategy game genre. The new Age of Empires certainly looks as though it retains the gameplay of the original and makes a number of impressive visual upgrades - but is performance everything it should be?
 
Some of the changes are baffling though, such as the insistance to remove the words "colonial" or "plantation", or how Natives can't mine anymore, or befriend wild animals because that'd be stereotypical...
 

Kadve

Member
As someone pointed out in a steam review. This is a game about colonization... that's afraid to use the word colonization...

Just use the improvement mod or Napoleonic Era. Booth gives you everything from this version (sans the graphics, obviously), and much, much more.


 

Komatsu

Member
The game looks absolutely fantastic but I am not a fan of the changes to building names and to some of the Native American abilities.
 

Diddy X

Member
I was amazed with the graphics back in the day, I completed it a couple time, this remake looks good, I'll play it to bring back the memories.
 

Hnjohngalt

Member
How does this game compare to Rise of Nations? Does it have a conquest mode with a map like risk? Or is it just scenario based missions like AOE2?
 

KyoZz

Tag, you're it.
Played through 4 'story' missions last night and was entertained. I probably should have gone through the tutorial before jumping in since I was pretty rusty and only recently played AOE1 which this game does have some different controls from.
  • Graphics are fine, I have no idea what people are complaining about, maybe because I didn't play on the original but they look good to me
  • Performance is good, I need a new GPU but my 980 runs the game at 4K well enough that I haven't thought of switching, not that you need high FPS for a RTS anyway
  • Voice acting is all fine, didn't really get far enough in the game to get any real impressions from the story in itself
  • I forgot that AOE doesn't have any sense of a rotating camera. I was constantly losing NPCs behind buildings and whatnot so I had to bind a key to toggle 'non-moving' toons. I really hope the new AOE has a rotating camera as RTS games without it feel ancient
  • Maybe I'm just a dummy but why can't you see which units you have in your ships. Several times I forgot which ship I had loaded with units and had to force all of the boats to dump units because I couldn't recall which ship had my peeps
  • Sound effects are really good, especially artillery explosions, sounds wicked on my HT setup

Overall I was itching for a new gamepass title to play, something a little slower paced after Doom Eternal and this definitely fits the bill. Recommended

You can rotate the camera by holding ctrl (the right one) and using the arrows.

On AOE IV do we have some news?
All we know is here, I'll update the OT as soon as a news drop

I'm probably dumb, but someone know how to turn off HUD ?
Also, I can't turn the subtitle off, is this normal (playing via Windows Store) ?
 
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