*A HUGE WALL OF TEXT IS APPROACHING FAST*
On Age of Empires Three.
My verdict? AoEIII is just about as good as any other Age of Empires around. The supply system is kind of a problem but also oh so fun - essentially, you customize a deck of bonuses pre-match, and you can purchase bonuses from that deck during the game for experience (which you receive for exploring, killing units, building stuff...). The problem with that is... to add cards to your deck, you need to first grind out enough total XP throughout games. Then your home city levels and you can purchase new cards from it, and so on. Tedious, and really kind of forces you to main one faction. If you don't like that - there's save files around to max the cities out instantly.
There's also hero units - Explorers. They fail to make any impact in direct combat, but can gain good support skills and, well, are super handy for exploration. You have one for free, and it stays at that - some factions have exceptions.
The hardcore competitive players seem to prefer vanilla, but I'd say that the two expansions add a bunch of great and interesting factions. The campaigns added are so-so, though. Of note is that all the factions actually play differently - while there's roughly the three groups of European, Native and Asian (with the two expansion packs), there's some crucial differences. Europeans share perhaps 50% of their troops, Natives and Asians practically none, and there's a few other uniques around as well. Take the English, for example - they spawn extra citizens when building their versions of houses. Or the Dutch - they need gold to create villagers and have a special building that generates extra gold for them, making them an excellent boom nation. And, finally, my favorite, the Japanese - they are a civ with a strong economy and a lot of flexibility going for them, but their military doesn't really have anything special going for them (apart from Samurai, and those need a bunch of upgrades) even though they have an unit for every situation.
How Japan works is: You can't hunt. Instead you will want to build Shrines, their house replacements that slowly generate ressources - you can choose one and switch around -, they also attract huntable animals that speed up the pace. Jap gets two explorers instead of one, and their explorers can build those shrines. So what you want to do is explore the map, build shrines every time you have wood and some animals around, and put all possible shrine improvers and economy boosts in your deck that you can - extra wood also helps. You then want to leverage that superior economy that can produce whatever ressource you want into dominance - again, Japan has sort of mediocre units, but if you have more than the enemy does you're set. They also have special Daimyo heroes they can ship in that act as mobile recruiters/powerful cavalry/shipped unit offloading point, and that obviously helps when you're going offensive.
The setting - american/asian colonies - is probably not as awesome as a straight up medevial setting is. Certain things got streamlined. Again, the balance is not perfect, and the grinding is stupid. But it's still got a load of great new things. Trading posts that control trade routes for profit, or give you an alliance with native tribes (granting you an additional unique unit and a few techs). Unique factions! An Imperial Age that makes the late late game interesting! Still an awesome soundtrack!
It's a really fun game. I got it for 10€, zero regrets, would say that if you enjoy the genre even full price for the gold edition is fair. Just be mindful of the problems the decks can present, learn to not care about that and you'll have a great time.
You guys never heard of drush? Basically you delete your town centre and plop it down next to the enemy's in the dark age. If you're a civ with stronger town centre, it's GG time.
They patched that out in Conquerors
Was pretty much a Teuton-exclusive tactic iirc, since they had extra range on their town centers. But Conquerors changed that bonus to just grant extra sight range.
Oh, and I overlooked Steam Workshop support. Actually excited now... if it's not just maps.
Author
Topic: Age of Empires 2: HD: Electric Wolololoooo: The Coloning. (Read 10995 times)