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[Catastrophic lolcats]

Russia gets their games for CHEAP. I'm rather surprised.

Valve added the "Russian Region" because they thought it was an extremely untapped market due to most developers/publishers not bothering because it has the highest rates of piracy (alleged). It seems the Russian store has been kicking over quite some profit and Gaben (head of Valve) did a few interviews where he said that the majority of piracy is a "service problem", just Google "Valve on Piracy".
It may be good to note as well that because the Russian store is so much cheaper than other stores a booming "black market" has emerged where quite a few third parties purchase Russian steam games to sell to other countries. It's interesting to note that the difference between regions are decent enough for a few retailers to shave a profit off.

Personally while I agree with that to a degree I can't in anyway support price regions. Even more so when it means that a country with the highest rates of piracy gets better treatment than countries with a modest rate of piracy, doesn't exactly strike you as fair for the consumer, also that consumer is charged almost twice that of the US store.
Now while Valve is actively supporting price regions I can't really say I'm happy with them.

I think price regions might even push me to move to greener pastures. However, with more and more games being Steamworks (only activated on Steam), the selection, the still rather good (sale)prices for most games that don't price region, my own personally library and finally the lack of other decent services to rival Steam I'm still rather locked to their service.
I'm rather fond of their service in a lot of ways, downloading and installing is generally so easy it's almost a crime. Although the service still has a couple of glaring holes like the wonky offline support and general speed of the platform.

Maybe when GOG.com starts improving their catalog and get their head out of their arse about pricing (devalues intellectual property my arse) then maybe. I've always liked DRM-free products.

tl;dr. Valve added a cheap Russian store. Got a region that was often neglected to start buying more games. Valve supporting price regions has a whole bunch of negative affects.
(Written at 6:32 in the morning. Keep that in mind when you notice the lack of grammar and spelling .

[penguinofhonor]

Tell users in other regions to pirate stuff instead of shelling out $60 on launch day for every new game. Then we'll probably get lower prices.

And tell Australia to stop censoring things so people can actually publish their games there easily.

[Sirus]

Anyway...Age of Empires III. One of those series that people rave about but no one actually explains. What's the gameplay like? Is it like Civ, where you build cities and have abstracted combat? Is it like Warcraft, where settlements are built and combat is more tactical? Some combination of the above? None of the above? How many factions, etc?

It looks amazing, but the Steam store page reveals absolutely nothing about the game other than "European powers colonize the new world, Asians struggle for power".

[Nadaka]

age of empires is like warcraft, but not cartoony and less/no magic.

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Tell users in other regions to pirate stuff instead of shelling out $60 on launch day for every new game. Then we'll probably get lower prices.

Then we'd just have the problem of publishers abandoning the platform like Ubisoft (not that Ubisoft was a loss in anyway).  It's not until a general culture shift about piracy and copy-right than this will have any affect at all. Otherwise our medium will just wrongfully get labeled as thieves.
The problem with price regions have to be address not only by the consumers but also the developers, retailers and publishers. Few have already joined the fight against price regions like GOG.com or Paradox Interactive.

And tell Australia to stop censoring things so people can actually publish their games there easily.

I've actually been heavily involved with campaigning against censorship in Australia, as has an extremely high amount of other people. It's reached the point where the general opinion on censorship in video games was so low the government were forced to implement an R 18+ rating which means that games can get by uncensored.
The main reason why games were being censored in Australia was due to a legal loop-hole of only having a MA 15+ rating for video games unlike movies and other media which has a R18+ rating. This means could be "refused classification" because they could not be placed into our rating system and therefore could not be sold.
A few ... certain senators were using this to their advantage.  The video games as boogey-man is an extremely easy way to get votes and attention everywhere around the world, no different here.

I have no idea what kind of point you were trying to make and I'm going to assume you're trying to be a snarky loudmouth.

Anyway...Age of Empires IIII

Age of Empires is an extremely classic series of games and is iconic in most gamers' history. Consider trying the first two games before trying AoE3, most people agree that they were the better games. There's demos still floating around the internet. 
Basically it's a RTS like Warcraft. Manage resources, build buildings, build defenses, build units and FIGHT. It's got quite a lot of depth like most RTS when analysed.

[Aklyon]

Most people I've heard say that AoE III isn't as good as AoE II.

[Nadaka]

I now remember AoE III... They took out the random map feature, the best part of AoE 1 and 2.

My recommendation is to just get AoE 2 instead.

[lemon10]

Loved AoE 1 (as well as it being literally the computer game besides minesweeper and similar that I played), loved AoE 2 (which is far more recent (but still very old) and you would probably want to try out before any of the others).
AoE 3 was a pretty terrible game comparatively from what I played of it, I would highly recommend just playing the first two.

Yeah, AoE its basically Warcraft (if you want to simplify it that much), except no special abilities/magic for units (with a few exceptions).

[Flying Carcass]

Age of Empires 3 was alright, but Age of Empires 2 was great and is one of my all-time favorite strategy games (from what I played of 1, it was also very good, but I only played the demo of that). You build a town/base, build defensive walls and towers, send workers to gather resources, build an army, and attempt to defeat your opponent(s). I'd suggest taking a look on youtube under "Age of Empires gameplay" or see if there's a demo available to see if its something you're interested in.

Age of Mythology is also worth a look if you like the Age of Empires series, since its basically an Age of Empires game but with Norse, Greek, and Egyptian mythology.


Edit: When I think about it, I think the reason I never really got into Age of Empires 3 was because Rise of Nations was simply better and also had 17th/18th century era units.

[Sirus]

Wow, that's pretty damn unanimous. I'll pass on it then, see if I can find AoE2 somewhere.

[UltraValican]

Wow, that's pretty damn unanimous. I'll pass on it then, see if I can find AoE2 somewhere.

Wallmart/Target sells EO2 and the expansion for about 10 USD.

[Flying Dice]

Wow, that's pretty damn unanimous. I'll pass on it then, see if I can find AoE2 somewhere.

Wallmart/Target sells EO2 and the expansion for about 10 USD.

I also recall finding a third party company that republished the gold editions of AoE 1 and 2 together, and got it for something like 15 USD. So yeah, you can find them for cheap pretty easily. AoE2 was pretty much the first game I played a ton of, apart from some really old shareware DOS games. (Battle for Atlantis, anyone? S'still a great game.)

[Catastrophic lolcats]

Just for a heads up, the game is part of a collection of classic games that aren't available for digital downloads. The developers (Ensemble Studios) who made the game are now defunct, so the only people making profit off this is the publisher (Microsoft) and a much much bigger cut, the retailer (likely Amazon).
So ... yeah. *whistles nonchalantly*

[SirAaronIII]

I'm a bit late, but I have to agree that AoE3 isn't as good as AoE2.

Also, there should be a thread for AoE2 game organization. I think there already was, but it fell way back.

[neotemplar]

So Mirrors Edge won.  I'm gonna buy it unless someone drastically scares me off of it in the next few minutes.