So I just finished the AOE3 campaign. It only took me about a year. Luckily, I have the War Chiefs expansion to look forward to now, and it's already installed and updated.

The Black family storyline was actually not too bad, for a real time war game. I'm a girl gamer. I don't like things whaling on me too much while I build my little towns and fortify. When the bad guys come and burn everything I've built so nicely down, I get annoyed and don't wanna play anymore. Thus it takes me a year to finish a game... Well, really it took be about a month of casual gaming since I have only really been playing since Thanksgiving when we got the new computer monitor.

So you can guess, I set the difficulty to Easy. Even *I* was able to get through the whole game without too much trouble here. About halfway through, I considered adjusting the difficulty but didn't after one particularly annoying part where I had a really hard time snatching the caravans away from the bad dudes. They kept changing back to the enemy side and I had a hard time winning in the time period. I had to restart once there. After that, I paid more attention to what the goals and objectives of the mission were. I even would avoid doing the primary goals long enough to enjoy completing the secondary ones. Still, I like my towns organized and fortified, even when the AI doesn't have too many random bad dudes wandering around.

The Black family narrators had a decent story, although the antagonists never really... resolved into a concrete thing. The final battle was, sadly, no harder than the prior battles, and I felt a little let down at the end.

I don't feel like the little guys running around on my side were that distinct. My tactics mostly involved very simple things like:

(1) Artillery demolish buildings well but keep them away from foot soldiers and cavalry
(2) Cavalry are good against foot soldiers
(3) Don't send cavalry against guys with long sticks
(4) Make lots of expendable indians with blowguns and little canoes
(5) Avoid the giant canons unless they belong to you, then spend all your time blowing shit up
(6) Big boats sink slower and hit other things harder, target land-based units with them and then sail away
(7) Build lots of tower gun things. Outpost things.

I didn't use the hero's special abilities much. I did learn to monitor my resources and how to tweak things better to keep them all high enough. I was always meticulous about where I planted my towns on a map. The resources and map layouts were fantastic and well balanced. The superb graphics and variety of terrains made it very fun to play 1-player.

I would say that my favorite part of the game is the variety of upgrades and buildings and types of people you can have, to make the game interesting strategy-wise. The campaign was interesting because there were a variety of goals, from building a solid fort and defending, to chasing down bad guys and freeing prisoners, to protecting miners as they demolish bridges, and finally, knowing when to flee to safety.

If I could change one thing about the game... hmm. It's easy to say make it longer, or more complex... but let's just pick a mechanic. I would make you able to zoom in and out just a little bit more. Especially out. I often found myself scrolling around on my giant 30" monitor and still I wasn't far enough out to select the army I wanted to make march.

Still, I really enjoyed this game and I am not much of a computer gamer. This is the second game in the last 5ish years that I have played all the way through (the other being Sid Meier's Pirates!).

Posted by sorsha on January 27, 2007 6:41 PM | Permalink