Thinking about Age of Empires 3, please describe why you play this particular title.

[Interjection]

For those unaware, Microsoft is running an AoE questionnaire, presumably to inform the development of AoE4 and/or definitive editions.

It's 99% multiple choice/ranking stuff - pretty easy. Would encourage everyone to share their thoughts if they're enthusiastic about AoE4.

But I got to the question in the title of this thread and wanted to share my response. Here it is:

-Pacing. AoE3 is not too slow or fast. It's in the Goldilocks zone. Age 1 (Discovery Age) takes about ~5 minutes, your time is primarily spent exploring the map and collecting treasures. Scouting is interactive, dynamic and satisfying. No age 1 is the same. You have to prioritize which treasures spend your explorer's HP on, keep track of your opponent explorer as they can steal treasures (and you can steal theirs!). When you discover trading posts & native villages the fog around the sockets is immediately lifted. Idk why that's so satisfying but when it happens I enjoy reoptimizing my scouting waypoints. The black map is basically gone by the time you hit age 2 so you can focus on the real game

-Homecity shipments & Politicians. Age 2 (Colonial Age) this is really the start of the game! You chose 1 of 4 politicians and start sending shipments. Shipments give you a lot of choice over how you want to play (almost like customizing your civ's bonuses). Shipments make the game unfold in a significantly less linear way due to their effect on the number of possible build orders available. Also, whenever a shipment arrives it's a bit like shifting gear. You basically have to make a strategic decision about how to play the next few minutes of the game (e.g., do I send an eco upgrade and drop back OR send a military shipment and push OR ship some gold and age up, etc). They don't commit you to one gameplan, they open up MANY over the course of one match. They feel fun because they are quite powerful and result in fast moving dynamic gameplay – a bit like casting an ultimate.

-Map control. In AoE3 you rarely build farms. Instead, players fight over controlling the map for natural resources. The maps are also relatively small compared to other Age games which makes placing your units/vils/buildings very important decisions which will be reacted to quickly. It makes for a dynamic and reactionary game that is sometimes reminiscent of chess and is very engaging. You're not just playing a war of attrition.

-The industrial age. I love factories chugging out resources. Heavy Cannons. Big frigates. This part of the game is a real treat because it isn't seen in every match. Getting here all the time would lose it's magic.

[Kawapasaka]

Civs are seriously unique. This is a double edged sword as in it's a nightmare for true competitive balancing, but it makes the game very fun and dynamic. In other strategy series I've played like Civ, Total War and C&C the differences between factions are usually a couple of situational and relatively inconsequential bonuses at best and some unit reskins.

[Riotcoke]

Civs are seriously unique. This is a double edged sword as in it's a nightmare for true competitive balancing, but it makes the game very fun and dynamic. In other strategy series I've played like Civ, Total War and C&C the differences between factions are usually a couple of situational and relatively inconsequential bonuses at best and some unit reskins.

Civ is a bad example, the bonuses are completely unbalanced, and change gameplay dramatically for each civ

[Squamiger]

My response to this question on the survey was about home city shipments, and the mechanic of "popping" them from TCs or other HC spawn points. They just make the game incredibly non-linear in a way that no other RTS has ever accomplished. In other RTS games, the "snowball" effect is pretty much the most dominant mechanic of the game-- if you start well-macroed and pick up some early wins, you have traded gather time more effectively than your enemy and you are pretty much guaranteed to win since everything else builds off your initial decisions.

Shipments totally alter this question however, as you can time them in really interesting ways. Timings become much more important than long-term snowballing, and HC shipment pops timed with units and other advantages can radically alter fights in really cool ways.

The Aizamk Yurashic game is probably one of the best examples of this mechanic, and it was an INCREDIBLY satisfying and exciting game: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LuMcFUjt6zQ

Shipments also just make each civ even more unique than they already are. For real, consider Ports, Spain, France, and Germany, how different would these civs actually be without shipments? And how many extremely creative strategies exist as a result of interesting deck builds?

The shipment system is by far the most innovative thing in AoE3 and I really hope it becomes a feature of aoe in future installments, just like town centers or villagers.

[Imperial Noob]

I replied:
breadth of creativity in the choice of historical and quasi-historical content (singled out the obscure episode of the Knights of St. John in the Caribbean, Ponce de Leon's fountain of youth legend and Gavin Menzies' bonkers tale of the Chinese voyage to the New World)
visual artistry
amazing music (on the composition, recording and mixing level)

[dansil92]

I really like what you've said here @Interjection it is very similar to what I said on my response- i recently replayed AoM and realized just how dynamic and fun the shipment function, map size and pace of the game really is

[Kawapasaka]

Civs are seriously unique. This is a double edged sword as in it's a nightmare for true competitive balancing, but it makes the game very fun and dynamic. In other strategy series I've played like Civ, Total War and C&C the differences between factions are usually a couple of situational and relatively inconsequential bonuses at best and some unit reskins.

Civ is a bad example, the bonuses are completely unbalanced, and change gameplay dramatically for each civ

Compared to starting location/resources the civ bonuses often don't mean much I found. Just get a good production/growth capital, start spamming wonders and bam, snowball. And when the civ bonuses are relevant, they usually don't give the civ a unique playstyle, it's just a straight buff.

[Goodspeed]

I would have said the addition of shipments to increase strategic depth, XP as a resource, and trading posts as a way to encourage early interaction between the players.

[pugs]

can i just ask why is the pole soo short?

[Dolan]

I don't play it anymore, but it's still my all-time favourite game. And if Microsoft made AOE3 games hosted on their servers, so that someone's lag wouldn't impact other players' game experience, I would have probably kept playing.

I'm sure lots of competitive 1v1 players will say that they like the game because of mechanics, XP, shipments and other innovations brought by AOE3. But if you think about it, probably nobody started playing this game because they saw VODs and said to themselves "omg, those are some mad mechanics, I really need to get this game!" They probably realised this much later, after they already played the game for a while. But when you first picked it up, you probably thought "wow, this looks nice compared to AOE2, and civs have musketeers, and explorers can have dogs or balloons!" So, I think what really drew people to this game wasn't the features that made the game likable to competitive players, it was graphics, the colonial times which featured native villages and civs too, the awesome-looking warships and the super-long range of monitors and mortars which could blast an eco from a huge distance. I think it's this sort of things that attracted people to AOE3.

Then, as they played more, they moved on from superficial impressions to more in-depth game features, to civ unique features, units and bonuses, and discovered you could also play the game in many ways, in different game modes too. The game has a lot more flexibility in giving different people different reasons to like it than it seems. And eventually different people will be led to different pathways: some will pick treaty because they like a slower paced game with enough time to boom and prepare, others will just play versus the AI because they like the challenge of playing against higher and higher difficulty AI using defensive walls and outposts with canons behind, others yet will become interested in multiplayer team games in which opponents can be much trickier than the AI, while maybe a minority will eventually get mainly interested in 1v1s. There's also going to be lots of mixed interests for both treaty and scenarios, deathmatch and teams, 1v1s and teams, FFA and so on. There really is no shortage of options and game modes, depending on what kind of game you like. Sure, some of these game modes seem incomplete, something seems missing, like in-game diplomacy changes have been eventually disabled in AOE3, probably because they created major OOS issues (diplomacy changes would need to be synched fast to be effective in game, and if the game lags, that would lead to OOS pretty fast).

I think I played all types of games, though mostly teams, occasionally 1v1s, and even less often scenarios, FFA, NR/treaty, bot games, etc. But what was most attractive to me was the maps and the scale of the game: the units were neither too small nor too big, they hit the right spot in terms of scale, which allowed you to see them well enough but also be able to build lots of them and control them all over the map. It really made you feel like Napoleon with a keyboard with an opportunity to conquer new unknown territories right around the corner, if you played your (homecity) cards right.

But, as I gained more experience, you know what I liked most? The fast pace and the ability to macro all over the map superfast using a huge amount of hotkeys. This was something missing in every other game I played, including AOE2, with its clunky engine. Playing fast to gain that extra small advantage in gathering from vills micro and units micro is what kept me interested once I started playing PvP. I think I was using all the hotkeys in the game, except for stuff like pen or building a saloon. So it was this combination of complex interface that gives you a lot of flexible power and options to control as much as possible all over the map, as fast as possible, that was something I haven't seen in any other games. Maybe SC2, but SC2 looked so nerdy and sci-fi by comparison to AOE3, in which maps are natural, with mellow lighting and vegetation, and they are also random, so they need to be scouted completely to know how you should play the map. I think that says, in a nutshell, why I grew to like this game more and more, the more and more I played it too.

Once I got to the level of creating content for it, like scripting random maps and making my own UI, and even adding new textures in the game, it got to another level, in which I was using the game engine to build new worlds for new possible game experiences. And, as you probably know from AOM times, some people have even built a game of chess using this game engine, so you could go very far with what you could create. I had planned to create a game of football using the AOE3 game engine, but the project got stalled since I couldn't identify a unit model that could be hit like a football between units. I had the whole football pitch built with all the markings for the goal and penalty areas, I was trying to use Chinese monks as players, but I just couldn't identify a unit that they could kick around like a football, haha.

At least I built a map with a volcano on it.

[jorgeguerra]

Is it just for me or the questionnaire is down?

[Lunatic_Fringe]

The questionnaire asked only 2 questions.

[ssaraf]

RIP, it asked only a couple of questions like age , are you a MS employee and then bammmmmm.. Thank You ..
Looks like they got enuf survey results.

[Cocaine]

I play this particular title because theres no AOE4 yet.

[PrussianKommandantFox]

I play it because it is simply different and an experiment. I was first introduced to AoE 2 ages ago when my mom was being a bit tyrannical on what games I played... and it wasn't the best. It was so much like so many other RTS games that had multiple resources that I was sort of turned off. It didn't help that in order to be actually good at it, you had to be a microGOD...

AoE3 was different, was less micro-intensive and actually fun to play...