Age of Empires III Preview

Age of Empires III was released late in 2005 and earned plenty of praise from the video game press, including a very respectable 8/10 from us. We fired a few questions at Greg Street, Age of Empires III designer, to get his views on Ensemble Studios’ latest release.

Did you look at any other RTS games, (e.g. Total War series) for inspiration when making the new game? Or was it more a case of improving an already popular formula?

Greg: We are consummate gamers, so we take a look at virtually every good game that comes out. We looked at games like Starcraft a lot for UI. We looked at battle.net as a model for ESO. We looked at Rise of Nations for things like their tooltips and tutorials. We even played a lot of older games set in the same time period, such as Colonization and Conquest of the New World. But mostly we looked at Age of Kings and Age of Mythology and tried to figure out how to capture the look and feel of those games without directly cloning them. Total War is a good series, but they’re trying to do something different than we are.

How much further do you think you can take the genre?

Greg: It’s tough. For some reason, fans and reviewers expect to see constant evolution in the RTS genre, even though shooters continue to come out with little more than a new weapon type or fancier lighting. The Madden games continue to sell phenomenally well year after year, with very few new features. There is some pressure to just keep adding ‘more’ – more civs, more units, a higher population, more ways to play – but RTS games have a pretty steep barrier to entry as it is, and I’m not sure they benefit from being even more confusing. We’ll just keep trying to focus on fun games – games where you want to talk about the battles afterwards, compare strategies and brainstorm about new ways to win. It doesn’t take a brand new feature like civilization borders or a Home City to make a game fun, though it may take features like that in order to get a game noticed.

In many RTS titles, sheer weight of numbers will see you through. What elements does AoE III incorporate to differentiate from the competition in this respect?

Greg: This was something we wanted to try and fix from AOK where strong economic players could basically put gather points in enemy towns and mass-produce any kind of unit without having to watch the battles. To try and improve this in AOE3 without totally throwing economy out the window, we made unit relationships even more extreme. If you bring the right unit to a battle, you can take out a lot of enemy units without losing your entire army. Artillery are particularly powerful in this regard. Undefended towns tend to be pretty weak – you can destroy a lot of buildings easily by attacking at the right place at the right time.

How important is the Multiplayer aspect of AOE III?

Greg: It’s very important. Single-player aficionados like to say that we only care about multiplayer, and the multiplayer fans think that we don’t spend enough time on them. In reality, both are important. There are far, far more single-player customers out there, but the guys online are more active and vocal in promoting the game and bringing in new players. Multiplayer ends up being tested more because it comes online sooner – you can’t develop AI until you know how the game is supposed to play. We really wanted to develop a strong multiplayer community with this game. We wanted gamers to recognize each other and communicate online. You can have all the fancy online features in the world, but if guys aren’t playing your game, you’re just wasting your time.

What has been your favourite moment playing AoE 3 so far?

Greg: We hosted a tournament in the final weeks of the project. While it ended up being a little bit of a distraction to finishing the game, it was worth it in terms of team morale. Suddenly everyone was talking about strategies for the game and trying the craziest stuff. Tony Goodman, our president, has never been much of an RTS player, but he became obsessed with practicing with his team for the tournament. He got a little miffed when we scheduled management meetings because that meant less time to practice. The whole company was out watching the final round between the two top teams. It was awesome to see everyone come together like that after a long project. Seeing the art book (from the Collector’s Edition) for the first time was also very cool. Travelling to Hamburg to meet with the German media was a highlight. Hearing the orchestra play the soundtrack for the first time. Having the community day with all the webmasters was great. If you mean the best time actually playing the game, it’s hard to remember a single moment. There was this one game on Saguenay (which up until then was one of our least-favourite maps) where one team completely rolled the map, but the other team sailed across the bay and started rolling through the up-until-that-moment victors’ original towns. That was probably the most memorable game I recall.

How did you decide on which units would be present in which armies, and did you try to accurately recreate history, or was it more of a balance issue?

Greg: It was a little of both. We started by trying to come up with all the cool names of soldiers we could, such as dragoons and grenadiers. Then we worked to find roles for them all. For some units, like the skirmisher, the game had a need for the same role that existed in history. For units like the dragoon and grenadier, we basically had to bend history in order to fill a role that the game needed. Real warfare tends to be less diverse than our games – musketeers outnumbered cavalry and light infantry by an order of magnitude. We know that the Germans and Dutch had musketeers in real life, but we thought it would be more interesting if some civs lacked some units and had to fill that gap with a different kind of unit. This sometimes gets blamed on the time period, but actually the 1600-1800s had some of the most diverse soldier types on the battlefield. Medieval (Europe) armies were simple; typically a bunch of peasants with sticks and pitchforks, some excellent heavy cavalry, and perhaps a few archers

Some people feel that the Portuguese are under-powered in multiplayer. What are your thoughts regarding this and will there be upcoming balance changes for the civ?

Greg: I think they are a little slow getting into the game. They do fine if the game goes long enough. They used to start the game with one more Settler, and in retrospect, taking that away slowed them down a lot. I would expect a change like that in a future patch.

Do you believe the French to be overpowered? What are some of your favourite strategies when playing against the French?

Greg: I don’t think their economy is necessarily better than anyone’s, especially early. But they are amazingly well-rounded. Coureurs let them have a strong defence without a lot of early investment. They have some great unit types without many techtree holes. We will likely address this in the next big patch we do. When I play against French, I train Dragoons, which can shut down a French Cuirassier army. I try and control big portions of the map, because the French aren’t great at early expansion and they can be starved no matter how many Coureurs they have. Coureurs may be able to defend their Town Centre easily, but small groups of Coureurs out hunting or chopping can still be knocked over in a raid and they are slow and expensive to replace.

The games market is very competitive. Which games do you see as direct competition to AOE III? How do you think they compare?

Greg: I’m not sure there is a direct competitor this time around since neither EA nor Blizzard released a game right on top of ours (which has often happened). We get compared the most to the excellent Rise of Nations, Dawn of War, Warcraft III and of course Age of Kings. I think the biggest competition for AOE3 is actually consoles (including our own Xbox 360) and MMO games. Those are where we could lose players.

Age of Empires III is available now for the PC. For further information head over to our Age of Empires III game index.