Age of Empires III Retrospective
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- Опубліковано 8 чер 2024
- Hey folks! Today's video is a retrospective on Age of Empires III.
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In the retrospective, I reference a video I made a couple years back on the Home City system. Here's a link if you're interested: • Everything Age of Empi...
References:
- www.agecommunity.com/aoeinterv... (Bruce Shelley interview)
- pc.gamespy.com/pc/age-of-empir... (developers playing WoW)
- • The Making of Age of M... (Age of Mythology developer commentary) - Ігри
Damn, competitive AoE3 sounds like a completely different game back in 2005 - 2008 compared to today!
The micro difference between Age 2 and Age 3 is that the latter takes away a lot of mechanical micro, meaning you can focus attention on other areas. For instance, focusing fire on individual units (apart from siege machinery) in Age 2 is rarely seen, whereas in Age 3 it's essential to avoid overkill and it's common practice amongst even intermediate players. Due to the fact you don't have to reseed farms and manually navigate each villager every 30 seconds, you can divert your efforts to other minor things that eventually improve your overall performance - if you don't, you will fall behind because everyone else does.
About scouting: in Age 3 you also have to make a decision whether to scout your opponent's base and try to read his build order (by spotting and recognising shipments dropping on the floor) or whether to collect more treasures from the map - some of which may drastically boost your score, but require extended commitment from your explorer.
Units in aoe3 also fire a whole lot slower, which is why it's easier to try to avoid overkill. If they fired as fasr as in aoe2, there's no way you could micro them effectively like that.
Didnt AoE3 have a major tournament last year? NWC hosted by Escape and ESOC
They did. ESOC hosts tournaments at least twice a year - even elifents participate. Actually, there is already a good thread about this video on the Eso-community forum.
They did this year too
I love these in-depth analysis of game mechanics!
Age of Empires 3 is underrated
Holy moly man, this and your Age of Mythology retrospective were some amazingly good content. Your channel in general is just really good, no fluff or superficial videos.
Can't wait for your AoE1 video, I played that but I don't remember much of how it was and remember not knowing what the hell I was doing, lol. Wonder how that game was played at the highest level.
Hey Bronwbear and others
I really liked your videos, also because it’s not too long I have some ideas to have some talk in the comments.
First about micromanaging and micro decisions.
What I like the most in games is their historical accurateness. You learn in a very exciting way about both civilizations and in general historical warfare. And you also train your mind.
In my opinion micromanagement doesn’t train your mind. Boar luring in aoe2 or treasure hunting in aoe3 are always the same. Micro decisions, in the contrary do train your mind. And in my opinion there are a lot more in aoe3.
I have the feeling that in aoe2 you always have to do the same things: build military out of military buildings, keep up constant villager production, make and reseed farms and many more. Towns get such a urban sprawl after castle age that your building placement is not important anymore and you have to invest considerable time to make use of every building efficient.
In aoe3 everything is much smaller and therefore every single thing is more important.
You have to choose how to build your base, because you ll probably needed till industrial age. Thereby you have to choose which treasures are worth it, what home city shipments you send. Example: if you send military form your homecity instead of making it, you can advance to the Fortress age faster because you don’t have to chop the wood to make military buildings, but you re still protected. You only hurt your economy in the long run, by not sending economic cards.It’s an extra strategy you have compared to AOE2 where you can only move on the spectrum between fast castle and colonial play. This brings me to my last point.
AOE3 is more about getting away with something than AOE2. When I play AOE2 and make a big mistake like forgetting to make villagers (I know I’m a noob), I know that I will lose, but because of the slow nature of AOE2 you ll have to wait for 10 minutes more until you can resign with your adversary having the feeling it was a good game. The faster nature of AOE3 gives you the chance to have more interesting games in the same time span.
I don’t want to upset any of you! I really like you play AOE2 and the not mentioned AOM and learn more about cultures. I only want to train our minds by thinking and discussing about complex thing like RTS games.
I’ve only discovered your channel yesterday because of a mention in Harvestbuilddestroy and today you are talking about my favorite game, what a coincidence. As I already had a lot of discussions with my friends about which is the nicest game in the age series this videos are very interesting.
Great vid! Hope to see more of your analysis in the future. Makes for a relaxing afternoon.
I find it interesting that only 10 minutes in does he mention that what he is talking about is limited to the state of the game 12 years ago lol
Well written and enjoyable to watch as always.
I would love an in depth look into the rise of the AoE2 competitive scene
Age 2 is more like a slower Starcraft, where you mass one or two units until the enemy's eco is dead. Age 3 simplifies a lot of things and for me, for much better. In Age 3 units and counter units are all on the same focus (that's something ES did in Age of Mythology).
In other hands, the gameplay in Age 3 is far more interesting. Despite being based in a time period that may not be that loved as the classic ' castles and knights', the fact that in Age 2 Aztecs have champions, Mongols have cannon battleships, Huns have priests, etc... That things are just so dumb... In Age 3 every factions is fairly different, that's a good improvement
I’m glad to hear that there will be more videos in this series. I’ve been playing Age of Empires 3 but began to crave the AoE2 experience. I actually don’t like the 2D + grid system of AOE2 compared to AOE3’s 3D system
Have you ever played Total War? :D Any chance of retrospective for those RTSes? Or maybe Impossible Creatures? Nice video again!
hi brownbear, you probably wont read this but you mentioned somewhere that getting out of your comfort zone was the way to improve, therefore i would like you to do a piece on supreme commander forged alliance, which decided to simplify and streamline RTS mechanics in a totally different way of most games by giving the player a super powerful UI instead of simplifying the game. It could be interesting for you to think about that.
You're right, the holy triangle should be perfectly balanced in order to have a competitive RTS.
I felt the recent Red Bull tournament setting in AoE2 made the games less interesting because it messed with the Holy Triangle.
As a long time SC player I feel like SC2 is also guilty of stressing the tech aspect compared to BW. This leads to unit comp being much more important than expansion pattern and timing for example.
I am definitely super interested what AoE3DE will look like. I am wondering which mechanics will be removed/balanced/implemented considering the popularity of AoE2DE.
Also the narration style here sounds more natural, which is less distracting
So what you are saying is you expected aoe 3 to be like aoe 2 and when it did not it failed your expectations, lol. Aoe 3 is also much much harder in terms of micromanagement than aoe 2, split shotting snaring pulling troops are some advanced techniques that require serious skills to pull of perfectly every game.
Aoe3 is much more simpler than Aoe2 while you are playing as europeans,they are like aoe2 but whitout rams,scorpions,huskarls, onagers, trebuchets and camels.
The expansion civs are much harder because they have a ton of mechanics,the native americans are by far the best ones in their design, but asian and africans sucks in that, their new resources are boring and broken.
"last major tournament in 2008" Did you do any research about the game before making this video ?
I think it's a good video.
Here are the prize pools of Age 3 tournaments: www.esportsearnings.com/games/177-age-of-empires-iii. 2/3 of the game's lifetime prize money comes from two tournaments, WCG 2007 and 2008. Somewhat by definition (between prize pool, being offline events, and featuring players from around the world), these were the game's last (and only) major tournaments.
In addition, most top players quit after WCG 2008. Any tournament that took place after just wouldn't reach the same level as those who came before; the training environment wasn't as competitive.
@@brownbeargaming Current top players are much better than old ones except maybe H2o and iamgrunt. You can't just elude 12 years of the game because of the prizepool of tournaments are not as big as they used to be. It would make more sense to talk about how the game is now.
@@bilborabbit9327 Mmmk, well sure, I'm open to being wrong here, but I can't really figure out what this is based on - have you brought top players from the old days back into the game, trained them up back into shape, and seen them lose to newer players? Do you have some kind of theoretical analysis of the quality of macro or micromanagement between now and then? Just curious. My perspective comes from the straight-forward idea that skill level is relative to the quality and quantity of competition. Back in what I would call the peak of the game (2005 - 2008), a large community of top players were grinding ranked games every day for six to eight hours a day, punctuated by regular online tournaments. This community by and large left the game following WCG 2008. Has it been replaced by another equally sized community of people grinding ranked games six to eight hours a day? Everytime I make an Age video I log onto ESO and try to find a game (either on ESOC or the base patch version), and out of a dozen or so attempts I've only succeeded once. It doesn't seem as active as it was back when I played.
@@brownbeargaming Well H2o came back but didn't win any tournament even if he was the best player before. Current top players have been playing the game for more than 8 years, they have more experience, more time played, and they benefit from what the old players "discorvered". As for micro, I'm not an expert but some tricks didn't exist back in 2008 (the pull trick for exemple). Skill level is also relative the experience of players. It becomes clear when you look at starcraft 2, almost every old top players that tried to come back didn't have any good result (mma, top, bomber for exemple).
@@bilborabbit9327 Mmmk, so I'm not seeing anything about quality and quantity of practice in your response. Did H2O train like he used to in 2007/2008 to get back into shape? With regard to experience, I don't think StarCraft II shows what you think it does. That game has featured a continuously active professional scene since its inception with hundreds of thousands of dollars of prize money every year, plenty of full-time professional players, etc. The skill level in that environment is going to rise over time. Despite that, when old players come back into the scene, they nonetheless rise to near the top of the Grandmaster ladder. Both Taeja and Fantasy came back and were even competitive in the GSL. The players these older players typically don't do well against are the people who have maintained a professional training routine while the older players were gone, i.e. current pros and aspiring amateurs. Which, you know, gets back to my question about quality and quantity of practice in the competitive scene.
Edit: Ah, by the way, I recommend the book "Peak" on this topic. It discusses the relationship between skill level and experience at length, and finds the connection between them to be pretty weak. In the absence of deliberate practice or active competition, most people plateau, or get worse over time.
No aoe1 and aoe2 retrospective? :(
Why you no have time anymore?
Hi, late comment, but could you please include the AOE2 based Star Wars Galactic Battlegrounds in the series, also developed by Ensemble in 2001. It is the least popular but probably the most interesting since the economy and faction design was almost an exact replica of AOE2 but it didn't really work.
Nobody is really talking about it but it seems strange that such a popular game would fail when it is re-branded to be a hugely popular story setting.
But anyway, despite the name I view it as part of the age series.
I haven't played AoE3 for many years. I recently used it again, and for some reason the game seems zoomed in. Even when I tried to zoom out or far away, nothing changes. It seems to still be a close up. It makes the game not fun to watch.
go to settings and change camera. zoom to very far. that should work.
With regards to the style of the video, I prefer the less scripted approach here compared to prior videos.
I think the highest rank I got in AOE III was 25. Could battle with most players.
AOE III is the most refined of the series, taking away a lot of the little annoying mechanics which in turn emphasize combat and controlling the map.
AOE II is kind of goofy in the sense of assaulting towns via building towers, deflecting attacks via starting construction on buildings, it's stupid! But that's huge in AOE II tactics.
AOE III is overall the quicker game, but it is true that this game is more limited in terms of tactics. Many units do huge damage to specific units or buildings but little to no damage to others, especially when it comes to artillery (as in units are more limited to their use). Also the card system is not balanced. Many cards are plain bad and are never used; and pretty much everyone follows the same linear path to success, though there are players who manage to win by unorthodox means.
Overall, AOE II & III both have their flaws so it's hard to say which is the more superior. I sometimes prefer the micromanagement of II but usually I get annoyed by them and go back to III. I hope the developers of IV really knock it out of the park.
i personally hope they focus more on the AoE2 style of fundamental gameplay, where there is very little automatisation, i dont enjoy when the gameplay gets smoothed out and takes the control out of the players hands giving a skewed return on investment,
for example when they gave the magic missile style weapons in terraria autotargeting (presumably for console players) i felt it took away a lot of the charm because there would rarely be any need to take control yourself which was the defining and most enjoyable feature of that weapon(the full control over the projectile)
something similar happens with AoE 3 compared to AoE2 i think, the gamemechanics dont feel good somehow.
and sc2 vs sc bw is very long story but it boils down to the automatisation and the smoothening of the ai taking away something that breaks the game.
i hope they find a way to get it right but im not particularily invested i have to admit, but i do want to follow how it is anticipated and how it ends up of course.,
A whole lot of what made aoe3 a lot less satisfying is the 3d aspect of the game. Aoe2 was layed out on a grid which makes it feel very snappy and responsive. The grid design isn't as pretty, but makes the micro and overall mechanics feel much less wishy washy.
In aoe3 and aom, there were the new walls and the removal of the grid system, which ruined the responsiveness.
Almost everything that I love about AOE2 was removed, changed or dumbed down in AOE3. I have tried it a couple of times and I agree that it was made for a different audience, I don't think there is anything significant to it that appeals to me.
@Starscream91 We value different things. Your conclusions are a bit biased.
@Starscream91 Then phrase it as an opinion instead of facts.