I personally like the variety, but the pacing and strategy are both quite different. In fact, if there’s a criticism of AOEIII’s core gameplay, it’s that the exploration and Home City mechanics take away the laser focus that the first two games had on building and fighting. Each civilization has different cards that you can mix and match for different Home City shipments, which adds another layer of strategy to a game where there’s already a lot to do. Every action you take in-game also earns you experience, which you can use to collect “shipments” from your civilization’s Home City. As such, when each match begins, you get an “explorer” unit, who can uncover big swaths of the map and collect small treasures along the way. The biggest difference between AOEIII and its predecessors is that the game is based on exploration in addition to city-building. For the most part, the game balances these civilizations well, although we’ll have to wait and see what the multiplayer community figures out, now that each civ has been rebalanced slightly for the Definitive Edition. The Sioux’s cavalry is unparalleled, but they have no siege weapons to speak of. The Dutch can produce massive amounts of gold, but fielding a good army can be very expensive. The Russians, for example, can field a huge military early on, but it’s tough to build up their economy. Like most RTS games, the whole game is a delicate balancing act between spending resources on stuff you can use right now, and saving it for more powerful units and technologies down the line.Īs in previous Age of Empires games, each civilization offers unique advantages and disadvantages. From there, you can invest your resources into building up a military, researching new technologies and even moving from one historical “Age” to the next, which increases the variety of buildings and units that you have at your disposal. In most scenarios, you’ll start with just a Town Center and a few resource-gathering villagers.

Age of empires definitive edition guide