How about Empire 3? Let's comment. Tell me about it.

Age of Empires II: Age of Emperors is one of the last representative works in the real-time strategy game market, but it has been six years. The imperial era represents this type of game in many aspects, and in many other aspects, this game has also been innovated and improved, setting a good example for a large number of historical real-time strategy games. One of the most successful is Myth Age, which is another masterpiece of this game series to write the name of the ensemble studio into history. Age of Empires III tells the history from the past to the next few hundred years. Swordsmen and slingshots will gradually become riflemen and cannons, and the game retains the iconic excellent architectural design of the game series. In addition, the game has a more gorgeous visual effect, which makes an interesting innovation and improvement on the long-standing "main city" series system. Therefore, in fact, although Age of Empires III is still a battle between meat and potatoes compared with its predecessor, we should pay attention to the most interesting and wonderful improvement of this game, not the part that seems to have little improvement.

There is no doubt that Age of Empires III is still an impressive game. But fans of the game series can still find a nostalgic feeling in this game. Part of the reason may be purely subjective. Age of Empires III is still set in the colonial era, and mainly tells the imaginary European countries' struggle for control of the new world (that is, independent North and South America), showing a subtle cultural conflict, such as the battle between Japanese warriors and Persian elephants. There are five different development eras in the game, until the last industrial era (marked by the appearance of trains and mass production), the game mode of each era is not much different, because it has the same power as gunpowder from the beginning. However, in Age of Empires 3, whether it's a galleon with a cannon on the side or a horse-drawn cannon with deadly power, this is not only what you need, but also a welcome change made in this series.

At the core of Age of Empires III are eight different European civilizations. Of course, you can also find mercenaries from other forces and different tribes in the United States in the game. These eight European civilizations are Britain, France, Spain and the Netherlands, Russia, Portugal, Germany and Turkey, and each civilization has its own unique key differences in economic and military aspects. In the actual game, these differences are very obvious. For example, when Britain builds a new house, it can automatically get extra workers. Russia, on the other hand, can quickly train a large number of light cavalry. However, in the battle, the characters of these eight civilizations did not leave a deep impression on people, because most units and buildings of various units are not particularly different. For most troops, many units and buildings are the same. Of course, there are exceptions-for example, the Turkish Empire has its own advantages in gunpowder technology, so they can make some of the biggest and most powerful weapons in the game. Strangely, the British longbowmen are as powerful as they are in Age of Empires II. This may just be the inevitable result of the game setting, but don't expect any unusual differences between various forces in Age of Empires 3. Fortunately, every civilization in the game looks complex and powerful enough, so you can like a civilization early and hope to use it all the time.

Age of Empires 3 is a game that can meet all your expectations. The game has a long single-player campaign mode, including three different campaigns, and each campaign is divided into several small levels. In the game, the difficulty of the game is divided into five different levels, and each level has a large number of settings for you to freely customize the situation of your computer opponent; The game supports networked battles; Of course, the game also supports ES online player confrontation service, in which you can rank and chat with other players online. The game also includes a level editor, in which you can create your own maps or campaigns and add your knowledge and information to all units, buildings, cultures and environments. The game also includes a training level to teach you some basic knowledge. In the training competition, a very helpful commentator will gradually teach you how to play games.

When you are familiar with the game, you will find that Age of Empires 3 is very similar to Age of Empires 2. Old players of the series of games may soon pay attention to and thank the game for its simplification efforts in many aspects, and all the advantages and smooth gameplay of the series of games have been preserved. At the beginning of the game, you need to be responsible for a colonial power that has just arrived in the new world. You must produce workers from towns. They can build new buildings and collect three resources in the game: food, wood and money. The fourth resource in Empire II, the stone, will no longer appear in the game. This time, you don't need to worry about the reduction of collection efficiency caused by excessive collection of surrounding resources. For example, now colonists cut down wood. After logging, they no longer need to transport it back to the town or lumber yard. In Age of Empires III, the market focused on economic upgrading, and building a mill and cultivated land could provide you with unlimited money and food respectively. Therefore, in the later stage of Yichang, you don't have to worry about the micromanipulation needed to collect resources-unless your enemy suddenly rushes in and destroys your economic foundation. At the same time, in the game, you must build more houses to support the population growth. Building walls and defensive buildings can be used to resist the enemy's guerrilla tactics. The military units in the game mainly include infantry, cavalry and artillery, all of which need to be trained from specific independent buildings. The construction queue of most troops can accommodate five units at the same time, which is much more convenient than training one by one. As long as you have enough resources, you can also order the construction of a queue unit. If you lack guards, this may be the fastest way for you to quickly assemble some defense units, but strangely, it takes the same time to build one soldier as it takes to build five soldiers. You can train the first unit first, and then quickly add four units to the queue when he has finished training, so that you can get an army efficiently.

So in a general competition, you will spend a lot of time building your base and economy, and finally assemble a mixed army of multiple arms to defeat your enemy. Just as you need to take turns to micromanage, a correct balance between economy and military is the key to your success. Now the interface of the game has become quite simple, and you can intuitively understand the latest situation in two aspects, so the flexibility of your hand is also the key to winning. You need to decide when to prepare for the battle and when to start the attack. If the enemy is not at the same level as you, you can quickly end the game through simple arms accumulation, and if you are facing an opponent as skilled as you, you may delay for a longer time than a standard game in Age of Empires 3 in all aspects.

In the game, a large number of interfaces allow you to set everything, but when you start to seriously consider the battle, you will find that the scene becomes more chaotic and unreal than you think. The military units in the game will automatically form a queue, as you can imagine (infantry in front, artillery behind), and the whole queue will move at the slowest unit speed. Unfortunately, when you give the order to start the attack, they still move at the same slowest speed. Therefore, in order to make your cavalry fight more effectively, you must separate them from other slow units such as crossbowmen.

When the battle begins, all this ingenious queue combination will collapse immediately: riflemen will spread out and attack, cavalry will charge back and forth to the target in droves, and so on. All the units are crowded together, so the artillery can attack the moving enemy easily. When the warships of both sides are in close contact or close to the coastline, the majestic warships will show terrible and powerful attack. Most units on the screen look small, so it is difficult for you to track the combat situation of a unit in a fierce battle, especially at the beginning of the battle, the number of running frames of the game will drop significantly-even under a better machine configuration. Therefore, the balance of game victory is not only biased towards those players who can produce the most powerful units and have the most flexible operation, but also biased towards those players who have the fastest frame rate machines, because you need to operate your units in time and accurately on the battlefield. We admit that there is nothing strange about an instant strategy game, but it will become a problem: you may have been looking forward to the sequel of the best instant strategy game for a long time, but in the end you may have to lower the resolution of the game to play smoothly.

The imperial design in Age of Empires 3 is the biggest unique expression of the game: the concept of the main city of your colonists. During the game, you may build your main city immediately, and the main city will send you some extra resources, economic and military upgrades from time to time. By gaining experience, you can get these rewards, and when you build your own base-better yet-kill the enemy and destroy the enemy's buildings, you can automatically get experience. At different times of the game, you can get different rewards (for example, you can only get some rewards to promote economic development at first, and then you can get artillery and cavalry), and most of the rewards may only be used once. So you must weigh various strategies, such as asking for reinforcements to enhance your attack, or saving them first and then asking for reinforcements in an emergency when the enemy attacks you. The reward system is not only very simple, but also very interesting, which makes the game encourage more attacks and more game changes compared with Age of Empires II.

As you play one game after another, your main city can continuously gain experience value and gradually give you more and better rewards. Every time your main city rises to a new level, you can open a "card" with a similar level. Only when your main city reaches 10 level (you need to play a lot of games) can you get more powerful cards. The emergence of more powerful cards requires your main city to rise to level 25. Of course, some cards also have preconditions, so this system is very similar to the concept of skill tree in role-playing games.

In fact, the concept of the main city in Age of Empires III is like a role-playing game, although the game only slightly tries to personalize the main city to avoid your excessive dependence on the main city in the battle. But in the game, you can get a good reward by opening a new card. In a game, you can only have 20 cards at most, but since you are likely to play more cards than this number, the game allows you to freely combine different cards to deal with different situations. For example, if you fight on the great plains, the free sailboats and sailboats in the reward are of little use to you; But if you fight in the Caribbean, then they will definitely help you. In the game, eight different civilizations have their own unique cards (of course, more cards are the same). Finally, you can use this system to add some gorgeous changes to your game style. However, the most likely effect of this system is that the game encourages you to use a civilization and continue to use it. In the online battle, you can't randomly choose a civilization to play like the previous Age of Empires series games, because you may have to spend all your experience on a civilization.

Age of Empires 3 has also made a lot of other changes to the series, although if you are an old player of real-time strategy games, you may think that these changes have already appeared in other and even strategy games. For example, every new colonial power will have an explorer at the beginning of the game. This is a hero who can't be killed. You can control him to explore the fog of war around the starting point, collect treasures and gain early experience. In the game, you will find robbers, wildlife, and more guardian ornaments that can promote your economic development in the early stage of the game. In addition, more importantly, when you are waiting to collect resources at the beginning of the game, the explorer can keep you busy. If your seeker loses his health, he will become very weak. You can redeem the seeker with some money, or restore his life with some friendly units. As mentioned above, you can also set up trading posts in places set by native American tribal forces and establish alliances with them. The core of this political relationship is that the buildings of Native American tribes cannot be destroyed, but you can make the relationship between the enemy and these tribes tense by destroying the trading posts established by the enemy. In addition, every native American tribe has some units and economic upgrades. If you like, you can buy these units and upgrade from them to enrich your game strategy. Of course, trading stations have many other uses.

In the previous imperial games, you can win by building a world miracle and defending it for a while, or you can win by beating the enemy back to the Stone Age. For better or worse, in Age of Empires III, conquest is the only condition for victory … until the last person leaves. But it is puzzling that you must completely kill every unit of the enemy to win. Although opponents are free to give up at any time, when you fight fiercely online, some bad guys will hide some farmers behind trees or in the corner of the map during the game, which may delay a simple game for a long time. This is because it takes a long time to find the enemy in the game (you need to open all the fog of war on the map), but why did the game of Age of Empires 3 not end when the enemy base was destroyed, but we had to take such a planned massacre? We don't really know. However, whether it's stand-alone or networked, you will feel a little discouraged when only your main city is getting experience values alone. Maybe this is because the game should prevent cheating, but when you can play online with other players and get a "real" experience, playing alone will make you feel like a waste of time. In fact, you can also gain experience by playing against a computer in networking mode, provided that another player is also in the game.

When it comes to the computer opponents of Age of Empires III, they have changed from the initial level of numbness and simplicity to the level of challenge, difficulty and expert. In the tradition of Age of Empires, there are a lot of sea areas on the local map, and there are many naval battles in the competition, so the performance of computer opponents is always unqualified. In any case, on the land map, computer opponents can build economy very effectively (with a higher level of difficulty), which can harass you more and make up for the lack of intelligence of computers. Playing against computer AI is a good exercise, but obviously playing against real players is a better experience. The game's campaign performance is excellent. At the beginning of the campaign, you need to find the legendary fountain of youth. In Age of Empires 3, most of the battles are the kind of tasks you expect, and some bad dubbing and bad cutscenes promote the development of the story. It is not a wise choice to give up fighting directly, because fighting will teach you the tricks of the game and show some unique scenes, not to mention a lot of different tasks. But for a real-time strategy game, the performance of the campaign part is very standard, and the bravado and adventure in the story seems to be more suitable for the Age of Myth than the Age of Empire.

Apart from clumsy unit movements and frame rate problems, the image effect of Age of Empires 3 is surprisingly realistic. The water in the painting is very vivid. When a warship fires and makes the ship vibrate back and forth, water waves will gently beat the huge hull. Just like a building, when a ship is hit by a cannon, it will become large and small pieces, surrounded by flames and smoke, and the scene looks very spectacular. In the game, other military units also have many wonderful and meticulous actions. In addition, there are a lot of different environments in the game, from the dense South American jungle to the cold yukon river and so on. In the battle, there are always some very cruel pictures in the battle scene, especially after the appearance of large weapons, such as a shell hitting one side of the infantry phalanx, all the pictures look wonderful. In Age of Empires 3, the game will automatically adjust the most appropriate video settings according to the configuration of your machine, but it is not very helpful, because even if all visual effects are not turned on, the game will perform very well-even on a machine with ordinary configuration.

The sound effect of the game is excellent, although in the tradition of real-time strategy games, you usually only hear the same sound over and over again (at least they mainly speak their own language). The sound of artillery firing is very realistic. When an army wins the game, you will see all the units in this army stand up and cheer loudly. According to different civilizations, the music styles in the game are different, but they are all very suitable for the theme of the game.

Different from the previous ensemble studio series, the current real-time strategy game market has developed from a small scale to a highly competitive market, but Age of Empires 3 does have some very attractive content. Age of Empires 3 retains many advantages of the previous work, which is full of depth and charm. However, Age of Empires 3 also looks very rough in some aspects, so players who expect this game to improve or even innovate this type of game may be somewhat disappointed. But those players who are looking for a complex and interesting real-time strategy game with fantastic visual effects and historical background will find Age of Empires 3 is exactly what they are looking forward to.