It has been a long time since the last, real Age of Empires game. Ensemble decided to orderly follow the timeline after Age of Empires II and its expansion. The new world is a goldmine for the European nations and during the years between 1500 and 1850 there were enough conflicts and new technologies that an Age of Empires title based on this period would be suitable. The developers used the high-profile graphical engine of one their canceled projects and complemented it with a physics engine. We were shown several in-game scenes and maps, and yes, it looks gorgeous. The wave ripples, the blooming on the Notre Dame cathedral in Paris (the French Homecity), the untouched nature of America, it looks very beautiful. Physics are present too thanks to the Havok technology. It looks like a nice extra with soldiers that are thrown away by the impact of cannonballs only to hit the ground/a building or to fall off a cliff. Buildings really get 'destroyed'; parts are blown away until the health bar is completely empty and the whole ruin collapses. Not only cannons or artillery are effective, infantry units make their contribution to this destruction too. As it has been said before you won't see a sword unit slashing in on a building in AoE III but instead he will throw torches so it'll burn down. Bruce couldn't yet disclose details about the minimum specs for all this eyecandy since not everything has been optimized yet. He did say that if you could run Half-Life 2, you could play Age of Empires III also. We'll have to wait and see what he exactly meant with that. If AoE III in the end is as scalable as HL2 then no-one will complain other than about the high-end special effects they would have to miss if they have a low-end PC.

Of course there is more needed than great looks and physics alone. The gameplay is equally important. A very early version of AoE III put a lot more emphasis on combat (where you could earn victory points by defeating foes and such) but in the end Ensemble realized it was too far away from the Age of Empires core concept. Innovation is good but too much could scare fans. And some aspects from the previous games (like economics) need to be maintained. Before we discuss the important new features to the gameplay mechanics which still made it into this game, we'll talk about the civilizations. The eight different nations (British, French, German, Dutch, Spanish, Ottoman, Russian, Portugese) all have their fair share of unique units/buildings. Like before there will be specific counter-units and such. Bruce showed us the Dutch civilization. They don't have musketeers but instead skirmishers, actually an anti-musketeer unit. With the Dutch you also don't need food for your units but gold (I guess some Dutch clichés will never be forgotten... :) ), they can also place a bank which automatically generates gold. Every civilization has its oddities like this. It definitely looks a lot more diverse than the previous games, which is understandable since there are relatively less playable nations now. Capturing enemy buildings, or converting units from another side is not present here. Balancing it like the way the game is now is already a heavy task. Each aspect undergoes heavy testing. Everyone at Microsoft and Ensemble needs to play it, not only the professional beta-testers. Bruce expects that once a whole community gets their hands on the full version some balance issues might pop up but they try to give as much attention to it as they can before release. From the moment the game was in a playable state the balancing already started. The gameplay still resembles that Age of Empires feeling, there are subtle differences of course, like the fact villagers won't need to carry resources back to a building. But there are clearly more remarkable changes. The combat is heavily improved. You can't really use the terrain to your advantage nor does it seem to have the realistic scale/morale options of Cossacks II f.e. but there are different formations and as we told before, a very big variation in units.

A Homecity is one of those other major new features and it even adds a persistent flavour to the game. But first things first; in a normal game you can earn different shipments of this nation's capital. These shipments contain military units, new technology, resources or more settlers. They'll be available at your normal base once the shipment is ready. It's an important way of reinforcing your settlement and if you don't pay attention to the Homecity you'll have a very clear disadvantage. You are always only one click removed from a view of your homecity (which is very detailed but you can't really influence wandering people there or such, just order shipments). A homecity acts like a sort of role-playing game character too. Because during multiple game sessions the Homecity gains experience when you kill foes, build up your base or if you find something special. You'll always be wanting more levels because this way you can unlock new possibilities. Shelley made the comparison with a deck of cards. In every game session there are 20 card points at your Homecity which can be spent on specific types of shipments (or cards as you could call them). Cards can be chosen for the different ages (although judging the Homecity interface not for the fifth, hard-to-reach Imperial Age apparently) each game but every player will still need to deal with that maximum limit of 20, even if they already unlocked a lot more cards. As we understand it, even a player with a high-level Homecity will need to think where to put his strongest powers. It would be embarrassing if you are already defeated before reaching f.e. the third age where you have put your cream of the bill cards in, because you didn't have great shipments in the first ages. Singleplayer and multiplayer Homecities are clearly separated, Shelley told us. Pretty fair, since playing against the AI or againts human opponents will always be a big difference.

Each age you can also choose between two governors. We saw a choice between a quartermaster and an sergeant-at-arms which will respectively offer economic and military bonusses. The selection menu instantly reminded me somewhat of the way how you chose which gods you would worship in Age of Mythology. It was said that you could unlock new governors once your Homecity reaches higher levels/ages up.

Another new aspect for the Age of Empires series will be the natives. There are 12 different native clans and they could prove very useful. That's right, you can only ally with them, not even destroy their (tent) camps. You gain their favour by setting up a trading post next to their settlements. It allows you to acquire their units (often very good counter-units), or rare technologies. The alliance only keeps lasting if it is your trading post that stands next to their encampment. Some heavy battles will be fought over these outposts. A map won't feature more than two or three differents native tribes though so the stakes will be high to obtain the help of the natives (and you can ally with all of them, the tribes themselves won't hold any grudge against you if you have other alliances). Since the population limit of every civilization is capped at 200, the natives can also provide that little extra power in numbers with their own population limit of 20. More resources/experience can be obtained through owning trade routes (just build a trading post at the right place and you have one). You can't attack trade routes (which are represented by a moving stagecoach or a train later on, on the mini-map it's just a white line), it are really the trading posts themselves you have to target. This way the game was easier to balance (by equally dividing the available trading posts on the map).

A dynamic day/night cycle has been left out the game, you won't even notice any night effects during skirmish or multiplayer campaigns. The singleplayer campaign does feature special goodies like night themes, change of lighting and weather effects. Bruce talked about a mission in the Andes mountain range (in Peru) where you would have to find shelter for your units or they would die from the cold snow raining down on them. Fans will love to hear that these kind of effects can be easily manipulated in the scenario editor. A random map generator will make it into the final game also. The storydriven campaign is divided in three acts and 24 missions. The campaign follows the events surrounding one family and will be more gripping than the the campaigns of the other Age of Empires games. You could compare it more to the way it was handled in Age of Mythology. The Ensemble Online multiplayer service has been improved and a lot of features that the hardcore community wished for have been implemented. We were also shown the content of the Collector's Edition. A very expensive looking art book, a poster, a music cd of the game next to the normal game are present in this package. This looks like an edition worth paying the extra money for. Be quick to (pre-)order it though if you want one, only 50.000 CE units will ship worldwide (in Europe this special version will be in stores on November 11th).


Note: If you're wondering about that massive multiplayer game Ensemble is developing, well, keep wondering then. We asked Bruce about it and he could only tell us it's still too early to talk about it as it is one of the many start-up projects Ensemble Studios is investigating. It might work out or not.