A few years ago, I was a young man who had just graduated from college. The salary only feels hot when I get it, and I always want to spend it quickly. After buying the things necessary for a person's life one by one, I took the ten thousand yuan that I had left behind and equipped it with a new computer. The game I was thinking about playing was Age of Empires 3.
It was a very peculiar obsession, at that time I was not very familiar with the various things in the game world, nor did I know the decline and rise of real-time strategy games, nor did I know what could be played on the computer, but I just happened to know a steam. As for why I would play a game from more than a decade ago immediately after I was equipped with a computer? It's hard for me to say why. When the original version of "Age of Empires 3" was released, my family didn't even have a computer, and I went to my friends' houses on weekends to play, and occasionally I could get in touch with such a magical world, the little people in the picture looked so real, each one obeyed my command, I could tell them to build a village, form a battle squad, and then fight with people outside. I'm still worried about whether they'll survive or look at the buildings I burn and feel guilty—the impression that sounds far from the actual game has been around for more than a decade.
As a result, Age of Empires 3 became my first PC experience when I started working back with the game after graduation.
Of course, if you look at "Age of Empires 3", which was originally released in 2005, there are already many backward points in terms of modeling level, picture effects, and ease of operation. And now, the "Age of Empires 3 Ultimate Edition", which has completely replaced the high-sided number modeling and greatly changed the game interface, even if it is given to the new era players who are particularly picky about taste, will not be ridiculed because of the ancient graphics.
Initially I just wanted to talk a little bit about how Age of Empires 3 Ultimate Edition has changed from the original Age of Empires 3. But when I started writing, I suddenly thought that Age of Empires 3 is already a game that has been released for 15 years. The player base has even iterated for more than one round, and now released in a new look, Age of Empires 3 Ultimate Edition is not the kind of thing that earns the feelings of old players, it has a very important mission - to attract new, this era of players to play, to re-expand the Age of Empires series community, to reproduce the glory days of real-time strategy games.
On the other hand, a large part of those changes have been elaborated in previous fresh trial reports. For players who have not played the original version before, and are reading this article now, it is necessary for me to carefully explain the gameplay of Age of Empires 3 Ultimate Edition.
In short, Age of Empires 3 is a real-time strategy game. You need to explore the world, develop the economy, build an army, and ultimately defeat the enemy. In these respects, Age of Empires 3 has a very rhythmic, convenient design. Its economic system is a little simpler than the previous generation, divided into three major resources: food, wood, and gold. The process of collecting resources has become very simple, you only need to send "farmers" to collect the corresponding natural resources, they will automatically collect resources into your treasury, and do not need a route between resource points and a warehouse.
This is an important feature of Age of Empires 3 – a very large number of real-time strategy games have a similar economic system, sending out "farmers" to collect natural resources and then bringing them back to the base camp so that you can take advantage of those resources – Age of Empires 3 eliminates this step, they can collect resources anywhere, you can easily click on the unit to see his contribution to the economy, and there is no need to walk back and forth between the resource collection site and your base.
In Age of Empires 3 Ultimate Edition, almost every source of resources becomes a "trickle." Shipping can bring trickles, dry houses and banks and other civilized special buildings can bring trickles. Click on "Farmer" and you can see how fast he is now contributing to your income, which is also a trickle. All trickle together, how many seconds do you need to advance to the next era, how long it will take to pull out an army of 30 musketeers and 20 spearmen, for the master, these detailed data can be more helpful in planning military production. For novices who are just getting started, there is no need to design a round-trip route, which greatly reduces the difficulty of getting started in the economic system.
But that's not to say that Age of Empires 3 is more rudimentary in terms of business simulation, the game also has a system that combines gameplay and scene narrative: trading stations.
In different maps, players can sometimes see a fixed trade route, where you can build trading stations, where caravans will bring you certain resources. Sometimes, you'll see Aboriginal villages, where building trading posts can produce additional combat units that don't take up the player's total population. You can see caravans on trade routes, people pushing carts in Asia, and merchants on foot in South America.
Indigenous villages are also closely related to the map itself, they are not randomly brushed out, but bound to each other with the map, the maps of different regions, the indigenous people are also completely different. Their form of existence is not limited to the literal "aboriginal village", such as in the Central Plains map, you can even recruit monks from the Shaolin Temple! The scramble around the trading post is also the theme of the game set in the background of Age of Empires 3.
In terms of game rhythm, Age of Empires 3 gives players a total of five "eras". "Era" represents the evolution of a series of science and technology, and also represents the continuous development of the game into the various stages of white-hot. In this regard, Age of Empires 3 is designed to allow both newcomers and in-depth researchers to have a sense of rhythm that can be played.
First, in the first era, Age of Discovery, players were unable to build aggressive armies. It's true that you'll get an explorer to explore the map at first, but he only does a quarter of the damage to the villagers, which limits the maximum quick-attack gameplay and gives less familiar players enough time to organize their defenses against early attacks.
However, in the second era, players who specialize in harassing other people's economies can use experience to summon a small army from the main city to attack. At the same time, for players who are more focused on climbing economy and climbing technology. Quickly entering the third and even fourth era, as long as it can hold up the earliest wave of raids, it can use more developed economy and higher technology to counterattack back. Between the Era of Quick Attack and The Age of Rapid Rise, Age of Empires 3 strikes a good dynamic balance.
In the final white-hot stage, the "Revolution" system after the overhaul of Age of Empires 3 Ultimate Edition brought the most spectacular confrontation scene to the game. In the fourth era, european countries can choose not to evolve to the last era, but to launch a revolution with fewer resources and become a completely new country, with a different and extremely powerful main city, not only able to produce the latest technological equipment such as Gatling machine guns and armored ships, but also all the pioneers can take up arms and attack.
Usually, under the premise of a population cap of 200, players who have reached this stage often have seventy or eighty or even 99 pioneers gathering resources, only a hundred population is an army, after the revolution, all the population has become warriors and can go to battle immediately. However, conversely, if you ascend to the fifth era, the final technology of each class will often bring +50% health and +50% damage to the unit. The technology of villagers to collect resources can also be upgraded to the highest level, with a strong endurance. The civilization that chooses to ascend to the fifth era faces the opponent of self-revolution, as long as it can hold up the wave of pressure of the revolutionary army, it is likely to continuously produce the most powerful units, thus laying the foundation for victory.
Another core system that makes the gameplay more diverse is the main city shipping. The player is not alone, you have a country behind you.
In the background setting of Age of Empires 3, players are not simply a life-and-death relationship. Instead, they fight each other in order to open up new lands and build new trade routes, which in turn leads to the relationship of armed struggle. In the most standard game mode, you can win not only by destroying your opponents, but also by occupying most of the trading sites. For European countries, the player is a colonizer who has come to the new world, opening up new colonies here. For American civilization, it is to find ways to resist the colonization of outsiders, while Asian countries have certain similarities with European countries. In short, in order to support your front-line construction, the main city will provide you with a variety of support according to your performance.
This is the experience points associated with the main city shipping system. Producing units, destroying enemies, collecting resources, and all kinds of positive actions can give you experience points. Experience points can be redeemed for support supplies sent from the main city, such as the most direct resource chests, or soldiers, or unique technology. This system greatly enriches the strategic route selection of the game, and at the same time, each action jumps out of the design of experience points, which also allows new players to more intuitively feel the benefits of their operations, providing instant satisfaction.
At the end of each battle, your XP will be added up to upgrade your main city. In the original Age of Empires 3, you needed to unlock new support cards with the points you earned after upgrading your main city. However, this setting forces players to spend a lot of time playing repeatedly to form the best deck. In the Ultimate Edition, players no longer need to be bothered by the low-level main city to send advanced support, the deck is fully unlocked from the beginning, and you are free to choose 25 of the 25 cards you need from all the optional cards. However, for European countries, the main city upgrade still has some effect, and you can unlock content that customizes the appearance of the main city. But in Asian countries and American countries, the main city upgrade has become pure data.
To be clear, the design of direct unlocking all cards is only suitable for small-scale battles and multiplayer games – the main game mode of real-time strategy games. In story battles, players still need to unlock new cards one by one as the main city upgrades.
Next: More
Wait a minute, I mentioned the plot battles in the paragraph above... Right? Yes, in contrast to Age of Empires 2, the original Age of Empires 3 did not provide realistic historical battles for players to play, and based on the era background between the 17th century and the 19th century, the original three-act story was played by players.
In this campaign, Blood, Ice and Steel, players can start with the Knights of St. John of Malta and see the Blake family's two-hundred-year feud with the Tibetan Bone Group. It is interspersed with many stories from the classic scenes of history from the Age of Discovery to the era of the Westward Movement. For example, Morgan Black met the pirate Liz in the Caribbean, John Blake fought alongside the native Houdnosoni tribe, Amelia Black formed the Falcon Company to participate in the construction of the West Coast Railway, and so on.
History becomes the background of the development of the plot rather than the direct subject matter. The "Fire and Shadow" provided by the expansion pack is a story that tells the story of how the Black family and the indigenous people cooperated, and the three main lines in "Asian Dynasty" are not historical facts, but wild historical stories adapted on the basis of historical events.
Historical battles! Age of Empires 3 Ultimate Edition finally brings out the campaign content that players have in mind and is based on real history. The pirates of Barbarossa, the expedition of da Gama, the Russian expedition to Siberia, the privateer Francis Drake, the French capture of Fort Duquesson, and the Battle of New Orleans in the early days of the American state. A total of six historical battles are the main additions to this final edition.
However, if you think about it deeply, players will quickly find that something is missing.
yes. The history of the Renaissance to the Industrial Revolution in the past few hundred years is by no means such a romantic era. We don't see the infamous triangle trade in Age of Empires 3, the massacre of indigenous peoples by the Westward Movement, or how the smallpox brought by Europeans wiped out the glorious Aztec civilization, let alone the Black Death, and the wanton invasion of Asia by Europeans. That's a heavy history that games as entertainment products can't afford. Even the few six historical battles have deliberately avoided all of these bridges that will remind people of the uneasy past.
I'm afraid that's one of the reasons Age of Empires 3 chose to make an original plot and bypass the real history. When players talk about discovering new continents, it's about opening up new worlds, discovering new shipping lanes, not trading poor slaves or exterminating innocent natives. That's not to say, though, that players can't see anything real about this era from Age of Empires 3. In addition to the scene narrative and historical battles, in the main menu of tools - summary, players can also enjoy the background story of the various buildings, units and historical characters that appear in the game, just like reading an interesting encyclopedia.
Age of Empires 3's game design is not only about gameplay, but also very closely shows the customs and customs of different civilizations. The four Native American countries (Houdenosoni, Lakota, Aztec, Inca) have completely different houses, military buildings, military units, etc., three Asian countries (China, Japan, India) each have very unique architectural and unit designs, and eight European countries, all of which have their own encyclopedias. The historical background can be said to be by no means shallow.
Sometimes, I struggle to judge a game's overall performance. Specific to Age of Empires 3 Ultimate Edition, indeed, the improvement of graphics, the rework of modeling, and the game interface, the new economic system of Lakota and Holdrosoni, etc., I will have to marvel at the hard work of the production team, which has a very high degree of completion in so many aspects of the game, but can also make very inferior mistakes that make people laugh.
In the second half of the story campaign "Fire and Shadow", in the original plot, the protagonist was initially attacked indiscriminately by the Sioux Mad Horse Chieftain, and then the misunderstanding was lifted, and the Sioux fought alongside the Sioux to defeat the U.S. troops who had come to put down the rebellion. For us on the other side of the ocean, anyway, it is a group of people who don't know much and a group of people who don't know much, and we don't think there's anything wrong. However, this plot actually disparages the Lakota people who were active in the Great Plains at the time.
Therefore, during the production of Age of Empires 3 Ultimate Edition, the production team hired the existing Lakota people as a guide and made a significant modification to the plot. The protagonist initially faces enemies who become the Reynolds gang of bandits who are entrenched in the area, and the name given by the invaders of the "Sioux" is also modified to their self-title "Lakota", and in the plot, they become the protagonist's spiritual mentor- and appear, known as "Uncle Frank".
Whether this change itself is good or not, it is difficult for me to make an evaluation, but the mistake they really made is not this. However, although the plot text has been modified to a new plot, the protagonist's Chinese dubbing during the dialogue has not been changed, or the old version of the dubbing.
Almost all of the cutscenes in this section, and almost all of the plot voices in the battle, are all voiced by the old version Chinese. It's hard for me to recreate this funny scene with screenshots, please imagine. The dubbing is talking about a set of plots, but it does not correspond to the new version of the plot, that is, the text content. The text content is another set of plots, a completely new story that has been modified. Imagine what a sensational situation this is.
And the length of text display is determined by the length of the dubbing, sometimes, the dubbing just says a few words, but the text content has a long two-line, even if you completely ignore the interference of the wrong dubbing, only look at the text, you will encounter the problem of too late to see. So much so that I didn't look closely at what the new plot was saying, because the long paragraphs were all skipped quickly.
What's even more ironic is that, as I said above, the new character, Uncle Frank, has a new voiceover. No, not in the middle, but in english lines for the real Lakota people to match. I have to criticize this practice harshly because his dubbing level is so poor. The protagonist uses the old version of the wrong middle to say a sentence, and he reads back a sentence in English lines with no acting skills and no emotion at all. Such a performance effect has no positive significance other than making the player laugh to death.
I don't understand. Do I really need to find an actor who voices a dragon and really need to look for a dragon? If I want to find someone to play an ancient eunuch, I have to ask the actor to castrate? Why does dubbing a character from the Lakotas necessarily look for an unprofessional Native? I don't have a problem with the plot changes, but it's not a wise move to completely ruin the game's performance in order to satisfy this strange request.
In addition, there are also battles, such as the battle, the building was not corrected because of the economic system of the Lakota people, the music sometimes overlapped, the battle would suddenly start to stutter from time to time, and the screenshots of printscreen did not know where to save after ... I am not so harsh on such and such problems, after all, bits and pieces of small bugs are always difficult to completely fix. I believe that future updates can also be gradually repaired. But I really can't forgive such a serious mistake as mentioned above.
Age of Empires 3 Ultimate Edition is truly a game worth playing. It has enough background for lovers of history, especially those who like the history of the great geographical discovery to the Industrial Revolution. For players who like to play real-time strategy games, it is also a new remake of a very classic. But the strange problems that have arisen at the production level have led to a large number of bad reviews that don't actually make the game experience unacceptable for most players. It is not the kind of overall inferiority, but in the extremely excellent content and gameplay, there are several foreign appearances. New players can play with confidence.