Age of Empires 3 Q&A Discussions

[Rafal Dudek]

Well, after putting together the questions here is the final thing:

http://www.3dgamers.com/articles/more/124/

Lead designer Greg Street took the time and answered some of the questions. We even got some new info about the game from them as well :):

[Rafal Dudek]

I personally am disappointed that there is no morale factor. Considering that morale had the greatest historical effect on troops and formations during that era, its just too silly not to have it in the game. Cossacks 2 did have that awesome morale feature which you could use to fight against the odds.

[Stiler]

Yea, he totally went around my question :p

"Believe it or not, that is something we are still working on. None of it is that difficult to add from a development standpoint. The decision has more to do with a player's comprehension of what is going on. AOE3 is a big game. There are probably a dozen reasons why your army might win or lose a fight, and the more variables we throw into that mix, the harder it is to predict or understand what's going to happen (which kind of goes against being able to strategize in a strategy game). We have lots of different kinds of techs - traditional unit upgrades, armor and weapon upgrades, Native American upgrades, Home City upgrades, civilization bonuses... the list goes on and on."

IMO "which kind of goes against being able to strategize in a strategy game" that.......doesn't make sense.

IMO that's one of the main reasons I love games like the Myth/Total war series of RTS games over the general AOE/Ron/Warcraft style 2d flat "combat spamming" RTS games.

To say that the "combat" is "strategic" is a blatent disregard for basic strategy.

Using elevation, factoring in the morale of your troops, the weather, etc is one of the BIGGEST parts of strategy, and in any real strategy game it should be represented in some way.

I know the other AOE games didn't get into it really, but that's my main beef with the games, if they would just upgrade the combat to actually let people use "Strategy" and not "pump out 100million units" but let someone actually plan and get rewarded for knowing how to use his troops I'd be able to get into it a lot more.

I just get so annoying that games like AOE/RON which have some very interesting elements outside of their combat (building/researching/different civilizations, etc) and yet they just fumble the ball on making combat actually take some strategy to win, the biggest strategy in those games is "who has the most units to counter that unit."

That's it, it doesn't matter where your troops are, if they are gaining a level of sight because of elevation, if the troops have high morale, if the troops aren't fatigued because of the journey, etc.

I just want to be able to actually "think" for once in the combat in these games and be able to "outsmart" someone because I used the enviroment to my advantage, or because I used my troops to my advantage.

[Torsion]

Thats why supreme commander sounds awesome! But AOE3 still sounds like a fun game.