viktor_haag (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
viktor_haag) wrote2008-01-14 09:56 am
viktor_haag) wrote2008-01-14 09:56 am
Entry tags:
Recently played: Age Of Empires III
Friday evening, we had five players at the Old Huron Redoubt, and wanting something we hadn't played in a while, but which still would have a bit of crunch, we put Age Of Empires III on the table (one of the dumbest names for a boardgame, ever).
What was intended to take 90 to 120 minutes sprawled out into a 210-240 minute long-distance jog. I wouldn't say it was un-enjoyable (several players commented that it didn't really feel like it was dragging at any point), but it was still too long and not really close in the end. This is one of those games that really benefits from players with similar amounts of experience about the game; forming a good strategy really depends on knowing how the game scores, and what the various "special power" tiles do, and when they're likely to be available. As several players noted, it's also pretty bleak if you get behind early, making it very difficult to get back in the game.
There are so many moving parts in this game, that it's next to impossible to form up an unassailable strategy, and so you really do have to keep your options open until very late in the game; everything depends (pretty much) on the tiles you manage to purchase in the last two turns, as these can represent a very large portion of victory points. As such, it's important go into the final two turns with lots of cash (or the ability to quickly generate it); being cash poor towards the end of the game is a very bad idea, unless you can be confident that you'll be able to make up victory points some other way.
This is the fourth (fifth?) time I've played this game, with a variety of player types, and no-body ever seems to make much of the military option in this game. I wonder, in fact, whether it really deserves to be there at all; exercising the military option is quite expensive, as it demands that you throw soldiers into the New World when (imho) they'd be far better spent making discoveries, raking in plunder, and then turning that plunder into VPs through tile purchase. Well-timed military action can be useful (small adjustments during a scoring turn can boost your colony points through changing the "majority control" colonist numbers in the New World), but the time and resources it takes to set up such a carefully controlled manoeuvre I still think can be better spent elsewhere.
My balanced strategy, in the end, led me to victory by a sizeable margin, as I was able to stock-pile enough cash to end up with four phase III tiles: I scored 12 points from ships, 14 points from capital buildings (tiles), and 10 or 11 points from colonists on the board; I was also able to buy the Migration tile on the last turn, and this netted me an extra four points (and cost my closest rival four points, so it represented an eight point swing). I'm sure that a subsequent play with these same four players would end up being much closer, but I also have a feeling that this game might prove to be just a bit too long and crunchy for a night-time play and thus not really enjoyable for the Friday Night Group (who tend towards the more family-oriented games anyway).
Age Of Empires III is quite a good game, but it's a bit long for what you get (Puerto Rico is, for example, smoother, quicker, and more elegant) and it is also ridiculously over-produced: all those plastic minis, the oversized board, and the box that has more air than components, is a little silly (the game could quite easily have been compressed into a book-shelf release the size of Puerto Rico, or at most, a slightly over-sized bookshelf box the size of Amun Re or Thebes). If you have a group of gamers that like the longer, crunchier games (like Age Of Steam, or other games by Martin Wallace), then Age Of Empires III is quite a good game and I would recommend it.
What was intended to take 90 to 120 minutes sprawled out into a 210-240 minute long-distance jog. I wouldn't say it was un-enjoyable (several players commented that it didn't really feel like it was dragging at any point), but it was still too long and not really close in the end. This is one of those games that really benefits from players with similar amounts of experience about the game; forming a good strategy really depends on knowing how the game scores, and what the various "special power" tiles do, and when they're likely to be available. As several players noted, it's also pretty bleak if you get behind early, making it very difficult to get back in the game.
There are so many moving parts in this game, that it's next to impossible to form up an unassailable strategy, and so you really do have to keep your options open until very late in the game; everything depends (pretty much) on the tiles you manage to purchase in the last two turns, as these can represent a very large portion of victory points. As such, it's important go into the final two turns with lots of cash (or the ability to quickly generate it); being cash poor towards the end of the game is a very bad idea, unless you can be confident that you'll be able to make up victory points some other way.
This is the fourth (fifth?) time I've played this game, with a variety of player types, and no-body ever seems to make much of the military option in this game. I wonder, in fact, whether it really deserves to be there at all; exercising the military option is quite expensive, as it demands that you throw soldiers into the New World when (imho) they'd be far better spent making discoveries, raking in plunder, and then turning that plunder into VPs through tile purchase. Well-timed military action can be useful (small adjustments during a scoring turn can boost your colony points through changing the "majority control" colonist numbers in the New World), but the time and resources it takes to set up such a carefully controlled manoeuvre I still think can be better spent elsewhere.
My balanced strategy, in the end, led me to victory by a sizeable margin, as I was able to stock-pile enough cash to end up with four phase III tiles: I scored 12 points from ships, 14 points from capital buildings (tiles), and 10 or 11 points from colonists on the board; I was also able to buy the Migration tile on the last turn, and this netted me an extra four points (and cost my closest rival four points, so it represented an eight point swing). I'm sure that a subsequent play with these same four players would end up being much closer, but I also have a feeling that this game might prove to be just a bit too long and crunchy for a night-time play and thus not really enjoyable for the Friday Night Group (who tend towards the more family-oriented games anyway).
Age Of Empires III is quite a good game, but it's a bit long for what you get (Puerto Rico is, for example, smoother, quicker, and more elegant) and it is also ridiculously over-produced: all those plastic minis, the oversized board, and the box that has more air than components, is a little silly (the game could quite easily have been compressed into a book-shelf release the size of Puerto Rico, or at most, a slightly over-sized bookshelf box the size of Amun Re or Thebes). If you have a group of gamers that like the longer, crunchier games (like Age Of Steam, or other games by Martin Wallace), then Age Of Empires III is quite a good game and I would recommend it.