Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties [PC]

We'd definitely appreciated our time with the Black family in Age of Empires III (not to mention Arkantos in Age of Mythology) but it's nice to know that Ensemble will be returning to the more historical campaigns for Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties. The Japanese campaign features Tokugawa's efforts to unify Japan, while the Indian campaign focuses on that country's first war for independence as they overthrow the East India Company.

The Chinese campaign is even more interesting but it takes a more speculative approach to history. Asian Dynasties postulates a Ming Dynasty exploration of the New World. Once the Chinese treasure fleet touches down on the Pacific coast, they'll encounter Native American groups. Asian Dynasties will include as much Warchiefs content as necessary for this campaign but you'll still need to have the Warchiefs expansion if you want to have all the civs and units available for multiplayer.

Aside from the unusual campaign setting, the Chinese have another very unique feature. Rather than creating their armies unit by unit, the Chinese create "banner armies" that are bought and led as groups. Each banner army will be made up of exactly two units types -- say pikemen and archers, or flamethrower artillery and cavalry. The disadvantage is that Chinese players can't create exactly the army they want for the perfect counter but they get a pretty substantial discount per unit when forming banner armies, so it sounds like balances out.

On the Indian side, players will be able to field up to six different kinds of elephants, from the requisite ranged elephants with archers on their backs to the more inventive melee elephants who carry flails on their trunks. Our favorite, of course, are the siege elephants that carry cannons. They even recoil a bit when the cannons fire.

The new civs make use of new home city deliveries. The Japanese for instance can order up a Shogun unit that functions like a mobile barracks and grants powerful bonuses to nearby units. There are three different types of shogun as well, so you can pick the one that works best for you -- whether you need archers or samurais or what have you.

There are two European trading partners for each of the Asian civs in the game. By using the new consulates, the Asian civs can start to generate a slow trickle of resources that they can eventually trade in for specific deliveries from those civs. If the Chinese save enough tea, they can trade it to the Dutch or the French for extra cannon.

Each new civ gets five unique wonders that confer significant bonuses. India's Taj Mahal allows the Indian player to force peace across the map for 30 seconds. Other wonders might pump out a steady stream of units, or grant you a 10 second peek into your enemy's base. More interestingly, the civilizations in Asian Dynasties use these wonders to advance to new Ages, instead of merely spending the resources required of other civs in the series.

As expected, the Asian Dynasties expansion comes complete with all the little visual touches that we've come to expect from the series. And of course, this time around, those touches reflect the Eastern setting. Players will see pandas wandering the map in search of bamboo stands and will also see their own workers toiling away amid groves of cherry blossoms.

Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties will be out this holiday season.

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