Age of Empires III: The Asian Dynasties

Oct 24, 2007

Imagine how it could have been. Japanese monks and samurai with Cherokee allies fighting Indian swamis and elephants for control of the fertile coast of New England. How's that for outrageous? But wait, there's more! How about the Aztecs conquering Japan, or Sioux cavalry running amok in Ceylon?

As if it wasn't silly enough to have the French settling Texas, Age of Empires III has completely lost its marbles. With three new Asian civilizations and a whole mess of Far East locations, Asian Dynasties turns this series global and goony, abandoning all pretense of staid historical stuffiness in favor of a wide-open free-for-all of East meeting West and thoroughly upstaging it with some clever and funky innovations. History? Bah. This is gameplay.

Each of the Asian civilizations has its own bag of twists. The Japanese don't eat animals, but they encourage them to graze at their shrines (they respect nature, you see). The Chinese don't train individual unit types, but they gather armies in pre-packaged collections (they are a diverse culture!). The Indians spend wood instead of food to recruit villages (who knows what's going on there...).

The twists keep coming. The Asian civilizations age up by building magnificent Wonders of the World that don't just sit there and look pretty. Each Wonder tweaks the gameplay just enough to matter. Some wonders even give you Age of Mythology-style god powers. Not content to leave well enough alone, the Asians mess up the whole resource model. Early on, they can build rice paddies, which can toggle between gathering food or coin (the Europeans and Native Americans have to wait for late-game plantations to gather coin from anyplace but mines).

Each Asian civilization accumulates a free resource called export. The symbol is a spice leaf that looks like tobacco, or maybe something more illicit. These leaves can be spent on an alliance with your choice of Western nation, which is sort of like having an off-map native settlement. The difference is that the longer you wait, the more powerful stuff you can buy. Save up your export long enough and you'll be rewarded with a gaggle of British redcoats and their trusty falconets, or maybe a stout Portuguese naval force, or French gendarmes bringing culverins to the party. East meets West indeed.

The new map scripts add tons of gameplay, and not just for the King of the Hill and Regicide modes (control a victory location while a timer counts down and kill the other guy's hero unit, respectively). A Silk Road map is a battle over a dense line of trading posts that rapidly change hands. Maps like Honshu and Ceylon are a great opportunity to flex Age III's robust naval model, now more attractive for all the naval treasures guarded by pirate ships and great white sharks. All the Asian maps have new native settlements... although the Jesuits aren't exactly natives. But Westerners make plenty of appearances among the Asians. Monasteries are a great location to recruit reformed pirates, cowboys and outlaws, for instance. There's a great salty/sweet contrast seeing Westerners throwing in their lot, Tom Cruise-style, with samurai and naginata riders.

Asian Dynasties includes three relatively short single-player campaigns, one for each new civilization. It's the usual scripted stuff, but it's concise and varied. The missions play as challenges rather than tutorials, allowing a wide variety of options rather than a set solution. For multiplayer games, you can toggle whether to enable the War Chiefs content. This means Age III fans can play Asian Dynasties without shutting out players who don't own both expansions.

The Asians really flesh out Age III's explorer system. One of the series' best innovations was an explorer who gathers treasure rather than just unfogs the map. This worked wonders for getting rid of the early-game tedium of waiting for your villagers to gather enough food to hit the second age. With War Chiefs, the Native American explorers were powerful warriors who were particularly valuable in the late game because they added buffs to nearby armies.

The Asian explorers are even more crucial, serving as centerpieces to late-game armies for how they can be upgraded with powerful abilities. Then there are the Japanese Daimyo, who are an unholy combination of roving barracks and war chief. In fact, the Europeans have been completely upstaged in the early game. It's a bit sad seeing some poor Old World explorer trying to grab a treasure out from under a Chinese monk and his cadre of ass-kicking kung fu disciples. "Uh, hi there, guys... don't mind me," he seems to say nervously, scurrying along and hoping not to be noticed.

This is actually a bit of a problem with the expansion. There was a time when the Dutch and Ottomans were the really funky civilizations in Age of Empires III. That time seems awfully quaint now. Big Huge Games sexied up the Asians so much that the European civilizations are downright bland in comparison. A hardy French Coureur des Bois? Yawn. Speedy Spanish home city shipments? Whatever. Free German Uhlans? Wake me when the Indian siege elephants arrive.

But the entire series is better for this dramatic infusion of creative energy. The developers at Ensemble cut loose a little with the War Chiefs expansion. But for Asian Dynasties, they passed the development baton to Big Huge Games, the folks responsible for the gloriously unconventional Rise of Legends. Asian Dynasties has a touch of Rise of Legends' wildness, but it doesn't abandon the basic tenets of Age III. This is still a fussy game about meticulous economic and tactical management. And not only does Big Huge honor that, but they improve it by making some important changes to the interface.

In fact, these are improvements Ensemble should have made long ago. With them, the core gameplay is more manageable. There are more detailed tooltips, better and more flexible hotkeys, and an incredibly helpful button that lets you summon your entire army, above and beyond the 50-unit selection limit (which Big Huge, sadly, wasn't able to circumvent). You can select units by type, map-wide. You can rally all military buildings to a single location. You can queue build orders in multiple buildings at once. Ever play an expansion or sequel and then realize you can never go back to its predecessor because you've been spoiled by the new? Asian Dynasties is like that. Hopefully, Ensemble will patch these interface improvements into the core game without forcing fans to buy this expansion pack.

Of course, that's silly talk. Force? No self-respecting Age III fan would want to miss out on all the East meets West fun, not to mention the new artwork: such gorgeous pagodas, arches, minarets and colors that those musty old Europeans could scarcely imagine in their new worlds. This expansion pack is a rare and generous package of new visuals, new gameplay, and absolutely crucial improvements to the core game. If you weren't an Age III fan before Asian Dynasties, get ready to be one now.