The Age of Empires series is the popular, best-selling, highly acclaimed franchise brought to us by Ensemble Studios.  Anyone who is in the know about strategy games knows about this series, and as a lot of you know, Ensemble is hard at work on yet another iteration in the series.  Age of Empires III has recently been announced and it’s the first real sequel to the series in more than five years.  The “Age ofâ€? series has had some offshoot games, such as Age of Mythology and Big Huge Games’ Rise of Nations.  Though both of these games took the general gameplay of the Age of Empires series and both were pretty successful in their own ways, neither of the games had that magic touch to them that Age of Empires and specifically Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings had.

Age of Empires III hasn’t been announced for a long time, some early information surfaced at the beginning of the year with some basic information and screenshots, but it wasn’t until about E3 started that people really knew just how good the game looked.  The new game takes place in the “new world,â€? commonly known to us as North and South America.  This is during the colonization era in the 1600's.  One of the new important features Empires III will have is your home city type place that is your capital over seas.  Your home city will be a key resource for technology, money, and other funding that you’ll need throughout your conquest.  As your city progresses so can your campaign.

In Age of Empires III, there are eight colonies for you to play campaigns as.  Britain, Germany, Turkey, The Netherlands, Russia, Spain, France, and Portugal all make up completely unique gameplay experiences due to their experiences in real-life history.  Customization to your home city in whichever colony you choose to campaign as will be an interesting aspect of it, you can create a housing scheme complete with colors, streets, etc. just to make it look exactly how you’d want it to.  Realism is something Ensemble is trying to make very prevalent in Empires III.  The newly introduced combat system will also have a very effective role in this as well.  No longer will your armies charge at one another aimlessly, but they will feature very realistic and impressive tactics that you’d see in movies and hear about in History class.  

Similar to Age of Mythology, Empires III will have an “age upâ€? option, where you can advance your society and in that process gain a few new options or abilities that you didn’t have previously.  If it’s anything like Mythology, which on paper it probably will be, it will probably be new infantry units, new buildings, better defense or something like that instead of new God powers or something (because it’s not mythical!).  One really cool economic addition to the game will be the ability to create treaties and trade-routes and other things of that nature with tribes around your area.  So if you needed food, gold, or some other type of resource that you weren’t able to get, maybe a friendly ally will come in handy in that department.  Just hope they don’t catch on to the fact you’re pillaging their mother land!

Combat, overall, is going to be much deeper than in the previous games.  Mostly because of the new system, but also because of the new graphics engine.  If you just order a large unit or group of units to attack an enemy set they will try to flank them rather than to just engage them dead-on.  However, if you have your units facing them in the right way it’s possible you can use some excellent strategies to take out your foes in a very strategic fashion.  As mentioned before, the graphics engine is something that’s getting a lot of attention right now, probably more so than anything else.  To put it bluntly, based on the videos and screenshots we’ve seen so far, if it looks like that when it comes out, there won’t be a better looking game in the genre on the market.  That said, it looks like it could take a beast of a machine to pull that off.  It looks almost lifelike in a way, when you see it in motion you’ll understand, words don’t do it justice.

Overall, it looks like Ensemble is doing a good job of putting Age of Empires III together.  There are some nifty little additions to the gameplay that are definitely welcome so far, and there’s probably going to be a few more as time rolls on and more information surfaces.  Considering the game is coming out in November of this year, it’s probably nearing its final stages before testing, so hopefully there will be a playable demo in the near future.  Age of Empires III definitely looks solid, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a better looking strategy title in production right now.