Age of Empires 3 Demo Released

Ok, here are all of the problems I noticed while playing this game.

Treasure guardians will run away and come back at full health. This applies to the horse riding ones in particular. This seems to happen when they go into the fog and then come back. IE too fast for your attacker.

The anamations for Priest, the anti infantry cannon, some guardians (mentioned in previous posts) are not complete. Just look like placeholders.

Misc flickering of the screen. Probably due to me emulating a GF4 via RiveTuner. Its actually a GF4go on a laptop. However it could be a bug.

Can't train natives. You build/pay but no unit comes out.

Too much micro managing of peasants. You need quick resource keys like Hunt/Gather/Chop/Mine etc. Perhaps you can have different peasant build quest for each order type. That way you don't have to manually point each peasant to the resources. Look at how Empire Earth II does it.

No advanced unit orders. No formations. Can't even tell the units to defend a position. This has the effect of breaking up formations even when there is just 1 attacker(scout). This might be realistic in a full attack situation but it doesn't make sense for just 1 attacker.

Need a unit facing system. Like Rise of Nations. Where you can click and drag a direction you want the unit to face. Its really important to have this if you are going to replicate musket/cannon warfare.

No population limit meter.

The cannon system of different deployments for faster movement etc is a little for the sake of it. This could easily be automatic.

Where are the highlighted letters for each command? Like starcraft/warcraft. IE B = Build D = Deploy ETC

The medic's healing doesn't work.

Sometimes on the New England map the bottom trading post gets caught between the small hill. This prevents it from being built on.

Need some way of telling how much food a mill makes. Same goes for the plantations. How much coin are you getting?

All in all this feels like the original - game play wise. I'm sure it looks good on a nice machine though.

when i try to launch the exe i just get an error box with a big red x like so X and no actual error message just a box that says 'OK'

Does anyone have a bug where their sound works at the beginning but like 5-10 minutes into the game, the music keeps playing, but all sound stops?

Work-around for 2005FPW owners:

1) Delete the folder <My Documents>\My Games\Age of Empires 3 Trial
2) Set your monitor resolution to 1024x768
3) Start the game
4) From the options menu in the game, set your resolution to 1680x1050
5) Quit the game
6) Set your monitor res back to 1680x1050
7) Launch the game.

All is well.

My review: In Reply

Did anyone else notice their priests crab walking on their backs instead of walking? I created two priests to heal people and I thought that they were lying in the grass outside of the church just waiting for me to give them orders since I kind of forgot about them. When I selected and moved them, they didn't get up and started what looked like crab walking on their backs. It's just a small model rotation glitch, but has anyone else seen this or it's just me?

I think it's noteworthy that this demo does exclusively run under WinXP (yeah, because Win2k is SOOO different...)

http://www.microsoft.com/games/age3/survey/

Do the survey to rate the demo!

Man! I was finally winning a scenario for once, was finally rampaging through the enemy settlement base area, and it just complete CTD, no errors, no nothing, as if it wasn't running. :(

Great old AOE gameplay though, if you liked the first two you'll like this one. Expands with home base cities and decks, shipment stuff, took me a bit to realize how important this stuff was, but should add some new spice while not stomping the old AOE way. Great stuff, can't wait til the final.

I figured out how to fix the reboot problem at least for my ATI card. Go into your video card settings and move the slider for standard settings to "balanced". For whatever reason anything higher will not work.

You can lump me with the *demo doesn't work* people. Direct3d initialization errors here.

Add one more 2005FPW that this doesn't run on...

Holy crap...it fried my video card.

I played it for 20 minutes, and my system froze. I rebooted and tried to play it again, and my system froze within 5 minutes. I looked in the case and I can't see anything wrong...the temp is fine.

Now when I boot up ANY game I have white pixels and glitches (WoW, Guild Wars, UT 2K4)!
WTF =(

ATI Radeon 9800 Pro SE 128mb card taken down by AoE III = /

those screenshots can't be in game right? - specially the huge boat in the water?

requires WinXP or later... doh. i guess 5 years is enough time for an OS.. only reason i havent upgraded is because win2k has everything i need and works wonderfully well

It runs fine on my AthlonXP and Radeon 9800XT. Although it doesn't look nearly as good as it does in the press screenshots. I don't think all those shader effects are turned on or something, because it looks very plain.

As long as you turn the shadows off, the game runs very smoothly, and should run good on lower end systems.

Great so i cant play at all because your protecting me from possibly running this without a gpu... i have regular 6800gt (single card)
===============================================================
File 'Age3Log.txt' opened at Wed Sep 07 21:36:54 2005

===============================================================

PreGame 12954: nvCPL reports 0 GPU(s).
PreGame 12954: Unable to get SLI mode!

soooo should I cancel my download or what?

Status report:

okay entering the 2nd age now. So far it plays very similiar to AOE II. Not sure what else i was expecting but lets just say it isn't a radical new game so far.

The GUI takes up nearly a third of my screen, lol.

Running it at 1600x1200 here.

Win x64
6600gt, latest drivers
1gb RAM
fast something 64bit AMD proc
ASUS board

Direct3D error.

duhh..

back to sweet sweet advance wars

Was there a semi-public beta for this, like there was for AoM?

I was in the AoM beta, and the first version "sucked" like this one does (stability/etc), and so they'd get it working for everyone, then let a bunch more people into the beta, get it working, etc, untill it worked on 99% of everyone in the beta, THEN they put out the demo.

I have the demo, but it won't even let me install it. I get an error stating that it only supports Windows XP and refuses to let me go any further with the installation. I have Win2k, so I guess no demo for me.

Anyone else having this problem?

Im loving it so far. So uhh.. Where is the population meter?

The screenshots look amazing. Somehow I missed out on all the "Age of" and "Civ" games.

I've played this for a little bit now and I've got two points.

1. Its good. Very good. Different enough but still keeps the AoE feel.

2. The dialog needs work.

can anyone tell me how to actually increase my resource collection properly? it seems like the enemy always manages to mysteriously have a huge army that crushes mine before I have a chance.

and yes, I've got a mill, I get more settlers, and research resource gathering improvements, so I'm not quite sure what I'm doing wrong.

Is there a multiplayer mode?

WHY MUST MY RAM BE IN RMA THIS WEEK, DAMN YOU NEWEGG (AND OCZ)

I've never gotten into RTS games.

I've never played any of the AOE games.

Question for the Shack: Should I bother with this demo?

Repost from the Inf thread:

http://polycat.net/gallery/aoe3

There are some screens from my brief 15-minute play session. That's what the game looks like running 1280x1024 on the following system:

AMD64 3500+
256mb FX6800 GT
2gb DDR400 RAM

The game is 540mb when installed, and it seems like a fairly high-end system will easily be able to run the game with, roughly, the visual quality of all the PR screenshots we've been fed over the last few months (though probably not up to the point where people can beef up the FSAA). And other than the fact that the interface seems grossly over-sized, I must say that I have a good feeling about this game. As a non-AoE fan in the past (not that I disliked them, I just have never played them... And I didn't like Age of Mythology), the game feels a lot like Rise of Nations to me. And that is a very good thing.

As someone who isn't a big fan of RTS games, this demo isn't doing a whole lot for me :(

Pretty graphics, but the gameplay hasn't changed. Sure, there are "shipments from your home city" and a slight persistent city growth RPG feature, but other than that this might as well be Age of Empires II. The devs pretty much admit that in all their interviews, but it's still disappointing. I was hoping for something a little different :(

Then again, if you loved the previous Age games, you'll probably love this one, too. It is highly polished and entertaining to watch!

Is it just me or is that interface xbox huge?

Maximum sweetness!

holy fucking shit

i need to hook my gaming computer back up.....

*hits post comment and runs to look for box*

Sort of Off Topic but related to a problem I'm having with my 2-year old Radeon 9700 Pro:

Whenever I enter a 3D application, I get display corruption (green textures, looks kind of like the matrix). If I just stay on the Windows desktop or play 2D games, I'm fine.

Tried driver updates, cleaning the card and slot, etc. Why is this happening? Did a pipeline get fried or what?

I hate it. It doesn't let me play games anymore but makes it difficult to justify a new $300 card when I can still surf the web and do word processing, which takes up most of my time in the school year.

fun fact: AOE1 was the second video game i ever bought (with my own money).

the first was micro machines turbo tournament.

Game crashes whenever I try to start it up. Tried reinstalling it but didnt help. I blame it on microsoft. I give up.