Age of Empires III

Age of Empires III Tips & Tricks

• Revealing the entire map

  Save your game and resign. The map will be shown to you as if you had lost. Then, just load the game and keep playing. Note that the map will be shown only between clicking to resign and choosing to quit. It will not continue like this when you start the loaded game.

• Easy experience points

  To get easy experience for your home town, start a skirmish. Choose the sandbox difficulty setting and the smallest map. Win the game the fastest way possible. You will receive the usual experience, but can do this as many times as desired, resulting in lots of experience in a short amount of time. If desired, you also use the cheats to win the game easier.

• Invincible units

  Remember that this procedure involves editing a game file; create a backup copy of the file before proceeding. Utilize your text editor to edit the "proto.xml" file in the "data" directory in the game folder. Find a the heading for a unit in the file (for example, "Explorer"). Locate the area below the heading that starts with the tags. Add a new line under that area with: Invulnerable; DoNotDieAtZeroHitpoints

• God-like heroes

  This is similar to the "Edit resources" trick, except only your side benefits not the CPU as well. This trick will enable your hero character to move very fast on the map; have lots of hit points; destroy any enemy unit/building in one click; etc. REMEMBER: This procedure involves editing a game file; create a backup copy of the file before proceeding. Use a text editor to edit the "proto.xml" file in the "data" directory in the game folder. Search for your hero's first name plus "SPC". For example, for "Amelia", it is "SPCAmelia". You should find something that looks like the following: The XML tags of interests are as follows: 5.0000 7.0000 18.0000 850.0000 850.0000 24.0000 BuildingAttack 14.000000 Siege 3.000000 DoubleBarrelAttack 750.000000 Ranged 16.000000 3.000000 1.000000 GAIAEnemy HandAttack 14.000000 Hand 1.500000

• Edit resources

  Remember that this procedure involves editing a game file; create a backup copy of the file before proceeding. Use a text editor to edit the "proto.xml" file in the "data" directory in the game folder. REMEMBER: You may first need to uncheck the "Read Only" attribute of that file's properties in Windows Explorer. Search for the text "CrateOf". You will find CrateofFood, CrateofCoin, CrateofWood, CrateofFoodLarge, CrafteofCoinLarge, and CrateofWoodLarge. For all these entries, find the tag "InitialResourceCount" and change the count to whatever desired. For example, the normal crates each have "100.000" of the resources. You can change the "100" to "99999.000", etc. Make sure you do this for all the crates; sometimes a map will give you a large crate of something, and smaller ones of something else, etc. This works best because every map you play in campaign or skirmish starts you with some "crates" of resources, which your settlers will gather out. This will edit the crates to have huge amounts of resources in them. However, it still takes a long time to get the resources out of the crate for the settlers, because there are so many. If you are impatient, search for "Settler" in the "proto.xml" file and find the tag for GatherCrate. Change the value to whatever desired, preferably something very high (for example, "99999"). They will pull the resources out of the crate instantly.

• Unlimited resources

  Utilize your text editor to edit the "proto.xml" file in the "data" directory in the game folder. REMEMBER: You may first need to uncheck the "Read Only" attribute of that file's properties in Windows Explorer. Search for the text "CrateOf". You will find CrateofFood, CrateofCoin, CrateofWood, CrateofFoodLarge, CrafteofCoinLarge, and CrateofWoodLarge. For all these entries, find the tag InitialResourceCount" and change the count to whatever desired. For example, the normal crates each have "100.000" of the resources. You can change the "100" to "99999.000", etc.

• Easy leveling in Single Player

  Open the sp_yourcityname_homecity.xml file in the My Documents\My Games\Age of Empires 3\Savegame (dont forget to make a back up first) folder, search for [level]. You will see something like this [level]xx[/level], put in 99 for the xx, save the file, go into the game and play a skirmish. Now you are level 99 !

• Making a Strong Hold

  First put a wall around your strong hold then gather food, coin and wood and go into the fortress age (get fortress from home city). Now put fortress into the center of the the square wall and what do you know, its a strong hold. Upgrade if you like.