This is an old game and if you want praise, just take a look at the other reviews on this site. Why do I not like AOEIII? Personally, real-time strategy board game play has had its time. The earlier Age games were fun for what they were. I never really liked how each individual unit had health bars, suffered from those stupid robotic attacks, and never healed in a more convenient fashion. To me, it seemed like AOEIII was trying to put too much reality into the game and that made it that much more unrealistic to me. The cannonball hits the man, the man goes flying: is the man a man? or does he represent an army? or rather, is he just a board piece? Other small details that people have noted are the so-called "siege attacks" and walls. When infantry units attack buildings, they throw flaming brands which is probably symbolic to razing a town. That doesn't do it for me. Walls are generally pretty useless. People SHOOT through the walls. What the bloody hell is the use of walls if they don't block projectiles? Something else I never liked was that defenders couldn't man the wall, or at least never had a bonus of some sort. The railroads are a joke. Yeah, disappear into nothing and deliver supplies to every country no matter what. What a stupid concept. How do bombards work? Why do they only hit buildings? WHY? There is that whole balance is everything...BULLSHIT. It's time that people moved on to something else rather than this old and outdated style of play. Some good strategy games these days you say? There are tons, and I bet you know a lot of them. To name a few, there is World in Conflict, Company of Heroes and Rome Total War. Rome Total War is high in my books because it not only has a turned based strategy board game for you economy wackos, but has real-time tactics. YES TACTICS. You could never do THAT before because all you did before was send your armies into oblivion! I just saw a video of StarCraft 2 and basically its the same meat grinder techniques as the original except with more units and better graphics. I would have expected something like Company of Heroes or at least something more revolutionary. Rome Total War not only lets you man walls and hold sieges in real cities, but allows you to command armies of up to 10,000 units if not much more. Impressive eh? Not to mention cavalry actually have charge bonuses unlike the stupid AOEIII ones. This game came out 3 years before AOEIII. It had more entertaining game play and more REALISTIC game play. I just saw a bit of the new Halo Wars thats being done by Ensemble Studios. It looks like C&C 3 with different skins. Sorry ES, move over. Your time has come and gone.
