I gotta say it surprised me how well DE team has managed the campaigns. I didn’t dream they will be as good as they are now. Might be too early to judge, but after Barbarossa campaign on hard I am amazed how well you managed remastering those scenarios. New pop cap limits is what those campaigns needed, and the new AI that followed, that is demanding, but not broken fits those scenarios really well. Even friendly AI’s feel like they aren’t that retarded as they used to be - not too strong, but they remain a nuissance whole game.
I liked how friendly AI in Barbarossa M3 sent their 3-ship fleet instantly to me once I’ve had an enemy in vision of my ships, and after we cleared the river, they began regular small skirmishes with unit transports on enemy’s land. It was cute.
I really love the idea of different pop cap for various missions. It’s immersive that the last mission of campaign is a big clusterfuck, a glorious battle for Jerusalem with 150 pop on both sides, while Barbarossa’s journey to Poland presents only 100 pop cap to work with. Fullfills my need for bloodshed, and doesn’t destroy my vision from childhood of Henry the Lion scenario, where you’ve had limited force to work with
I love the fact that DE team used factions from expansions to correct old enemies in a subtle way. Turning Mongols to Kipchaks from Barbarossa 1 was really clever. Italians are finally using Italian civs, Czechs and Poles are Slavs. (although we all now Slavs present eastern Slavs, not the western, it’s still better than Goths or Teutons)
New AI is much better than it used to be, manages it’s eco a lot better, makes more vills, and exhausts whole forests and gold mines to sustain it’s war machine, while denying you resources everywhere it can. It did even beat me on mission 4, on 2nd attempt I’ve barely made it scrambling for every resource I could find, securing them with castles, and fighting both on sea and land. We both exhausted all the gold on map - it was nice to see they struggled with it aswell, did not produce any units but helberds and such. It’s rarity to see non-cheating AI in today’s games.
If this is what we get, I have no fear for AoE3 DE anymore. A pity AoE1 campaigns did not receive as much love as AoE2 ones.
How do you feel about them?