I am a video maker( just like youtuber while I post videos on Bilibili). I have recieved tons of comments about the reasons why people don’t play AOE3 or hate AOE3. They have kinds of reasons, I will write the main reasons here.
Lack of history campaign. And the existing history campaigns are not popular. They want some history campaigns focus on Europe and Asia. For Chinese players, they especially do not like the Chinese campaign.
200 pops is not enough, they want more populations. And for PVE players, they don’t like the limit of tower\fortress\warship.
They don’t like the troops speed change so exaggerated. I mean, sometimes too slow(when goes with artillery) while sometimes too fast. They always consider that it represents AOE3 is shoddily made and a semi-finished product.
They don’t know how to choose cards, there should be a recommend deck for every civ. But the original decks in game now are not practical.
There is not much to do about this tbh. The beginner decks are ok. The problem isnt that they are bad, but that new players constantly forget about the cardmechanic and straight up dont see the value in sending for example +700 Wood^^’
Yes, there were some good options… I was even thinking of making 3 campaign DLCs:
Return of the Kings (basically a port of 3 campaigns from Age of Empires II to III):
a) Pachacuti (Incas vs. Incas)
b) Moctezuma (Aztecs vs. Aztecs and Spanish)
c) Francisco de Almeida (Portuguese vs. Spanish, African civilizations, and Ottomans)
Battle for Europe
a) Suleiman (Ottomans vs. Spanish, Germans, and Persians, aka renamed Indians)
b) Gustavus Adolphus (Swedes vs. Russians and Germans)
c) Napoleon (French vs. the rest of Europe lol)
And for Asia, maybe just Koxinga (Chinese vs. Dutch)
Unfortunately, AOE3 goes for 20 years and MS never solve these problems. I don’t know if they feel too hard to do that or just do not aware of it. The four civ DLCs do not attract new players, because the base problems are still there.
The USA DLC is good, but it do not contain a campaign. And it can be gain as free, that let W.E. make a lot less money.
The Africa DLC is good, it also have several campaigns, but few players are interesting in Africa civs, and we can see the number of players in steamdb just made 5000 to 5700. I think it is a bad choice.
The Mexico DLC is good, it has tons of contents and could be the most complex civ in the whole AOE series. But it still do not attract any new players and it was too cheap compared with AOE2/4/M dlcs.
The KotM DLC is good, and it seems to be the best sell DLC. The Europe content really gains more attention. But it has no campaigns,too.
It’s pitty for AOE3 to lose chances time and time.
That refers to another problem. Some players complain that there’s no tutorial in AOE3. In fact we know the tutorial lies behind ‘tool’, and the art of war is also a kind of tutorial, but new players may be hard to realise that.
mmm entiendo lo de de la población, pero habran facciones que se romperan absolutamente, ademas de que si ya el aoe 3 se relentiza con muchisimas unidades en pantalla imaginate con llegar a pop 500
y en cuanto a limite de contrucción… ahi tendrias que hacer un balanceo general en todo, por que imagina que malta haga fuertes infinitos de 18k de vida? o las mismas facciones nativas con la carta de danza defensiva
Yes, exactly…if they had tried to do worse with the game, they wouldn’t have succeeded…
Yes, the AoE wiki treats them as campaigns, but they’re really just scenarios grouped into a “campaign” which is the Historical Battles… AoE 3 itself only has 8 campaigns (the 3 from the original game, the 2 from TWC, and the 3 from TAD)… and in 3DE, 2 more are added: The Art of War and Historical Battles, and that’s it, those 10 and nothing more…
Yes, it was for balance reasons; otherwise the game would be unplayable with so many defensive buildings…
If we have to add another reason, it would be the people who played the Vanilla version and never gave this HD version a chance for several reasons:
Bullying Spain: Perhaps it’s due to the Black Legend in the minds of the early developers, making it the weakest civilization in the game. They didn’t even give them Tercio Arquebusiers, because apparently they wanted to keep the number of unique units per civilization to a minimum, and since they already had the Cuirassier and Swordsmen, they didn’t give them anything else. Instead of the Dragon, they could have given them the Conquistador with an arquebus on horseback, but no, another waste. No mention of the Viceroyalties, nor the buildings, landmarks, and viceregal wonders—nothing, because they wanted the first 8 civilizations to be uniform and identical. TERRIBLE MISTAKE.
Pikemen don’t act like pikemen: They don’t have good range, nor do they allow for attacking in formation as they were originally intended. In fact, in multiplayer, it’s more convenient to build Dragons than Pikemen to counter cavalry, making it almost useless except for initial rushes.
Anti-cavalry and anti-everything Musketeers: They’re even more efficient than pikemen, and for some reason, they all have bayonets for close-range combat, which is ridiculous, considering it wasn’t invented until 1670.
Unhistorical Revolutions, Bullying Spain Again X2: Having to play as Germany or Islamic countries to play as Peru is completely nonsensical. They could have used other real countries, but no, they divided up South America as if Russia or even Turkey had created Viceroyalties here, not colonies, Viceroyalties. Oh, but of course, for the English, viceroyalties don’t exist, only colonialism.
Cards Level Up System Ruins Multiplayer Balance - Instead of having cards unlocked from the start, if you want to play each civilization at its best, you’re forced to play with weak and terrible cards until you unlock the most overpowered ones as you level up. This system is tedious and annoying, since each game can last 1 to 2 hours just to get enough XP to obtain sufficient cards, and you end up playing not for fun but to gain XP. This prevents real balance in multiplayer, since some people, through luck or mathematical experience, will know or intuit which cards are better to level up and which aren’t. The worst part: You can’t correct it: If you choose the wrong cards, you only get one chance to rebalance. That’s not even the worst part: Before the WarChief and AsianDynasties expansions, ALL the cards were THE SAME for all civilizations: just more soldiers or random economy bonuses, but they were identical for all 8 civilizations. There weren’t many unique cards per civilization. So what’s the point of having something locked that’s the same for all civilizations? TERRIBLE DESIGN. People hated it so much that they created mods to unlock all the cards from the start, or to level up cities to 99.
Thankfully, the revolutions in the DE (Destination Edition) have changed and now make more sense. Spain now has more thematic cards, a Treasury card, and pikemen can even be a profitable build in Imperial.
They even fixed the Level Up system, and now it’s only for cosmetics, as it should have been from the beginning. But oh well, it’s unlikely that people who didn’t give the DE a chance back in the day will find out.
The Incas and Italians were a good hook for the DE; in fact, that’s what made me want to play the DE, along with the fact that it was on sale.
Yes, Age of Empires 3 DE is a very decent game… I think that if they only focused on releasing campaigns for the civilizations already in the game (and if some civilizations are missing, you can customize them) it would have done better than just releasing new civilizations with almost no single-player content and that’s it… I myself think that two campaign DLCs would have been very good if they had been released in 2023 and 2024…
It’s nearly impossible to use the editor to create custom campaigns. This is a terrible downgrade, considering that Age of Empires II allowed it, and that’s what kept the game’s fanbase going for the longest time: the fans of Single-player content in custom campaigns and mods.
In Age of Empires III, almost every campaign civilization has its own unique home city generation, allowing players to acquire new cards as they level up. But, the devs never allowed this system to be used in the Editor to create your own adventures, and shate it in the network.
And they never fixed that in the Definitive Edition. I think that was the biggest mistake.
el juego si tiene leyenda negra xd pero ya a mi me da igual solo con leer el compendio te das cuenta de ello, que por cierto lo de las cartas en el aoe 3 original si fue un problema, sobre todo el desbloqueo de cartas, osea en el papel estaba bien, pero al final del dia el que jugaba mas tenia mas ventaja que el resto.
The Black Legend was a very real English and Dutch political propaganda tactic during the colonial period to discredit the Spanish viceroyalties, and you are the one making a fool of yourself by defaming me.
Unfortunately, this legend took such deep root, for political reasons, that sometimes even the Spanish are deliberately attacked in media, in ways they shouldn’t be.
In this case, in vanilla Age of Empires 3, many descriptions of various units reveal precisely this view and there are many subtle examples:
Spanish galleons has the ability to produce Pirates, when it should be the English, who were the true privateers (Corrected in the DE)
The description of Spain in vanilla speaks ill of it, no mention of Viceroyalty, tribunal de las Indias, human rights for natives, nothing!!!, only poison. If you compare it to that of Britsh civ description, they are like Mother Teresa of Calcutta, which is a terrible joke.
Morgan Black, of the campaign, looking for conflict with Spain in 1565; when in reality Malta was an ally of Spain, and Tenochtitlan had already fallen by 1521, so there shouldn’t have been any Aztecs city there. Less slavery; what existed was feudalism, which Malta also practiced, and even more so by 1565 when corregidores (royal officials) were established, replacing the original conquerors who did commit abuses. Therefore, the idea of freeing Aztec slaves or fighting alongside them is wrong from any perspective.
No mention of the viceroyalties.- No mention of the Spanish viceroyalties in economic bonuses, unique buildings, landmarks, wonders, or anything else. (Lightly corrected in the DE).
And I’ll leave it at that, because this topic is about why the Definitive Edition isn’t played as much, and this is about the vanilla version. Thankfully, the Definitive Edition fixed several of these issues, and the campaign thankfully isn’t taken too seriously, because aside from being fictional, what attracts people is the multiplayer.