Once your experience level has filled up a meter, you'll be eligible for a shipment. When you kill hostile units, destroy enemy buildings and set up trade routes you'll be rewarded with experience points.
With the addition of the 'home city' and its upgradeable card system (see 'Decks And The City!', opposite), you can now have shipments of supplies (the main resources are wood, food and money), troops or other goodies sent to your new colony. Construct a trading post by a native settlement and you can recruit their soldiers and medicine men.
If it were a historical simulation, you'd probably be selling these poor folks diseased blankets, turfing them out of their homes and calling it 'manifest destiny', but Ensemble has wisely chosen to sidestep most of this unpleasantness, allowing you to'ally yourself with the tribes instead. As you'll no doubt have guessed, this game has of Native Americans. Thankfully, the setting isn't the only thing that's new. The mood of the single-player campaign is a little more altruistic, spanning a few hundred years and putting you in the shoes (or fetching suede moccasins, at one point) of three members of a family as they move around the Americas, striving to keep the secret of eternal life out of the hands of a wicked secret society. This time around we're in the New World, with players assuming the roles of conquistadors, colonists and explorers, scouring unspoiled lands for wealth and power. Then, as your city evolves, new cards with technologies, buildings and other goodies open up. Your home-city itself is like a giant role-playing character, in that it levels up as you progress through your games, independently of how you level up ages within a single game. Unfortunately, you can only use 20 in a game, but you can create different decks of cards for varying situations: naval battle, cavalry-focused, economy-focused and so on. There are many different cards available as you go through the five ages. Then all you need to do is flick to your home-city screen and cash in your points for shipment cards such as troops, technologies and resource packages. As they accumulate experience points through building, gathering and fighting, they earn shipment points from their main city. Basically, each civilisation (there are eight in total) has its own home-city screen. Card Sharpīut the feature Ensemble believes to be the biggest innovation in AOE3 is a cardbased improvement system, which sounds a bit complex to us. When you attack buildings like windmills, even the movement physics of the sails change as they're blown apart. Again this is through physics rather than animation. Perhaps even more impressive is how buildings break down during battles. Yes, when you shoot troops with a cannonball they actually do fly through the air and bounce off things. No, Ensemble has also used the Havok engine to bring ragdoll physics to AOE3. It's not only things like water, smoke and fog effects that have been added.
It's only when you observe the game in motion and see all the little gatherers chopping, mining and farming that familiarity filters through. Pretty isn't it? In fact graphically, Age Of Empires III is almost unrecognisable from its predecessors. It was more of a short-side diversion to try out some new ideas in preparation for the game that was to follow, focusing on the discovery of the New World. Contrary to popular belief, Age of Mythology wasn't Age Of Empires III, and was never meant to be.
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