Discovering the Age of Discovery

I'm playing Age of Kings III: Age of Imperialism for the first time, borrowing it from an acquaintance to make sure it runs on my Vista before buying my own copy. I'm well acquainted with its predecessor, the Age of Kings, a medieval real-time strategy game. I'm not terribly good at it -- I'm far too lazy and indulgent to bother getting "good", preferring instead to play on easier difficult levels where I can be wasteful but still win with a bit of effort. I'm the type of player who likes building towns and amassing armies, but not using them. After playing through the tutorial, I decided to play a skirmish match, set on easy. I'm playing as the Germans, mostly because I've gained an affection for all things German after four semesters of German language classes. Hearing a sturdy "Jawohl!" when I tell soldiers to march around is rather gratifying.

I chose a New England map, and as it happened the map was divided into half by a trading route with controllable areas. After my explorer "Klaus" uncovered that portion of the map, I made haste to start claiming them. Apparantly on "Easy" difficulty the computer spends most of its time contemplating its navel or some other such thing, because despite my woefully inefficent resource gathering -- directing settlers to chop wood, produce food, and mine silver for money -- I claimed all four trade route spots and build two outposts along the road.

I quickly found the enemy colony -- here you can see one of my "Uhlans" encountering rival woodsmen. The coin emblems on the map represent trade route spots, the little huts Indian villages, and the X's treasure sites. I'm rather lazy and never got around to taking any treasure. I parked a tower just south of the Dutch colony to  keep an eye on Dutch troops that might try to raid the trade route:  I could only support so many troops, and so preferred instead to keep my army at a central location and then move them to wherever they were called for if the time came.






As it happened, by the time Dutch troops started wandering southward, I'd already made the tower into a forward base: it was quite near a silver mine, and so I had workers there mining it. I also had a barracks and an artillery foundary. The Dutch would attack it numerous times, getting slaughtered and each and every time. There was no contest: my soldiers were massed and mixed, consisting of crossbowmen, heavy swordsmen, and skirmishing riflemen. Once I got cannon -- and an upgrade from my "home city" that allowed me to turn cheap cannon into field artillery -- the game was effectively over.




 I soon began reducing their town to rubble. After destroying their two barracks, all resistance stopped -- I needed only to keep reducing their colony to force them to surrender. Meanwhile, my cavalrymen were hunting down Dutch settlers and giving them a taste of silver.




The slaughter was not all on land, either: the tower I built just north of the trade route blew up a Dutch ship while I was busy watching my cannon reduce the Dutch town to rubble.






I decided to try another game, this one on a different kind of map, one that promised a river.




German Soldier:  Llamas....rheas....and dirt. Where the hell did we land? 

Again, a trade route lay roughly in the middle of the map, which was intersected vertically by a river with shallow spots. My explorer Klaus stumbled upon the Portuguese colony by accident and began throwing things at it. He would do this for a while longer.Once my economy started to develop, I militarized the middle of the map.



Where we see my troops attacking a pirate and an Indian with a blowgun to claim their treasure. Geld ist gute, ja?  I again built a tower just south of the enemy colony to help stymie any invasions on their part, then turned it into a forward base at my leisure. This turned into a nice move on my part. The location I chose allowed my soldiers to take over in the woods with a tower at their backs when the enemy tried to attack them, leading to a slaughter greater than before.




I soon began raiding the colony, at which point the Portuguese took great offense at Klaus throwing things at them and started shooting at him. He took refuge behind a rock.




 As my troop numbers grew, so to did my aggressiveness: I started attacking the Portugese workers. They would flee, only to find themselves facing another band of German crossbowmen, knights, and muskets: it was rather sad, almost.








I had the Portugese bottled up nicely. They were doomed. Rather than waiting on cannons, I trained pikemen to take on the town center directly. I lost quite a few during the siege of it, and afterward when villagers armed with muskets poured out of its sundered entryway, but was able to crush the colony quick-time.