Age of Empires 3: The WarChiefs Hands-On

Playing through the first act of the Nathaniel Black campaign, I got the feeling that the game is harder than the original. In the first mission, it was literally a race between my Iroquois and the other two tribes as we both tried to destroy each other's bases. The AI played quite aggressively for normal difficulty, so in the end, it was my brave foray into enemy territory that saved the day. Seconds before the Mohawks destroyed my home base, I destroyed theirs.

Bog of war.

Iroquois warrior.

The second mission was a rescue operation. I slowly got the hang of utilizing the strong sides of the Iroquois, so freeing the prisoners was not that tough. One distinctive new feature in the expansion is the Iroquois Fire Pit. It gives power to the tribe. The Iroquois dance around it. In the first mission, the number of villagers dancing around the fire pit would increase the speed of unit production by 11 percent per villager. Needless to say, had I utilized that feature more in my efforts to annihilate the other two tribes, I surely would've done better.

From what I could see, that was probably the most unique new gameplay feature that I saw in the expansion. Not much, but I only got to play Act 1 of the first chapter. In addition, you have to understand that expansion packs are by and large about adding more content, rather than gameplay innovation.

From a technical standpoint, I was still fairly unimpressed with the unit path finding and their responsiveness in combat. I can't believe this problem still lingers from the day I loaded up the original game. On the other hand, it seems that Ensemble has done a great job on further optimizing the 3D code, so now, the game runs smoother than ever. I had rock solid frame rates at high detail on a mid-range rig. Hopefully, since this is still just a preview build, the developers will tweak the unit AI a bit more before the final product ships.

We'll just have to wait and see, as Age of Empires III: Warchiefs hits the stores this Fall.