TeAM YYePG

FEATURE AOE3
SKIRMISH MODE
“[SKIRMISH MODE] IS THE MAIN THING THAT’S
distinguished our games from everyone else’s,”
says Shelley—and he’s right. Age of Empires was
the first real-time strategy game to give players
the opportunity to compete against the computer
A.I. on randomly generated maps, essentially mimicking
the structure of a multiplayer game. Even
today, the challenges inherent in making random
maps that the A.I. can play on intelligently—and
that players feel are fair—are just too great for
most companies.
Blizzard, for example, never includes random
maps; everything in WarCraft is always hand painted.
Shelley explains the difference this way:
“[Blizzard] is building chess games [in WarCraft
and StarCraft] for competition. One guy at Blizzard
THE NEW WORLD, OF COURSE, WASN’T NEW TO
everyone, and Ensemble knew from the start that
Native Americans would play an important role in
the game. They do, but not as a playable civilization.
“There are Native American towns on maps, and
it’s up to you to go discover them and forge
alliances with them,” says Street. You forge those
alliances by building trading posts near Native
American villages (and you break other civilizations’
alliances by destroying their trading posts). Once
you form an alliance with a tribe, you can use its
units and technologies, along with those of your
own civilization. So, for example, if you are playing
as the French and you ally with the Iroquois, you
now have access to French and Iroquois soldiers
and knowledge. “They’re kind of like plug-ins,”
Street explains. “They’re an additional civ that you
can plug into your main one to get extra abilities.”
Strategically, this adds an interesting new dimension
to the game. Native American alliances cost no
population spots because you needn’t provide them
with food and shelter, as you would your own units.
Nearing your population limit and short on warriors?
If you’re allied with a nearby Native American tribe,
50 > COMPUTER GAMING WORLD
> In
A.I. with attitude
said we wouldn’t believe the amount of e-mail they
get from competitive players saying stuff like, ‘If
you would just move that item two pixels south it’d
balance the map.’ We’re building a poker game,
where every hand, you don’t know what you’ve got
until you pull up your cards.”
AOE3’s big, new skirmish mode feature is the
inclusion of eight computer-player personas, one
for each civilization—Napoleon for France, Queen
Isabella for Spain, and so on (see page 51). Every
A.I. opponent will have different strategies, motivations,
and personalities.
“We wanted to beef up the feeling that you’re
playing against a persona, not a bunch of bits
calculating the most optimal way to attack you,”
says Street.
NATIVE AMERICANS
a game about the colonization of
America, deciding how to portray Native
Americans is especially difficult.
you have their warriors at your disposal with no hit
to your population limit or resources. And as you
advance, your indigenous allied friends get additional
units and technologies.
What they won’t ever get is attacked: Native
American units are treated as opponents only when
they’re allied with another civilization, and then, only
their military units can be attacked. For example, if
you are playing against the British, who are allied
with the Comanche, you can attack Comanche military
units—never Comanche villages themselves. If
no alliances are in place, Native Americans aren’t
attackable at all.
Ensemble and Microsoft admit that in making a
game about the European colonization of America,
deciding how to portray Native Americans was difficult.
It seemed that no matter how they were represented—or
even what they were called—somebody
One way they’ll do this is with audio taunts—
there are about 4,000 at this point—that will chime
in at key moments in recognition of what’s happening
in the game. Age of Mythology included
text taunts from the A.I., but with AOE3’s multiple
audible personalities, it’s much more amped up
this time around.
“A really cool thing is for the A.I. to tell you
what to do,” says Pottinger. “Let’s say that as
Napoleon is marching across the map, he says,
‘I’m on my way to kick your ass.’ That’s cool.
Why? It creates a time line and some tension,
because you know that in a couple minutes, this
big Napoleonic army is coming to your town.
That’s a lot more fun than just having 40
cuirassiers show up.”
PC meets PC
was going to be unhappy. Native American groups
themselves couldn’t agree on what Ensemble
should do. Microsoft conducted meetings with representatives
of different tribes, but according to
Ensemble president Tony Goodman, “It was impossible
to get consensus on any issue. There was no
topic that they as a collective group agreed upon.”
Some tribal representatives felt the same way as
many at Ensemble: Native Americans should be a
playable civilization. Others wanted them in the
game, but to be unkillable. And the debate over
naming ranged from Native American to First
Peoples to Indigenous Peoples to...well, Indians.
Ultimately, it came down to gameplay. “We knew
what we wanted from a gameplay standpoint,” says
Rippy. “We did everything we could to make it politically
correct, but we didn’t let that drive the design.
Fun trumps history.”