So I'm going to speculate a little about what's going to be in Age of Empires III: Age of Discovery.
I've got quite a bit of play time on previous titles in the series to base my opinions on, and I did talk to some people at E3, but I'm not an expert and I haven't read everything out there.
With that disclaimer out of the way, let's get on with the pretty pictures :-)
Click each picture for more details.
The screenshots in this piece, and a lot of the other good pictures from Electronics Entertainment Expo (E3) this year are courtesy of Candace. She has an uncanny instinct for what to take pictures of. I did the post-processing (adjusting levels and restoring little bits with the
Gimp). Generally her photography is much more
artistic than what you see here. You can see more of her good work, including some from the expo, on her
Flickr pages. I think she did a great job on this shot of
Jeff Brown (one of the lead guys on AoE3). She also has the only flickr picture (at the time of writing) tagged with '
boothdude.' Read about her perspective on the trip in
her blog. See some of her academic work on feminism and women's social issues as her new site
femilicious.com develops.
I really like the way buildings can be rotated to pretty much any angle when they're laid out. They seem to connect much more naturally than the blocky boxed-layout ancestors of the modern RTS. The troops here are typical of the footsoldiers seen in Age of Empires 3. The shadows of the trees are clearly cast on to the water, down past the banks of the water. Very nice. A heavy cannon is the selected unit, but I think it's off-screen since I don't see it in the picture.
Everyone's on about water effects when a new game applies some nice shaders. In AoE3, the boats actually rise and fall with the waves. The height of the character of the waves can be controlled when the level is designed. I just wish South hall wasn't so dark so you could appreciate the range of colour in this shot.
The user interface during the game looks similar to ones you'd be familiar with from other AoE titles. The map is on the left, the selected units or buildings are in the middle and the actions are on the right. One thing I noticed when reviewing my videos of the demonstration that's new to me was what appeared to be menus that flew up from certain icons chosen on the right side of the screen. I'll have to watch that again to pick out exactly what was going on.
Two in-game shots? Um, more please? What did all yours turn out to fuzzy? Nice specular lighting on the sails in the second pic, btw. Feels very real.
In the user-interface page you repeated the caption on the third pic. tsk tsk tsk.
I wonder if the "people" resource is something like Karma or Morale? Did they mention anything like that?
Not sure about the 'people resource'. They did say clearly that there are just the three resource types now, though.
I only shot movies of the AoEIII demo and presentation. That's what I'm referring to now for my info. Candace got the screenshots here, and some more that did turn out well. Even a good photo needs post-processing though, and that takes time. When I get a chance, I'll try to get some more up.
UT8OYT8
With the population limits, why is it only 200 units?
the game is good and it's alook at hte meat of america