Darwinianevolution

User Score
5.0

Presentation - 5.0
Gameplay - 5.0
Value - 5.0

Game: Age of History III

Platform: PC, mobile (android, iOS)

Year: 2024

Developer: Łukasz Jakowski Games

Genre: Strategy, 4X

The 4X genre of videogames is one that I’ve never been too grabbed by. Considering how much I like traditional RTS games, you would think I would like the more expansive and ambitious 4X such as Civilization, Total War or Hearts of Iron, but the more I try them, the more I think they lose themselves in their plethora of mechanics. They focus on so many things at once that they miss the relatively simplicity of a RTS match. However, the genre has grown quite a lot since the old days, and has somewhat taken over the spotlight RTS games used to have, with very big budget releases every couple of years, more complex and adding more mechanics. Seeing this trend, it is understandable that other, simpler options appear, trying to distill the basics of the genre. And considering that excess of complexity is one of my main gripes with the genre, I couldn’t help to seek them. This is how I found Age of History III.

Age of History III is a 4X game developed by Łukasz Jakowski Games released in 2024 for PC and mobile. The game puts you in command of a colony of a nation of your choosing at different periods of history, and it is your job to take over the world. To that end, you will have to deal with many aspects of ruling a nation, while also keeping tabs of what your neighbors are doing.

The basic gameplay is very straightforward. You start by choosing one of the available maps, each of them already designed and located on the map. Each of the civilizations have a series of features of them: the type of government and the religion, the number of provinces under their control, the population of the nation, its economy rate, the technologies available and a series of extra bonus. Depending on which civilization you choose, the difficulty will be higher or lower, it is clearly not the same to start as a single province nation on a remote corner of the map or starting as the world power, with a good chunk of the map already under your grasp. Once you pick one, the goal is simple: take over the world. The game does not have an end point or a series of goals that bring you victory, you continue until the whole map is yours (you could continue playing after that, but I consider that as the “game cleared” stage). And since diplomacy options are limited, the game will consist of you developing your economy while also gobbling up neighboring territories while defending yourself from the neighbors who want to do the same to you. Unlike its predecessor Age of History II, Age of History III foregoes the turn-based system in favor of a real time one, which is a massive improvement, and makes gameplay considerably more fluid. More time speed options would be nice, though, especially during periods in which you just want to farm resources and can do nothing but wait until you get enough stuff to act, but you also want something stopping the game if an NPC declares war on you, least you get overwhelmed before you can react.

The economy is very easy to grasp once you fiddle around for a while. Each of the provinces has a certain population, and unique resource they produce and a tax collection efficiency. Depending of the combination of these three elements, the province will produce a certain amount of gold, which can be increased by investing in each of these areas to improve its output. This is also affected by the buildings you construct (always taking care of the space available) and the different bonuses you have unlocked. Population limits the output of the province, so to improve their growth, first you invest in population growth, then you invest in their economy, and then in their tax efficiency. As long as there’s enough population, you cannot max them out, so they can grow indefinitely. You still need to invest in multiple provinces, though, as there’s no way a single province is going to produce enough to sustain your nation once you reach a certain size. The unique resource will also affect the gold output of the province, as it depends of the prices of said product on the global market. You get a bonus if you become the world’s main producer of a certain item, so you are encouraged to both capture the provinces that generate a resource and invest heavily in their economy so their output soars. It will also depend on the time of the game, as certain resources can only be truly profitable at certain points (you are going to get very little use of uranium and oil during the Middle Ages, but they become valuable once we start reaching industralization). Gold is not the only resource, though, there is also “legacy”, which is needed to take certain investments and to get bonuses; “diplomacy points”, needed to take diplomatic actions towards other nations; and “manpower”, needed to recruit soldiers. One of the issues I have with the economic system is how slow it can be to actually invest in: to improve your economic output or your population growth, you have to select each province individually, instead of having an option of improving everything at once, or an option to invest as much as possible in a single province. This makes me spend a good chunk of the gameplay just clicking the right button of the mouse to add each of the investments, which becomes a chore, especially once you have a ton of money and have problems of reaching your resource cap (if you reach it, you stop getting money until you spend what you have). This is also a chore for making the different buildings, as if you want a temple or a factory in each of your provinces, you have to select them individually, one by one, a boring task once you have +100 provinces (and you can have up to thousands).  A slider system would have been much appreciated. Set the amount you want to spend on each, and just use the brush option to select them all at once. Hell, the game has a brush system implemented, but it is only accessible on the map editor or the sandbox. Why? Why not have it as an option to invest on multiple regions at once?

Diplomacy and war are a mix bag. While diplomacy has been somewhat simplified, the war gameplay has been somewhat revamped from Age of History II. Since gameplay now is real time rather than turn-based, this needed to happen. It is not massive, but seeing the troops moving in real time helps a lot in planning your next move and knowing where the enemy is going. You can also assign generals to your armies to improve their stats, though I feel that the difference is marginal until late in the game. You can choose between different types of units (frontline, secondary and supports), and this has minor effects on how the battles go. There is also a new unit, the settler, which is there to help kickstart the settlement of the non-occupied provinces. You create it, send it to an unoccupied territory, and it will colonize it automatically, much faster and easier than the method used in Age of History II, and since it can be done much earlier, it can help the expansion of those civilizations who start in areas relatively isolated from other nations (though if the big powers start taking land before you, you are toast). Diplomacy has also been simplified, but unlike the combat part of the game, it has been simplified to the worse. You have less options to negotiate and deal with your neighbors, as the limitations put in terms of alliances and other deals make it so the smaller states end up devoured quite early on. In Age of History II, you could make big coalitions between different nations, which could help deter the big states from conquering the smaller ones one by one. This has been removed, and at most, you can ally with other two nations. In Age of History II, you could make an union between two countries if their relations were good enough, something key in early campaigns, as you suddenly double the size of your nation. This has also been removed, and the only way to expand is warfare. Other options such as justified takeovers are not added either, something that has been common in other 4X games. I remember in Victoria II, you could offer loans to other countries, and if they didn’t pay them, you were allowed to take them over without any aggressive expansion penalty. It would have helped as a way to keep expanding while avoiding the penalty of aggressive expansion, which is all other nations ganging up on you, pretty much unwinnable until the very late game.

And here lies a big problem with Age of History III. Since the only real goal of the game is conquest, and the only real means of it is military conquest while also avoiding getting the aggressive expansion coalition against you, most of the middle game is spent waiting for that counter to go down. You use that time to improve your economy, but the bigger you are, the more tedious this is, since you cannot just make sweeping investments or changes throughout your empire, you have to go piecemeal. As I have mentioned before, this game desperately needs a system to make general investments much, much faster, so as to avoid hours of just clicking the right button of the mouse. Otherwise, you better have something else to distract you during the duller moments, or this game will feel like a chore. I get part of this game’s strength is how simple and easy it is to pick up for a 4X, but this area needed more work. Adding multiple ways of non-warfare conquest could have added more depth, and keep more options open if conquest is not a preferable tactic. Again, union between nations, debt mechanics, annexation of vassal states, buying and selling provinces rather than just selling them… I feel like there must have been a way to add them without overcomplicating the gameplay.

The map itself is quite simple. Much like Age of History II, the maps are just provincials divisions of the world, with more than 5.000 different provinces. While the main map is the world map, with all of the continents and the provinces, the game allows smaller games where you play on a certain region of the world, where each province counts for more. The goals between the campaigns and scenarios are the same, no particular win condition other than to conquer all. Graphics are simple enough, just what is needed to know what is going on. The campaigns could have used much more customization than what they have: things like how many NPC nations will appear or randomizing the province in which they appear (both possible in Age of History II). Images such leaders portraits, building icons and the loading screens are made by AI, not particularly distracting, but I feel it’s necessary to point out. The UI is pretty good, easy to follow, though some of the menus are accessible only if you have certain zoom of the map, which is odd. There is also an editor, but it is not particularly interesting. As the map available is only the world map, I imagine modding to add more maps would have given the game a much needed boost of replayability, though the editor states that “by creating or uploading any mods, you agree that Łukasz Jakowski Games retains full ownership”. Why bother with this? People complain when big companies do that with their mod community, taking their creations and using them as they see fit, it is not better when indies do this. A shame, honestly.

Age of History III is quite an impressive achievement for an one-man team, a quick and easy to pick up title for a genre that usually need big teams to properly pull off. However, some of the elements that have been left off from the previous title, plus a couple of areas in which it needed more detail, even despite its simplicity goal, pulls it back from being a truly great title. Still, it was quite a fun game, and considering the developer is still working on the title, I can imagine many of the criticism I added here might be gone eventually.

Score: 5/10