Forget "Age of Empires 3".. this game has all ur looking for right here, except for directx9.0 graphics.
Now this is very important, Look at age of empires 2 when it was first released.. "2D Graphics" most people were thinking "why are they going a step back in technology?". For, other games back in the year 2000 such as, Total annihilation kingdoms all had 3d engines. Now to prove that this game is still very successful go to the zone community. In fact, over 2000 players are playing age of empires 2 right now on zone. While the other hand, 3d games of the year 2000 have faded away in history never to be spoken of again.
Now this team already had the magic touch on ‘Real Time Strategy’ games so why'd they have to messed AGE OF EMPIRES 3 up?
Age of empires 3 seems to go in the completely opposite direction of what made this game so successful.
'/// The review is under
I used to play Age of empires when it came out back in 2000. After a while i got tired of it. I played the single player game and eventually gave the game a rest. Unfortunately, I stopped not knowing what i was missing.
When i started playing Age of empires 2 for the the second time.. about 2 years ago i wanted to try the multiplayer on zone. WOW i was in for a big shock.. I missed out key strategic elements which the AI could simply not provide. I instantly got addicted to this game. I recommend trying the multiplayer version before you put this game down because it has a lot to offer. For example, When ur playing on the zone.. you always have different places where you have to go to get your wood, gold and stone. The map is completely random each time you play, you never get the feeling of "ahh I’ve done this before". Thus, you constantly want to go back to the game. And most evident, is the fact the you have to change your strategy depending on what the other players do. For, you may get rushed early on or boomed out later on. To as what the other player is thinking is huge mystery, just has it should be in any Real time strategy game. On the hand, The AI in the game is so... repetitive it's unbelievable. Instead of having a good Ai to play against they just give him about 3x the amount of resources you get at the beginning of the game. So once you’ve survived his first few attacks your bound to win.
This game is very economically oriented. For example, you are constantly building villagers which would normally pose a big problem because it limits the time you can spend on actual building up your army. However, Age of empires just balances this out very nicely, they give you a hotkey to find idle villagers and they give you towers to put up early and protect your very vulnerable villagers and your course your own military units.
Don't forget for anyone still wanting to play this game, this game still suports the 1200 * 800 resolution in addtition to the 1000 * 700 resolution