I've been trying to get into online competitive AoE3 lately, and have succeeded moderately. I have always been a "Craft" RTS guy, so getting used to the Age way of doing things is taking me a bit of time. Although I did play a good bit of online Age of Mythology, so i'm not playing with a completely empty deck here.

One thing I've already noticed and think should be changed is the age 1 food crates. Don't get me wrong, i'm not against anything that gets us to the fighting faster (which the food crates certainly do.) What I am against is that it has become very clear that you HAVE to take a food crate as your first card in every game, with the possible exception of a map that forces you to use boats to reach your opponent. On any other map, to not use a food crate against any sort of decent opponent is the equivalent to putting powdered cyanide on your corn flakes, except that perhaps the cyanide will take longer to kill you.

In a case like this, having the food crate as a card that any race can and MUST use is useless and takes away from early strategic card choices. I figure they should move it to age 2 to drop everyone to the lowest common demoninator and allow for more choices of the first card. Granted, it'll slow getting to age 2 slightly, but it will allow for more choices which is what a good RTS is all about. If slowing down the rush to age 2 is a problem, just give everyone a free shipment of food by the town center from the get-go.. problem solved.

How things like this get past play testing is beyond me, because the players have adapted to doing this each and every game within a week of play. Silly ensemble, why not just do a limited beta test on fileplanet like everybody else?