Age of Empires III announced

Ensemble Studios has officially announced Age of Empires III, the next installment of its popular RTS game. The sequel is set in the time period directly following AoE2, lasting to the start of the industrial age. This means that a lot of gunpowder units are available, which will come in handy when colonizing and conquering the New World.

I quite enjoyed playing Age of Empires II with a friend a few years ago, so this might be worth checking out. AoE2 was very well done, although like all RTS games it lacked depth and put way too much emphasis on RPS in unit balancing. I wasn't particularly impressed by Ensemble Studios' more recent game, Age of Mythology.

As can be seen by the screenshots, they are using a new DirectX 9 engine for AoE3, supporting pixel shaders and lighting effects as well as some physics simulation. Let's hope the eye candy doesn't get in the way of gameplay (always a concern nowadays). The game is published by Microsoft and scheduled to ship in the second half of 2005.

5 January, 2005

Microsoft Anti-Spyware BetaBlocking bad bots without mod_rewrite