Rush, Boom, Turtle: "I'm the bad guy?"

4/2/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 3 of 4

I know how he felt. But in my case, I then knew exactly how that happened. I had sorted the game list by rank and hadn't paid any attention to the game's names. I hadn't seen the "NR30" that must have been in the title. I had just assumed they agreed to it before I got there and they didn't bother to tell me. Instead, here I was in a game advertised as "no rush 30 minutes," practicing my six-minute Aztec rush. I was the bad guy.

So what did I do? Pull back? Apologize? Gracefully quit? No. I had come too far, and been sucked too deep. I held out for a little longer, doing as much damage as I could before their armies had driven me back to my town center. Before they could knock me out of the game, I typed something dismissive -- probably "u ladies have fun" -- and quit out.

At which point I saw all those games with NR30, or NR20, or even NR40 in their names.

Shortly after Michael Douglas asks how it is that he's the bad guy, Robert Duvall shoots him. Michael Douglas goes over the rail and plunges into the gross water underneath the Santa Monica pier. Seriously, you don't want to swim in that stuff, much less fall into it with an open gunshot wound. That's pretty much how I felt at that point. Suddenly, I knew that I was the a-hole.

These guys wanted to sit back and build up giant forts, with walls and swarms of artillery and advanced units and Imperial Age powers. They wanted to play Age III like it was SimCity and then have a giant Gotterdammerung and knock it all down. They didn't care about the careful balance of rushing to turtling to booming, a vital ingredient of almost any RTS, and particularly RTSes as economically meticulous as Age of Empires III. They were happy to reduce the game balance to rock/paper, each standing there throwing rocks, breaking the game in the process but not caring one whit.

I don't know who you guys were, and I still think you're playing wrong, but man do I feel like a jerk for jumping in without lurking a bit longer to figure out what was going on. At that point, I didn't really have the stomach to play my Aztec rush, so I moved on to another RTS.

UNIT OF THE WEEK

Speaking of Aztec rushes, the Unit of the Week is the cornerstone of an Aztec rush: Puma Spearmen, seen here taking a break to feed some ducks. Like the other Native American races, the Aztecs are a weird lot. They get no cavalry, and no artillery, so you have to sort through their unit's stats to get some hint as to how to best play them.

The Aztecs can build their War Huts in the first age, so by the time they hit the second age, they're ready to quickly bring out military units. This is where the Puma Spearman are notable for being really good at knocking down buildings. Their siege attack value is 48. By way of comparison, the Aztec's Arrow Knights who use flaming arrows against buildings only have a siege attack value of 36, and they don't come into play until the third age. The Europeans get grenadiers which are great for knocking down buildings with their siege attack of 54, but they also don't come into play until the third age.