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

4/2/2008 12:00 AM | 0 Comments | Page 1 of 4

I'd been playing Age of Empires III with buddies on my LAN. The Asian Dynasties expansion had renewed our enthusiasm. Then I perfected an Aztec rush -- and when I say "perfected," I mean it worked well enough that none of my friends wanted to play Age III with me anymore. So it was time for me to go online, someplace I hadn't been since the game came out two years ago.

Unlike my buddies -- casual RTSers, the lot of them -- the people online don't have jobs. They do nothing but practice 24/7, perfecting their micromanagement and writing programs to analyze optimal build orders, and they've been doing it continually for the two years since the game's release. So is it any surprise that a seat-of-his-pants guy like me wasn't pairing with anyone using Ensemble Online's Quick Search function? I stared at the stalled matching system, thoroughly flummoxed by all this stuff about power rating, home city tiers, and having to enable the War Chiefs expansion so I could select my brand-new online Aztec city. It seemed as if Ensemble Online wouldn't have me anymore.

So I hosted a game and called it "new players only plz." Lieutenant colonels with level 148 cities joined. I didn't even realize city levels went that high. I politely declined to play. I eventually sorted the list of hosted games by the "rank" column header. A few "conscript" games rose to the top of the list. Conscript sounded about my speed. I jumped into the first one on the list and found myself in a 2v2 with three guys ready to go. "Rdy up," one of them typed. So I did, with my new Aztec city, eager to see how well my rush would work in the wild.

"Remember, no rushing for 30 minutes," one of them typed as I was getting ready to age up and get a military going.

"I didn't agree to that," I typed. "That's silly. Why would you do that?"

"So we can build up." Of course they want to build up. They're playing the Dutch, whose banks will guarantee a ridiculous economic advantage they can translate into an overwhelming force of artillery. Who ever heard of simply letting the Dutch build up for 30 minutes?

"You should have set the game up for that," I chided him. There are options in Age III to stop players from attacking each other for a set period of time. It's called treaty mode. It's there for people who want to enforce that kind of play. In other words, it's there for the Dutch.

"But then we can't build outside our base," one of them typed.

"Exactly. So why would you want to do that?" I thought I'd made a pretty good point, and he didn't seem to have a reply. I then informed my teammate that I was going to attack and dropped a beacon at a location where I'd discovered an enemy base. Then I attacked.

The profanity filter was on, so I couldn't make out a lot of what was being said, things like "Red player, what the _ are you doing, you _ing _?" -- but written in that online chat way that I can never bring myself to use, like so: "red, what the _ r u doing, u _ing _?"