Rush, Boom, Turtle: Naval Gazing

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Rise of Nations was also the first game to really give players a resource-based incentive for naval supremacy. Other RTSes had fishing as a way of getting more food, but Rise of Nations pushed the resource model out to sea even more. As soon as you reached the Industrial Age, you revealed oil on the map, which was needed to build modern units like tanks, destroyers, aircraft and missiles. Oil was rare enough and important enough that you'd want as many oil wells as you could get. Since many oil sites were offshore, here was a strong incentive to build a navy. One of my favorite map scripts in Rise of Nations put all the oil wells out to sea -- all of them! -- effectively jiggering the lategame balance so that you would lose if you didn't have a navy. The map script was called, fittingly, British Isles. Rum, sodomy, the lash and sweet, sweet crude.

It's no surprise that Big Huge Games were the guys to add naval treasure to Age of Empires III with their Asian Dynasties expansion. The original Age III featured explorers who walked around picking up little treats scattered around the map. In Asian Dynasties, Big Huge put even bigger treats out to sea, guarded by pirate ships, bandits on catamarans, great white sharks and killer whales. Name another RTS where you fight great white sharks. Go ahead. You can't do it!

Even before Big Huge Games got their hands on it, Age of Empires III was the game that best integrated its navy into the rest of its gameplay. For starters, they added ships that functioned as barracks, letting you sail up to a foreign shore and train units right out of the boat. You no longer had to bring over villagers to build a base. The simplified beachhead logistics made a huge difference on naval maps.

Then there was Age III's closest claim to a superweapon, tucked at the endgame and prowling the seas. Artillery is indeed the god of war in Age III, but it's easily countered by cavalry charges and anti-artillery artillery -- that is, until the monitor, a mighty Industrial Age ship with a massive cannon on its prow that can reach almost anywhere on the map, inflicting 2,000 points of damage with a single rechargeable shot. No line of sight? No problem. It can even fire blind, and unless your opponent has a navy that can come out and kill it, there's not a damn thing he can do about your monitor, the Big Bertha of the 18th century.

This was Age III's stalemate breaker, and it was at the far end of a shifting balance from land-based defenses to naval supremacy. Early in an Age III game, a simple outpost would drive away most ships. Naval supremacy was mainly a way to protect fishing. As the Fortress and then Industrial Ages rolled around, the balance of power reversed. No coast was safe from the player who controlled the seas with his frigates and monitors (this dynamic was also present in Rise of Nations, but its bomb ketches, the counterpart to monitors, were but a passing fancy on the way to nukes).

As Age of Empires III evolved with more and fancier endgame dynamics like European revolutions and trade monopolies, monitors lost their place in the spotlight, but they're still a significant part of the game balance that's lost when someone insists, "No water maps!".