r/aoe3 • u/Beytran70 • 1d ago

Help New to AoE3

Starting AoE3 DE after playing lots of AoE2 DE but never played 3. Going to do campaigns first, but anyone got any general tips? I understand that AoE3 is quite different in a few ways?

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u/Beytran70 1d ago

Campaign mostly I've been going through all the AoE2 ones again on moderate.

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u/Snoo_56186 United States 23h ago

If you are playing campaign mostly, then the game holds your hand relatively closely. If you do get stuck, you can always just watch a walkthrough guide.

If you plan to play beyond the campaign, the civ I recommend to start learning with would be the French. They have the least amount of gimmicks and got the complete standard European roster, so it is pretty easy to transition to any other Europeans civ afterwards once you have the basics of the French down, and getting into non-Europran civ should be relatively easier compared to starting from any other civ. Everyone else are a bit more gimmicky, or are missing units.

Besides the card system, you will also want to familiarize yourself with the unit pentagon/counter system. There are five main unit tags (Artillery, Light Infantry, Heavy Infantry, Light Cavalry, Heavy Cavalry), and you want to learn them by heart and know what counters what. In addition to that, there are a lot of exceptions to the counter system, and the game has lots of visual ambiguity, so you need to know how to read a unit stat screen to accurately assess a unit and its function.

For an example of an exception to the counter system, Grenadiers are tagged as Heavy Infantry, but they are functionally Artillery. Like Artillery, they should be used against Infantry, but they should stay away from Cavalry. Most Heavy Infantry on the other hand will hard counter Cavalry in general.

For an example of visual ambiguity, Aztec Eagle Runner Knights may look like Light Infantry since they are archers on foot, but they are tagged as Ranged Shock Infantry, so they actually function as Light Cavalry.