To that end, after playing Definitive Edition for more than a dozen hours (and the original game for who-knows-how-much longer), I’ve selected five civilizations that are especially welcoming for newcomers. How you train villagers, recruit soldiers and construct cities changes drastically depending on which civilization you pick.
In fact, unlike the first two Age of Empires games, in AOEIII, each civilization has totally different units available to it. But once that’s over, where do you go next? After all, the game has 14 different civilizations, and each one plays quite differently. To learn how to play the game, the best thing you can do is play through the Tutorial, which walks you through the game’s basic structure, the challenges you to win a match against the AI by yourself. But it does mean that if you’ve always wanted to play an historical RTS, either by yourself or against other players, Age of Empires III could be a very good place to start. This isn’t strictly a good or bad thing - players have been arguing about each game’s relative merits for the last 15 years. Even in its Definitive Edition, Age of Empires III has smaller maps, fewer civilizations and less complicated gameplay than its predecessor.
