This strikes me as an inadvertent design bias, where the developers play the game a certain way and are so used to doing it that way that they don't consider other players may go about it differently.

I've never played the full version of AOE3 (I've been itching to buy it), but what you just described sounds like so many of my past experiences playing RTS games. AOK's campaigns gave me a lot of headaches, and just thinking back to such maps as "Into China" and "The Horns of Hattin" gives me minor PTSD. Getting attacked all over the map, villagers dying in droves before I can respond, and enemy siege units causing havoc right outside my field of vision - all while the "you're being attacked" fanfare is going nuts. I had too much of an ego to lower the difficulty back then, and I suspect that won't change anytime soon.

Started playing Aqua Kitty: Milk Mine Defender. Fun for a short burst while I decide what next to play in the backlog. It shouldn't be hard to decide, but backlog is ridiculous.

Also finally finished Monster Hunter Stories so I started Hey, Pikmin! and boy does it remind me of Chibi Robo: Zip Lash. Unfortunately, it was also the second game ever to crash on my 3DS. Seems to be a fluke though.

Looks like I was wrong about one thing in Dawn of War II - Even if you exit to windows or hit alt+f4, you will have wasted a day of progress. So it's generally better to play and fail, except if you failed a defense mission you don't get to try recapturing that area right afterwards and then it pops up as a time windowed mission which is annoying.

I just upgraded the dreadnought into a total beast though and I'm getting better at using the scouts too.

Yeah AOE3 has some quite rigid triggers in some of the missions, it seems.

So in this mission, I did that now, did everything I could expect build a town center (which is usually the first one you do when building your town). I used my existing villagers to gather resources, built those buildings I can without a town center, and build lots and lots of lower units like crossbow men.

Something still triggered the enemy to send some troops (maybe it was that I went too close to their base), but it became kinda funny that those troops wouldn't attact the Aztec temples just because I had not build a town center. Massive enemy troops just circling around the temples, not touching them.

Then I just experimented all kinds of stuff, like trying to fight those troops wiith my low level units, and even attacking the base. That almost worked, somehow I was able to destroy 80% of their buildings but suddenly the enemy sends all its troops from the temples to the homebase, and they wipe out my lower level troops.

So if I try this "delay the town center"-trick in order to prepare, I need to kill those troops patrolling near the temples with huge armies of low level troops, and then build the town center right when they are cleared, and try to advance to new ages etc. to upgrade further and get better troops etc. It does feel that I am just trying to trick the enemy AI in order to succeed, using those triggers I know.

I need to change my tactic a bit though, maybe using cavalry instead of the crossbowmen because the enemy starts sending lots of anti-infantry artillery (+cavalry) which wipe out the archers and other infantry away quite fast.

No time to play so I'm still on level two :( But I've managed to rise up the bridge! Tomorrow I'll check what's on the other side, I hope ;)

VRChat and it's fun :D

Just installed Freespace and am giving it a go. Really impressed with it so far. Maybe the game doesn't have the prettiest of outer space vistas, but it's functional. The ship combat is quite good and it runs smoothly for the most part, and no bugs or crashes. The only hitch is that it's a bit jerky when dealing with the ship config screen. Can probably mess around with some settings to make that work better, but it isn't affecting the meat of the game: space combat.

Giving the T.16000 a workout, first time I've tried it. So far so good. Feels higher quality than the price would suggest.

On GOG - Ravenloft: Strahd's Possession. Forgot how brutal these games were. I love it!

Non-GOG: Mass Effect 3 on Origin. Nope, not as good as the first two. It's missing that certain something. Sometimes it's missing fun.

And, for something different, I'm playing a game on renpy - while I'm making it. ;)

Mages of Mystralia - steam version
Nine parchments - gog
NWN2
Pillars of eternity - gog
Tangledeep - gog

I can really recommend FSO http://scp.indiegames.us/ This is an upgraded open source port of Freespace 2.

What you need is Freespace 2 (gog installer) and the FSO Installer from them. And Gigabytes of disk space for all the shiny textures and stuff...
It can also run the original Freespace (as mod). Just follow the instructions.

If you want to have better graphics with the game, check out this mod (Freespace Port):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-u4xJqlN5-4&list=PL03B1D2760633BE3D&index=2#t=499

I played it vanilla though, thinking maybe I'll try the FSPort later...

At which difficulty level are you playing it? :) When I played it earlier (maybe two years ago) with the highest difficulty, I kept complaining here how unfair the game is at times, especially the last mission. Somehow I was still able to finish it, but it left a bad taste into my mouth.

Yeah I guess I could have played it with some easier difficulty, but just before FS I had played e.g. Wing Commander Prophecy + expansion pack in the highest difficulty, having no such problems. In WCP the higher difficulty just meant I had to be quicker and more efficient in the missions and dogfighting to succeed; in FS it often felt I had to find some way to trick the game AI somehow, like in the last mission not to fight the enemies in the open, but instead get to a certain cavity near the enemy mothership hull so that the enemy fighters and mothership guns couldn't reach me, but I could destroy the mothership with my puny lasers.

EDIT: Ok the FSPort was already suggested earlier...

Age of Empires 3 is kind of an uneven game at hard difficulty. Some missions are murderously difficult (like the one where you protect three Aztec temples; until you find about the trick where you shouldn't build a town center until you have destroyed most of the enemy home base and soldiers :)), and then right after that you get a super-easy mission where you just run around the map with your troop doing some stuff.

Some things feel certainly different to the earlier AoE games. First of all, cannons and artillery are damn powerful. If you have e.g. three mortars, you can take any building, tower, wall or big enemy ship down with mere few hits. I do recall having to use much more time bringing e.g. towers and walls down in the earlier games, especially AoE1, and also being better protection. And e.g. those mortars also have insane range, it is not like they barely outrange enemy towers and you have to slowly creep them towards the city, it feels they have like twice as long range or something. I'd say they are way overpowered.

Especially those damn anti-infantry artillery: if the enemy has a couple of them, you can pretty much say bye bye to your whole infantry army. I guess you should try to flank with cavalry to take the artillery down, but they are usually hiding behind rest of the army so getting to them is quite often hard, even with cavalry.

Also, towers and walls seem much less powerful as in earlier games. Earlier it was always a good idea to build towers and walls for protection and slowing down incoming enemies; now it feels that if the enemy has two cannons, the towers and walls go down in mere seconds, and even the upgraded towers do only measly damage to enemies. Heck, it is quite normal that just a bunch of archers or such takes down two or three gun towers, even if it takes longer for them than for cannons and other siege weepons.

So all in all, in AOE3 it feels almost pointless to build walls and towers. At best, they seem to be a small nuisance to the enemy, that's all. In AOE1-2 or Age of Mythology, if you were able to build e.g. a nest of three or four towers, it would be a real threat to the enemy troops.

Playing AOE3 just makes me feel I want to replay the first AOE.

Oh and one odd thing. So you have these "hero" units, like the lead character. At first I tried to protect them from combat as I thought that losing them would be an automatic game over, like in many RTS games it is. Not so. Only later I found out that they never die. If their HP goes to zero, they merely pass out, and revive after awhile, and they recover HP over time.

What this quite often mean is that you should use all your "hero" units in the front line, all the time. Before all your common troops, archers etc. That way, when an enemy army comes towards you, they first stop to fight with your hero units, while your archers etc. can hit the enemies in the mean time. Use the hero units as damage sponges because you won't lose them nor you have to heal them manually, like you have to do with common troops. Odd tactic, but it works. Send your hero units first towards the big enemy army, to distract them for awhile...

Oh, and what is with those healing units? Didn't they heal your nearby troops automatically, at least in AoE2? In AoE3, you have to manually tell them to insta-heal a group of soldiers. This just means there is more micromanagement; why was this changed like this in AoE3? Or is there some "auto-heal" option I am missing?

I am LOVING StarCraft 2. It improves on the original in almost every way.

I just wish Blizzard weren't such assholes. Given what they make you go through just to play the damn thing, if the game isn't amazing, it's not worth it.