r/aoe3 • • Feb 27 '22

if you're transitioning from single player to multiplayer, play the ranked ladder, do NOT play casual rooms

628 Upvotes

Do you feel like multiplayer is no fun, because you join a room and get stomped by someone many times better than you, or worse, you just get kicked from the room for being too low?

I think a lot of new players see casual games and ranked games as the two options and assume "oh casual must be for noobs whereas ranked games must be where all the pros are". The assumption is that "ranked" = death and "casual" = a chance of winning (credit to Ok-Acanthisitta-1126 )

That's actually completely backwards.

Casual rooms are best used if you have specific people you already know who are at your level. In fact, they are commonly used at the very high level to setup matches for tourneys and for grinding strats, bc it can be hard for the very best people in aoe3 to find good games in quicksearch. If you are playing alone and you join a random casual game lobby, you will almost certainly either 1. get kicked, 2. get stomped or 3. stomp some poor person who is even more noob than you.

The solution is to play ranked quick search. This is an ingenious system that will quickly figure out your rank, and then match you against people who are a similar rank to you, so you can play fun, competitive games where you will usually end up winning or losing about half the time, unless you start making some actual progress in learning the game. The only thing is you will probably have to lose about 5-10 games before the ELO system will accurately rank you, so don't worry about these early games. In fact, you might even want to just resign quickly in your first 5-10 games just so you can get ranked low sooner, so you can start playing fun games faster.

​

play ranked, get ranked, start playing enjoyable and competitive matches with people at exactly your own skill level


r/aoe3 • • Sep 10 '26

The Baltic Powers Update Patch Notes

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174 Upvotes

Get'em while they're hot!


r/aoe3 • • 13h ago

they units are REALY usless

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71 Upvotes

r/aoe3 • • 4h ago

The HATAMOTO Samurai Completely SLAPPED His Eagle Runners!

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0 Upvotes

r/aoe3 • • 1d ago

The age II whaling ship card is sooooo good

24 Upvotes

For 500 coin you get:

- 4 anti cav units
- A whaling ship that can attack and fish
- A mini tavern
- Fishing boat training
- The ability to build a dock

The ship can fish AND build AND train boats or units at the same fucking time. Insane.


r/aoe3 • • 1d ago

france civ treaty

9 Upvotes

first time playing france
3v3 4v4
40mins or 60mins
wht should i change and wht are the best units for it


r/aoe3 • • 1d ago

How to win the Artic maps Steam achievement? I've played all Artic maps (twice) and nothing:(

6 Upvotes

r/aoe3 • • 1d ago

We are reaching the 9th aniversary for Asian dinasties and they didn't released a unit more broken than this guy

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97 Upvotes

r/aoe3 • • 2d ago

I made an AoE3: DE database that reads everything from the game files and works out counters, civ rankings and decks from the numbers. Please test it and tell me where it's wrong

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87 Upvotes

Hey everyone! I built aoe3database.com, a free, unofficial reference for Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition. You don't need an account.

Everything is read from the game files (version 100.19.18309): 699 units, 164 buildings, 2,509 Home City cards and 1,446 technologies for all 24 civilizations, plus 150 maps, 43 native settlements, 30 revolutions, hotkeys, taunts and all 64 cheat codes. Nothing is typed in by hand, and the descriptions are the game's own text.

The part I most want you to test is the math.

  • Counters: which unit beats which when both sides spend the same resources. It uses every unit's HP, attacks, damage multipliers, resists and cost across 123 regular units of all civs. The fight is worked out with Lanchester's square law, after the side that shoots further gets its free volleys while the other walks in.
  • Civs ranked by their armies: right now Chinese, Spanish, French and Italians are at the top, and Indians, Japanese and Inca are at the bottom.
  • Builds for every civ: Colonial rush, Fast Fortress, Boom and Treaty. Each one has the army mix, age-ups, the cards to send in order, and a full deck you can open in the deck builder.

Honest limitations:

  • The counters use base stats, so there are no upgrades, splash damage, micro or abilities.
  • Range and speed only count for the walk-in. Kiting isn't modelled.
  • The civ ranking only looks at how cost-effective the armies are. Economy and map control are left out.
  • The builds are not pro build orders, only what the numbers favour.

I fully expect it to disagree with the real meta in places, and that's exactly where I need players.

Also on the site:

  • Deck builder: 25 cards, max 10 per age, like in the game. You can start from the game's own decks and share your deck as a link.
  • Unit vs unit calculator: pick two units, their upgrades and how many of each. It shows the damage per hit, the walk-in under fire and who is left standing.
  • Live ranked ladder stats, refreshed hourly from the game's leaderboard, with a player search: type any name to see its rating, rank and top % on every ladder. As I write this, 1v1 Supremacy has 4,965 ranked players and 2,889 of them played in the last 7 days. The median rating is 1052, and the top 10% start at 1535.
  • Every unit, card and tech with its exact stats and effects, plus unit IDs for scenario and modding work.

What I'd love from you:

  • Which counter or civ ranking is clearly wrong compared with your games, and why?
  • Anything broken, a wrong number, or something missing? Every page has a "Report a mistake" button at the bottom that comes straight to me, or just tell me here.
  • What would make you actually keep this open while playing?

Screenshots: the civ ranking, the counter grid, Chinese builds, the deck builder, the unit vs unit calculator and the ladder with player search.

Thanks for trying it!


r/aoe3 • • 2d ago

Question (Im new) What is the right situation for starting a revolution? keeping in mind that it brings your economy to a standstill

15 Upvotes

r/aoe3 • • 1d ago

Why the Inca Have Absolutely NO ANSWER for the Haudenosaunee?!

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0 Upvotes

r/aoe3 • • 2d ago

any discord servers i can join to just chat about AOE3?

7 Upvotes

just looking for friends and people to chat with when im bored. I work remotely so i typically have a lot of down time.


r/aoe3 • • 2d ago

Question Royal horsemen too strong?

5 Upvotes

I have been seeing more and more people go fully Royal Horsemen as a strategy in the past weeks. I thought that was weird, but seeing the over-1900 stats that they have, it is understandable. Then I checked the latest release and their base stats have been increased by 300. Which could explain why we see more people going with this strategy. This makes them too strong to counter, in my opinion. What do you guys think? Should the recent upgrade they received be revised?


r/aoe3 • • 3d ago

Mexico should get a San Patricio Brigade card.

32 Upvotes

Mexico should get a San Patricio card that gives Regulars and adds them to Forts. It's consistent with some of their other Harbor cards and references an interesting tidbit of history. For those who don't know, the San Patricio Brigade was a group of Irish-American soldiers in the Mexican-American War who defected to the Mexican army over anti-Irish and anti-Catholic attitudes in the US military.

That's it.


r/aoe3 • • 3d ago

Ottoman-like Villager producing Civ coming to AoE4 - would be interesting to see how they adapt this feature

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35 Upvotes

r/aoe3 • • 3d ago

Praise Netherlands Dutch fanart wallpaper

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58 Upvotes

Hope the community likes the drawing, also which CIV should I draw next??


r/aoe3 • • 3d ago

Question Sentinel Buff ?

9 Upvotes

What are your thought on the Sentinels ? Do they Need / could they get a buff ?

I think it’s Kinda sad that a Special Unit only trainable by one civ is skipping their Production to get Bow Pikes. Would love to See some Sentinel Play, but they are Kinda Bad ?
Granted, im neither good Not do I play high ranked, but in Most of the Videos im watching they simply getting skipped.
What are your thoughts on the Unit ? You think they should be better, or are they Fine as they are ?


r/aoe3 • • 3d ago

The NEW Swedish Cow & Berry Boom Gives You ULTIMATE Food Sustain!

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0 Upvotes

r/aoe3 • • 4d ago

Tokugawa skin japan explorer mod fix

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39 Upvotes

This fixes the issue that if you select the Tokugawa skin for the Japanese explorer, you just get one monk and the game would eventually crash.


r/aoe3 • • 4d ago

Help Finally got to 1400 ELO!!

10 Upvotes

Hey fellas! I finally got to 1400 Elo in 1v1 and I immediately started facing the dominance civs in this stage! So I wanna know how to win against such weird unfamiliar builds like the US Highlanders into Fast IV or the Ottoman FI turtling these shitty stuff I don’t know about it! Especially that I play mostly standard/booming

So what’s your advice to stay in that position -perhaps improving- while keeping my sanity?


r/aoe3 • • 4d ago

Meta USA builds after nerfs?

7 Upvotes

I'm having a hard time finding videos about United States builds that are relevant after the highlander, chinese immigrants, and cowboy nerfs. I also noticed that the capitol EXP was nerfed a while ago too. The highlander attack is 30-40s slower, cowboys are weaker, and because I've seen some FI builds rely on the capitol EXP, those builds are slower too.

From what I can tell, the dutch FF is still ok, and the 10/10 Spanish Immigrants FF is also still ok, but what else is there? I'm mostly looking for non-FF builds for variety. For context, I play mostly 2v2, but also some 1v1.


r/aoe3 • • 5d ago

Lionheart winning a game with 20 vills at 15 min:

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164 Upvotes

r/aoe3 • • 5d ago

Meme Danish voice lines be like

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97 Upvotes

r/aoe3 • • 5d ago

Info AoE3 website that reads game recordings analyses them and gives feedback

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10 Upvotes

Hi all,

I often play 2v2 with my friend. After games we lost we always look back at the recordings to see what we could have done differently.

Now we had the idea to ask AI for feedback on build orders or strategies. So I’ve made this website last weekend together with Claude that is public with daily limits.

It parses the recording gives an overview of everything that occurred, units produced, age up times, cards sent, unit movements, … which units kills who is unfortunately not part of the recording.

This is all then processed and sent to Deepseek v4.1 flash together with some game knowledge for analysis. Which is then shown in the feedback tab.

We also lookup each players game history and ELO evolution which you can also review.

The Steam sign-in is there to rate limit: the AI model behind the feedback isn't free, so it's 5 uploads and 3 game questions per day per account. If you want more, message me on Discord (Busulle).

Good to know: a recording only holds the commands players gave, so the site can't show kills or scores, and some things are estimates (it says where). Chat is never shown.

It's a hobby project running on a home server, so be gentle. There's a "Report a problem or an idea" link on every page, and I'd love to hear what's wrong or missing.

Link: https://aoe3.udonitus.com/

I only realized when creating this post that https://aoe3explorer.com/ also exists. I thought I had something new lol.


r/aoe3 • • 5d ago

As much as i would like for every AoE4 player to try AoE3 - it works the other way around. We will only benefit from sharing more player base!

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19 Upvotes