When comparing Age of Empires III vs Men of War: Assault Squad 2, the Slant community recommends Age of Empires III for most people. In the question“What are the best LAN party PC games?” Age of Empires III is ranked 36th while Men of War: Assault Squad 2 is ranked 101st. The most important reason people chose Age of Empires III is:
Age of Empires III features a new and unique card-based system that allows for you to deploy additional units and resources from your Town Hall. By eliminating enemy units and buildings, you are awarded experience, which not only goes toward your City Level (allowing you to purchase more cards out-of-match), but allows you to activate a card in-game. These cards can grant you additional soldiers, increase gathering speed of Banks and Workers, or even a fort that you can deploy anywhere in the map.
Specs
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Card-based upgrades and reinforcements add more to each match
Age of Empires III features a new and unique card-based system that allows for you to deploy additional units and resources from your Town Hall. By eliminating enemy units and buildings, you are awarded experience, which not only goes toward your City Level (allowing you to purchase more cards out-of-match), but allows you to activate a card in-game. These cards can grant you additional soldiers, increase gathering speed of Banks and Workers, or even a fort that you can deploy anywhere in the map.
Pro Graphics-gameplay balance
It is difficult to find good real time strategy games with aesthetics. Its high resolution graphics combined with fairly good RTS experience makes Age of Empires III a rare gem. Its AI and gameplay may not be up to the mark when compared to its predecessor, but still provides you a fair challenge.
Pro Good selection of areas to play in
There are 8 (14 with the two extensions which are inside the "complete edition" Steam is selling) different nations that the player can choose to lead to victory, each with their own different looking areas to explore. This makes for a good mix of differentiation of play depending on what the player chooses to use.
Pro Wide selection of missions
Players will see many different missions ranging from rescue missions to defensive missions. What is even better is that many of these types of missions will be mixed together into one, so there is a varying structure to each making for a different feeling to each.
Pro Direct control
Allows player to take a direct control of a vehicle, or infantryman (followed by their squad if any), which allows player to take the most important shots themselves, or to park their units into more pristine spots. Even if AI seems to fare well on its own, the more elaborate plans can be conducted by simply using this function.
Pro Fully destructible environments
This can make for a visceral feel as well as an immersive one as everything in the game can be blown to bits.
Pro Punishing
Definitely one of the more time and effort requiring RTS, which you cannot simply take off the shelf and do well in, without past experience. Bullets hurt, weapons are fairly accurate, yet do miss their marks occasionally, and explosions are going to demolish infantry.
Cons
Con Easily manipulated AI
During AI skirmishes, you can easily fortify your location with walls, cannon towers, and forts, ensuring that the AI continually sends large armies to their deaths. The AI will also only send their units to one certain spot of your base, thus you will always know where they will come from and which portion to build defenses at. Once your base is fortified enough, you can simply farm for experience, until no more can be gained, and then easily wipe your AI opponent out, making for one-note style of play
Con Strategy is highly lacking
Any hope of strategic depth in Age of Empires III is quickly dashed as many Multi-Player games quickly devolve into matches based solely upon amassing a large, singular army and throwing it at the enemy base ad infinitum. While the game does attempt to make terrain weigh in on how you can move your army, it serves only to restrict certain units from moving on it, and little else. Terrain does not affect sight or range of units, and acts solely as a placebo to make players think there is some strategic advantage if they don't know otherwise.
Con Could use better sound cues
Keeping track of ones units can become a difficult job (but a fun one) and having audio cues of when something is happening to your units could greatly help in this area, sadly there is very little of this in the game and could have been utilized better.
Con Non-existent story and unbalanced
The story is the same for all factions, same layout, same script. There's a lot of things that many new players will think are useless, such as creating a defense with barbed wire and mines. It's really unbalanced, considering you can take out a tank destroyer with 200 mm of armour with an armoured car with a 37 mm gun.
Con Punishing
To some a cost of mistake can be slightly too much. Simply having a squad in open at wrong time can end up losing them all in few seconds burst of concealed machine-gun.
Con Steep learning curve
There being no tutorial makes for a steep learning curve, so one will need to spend a good bit of time with the game in order to learn all the mechanics on their own.