YMMV / Age of Empires III

• Aluminum Christmas Trees:
  • The Knights of St. John actually did set up shop in the Caribbean!
  • Egyptian Mamluk mercenaries in America? Not as far-fetched as it sounds.
  • How about mercenary ronin/samurai? (still doesn't explain the ninja, besides the obvious).
  • At different points, different German states had colonies or attempted to settle colonies in South America and the Caribbean. And there is also the fact that the kings of Great Britain during the 18th century were also princes of Hannover, which explains the Hessian mercenaries in the American Revolution and the earliest wave of German immigrants to North America.
  • German Landsknechts, while mostly associated with the Europeans Wars of Religion, really served in America in some cases, like Ulrich Schmidl (one of the founders of Buenos Aires) and Hans Staden.
  • Pacasmayo is a real city in Peru, although unlike the one in the game, it is a coastal one and was founded by the Spanish in 1775. The game's Pacasmayo is probably inspired by Vilcabamba, Machu Picchu and Paititi.
  • Alright, the Ottomans only made one Great Bombard right after the end of the Middle Ages, and bombards fell out of fashion in Europe by 1600... but the Ottomans still used them as a desperate measure when the British attacked Constantinople in 1807. And they won.
  • Capybara in Caribbean maps. The only island with them in real life is Trinidad, which used to be connected to South America. However, nearly all islands in the Caribbean had some other kind of giant rodent when Europeans arrived, some of which were as large as dogs. And they were indeed hunted and eaten, often to extinction.
• Awesome Music: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Breather Level:
  • Any mission where you only need to rack up on experience counts, but especially "A Pirate's Help", the grinding mission from Blood, has you doing a lot of tasks in order to win Lizzie's favor. The thing is, you have 15 minutes, and if you use hotkeys appropriately, you'll manage to win her favor in just 4 of them (5 if you also do all of the side missions), leaving the rest of time to rack up even more experience. And you don't need to rush Morgan to Lizzie until the last minute, meaning that you can set the trading posts for grinding even more experience and create as many units as you can just to rack up on experience and reach Level 10 even faster on your main city, which will come in handy for the two last missions, especially the last. Just make sure not to miss on Morgan meeting Lizzie. It also helps that the mission is set between two draining missions such as "Temples of the Aztec" and "Spanish Treasure Fleet".
  • The "Crossing The Delaware" mission in the "Fire" campaign of The WarChiefs. You don't even need to go straight away to the first mission, you might even be more interested in exploring the map and getting the treasures, because you're going to need them later. Not to mention that at some point of the exploration, you'll get a Courier Des Bois (a French settler) who can get the supplies scattered across the map for you. And later you'll find a Huron native settlement where you can build a trading post so you can get even more units, which will also come in handy for destroying the ships which hold even more units. You can even get some decent artillery units before doing the first mission. By the time you're finished with the side missions, an otherwise difficult mission becomes piece of cake, and you can get a big army with just a few resources. The fact that it's set between "Breed's Hill" and "Saratoga" doesn't hurt.
  • Also from "Fire" is the mission "Valley Forge". Located between the aforementioned "Saratoga" and the even more exhausting "The Battle of Morristown", early on you need to take care of your few units, but Nathaniel and Washington can rescue a settler trapped in a tree a few squares from your base. Unlike the militia and both heroes, during this early phase this settler doesn't lose points outside of the camp. Once the six mandatory huts are built, you can use this settler in order to pick the food, wood and gold crates scattered around the map, thus making the "Collect 3000 food units" sub-mission easier. At one point you even find a pair of Huron villages, who in the food phase gives you a pair of Courier Des Bois (the even better French counterpart to the settlers) and in the final phase you can use to mass its unique unit, the siege Huron Mantlets, which can help you tear the English buildings and defenses like they're made of paper. By the time the final phase rolls, you'll amass a strong army in no time.
• Broken Base:
  • There are two visible splits in the fandom. Between Latin American and northern European players, on the one hand (even though the game is mostly about North America and Asia); and whenever the topic of a remaster or new expansions comes up, between those who think the game should stay focused on overseas colonization and those who think it should return to Europe and the Mediterranean (with some overlap with the other split, but not completely).
  • The Definitive Edition's decision to cut Crazy Horse out of the campaign, in favor of Chayton's uncle led to a pretty sharp schism, as the original campaign was one of the few times a famous Native American leader has been depicted in a video game. Some people felt this decision made more sense, as Chayton had a more personal reason to side with the Sioux as well as emphasizing his major identity struggle, while others felt that it severely undermined the original campaign's well written plot.
  • The Definitive Edition itself has become this, with some loving many of the new changes and continued supports, while others lambast it for being ridden with bugs, inferior, or accused of being politically correct.
• Complete Monster: Sheriff William "Billy" Holme is the Big Bad of the Shadow section of The WarChiefs Expansion Pack. Initially a friend to Chayton Black, Holme becomes consumed by greed when gold is discovered in the Black Hills. Holme summons his old friend Chayton with the intent of manipulating him into kicking the Sioux off the land so he can claim the gold. When Chayton attempts to negotiate with the Sioux leader Crazy Horse, Holme follows Chayton and attempts to assassinate Crazy Horse, shattering any chance of a peace settlement. When Chayton builds a fort for Holme, Holme orders Chayton to destroy an entire village and leave no survivors—including women and children—even though they have done nothing. When Chayton protests the order, Holme initially tries to justify it as they will do something, and then dares Chayton to turn on him. When cornered by Chayton in a cave, Holme justifies all of his crimes by arguing he would have been rich. When Chayton asks Holme if he would kill the settlers, he admits the only thing that matters is the gold. When urged by Chayton to surrender peacefully, Holme attempts to shoot him with a pistol despite his life being spared. A man who uses his sheriff's position to manipulate his friend into murdering innocent people all for the sake of greed, Holme shows the dark side of colonization and settlement in a game that skirts around these issues.
• Contested Sequel: While it's not considered a bad game by any means, the general consensus among fans is that III fell short of expectations when compared to the previous installment. That said, the game does have a very dedicated playerbase.
• Fan Nickname: Within the game community Amelia Black is named after one of the most powerful artillery units in the game, The Heavy Cannon, due to the large blast radius of her special attack on enemy troops.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • Many fans of Age of Empires II don't consider III really a game in the series.
  • Many fans of III don't consider The WarChiefs a real expansion.
• Game-Breaker: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Made in the US and with an evident North American-centered vision of the European colonization of the Americas, yet the game is most popular in South America and central/northern Europe.
• High-Tier Scrappy: The more historically minded players hate that the Aztecs are a playable faction, even the ones that can accept Iroquois and Sioux (in that order). They are out of time, out of place, and their technologies, infantry and naval units are nonsensically powerful in order to make them stand a chance against industrial era powers, despite their main claim to fame being their quick fall to a small and archaic (by game's standards) army of Europeans. Even then, they are still hard to master because they can neither create their own cavalry or artillery. What seals the deal is that the Aztecs already had their time to shine as the stars of the The Conquerors expansion of Age of Empires II, and that unlike other civilizations carried over from the previous game (Spanish, British, French, Germans, Ottomans, Chinese, and Japanese) they are stuck with the same fighting style, so they feel like treaded water. The studio elevating them to playable faction instead of other cultures that did survive the first Spanish onslaught and fought back to some extent historically, like the Inca, Maya, and Mapuche, comes across as pushing them down the player's throat.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Nathaniel Black, protagonist of Fire, is a half Mohawk Revolutionary war hero who personally knows Washington. Plus the Circle of Ossus is rather similar the Templars of Assassins Creed. Even better is that the protagonist is motivated against the main antagonist for a crime committed against the protagonist's mother, though Nonakhee winds up merely kidnapped instead of killed and Washington has nothing to do with it.
  • In an AMA at the Age of Empires 3 Heaven forums, lead engineer Sandy Petersen defended the game's focus on American colonization claiming that it would be ridiculous to play as Napoleon, start with a town center and build from there to fight the Battle of Austerlitz. Cue the first big game mod Napoleonic Era, whose aim is pretty much that, and later made funnier with Definitive Edition in various ways:
    • Two of the civilizations in said mod, the Swedes and Incas, were Promoted to Playable in the base Definitive Edition, which also contains scenarios based on historical battles, even though Napoleon isn't in any of them at release time.
    • The base Definitive Edition also reworked the Revolution mechanic, saving it in many cases from the Scrappy Heap, adding European revolutionary options^note Finland for the Russians and Swedes; Hungary for the Germans, Maltese, Ottomans and Russians; and Romania for the Germans, Ottomans and Russians. Later updates added Revolutionary France as a Revolution option for the French and a special Imperial Age upgrade with its own set of powerful cards that's coincidentally called "Napoleonic Era".
    • Knights of the Mediterranean throw the inability of having European nations fight on European land out of the window, as well as adding neutral European-based settlements as Royal Houses.
  • In Act I, Lizzie winds up fighting an ancient secret society widely dismissed as a myth that plans to take over the New World. Her voice actress, Jennifer Hale, would later voice Commander Shepard, who fights a similar threat in the Mass Effect trilogy that came out two years later.
  • All the drama between Microsoft and Ensemble on the issue of including Crazy Horse (see Trivia), after knowing that the Definitive Edition writes him out completely.
• Mis-blamed: No, this game didn't kill off the franchise - although as noted below, it was seen as falling short in comparison to previous installments, the real reason for the franchise's death was the closure of Ensemble Studios, for reasons unrelated to this game.^note Former producer Bruce Shelley cites Ensemble's inability to do games beyond the Real-Time Strategy genre, the size of the team growing to an impossible to control number, and Microsoft cancelling two of their projects but not reducing the studio's size as the possible reasons why Ensemble closed its doors.
• Moral Event Horizon: In Shadow, Chayton was tracking down Crazy Horse in an attempt to negotiate peace between the Sioux and the settlers. Holme trails him and attempts to assassinate Crazy Horse, completely wrecking any chance for peace between the settlers and the Sioux, so he could take the gold from the Sioux. And yet Chayton continues with Holme even after that. It's only when Holme tells Chayton to slaughter a Sioux camp "before it becomes a problem later" that he finally switches sides.
• Narm: In Ice, the cutscene before the third level shows Warwick's forces attacking an Iroquois village, depicted as a pitched battle. Due to the between-level cutscenes using in-game footage (unlike the end-of-campaign scene using all new footage), XP comes off the units when they die.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Most players avoid naval-oriented maps altogether due to Arbitrary Headcount Limits on each ship type and the incredible strain watching a naval battle puts on most low-to-middle-end computers. A later patch fixes the performance issues with naval units, but the mortar/monitor/rocket shell explosions will still put a strain on low-end PCs.
  • Unlike in previous games, you can't play games with more than two teams, nor have a skirmish game against an AI player using the same civilization as yours unless you make it in the editor.
• That One Level: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: The audio clips recorded for the launch of Definitive Edition ^note particularly the Inca, Swedes, Haudenosaunee and Lakota ones were criticized for being nearly inaudible that they sink into the background music, even in the highest volume settings. The Swedish voices, despite being intended to be loud, still lacks the energy of the original audio clips. Later expansions would improve on the voice clip quality.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Shares a page with the rest of the franchise.
• Vindicated by History: While Age of Empires III still remains a Contested Sequel within the franchise, it's seen something of a reappraisal following the release of its Definitive Edition. That it's also the only entry in the series to go beyond the timeframe of Age of Empires II, with its own distinct features, has also fostered renewed interest among fans.

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