Alpha and Omega vs. the World

You don't hear much from me or Beta about Omega. He's a dude I've known for about 15 years or so, and he's my most dedicated gaming buddy. He's been around the allot the last few days, and I've gotten him hooked on Age of Empires III: The Warchiefs. I have also in the past turned him on to Age of Empires II, Empire Earth 1 and 2, and Rise of Nations. We've played a couple of games in AoE3 lately, so I thought I'd share some of our matches, in recap form.

GAME ONE:
We played starter cities, me as the Russians and he as the Brits. We took on an even number of AI's, and while he fuddled with the controls, learning the ins and outs of the game, I steamrolled our foes into oblivion. Elapsed time: 26 minutes.

GAME TWO:
Omega wasn't happy after our first game, since he didn't get to do anything. He wanted to drag out the second game, so I just built up a small army and awaited his say-so to begin my attack. I must admit: I'm an artillery freak. I love to bring big guns to bear on my enemies. The bigger the boom, the happier I am. I'm the guy you'll meet in Empire Earth who'll swarm you with bombers and cannons, with a few lighter troops to protect the big guns, only to finish the job with 10+ nuclear bombers.. Anyway, I built about 15 mortar cannons and got a few dozen troops through shipments from my home city. Omega, on the other hand, brought in - I swear! - over 170 troops. It was typical Omega-style warfare: quantity over quality. In the end, we attacked the five opponents we had and blitzed them completely. Elapsed time: 1 hour, 26 minutes.

GAME THREE:
The next game saw us both going to my main city, a level 21 German city. We again, as last time, played on the Caribbean map, which put us on an island with one ally against about four AI's. I again went for my heavy artillery attack, since I wasn't going to be the bulk of our army anyway. I had around 10 imperial howitzers and a few dozen Doppelsoldners and Uhlans. Omega again fielded his army of 150+ random troops. I used a large navy to claim the seas near our island, and after we took the neutral island, we soon hit the limit cap and eventually built everything there was to build and maxed everything out, so we (or rather, he) decided it was finally time to assault the AI, which didn't put up allot of a fight. Elapsed time: 2 hours, 31 minutes.

GAME FOUR:
This game saw us on the Saquenay map, teamed with Napoleon against four AI's. Omega decided it would be a good idea to claim the map with walls, and proceeded to wall off a huge chunk of the map, bit by bit. I joined in for the heck of it (not much else to do until he gets bored and finally wants to go kill something), and made myself a few walled-in colonies near his base. For the first time, though, the AI fought rough. It began with the Russians and the Ottomans - at different times - attacking my main city. I built a small standing army to protect it, and they were busy the entire game. What was bad, though, was the orange nation (I forget who) attacked Omega and tore down a chunk of his wall before storming into his base. We had been marshalling our troops down near my base in the south, and they snuck past us and tore into his base in the north.We quickly squelched that attack, but the much-welcomed side benefit was that it pushed us to attack much sooner. I led the charge on a trading post in the east to break up a trade monopoly the other team had begun (Napoleon started one on us twice, and we had to break our own up to stop ourselves from winning that way). My pack of imperial howitzers dropped the trading post in one volley (as they do with most any building), and we began a clockwise blitzkrieg around the map. One by one we wiped out the AI cities, but - in a scenario reminiscent of a bizzaro-World War II - our German forces had to race Napoleon's French troops to the Russian capital so we could destroy it first. We did, and we won. Elapsed time: 1 hour, 35 minutes.

Phew! That's allot of action. I'll post more if we get more games in. Later, all.

(EDIT: I may sound a mite dismissive or negative about Omega's play in the above posts. However, he usually had almost twice my score, so his aggressive play style seemed to be better then my laid back style. He's better then me, at least.)