Age of Empires III

What works

Singleplayer skirmish

Singleplayer campaign

Multiplayer ESO

Scenario editor

What does not

Game doesn't install or run without the necessary libraries. Windows version must be set on XP and no higher.

Workarounds

I made this work with digital backups of the install CD I had. If you own the CD, copy the contents into a folder.

Use winetricks get the necessary libraries (warning - this used over a gig and a half of internet): 

winetricks corefonts d3dx9 quartz mfc42 l3codecx msxml4 vcrun6 riched20

After they're installed, run winecfg and under the "drives" tab set drive D: to the folder containing the the data from the CDs. Now:

wine D:/setup

should install it with no hiccups. In order to run the game, I had to use winecfg to set the Windows version to XP. To run it without a CD, update it by running the patch you can find here.

Sound doesn't work? See here. In my case I had to set quartz back to "builtin" in winecfg.

What was not tested

Multiplayer LAN

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU: Intel
• Driver: open source

Additional Comments

Some notes on the winetricks: I don't actually know how many of those are necessary. I compiled them from around the web. d3dx9_36, quartz, mfc42, and l3codecx are all in the original instructions, and you may be able to get away with the old method of manually gathering these dlls if you want to save internet. corefonts fixes a nasty bug where you can't fit the product key into the boxes. riched20 was necessary for me to run the game due to this error when trying to accept the licence:

0009:err:richedit:ReadStyleSheet skipping optional destination
0009:err:richedit:ReadStyleSheet skipping optional destination
wine: Unhandled page fault on read access to 0x001f0900 at address 0x7ac2b592 (thread 0009), starting debugger...