Age of Empires III

What works

- Out of the box the add-ons work (war chiefs, asian dynasties).

- Everything after some winetricks 

- It works better with Wine Staging 

What does not

- Unable to activate the main game without a winetrick (the add-ons don't need activation)

- A lot of errors appears but the game is somehow playable 

Workarounds

What was not tested

- I played through the tutorial and 1h skirmish

- Multiplayer wasn't tested 

Hardware tested

Graphics:

• GPU:
• Driver:

Additional Comments

Gold rating! I'm going to explain every error i had and how to fix them.. The game (just the add-ons) work fine without any tricks but they create a lot of errors and can be quite annoying. First of all I would like to point out that the game needs to be activated in an old school way with an "activation key", wasn't steam enough?? I guess the guys at Micro$oft are a bit nostalgic and want to throw to the end user a good old DRM just to remember that there is no freedom.. There are 5 main issues: 1) There is a bug that prevent the activation key to be correctly typed and redeemed, the first box accept only 4 characters instead of 5 [bug 20456]. To solve this issue run: winetricks -q corefonts 2) A window error appears just before the game intro video pointing out a "l3codecx" error, if "attempt run" is selected the game runs but it may be rendered in a small area of the screen, if Alt+Tab doesn't work, switching workspaces does (Alt+Ctl+left/right). Anyway this is quite annoying as the codec appears to be already installed, to solve this run: winetricks --force l3codecx 3) On the terminal there are a lot of errors regarding quartz. Quartz shows up as already installed, to make them disappear run: winetricks --force quartz 4) After forcing 2) and 3) you may end up without sound and other issues, i.e. the tutorial is unplayable because it doesn't load up correctly. Fix this by running: winetricks --force dsound 5) Steam attempt to install 4 packages but it fails, it appears every time the game is launched, I find no solution but the thing lasts 10 seconds or so, no big deal. To summarize, everything is fixed by running: winetricks --force corefonts l3codecx quartz dsound The game runs fine at maximum settings and better with Wine Staging :) ~·~·~·~·~ I uploaded some screenshots (comparing Wine vs Wine Staging) on my blog: https://manerosss.wordpress.com/2016/06/12/gamingonlinux/ ~·~·~·~·~ Antergos + OpenBox Nvidia 367.35 Wine 1.9.14 Gallium Nine (AUR) Phenom II x2 511 Gainward GTX 650 1gb 4gb ddr3 500GB HDD 7200 rpm