Dear fellow AoE III players,

The following is a list of little tweaks to AoE III which I collected for my personal use, but since I figured there might be others with similar playstyle habits, I thought I'd share them just in case.

Please note: most of these tweaks are for singleplayer only.

Always make backups of the files you change as you might need to restore them if something goes wrong or if you want to play multiplayer that requires unaltered config files.

Removing the pause window:

Browse to your Users folder and find the Age of Empires 3 directory. It’s typically in C:\Users\YourWindowsUsername\Documents\My Games\Age of Empires 3. Once there, open the Startup folder, create a new file and name it „user.cfg”.
Open this file with notepad and paste the following line into it:


That’s it, save and close the file. Now when you pause the game, only a white pause text should appear, letting you issue orders conveniently without that big, obstructive pause window blocking your view.

Disabling the intro cinematics:

Open the user.cfg file you created in the previous step (see above) and paste the following into a new line:

Disabling the Fog of War and revealing the map:

Browse to the Startup folder in your main Age of Empires 3 directory (in your Program Files or Steam folder by default) . If you’re playing the Asian Dynasties expansion, open gamey.con with notepad. (Otherwise it’s game.con for the base game and gamex.con for the Warchiefs expansion, but you only need to edit the one you’re playing)

Copy/paste the following code to the very end of the file:


Save and close the file. Once you’re in a game, just press Alt+Y to reveal the map and Alt+C to remove the fog of war.
You can also edit the code to change the hotkeys to whatever you like. Just replace "alt-y" and "alt-c" with the keys you prefer.

Zooming out further (increased max zoom distance):

In the Age of Empires 3\Startup folder, open gamey.cfg (for Asian Dynasties; otherwise it's game.cfg for the base game or gamex.cfg for the Warchiefs expansion) with notepad and search for the word "normalZoom". It'll appear in a line like this: normalZoom=50. Change the 50 to something else like:


This will let you zoom out further than the default limit. You can experiment with any number you prefer but if you want to set it higher than 65, you will need to set the Shader Quality in the graphics options to "High" or lower, otherwise a white fog will obscure everything at zoom levels above 65 if the Shader Quality is set to "Very High".

Keep in mind that this is for singleplayer - if it works in multiplayer, it may be considered cheating due to the advantage the larger field of view would give over those playing at the default limits.

Fixing homecity lag (and reactivating the in-game music):

This issue may not affect everyone, but if you’re experiencing low framerates in certain homecities this may fix your issue:

In your (Windows) Start Menu, open the Control Panel and access the Regional Settings (may be called Region and Language Options) and change the Sorting Order from Default to Technical (or alternatively, change the Format to English (United States)).
That’s it, start the game and there’s a good chance your previously laggy homecities will now be running smooth as silk. As an added bonus, in-game music will also work now if it didn’t before.