I have to admit, for something made by Microsoft, Age of Empires is a good game to own if you’re into strategy games.
As the name states, you play one of 12 historical empires, centering on the B.C./A.D. timeline border. The manual has a nice outline of the historical strengths and weaknesses of each empire. Great for kids who want to learn a little history as well! You build up your empire, collecting resources, going through the Stone Age to the Tool Age, passing the Bronze Age, and finally reaching the Iron Age. With each age you can research new technologies that help your empire grow and prosper, not to mention have a kick-ass military force to fight off opposing empires.
As I said above, different empires have different strengths and weaknesses. This is mostly based on which technologies are available for a particular empire. Each empire also has several little “bonus” characteristics, which set it apart from other empires and makes things a bit more interesting. This includes units that are a percentage faster than the rest, structures that are stronger or guard towers with longer range attacks, cost of units, etc.
You can play single or multi-player, via network or modem. I’ve even found out that you can play a decent game at 28.8 modem speed, but don’t quote me on that (I think the connection dropped at some point during the game).
Instead of going through a detailed synopsis of game play, I thought I’d share my thoughts on what I liked and disliked about the game itself.
GOOD THINGS:
All in real time
No more waiting around for other players to finish their turn. Actually, there are many strategy games out there like this, but not with the complexity as this one, especially in the technology research.
Nice graphics
Looks like someone actually spent time on appearance. They also show off the vector graphics in the manual just in case you didn?t think so. Unit movement is very smoothly executed, and very realistic. Battle is also well done.
Many ways to gather food
There are four total resources – food, wood, stone, and gold. You get wood from chopping the forest, stone from a stone mine, and gold from a gold mine. However, there are many different ways to gather food. From berry bushes, to hunting (gazelles, lions, elephants), farming, or fishing (using boats or spearing). It makes for a much more interesting management of your villagers.
The patch
Of course, there is a patch. The 1.0a patch to Age of Empires is available online. This patch gets rid of some of the bugs, and adds a few more features, including increasing the population limit. 50 units just isn?t enough for some people. But take note, this is only for the multi-player option, and can slow down game performance considerably, making movement pretty choppy. Also make sure that everyone who plays in a multi-player game has the patch if you have it, otherwise you will not be able to play with them.
Fun cheat codes and chat sounds
What is a good game without cheats. To use a cheat, you use the chat command line to enter the cheat code. One of my favorites is “Gaia”, where you are out of the game as a player, but you control all the animals. We once played a joke on our friend (who didn’t know about the cheats) during the beginning of a game and after a minute or so he was screaming about elephants attacking his town center. There are others, which you will find on various websites, including wacko units such as a big black sportscar, and a nuke patrolman that you can conjure up to destroy your poor primitive enemies with one blast. The “chat sounds” I think we found out by ourselves, by entering a number (I can’t remember the range offhand) in the chat prompt it made a “taunt” sound. I had actually found these taunts in the sounds directory and I wondered what these were for!
Soothing music and sounds
Ahh. Nothing like listening to game music. Almost thought I had popped a recording of “nature’s sounds” in the CD-ROM. The other interesting thing to note is that when your cursor/screen is centered near an animal, you’ll hear a moment of animal sounds. Same thing goes for the general landscape. If you’re looking at water, you’ll suddenly hear waves.
Unintrusive battle notifications
No “we’re being attacked!” or auto-centering your screen onto the battle. I mean, sometimes you’re just being attacked by a lion in the forest, and what a horrible thing it would be if it took you away to that while you were doing something important in your village. The sound is a short but sweet battle horn, and you’ll see flashing blips on the small world map in the corner of your screen.
Overall, the game is good for at least a couple hours, if not more, especially with multi-player games.
NOT SO GOOD THINGS:
Exponential difficulty
Okay, let me just say that I’ve played this game plenty of times, by myself and with other people. Lots of these times we’ve played the computer on various difficulties. Well, it’s gotten to a point where “Hard” is just not hard enough, yet “Hardest” is insane. Let’s see, we stomp all over “Hard” computer enemies, yet the “Hardest” computer enemies make it to Iron age before we even make it to Bronze. Hmm. The other thing about playing multi-player games with the “Hardest” setting is that inevitably one person will get nailed early, and will bitch and whine about no one else getting hit, and ending up starting the game over so that another person can get hit the same way.
If you don’t attack me, you don’t exist
The computer seems to play by this strategy most of the time. If you leave him alone, let his villagers wander in your town (most likely the town center is way way off in the distance anyway), he’ll be more likely to leave you alone as well. This can be good, but it just doesn’t make a lot of sense.
Red and Orange look REALLY similar
Who’s attacking me? Not only do red and orange players look similar, yellow ones look like gold mines on the map, and grey ones look like stone mines on the map.
Stop picking your butt and get back to work!
So you’ve waged war on an enemy and fought a long hard battle. You get back home, only to find your farmers are no longer farming, but just sitting there. (Same kind of thing happens when mines are depleted, etc.) No notification of this whatsoever, sound or visual.
Sometimes people get confused
If you have a big group of units, sometimes if you’re crossing a narrow stretch of land, they might get caught up in each other. This was fixed a bit with the patch, but there are still some instances.
It’s all just a big race
Okay, there are several different ways to “win” at the game. You can build a Wonder, and you win if it stays alive for 2000 years (about 10 minutes or so playing time I think), or you can control all the Ruins and Artifacts (“explore-a-carts”) for 2000 years. Or, kill off everyone else (the winning condition of choice). Or, score the most points (see below). Or, have a set time limit and see who scores the most points. But really, what seems to count the most is how fast you blow through the ages. Conditions to advance to the next age depend on how much food and/or gold you have, and if you’ve built at least 2 buildings of your current age. However, it says nothing about technologies researched. So, you can still have those tool age technologies that you haven’t bothered to research and be in the iron age. I say have more requirements for advancement, so that it doesn’t just become a big food and gold hoarding charade.
Score
We’re still figuring out how the score actually scores game play. Also it took us a while to figure out the scoreboard that you can display during game play. I actually still don’t know this, and it’s not in any manuals anywhere. The game insert does have a breakdown of the points awarded for certain units and technologies and events, but because of the complexity of the game it’s almost irrelevant. Of course, there is the achievements chart at the end, outlining the point totals a bit better and in different categories, but really, who cares?
So these are some hits and misses within the game. You can play with a randomly generated map, or you can play any of the included scenarios. You can also play a “death match” where you build as many troops as you can and bring them in to the slaughter. There are also single-player campaigns, but I personally enjoy the multi-player games the most. It is much more fun playing against human players, and much more challenging of a game.
There are new and different challenges with every random map generated. Also with 12 empires, you are always trying out new strategies. Though the game has been on the shelves for months, Age of Empires hasn’t lost its appeal.