Age Of Empires II: Conqueror 2.0 for Windows, Mac
- Publisher: Microsoft
- Genre: Strategy
- Platform: Windows, Mac
- Game Series: Age of Empires
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A Little Old? Perfection Ages Well
Pros
Good balance, several choices, stops many genre conventions cold
Cons
A little too complicated for newbies, the Zone isn't great for multiplayer gaming
Recommended it?
Yes
The Bottom Line:
Games this good don't come along often. It is seriously worth picking up, even if you don't like RTS.
Anyone who has had a PC in the past...oh...ten years, has played some type of game in this genre. Real Time Strategy. The methodical thinking of chess mixed with the on your feet thinking that only a video game can provide. Westwood's Command and Conquer made it royally playable. Blizzard's Warcraft II made it strategic followed by Starcraft giving it balance and style. Finally, Microsoft's Age of Empires II combined it all and made it ready for master and novice alike. How so? Read on.
The main gist of each game is this: you start out with some basic resource gathering and building units. From there, you create buildings that allow you to build stronger and more powerful units to use as offense and defense. Along the way, you might upgrade statistics to units or give them new abilities. When you have enough units, you send them towards your opponent's base to decimate it. Along the way, you'll encounter terms such as 'rushing' (attacking your opponent early before he has defenses up)and 'dropping' (using transport units to circumvent the opponent's defenses).
Age of Empires II doesn't screw with those conventions. It adds it's own spin of course, in the form of a historical background. Each building and unit existed in some way in the past. AoE II's gatherer unit is the villager or peasant. He gathers wood, food, gold, and stone to use in creating buildings, units, and researching upgrades. To be able to build newer and more powerful stuff, you must enter the next age (of history). The Dark Ages allow you only rudimentary units. The Feudal Ages allow a bit more, but not what we think of when we think medievil warfare. The Castle Ages finally let you build castles. The final age, the Imperial Age, allows the most powerful units technologies. While that is interesting, in effect it's little more than an excuse to quickly gauge an opponent's progress at a mere glance of one of his buildings as the look of each civilization changes from age to age.
There are 13 civilizations to choose from in AoE II with the expansion, The Conquerors, adding another five. While this may seem exciting compared to the two or three of Command and Conquer and Starcraft, the actual differences are minimal...at least at first sight. There are only four different looks for the 13 civilizations, meaning you can't tell at a glance if your opponent is British, French, or Celtic. Although the expansion adds a fifth look, that's still pretty limited.
Looks can be deceiving though, as no civilization can build every unit or research every technology. On top of that, each civilization has it's own unique unit that no other can building. Then, to put cream on the whole endeavor, each one has a bonus to a particular aspect of the game, such as villagers moving faster or some units being cheaper.
What this amounts so is that there are 18 different civilizations and at least 18 different approaches to the game because the player has to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of both his civilization and his opponents. This is all tempered by the similarity of the civilizations so that you aren't totally overwhelmed if you're a Persian player and you switch to the Vikings.
One of the best aspects of AoE II is that many strategies in other RTS games simply don't work in this one. The early game rush that I mentioned earlier, for example, is useless for killing an opponent. A simple click of an icon on the main building, the Town Center, makes all villagers garrison inside the nearest building they can get so. The villagers then start firing arrows on the attackers. What this means is that you have to wait for siege units that can do massive building damage quickly. Siege units have their own weaknesses, not the least of which being that they're expensive. So you want units to protect your siege units, units to protect those units, and then units to protect those units.
There are several campaigns in AoE II and it's expansion, each one placing you controlling the civilization of a historic figure such as William Wallace or Joan of Arc. These campaigns are decently fun, but some aspects like the population limit of 75 and bad voice acting sometimes make them more like a chore. Luckily the meat of the game is the random map mode. This all has variables that can be adjusted to your liking, such as difficulty, which age you start in, and how much of the map is visible.
The AI really doesn't attack at all below moderate difficulty, sending only small attacking forces that can be easily destroyed by a few static defense buildings are sent at moderate. At the hardest setting, it can put up a decent fight, even though the computer will resign if it ever runs out of resource access. It's a bit of a buzz kill to see your army raging through an enemy town only to have the guy resign in the middle of it.
AoE II was designed for use with Microsoft's Gaming Zone for multiplayer. It works ok. The spit-shine of Blizzard's battle.net is clearly superior, particularly given the difficulty of finding a game in the Zone. Also, there are minimal strategy hints to be found at the Zone. On the bright side, multiplayer is relatively lag free and the game has bonuses for those who ally. Several people can even control the same civilization at once, although this takes a lot of micromanagement.
The game is rendered in 2D sprites from a the standard isometric viewpoint. While this may seem dated, it looks better than any 3D game will for several years yet and insures that it will run on a normal computer without a $500 video card. The frame rate can get screwy if you have a computer from 1998, but will run smoothely even in 100 units vs 100 units clashes on most home pcs that are younger. The sound effects are informative and do what they're supposed to do, relay information about what's going on while sounding suitably middle-ages-ey.
The Conquerors expansion adds five more civilizations as I've said and polishes a few headaches from the first game. Farms can be qued up so you don't have the irritation of searching for every villager when you get the warning of an expired farm. Each civilization also gets a unique technology that can benefit them or hurt the opponent. But, beyond that, it's little more than a large patch (this is Microsoft software, after all).
All in all, Age of Empires II and The Conquerors expansion stand among the greats in Real Time Strategy gaming and computer gaming overall. Even five years after its release, there are thousands of people playing on the Zone thanks to innovation tempered with similarity and balance. While the RTS genre can seem a bit crowded at times, Age of Empires II stands solidly as one of the true greats.
The main gist of each game is this: you start out with some basic resource gathering and building units. From there, you create buildings that allow you to build stronger and more powerful units to use as offense and defense. Along the way, you might upgrade statistics to units or give them new abilities. When you have enough units, you send them towards your opponent's base to decimate it. Along the way, you'll encounter terms such as 'rushing' (attacking your opponent early before he has defenses up)and 'dropping' (using transport units to circumvent the opponent's defenses).
Age of Empires II doesn't screw with those conventions. It adds it's own spin of course, in the form of a historical background. Each building and unit existed in some way in the past. AoE II's gatherer unit is the villager or peasant. He gathers wood, food, gold, and stone to use in creating buildings, units, and researching upgrades. To be able to build newer and more powerful stuff, you must enter the next age (of history). The Dark Ages allow you only rudimentary units. The Feudal Ages allow a bit more, but not what we think of when we think medievil warfare. The Castle Ages finally let you build castles. The final age, the Imperial Age, allows the most powerful units technologies. While that is interesting, in effect it's little more than an excuse to quickly gauge an opponent's progress at a mere glance of one of his buildings as the look of each civilization changes from age to age.
There are 13 civilizations to choose from in AoE II with the expansion, The Conquerors, adding another five. While this may seem exciting compared to the two or three of Command and Conquer and Starcraft, the actual differences are minimal...at least at first sight. There are only four different looks for the 13 civilizations, meaning you can't tell at a glance if your opponent is British, French, or Celtic. Although the expansion adds a fifth look, that's still pretty limited.
Looks can be deceiving though, as no civilization can build every unit or research every technology. On top of that, each civilization has it's own unique unit that no other can building. Then, to put cream on the whole endeavor, each one has a bonus to a particular aspect of the game, such as villagers moving faster or some units being cheaper.
What this amounts so is that there are 18 different civilizations and at least 18 different approaches to the game because the player has to take into account the strengths and weaknesses of both his civilization and his opponents. This is all tempered by the similarity of the civilizations so that you aren't totally overwhelmed if you're a Persian player and you switch to the Vikings.
One of the best aspects of AoE II is that many strategies in other RTS games simply don't work in this one. The early game rush that I mentioned earlier, for example, is useless for killing an opponent. A simple click of an icon on the main building, the Town Center, makes all villagers garrison inside the nearest building they can get so. The villagers then start firing arrows on the attackers. What this means is that you have to wait for siege units that can do massive building damage quickly. Siege units have their own weaknesses, not the least of which being that they're expensive. So you want units to protect your siege units, units to protect those units, and then units to protect those units.
There are several campaigns in AoE II and it's expansion, each one placing you controlling the civilization of a historic figure such as William Wallace or Joan of Arc. These campaigns are decently fun, but some aspects like the population limit of 75 and bad voice acting sometimes make them more like a chore. Luckily the meat of the game is the random map mode. This all has variables that can be adjusted to your liking, such as difficulty, which age you start in, and how much of the map is visible.
The AI really doesn't attack at all below moderate difficulty, sending only small attacking forces that can be easily destroyed by a few static defense buildings are sent at moderate. At the hardest setting, it can put up a decent fight, even though the computer will resign if it ever runs out of resource access. It's a bit of a buzz kill to see your army raging through an enemy town only to have the guy resign in the middle of it.
AoE II was designed for use with Microsoft's Gaming Zone for multiplayer. It works ok. The spit-shine of Blizzard's battle.net is clearly superior, particularly given the difficulty of finding a game in the Zone. Also, there are minimal strategy hints to be found at the Zone. On the bright side, multiplayer is relatively lag free and the game has bonuses for those who ally. Several people can even control the same civilization at once, although this takes a lot of micromanagement.
The game is rendered in 2D sprites from a the standard isometric viewpoint. While this may seem dated, it looks better than any 3D game will for several years yet and insures that it will run on a normal computer without a $500 video card. The frame rate can get screwy if you have a computer from 1998, but will run smoothely even in 100 units vs 100 units clashes on most home pcs that are younger. The sound effects are informative and do what they're supposed to do, relay information about what's going on while sounding suitably middle-ages-ey.
The Conquerors expansion adds five more civilizations as I've said and polishes a few headaches from the first game. Farms can be qued up so you don't have the irritation of searching for every villager when you get the warning of an expired farm. Each civilization also gets a unique technology that can benefit them or hurt the opponent. But, beyond that, it's little more than a large patch (this is Microsoft software, after all).
All in all, Age of Empires II and The Conquerors expansion stand among the greats in Real Time Strategy gaming and computer gaming overall. Even five years after its release, there are thousands of people playing on the Zone thanks to innovation tempered with similarity and balance. While the RTS genre can seem a bit crowded at times, Age of Empires II stands solidly as one of the true greats.
