The review of the game follows the story below...

It's been a week since I started my campaign against seven of the hardest computer opponents that Age of Empires has to offer. It was an epic battle with many twists, almost unending pressure and often it looked hopeless.

I chose the Teutonics for my race and set about walling myself in and advancing through the ages as quickly as I could. The relentless hordes came soon. For awhile the walls held them off. I built castles and towers and filled them with archers. Finally, they came with cannons, but I'd prepared my paladins and put up gates by then. The villagers worked frantically building, researching and manning the towers and finally the seige slowed to a trickle. Alas, a relic lay nearby, but I was too slow in picking it up. It wasn't long before the enemy had and now the 400 year timer began. I had to destroy their church to stop the timer.

The church was on top of a hill at the end of a fairly narrow road and it was protected by two castles in front and an entire civilization behind. I wrecked the church 5 times, but it required me to send my villagers on a long journey through enemy lands to start a new village at the top of the hill. It was here that I finally succeeded in building a church, destroying their church and castles and stealing the relic. Resources were running low as I did this, so I wasn't prepared for wonder that was built across the map in the heart of another civilization across the map. Once again, I had to protect my relic, fight off invaders and destroy a well defended mosque a great distance away.

Once again, I sent out my intrepid villagers to build a village in the heart of enemy territory, but first they had to dodge the shells of the bombard towers.

I built a towncenter and then a castle and then another castle, then trebuchets and I succeeded in destroying the wonder, but this started a new seige on my castles and they were without the benefit of walls or the advavtages of starting resources. The trebs were able to knock down one of their nearby castles and then they were smashed and after some time, so were my new castles and everyone in them.

I had to redo this. It was the turning point of the entire game. The placement of the castles in this invasion were paramount. I moved them closer and was able to keep my trebs operating while they destroyed both castles, the wonder and much of the civilization. No longer could they produce the elite troops that had plagued me before and apparantly no one else in the game had the ambition to build a wonder. My relic was still in a church across the map guarded by only one castle and under constant attack. Before the game was over I would lose both. My original town with it's five castles would also be leveled and become an open field. All that would be left would be the ruins of some walls.

The campaign in west went well now. Progress was slow, but hopefull. There was a temple with two relics within reach and lots of untapped resources. It was frustrating to be so close and yet not have enough money to build up a decent offense. At one point long into this seige I noticed my wood production had almost stopped and I'd found that the woodchoppers had gotten too close to the red civilization and been picked off by cannons firing over the forest. Another time, cannons from the red civilization knoocked down my castle and church, freeing the relic. THis had to be redone. With only one relic producing gold, I needed the lumber trade to even be able to defend myself.

The pressure was finally off now. The tide turned. I mined the gold and stone, but used most of the gold to buy armaments and troops. By now, stone had shot up in price from 120 gold to almost 500. The trebuchets and paladins destroyed the whole civilization of Phillip the Good. My attentions turned to the Byzantine civilization to the north and their forests of bombard towers. Behind them lay the last two relics. Once again, they were uphill from me. While destroying them, I lost my relic to the east again, but this was obviously temporary.

The great mass of my living civilization moved down the narrow road to the place where my original relic had been. There were villagers, paladins, monks and trebuchets. They knocked down the enemy town and secured the last and first relic again. The timer was set for me. I wrecked their whole town just for fun in the short time that remained.
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This is an excellent "product" from a guy who admits he is just a "casual" gamer.
He actually admits this in an interview somewhere and I think he's more
competent than most designers and much older. So there, you little whipper
snappers.

My main complaint with this game has nothing to do with the game or
developers except that they should be more careful about who they allow to
start fan sites. A certain very popular site, perhaps the best site with the best
forum gave me a very bad experience. In one of my first posts a regular there
refered to me as stupid and silly and wondered in public if I was senile. All this
because I questioned the diplomatic system in AOK, which any competent
reviewer will recognize as being a joke. When I complained to the moderators
of this site about this abusive behavior and a general abusive behavior towards
Americans, I was banned from the forum and my ISP contacted for the crime of
contacting these people through e mail. And now on to more pertinent
information.

I found the game easy to learn and fun to play. The graphics were good but not
great. Pretty soon I found myself relying on one strategy. Wall out the invaders.
Get to castle age as quick as I can and build lots of town centers to expand and
defend. Once you beat the initial big invasion, the idiotic AI tends to just send
invaders in little trickles that never stop, but aren't that hard to deal with.

It's fun to use the various seige weapons, but I didn't really bother mastering the
armor and tremendous variety of knights and swordsmen. They all looked about
the same to me with the exception of the english longbowmen. You could play
this game for a very long time, but there are lots of very good games to play.

This is deep strategy, but not as deep as Railroad Tycoon 2 and Rogue Spear.
It's also all tiny people and buildings. There's no zooming in and out or rotating.
The fans are kind of ummmm...well, you read what I said above.

I only played twice on the internet and the first guy left as soon as I knocked
down his whole wall with a massive seige attack. The game then ended leaving
me without the ability to even finish off what he'd built. My second game I used
the wrong culture and after a prolonged build up I quicklly got slaughtered by the
elite teutonic knights. My Woad raiders didn't have the ability to build cannons I
found out too late. So there you have multiplay in a nutshell. If you are winning,
people leave and call you a hack. If you are losing, they love you and possibly
think you suck.

There was no third, more experienced multiplay for me as I got wrapped up in
the incident up top and lost interest in the game.