Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings for Windows
- ESRB Descriptor: Violence Blood
- ESRB Rating: T - (Teen)
- Publisher: Microsoft
- Genre: Strategy
- Platform: Windows
- Game Series: Age of Empires
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Different but good
Pros
Many more units and options
Cons
Resource hog
Recommended it?
Yes
As an avid AOE and AOE:ROR fan for the last year and a half, I had really been looking forward to AOK. I checked out the screenshots and the animation of the trebuchet ("treebucket") on all the websites. So as soon as it came out, my husband and I bought a couple copies and started playing at home.
To explain why AOK is so different from ROR, I have to go into game-specific details, but bear with me if you've never played either: when I first started playing AOE I, I played a very defensive game. I would triple-wall landbridges and my coworkers laughed their asses off as they built docks next to my pitiful walling efforts and transported across. Gradually, I came to realize that nobody ever won a game by building walls, and so I became a more aggressive player. This has been the way the game playing has grown on the zone too (zone.msn.com). It used to be that you'd rush to bronze and then bring out your hoplites or chariot archers and wreak havoc. Now, if you don't attack in the tool age, you're dead. You spend half your time in the stone age trying to find where the enemies are so that you can build your army buildings nearby.
AoK has changed all that, by giving you a scout in the beginning of the game. It's a simple matter of sending the scout around the entire map in the first minute, and the element of surprise is completely gone. You used to have to worry about the direction from which the enemy would be approaching, and whether or not your villagers had covered enough area to find all the holes in the trees. With a scout, those issues no longer are a factor. Plus, you can now build walls in the first age. Changing the first 5 minutes in that major of a way means changing the entire dynamic of the game, which has made myself and other hard core AOE players slow to enjoy AoK.
AoK is a much more defensive game than AOE and ROR. With walls in the first age and the ability to garrison archers in towers, defending your town in the first 20 minutes of the game is a little easier. After that point, the game does become more like AOE I, however - if you're not attacking, you're not going to win.
The main problem I have with AoK is that it's a resource HOG! I've got a K6-200 at home with 96 mb of memory, and ROR on this machine is speedyquick. But AoK is frustratingly slow. During a game, I once checked the tasklist and AoK had a footprint of 64 megs. Unbelievable.
If I did have a more powerful machine, I would be able to appreciate AoK's strong points more: A) like the original AOE, it runs on NT. Big plus for me. No way i'm going to run 9x at home :-) B) It's got more units, and some more interesting ways of countering. It's no longer as simple as "chariot archer to priest"/"priest to hoplite"/"hoplite to cavalry", the straightforward way to counter in AOE I. There are many more upgrades to each unit, and each civilization has a 'special' unit that is unique to that civ. The special units are very powerful in the third age, but end up being somewhat irrelevant in the last one.
I really love the new types of siege weapons, it makes attacking the new, more powerful walls and towers much easier. And there's nothing quite like 4 well-guarded trebuchets to tear through an opponent's buildings from out of range!
There are more ways to do just about everything in AoK, more ways to gather food, more upgrades for most units, more types of army units than the "cavalry archers infantry siege" staples, more ways to unintentionally die (wolves in the first age will hunt down and massacre your villagers if you don't get the loom!), more maps.
The #1 new feature, in my opinion, is the ability to restore a multiplayer networked game. Just vote to save it and it's stored in that state until you decide to restore. If you get tired of playing after a couple hours, you can postpone the game until later.
Eventually, I'm sure i'll warm up to AoK and forget about AoE, but so far
it hasn't been an easy sell. This game has a lot going for it for people new to the series, but if you're an old hand you might not warm to it as quickly as you did to the original.
*** Update added dec 99: Well, I was right, I eventually warmed up to it. I now thoroughly enjoy the game :-)
To explain why AOK is so different from ROR, I have to go into game-specific details, but bear with me if you've never played either: when I first started playing AOE I, I played a very defensive game. I would triple-wall landbridges and my coworkers laughed their asses off as they built docks next to my pitiful walling efforts and transported across. Gradually, I came to realize that nobody ever won a game by building walls, and so I became a more aggressive player. This has been the way the game playing has grown on the zone too (zone.msn.com). It used to be that you'd rush to bronze and then bring out your hoplites or chariot archers and wreak havoc. Now, if you don't attack in the tool age, you're dead. You spend half your time in the stone age trying to find where the enemies are so that you can build your army buildings nearby.
AoK has changed all that, by giving you a scout in the beginning of the game. It's a simple matter of sending the scout around the entire map in the first minute, and the element of surprise is completely gone. You used to have to worry about the direction from which the enemy would be approaching, and whether or not your villagers had covered enough area to find all the holes in the trees. With a scout, those issues no longer are a factor. Plus, you can now build walls in the first age. Changing the first 5 minutes in that major of a way means changing the entire dynamic of the game, which has made myself and other hard core AOE players slow to enjoy AoK.
AoK is a much more defensive game than AOE and ROR. With walls in the first age and the ability to garrison archers in towers, defending your town in the first 20 minutes of the game is a little easier. After that point, the game does become more like AOE I, however - if you're not attacking, you're not going to win.
The main problem I have with AoK is that it's a resource HOG! I've got a K6-200 at home with 96 mb of memory, and ROR on this machine is speedyquick. But AoK is frustratingly slow. During a game, I once checked the tasklist and AoK had a footprint of 64 megs. Unbelievable.
If I did have a more powerful machine, I would be able to appreciate AoK's strong points more: A) like the original AOE, it runs on NT. Big plus for me. No way i'm going to run 9x at home :-) B) It's got more units, and some more interesting ways of countering. It's no longer as simple as "chariot archer to priest"/"priest to hoplite"/"hoplite to cavalry", the straightforward way to counter in AOE I. There are many more upgrades to each unit, and each civilization has a 'special' unit that is unique to that civ. The special units are very powerful in the third age, but end up being somewhat irrelevant in the last one.
I really love the new types of siege weapons, it makes attacking the new, more powerful walls and towers much easier. And there's nothing quite like 4 well-guarded trebuchets to tear through an opponent's buildings from out of range!
There are more ways to do just about everything in AoK, more ways to gather food, more upgrades for most units, more types of army units than the "cavalry archers infantry siege" staples, more ways to unintentionally die (wolves in the first age will hunt down and massacre your villagers if you don't get the loom!), more maps.
The #1 new feature, in my opinion, is the ability to restore a multiplayer networked game. Just vote to save it and it's stored in that state until you decide to restore. If you get tired of playing after a couple hours, you can postpone the game until later.
Eventually, I'm sure i'll warm up to AoK and forget about AoE, but so far
it hasn't been an easy sell. This game has a lot going for it for people new to the series, but if you're an old hand you might not warm to it as quickly as you did to the original.
*** Update added dec 99: Well, I was right, I eventually warmed up to it. I now thoroughly enjoy the game :-)
