Wood: 100
It has not only been an age since I found myself playing Age of Empires for this 1001 blog but an age since I've been able to sit down and write this one after playing Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, the sequel to the Warcraft meets Civilization offering from Ensemble Studios.
The original game had kept my interest for a while until bone-headedness on my part scuppered my chances of a victory. I liked it and would be on the lookout for delayed but soon to be appearing Definitive Edition release.
To be honest with you, I very quickly forgot to keep an eye out for that, but not so for Age of Empires II, as it's the HD Edition that I'll be playing for this post.
How well will we develop our empire? Will I again run out of food and find myself with only a single villager on the map? Nothing can be answered into we dive in and find out.
Fun Times
I had to include a lot of screenshots from the opening cinematic to AoE II, as it's all kinds of wonderful. Chess has been used as an analogy for a war many a time, I'm sure, but none so poetic as the introduction to this game. Does it set the scene? Not really, no, but I'm in the medieval mood, that's for sure.
Just to go back to poetry for a second, though, I mentioned that I found AoE after having been thrown away by someone. It had no box or paperwork, but when have I ever read them anyway? I kid you not, I have, in the meantime, found the manual and the foldout full-colour fancy technology tree cheat sheet for AoE II, also thrown out by someone who no longer had the need for it, but could not find an accompanying disc. That's a bonus fun fact for you. Let's get on with playing the game.
The tutorial campaign this time around has you fend off the English, which is not something I normally want, of course, but I've been to a few of these places in Scotland and they're not half bad, so I'll defend them if AoE II wants me to.
Each stage is set up with a short series of still pictures with some overrrRRrrly acCented Scottish fella reading the three sentences that set the scene, and then you're plopped into a small map with a basic set of goals. Movement is covered by one map, the basics of building and attacking in another, specialising your builds and upgrading your empire in a third, and so on.
It sometimes seems a little too simple, but it generally lets you get on with exploring the game at your own pace. The core gameplay, like AoE and any other RTS game before it, is to gather resources and spend them on buildings, technological advancements, and people, be they villagers or vicious militiamen until you have enough stuff with which you achieve your goal, like driving out the English.
Even as early as the fourth map or so, games were stretched out into seemingly twenty-minute affairs, but while they felt long, they didn't feel like they were dragging.
What you do and how you do it is generally so straightforward that you can play casually. Obviously, I was still in the tutorial campaign here - playing too slowly will likely lead to your downfall against harder AI or human opponents - but I wasn't ever caught between a rock and a hard place with a ticking countdown timer to worry about. When - not if, but when - a small force of swordsmen was slaughtered, no big deal. A setback, certainly, but I'll just wait for a few minutes to train some more, maybe advance their equipment to give them a better chance of success, and then just send them out again.
This particular scenario had three nations on the map, one an ally to ourselves, and the other the English, with the goal of finding and protecting three artefacts of some kind. I already forget - this is what leaving a post for a week does.
One you start with, one can be found in your allies' town, and they'll let you in and hopefully trade with you at some favourable odds if you have the right buildings and don't be a dick to them, and the last can be found in the English camp, once you break through its gate (setting it on fire with your swords, even) and have a snoop around.
Only a Monk could carry the artefacts, so a sizeable security detail would hopefully ensure his safety before ending the mission with a victory.
In the final part of the tutorial campaign, we would get to fight side by side with William Wallace and his troops, who would be arriving later in the game, once we've patched up a few holes in our walls.
As you gather your resources and build more and more building types, like Barracks and Docks, you can research new technology and even choose to progress into the next age in order to branch out and also focus in on where you want your empire to head.
It doesn't seem to be as intricate as Civilization may be, but you can, for example, build a Barracks, and a Blacksmith, and have your Barracks churn out swordsmen while your Blacksmith strengthens their stats, essentially, and as the ages progress, turn those swordsmen into harder hitting, sturdier long swordsmen, and two-handed swordsmen, and champions ready to prove their knightly valour.
Of course, being an RTS title, every unit type will have its strengths and weaknesses against other unit types, and AoE II even comes with the ability to set up a units stance, of sorts (attack vs defence, really), and their formation, from bunching up to forming neat lines and so on.
This is all helpfully explained by this chart I'm looking at but lord knows how best to actually use it all. As well as having tens of options across the ages, you also have a game with about the same number of factions, coming from all corners of the globe to do battle. Celts and Britons, Franks and Goths, Chinese and Mongols, Turks and Vikings, each with unique units too.
It almost seems like there's too much, but I'm having a good time with this first campaign that I want to get stuck in some more.
After building a not-too-impressive castle, William Wallace - at least I hope it was William Wallace - arrived in his boats to do battle. I lost him in the shuffle immediately. I think he went off to defeat some archers who were taking pot-shots at my walls - or more accurately the buildings behind the wall because I don't think I built the wall correctly - and I have no idea what fate befell him.
I do know that I parked his ships right at the river crossing that the English were using. They weren't very effective. Various archers just walked right through them to be slaughtered a little further behind, where my forces were gathering.
My empire slowly working away - villagers keeping the fields going, hammering away at rocks, chopping down trees, all aided by buildings to make things faster or to be able to gather more resources - the task for my military forces was to find and destroy the English castle. I had siege weapons, and I think there were catapults too, I'm not quite sure - don't remember building any, and can't see them in these screenshots.
Like usual, my strategy was 'Click-drag around everything and attack en masse', which proved to work well.
I don't think my battering rams did anything, though. Might want to read the manual for that... Still, some Steam achievements later (the screenshot button being mapped to the menus by default, causing me no end of screenshots of a useless menu...), and I had completed my task of keeping the English at bay, and learning the basics of AoE II.
What could possibly be next for the game itself?
A Joan of Arc campaign? I'm so very tempted to click and start it immediately... but I ended my time with AoE II there. The French would have to wait.
Frustrations
My time with AoE II was largely so chilled that I didn't really have any gripes with it. The first time I booted it up it didn't want to get anywhere, but from then on, the only real bother I had was with tiny text at the resolutions I was using, and a mouse that would move my view of the map when I was just trying to move it to hover over various icons on the HUD.
I suppose I should have looked at all the keyboard shortcuts for them. Cycle through idle villagers? That could be handy.
So yes, I wasn't grumbling much at all. Then again, I wasn't really tested at all, either. I need to know what a real AoE II campaign feels like before I can really pass judgement.
Final Word
Others have already passed judgement of course, and this HD Edition actually scores lower than the Definitive Edition of the first game, but then again this one came out 5 years ago, as opposed to 5 months or so.
Some say that the HD Edition is faithful to the original - great for players like me - and others say that it's so faithful that it highlights the flaws of the game and doesn't make them any better. If I knew what flaws they were on about, I might be able to say one way or the other whether I agree or not, but until then I must just go with what I currently feel: that AoE II is well worth playing, to the point where I'd ignore all the good points I had about the first game, simply because the setting in this one is more to my liking.
Age of Empires didn't do much wrong, Age of Empires II refined it all. It's what a sequel ought to be.
Fun Facts
Despite launch day bugs that would allow players to cheat in multiplayer games, there wasn't a usable process of patching the game, and it would be 11 months until there was one.
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, developed by Ensemble Studios, first released in 1999.
Version played: Age of Empires II: HD Edition, PC, 2013.