Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings

Microsoft’s original Age of Empires, coming out when Warcraft 2 was still extremely popular, had lots of problems and was criticized as a Warcraft 2 copy. Despite all this, the game had built a large community over a few years.

This time, the creators took the best features of the original game and added loads of new features and fixes. It takes place after the fall of Rome and takes you thought the middle ages. As with the original game, Age of Empires 2 single player campaigns are based on real people, civilizations and events. The game features 5 campaigns, letting you recreate the battles fought by William Wallace, Joan of Arc, Genghis Khan and other leaders.

One of the best new things in Age of Empires 2 are the 13 new civilizations. Each of these civilizations have a few unique military units and research and technology options. These civilizations are well balanced, each a bit more advanced than others in a certain type of attack. For example, the Britons have a bonus in archery as they get to train a strong archer called Longbowman and their archeries train 25% faster. Each civilization also speaks in a different language of accent.

The game’s tutorial is excellent, explaining the basics of building a civilization and raising an army. The tutorial can get you started in no time weather you’re new to Age of Empires or have never played a real-time strategy game.

Players start with a town center and a few villagers. The first objective is to gather food, wood, stone, and gold. You can build lumber camps besides forests and mining camps beside supplies of gold and stones that are on the map. One of the most needed resource in the beginning of the scenario is food. Food can be collected in many ways. You can instruct villages to pick berries from bushes, send hunters to hunt down deer, slaughter sheep and make farms. Later in the game, you can build a dock and send fishing boats out to sea to gather fish. These can be used for making more villagers, building a variety of buildings to train soldiers, research new technology and trade with other players. More options become available as you advance through the 4 ages: the Dark Age, Feudal Age, Castle Age, and Imperial Age. The Castle Age should be researched as soon as possible, as it allows you to build a castle that lets you train your civilization’s special unit.

There are all the regular multiplayer options, and of course there are hundreds of fans to be playing on Microsoft’s Internet Gaming Zone. The Zone is one of the most reliable and easiest place to get a game going any time of the day. There are a nice selection of games to play including Deathmatch, where each player gets tons of resources and simply builds an army and fights, or Regicide, where the object is to kill the opponent’s king. Or you can just play the standard harvest, build, and conquer type of game.

There are lots of military units in the game that allow you to conquer other civilizations. There is a full range of soldiers that are the same for each of the civilizations available. These include everything from skirmishers and pikemen, to archers, swordsman, knights, and war elephants. There is also a wide variety of siege weapons that are useful for braking down walls and sea vessels. You can build monks to convert enemy units and heal your own. You can also train gunpowder units later in the game . Also, once you build a marketplace you can build trades carts, or trades cogs at your docks, and send resources to other civilizations in exchange for gold.