11 ms·

Why Age of Empires 2 is still growing

451 points by cpeterso 11y ago

fouadf 11y ago
If you're a fan of age of empires 2, you should definitely try 0ad http://play0ad.com http://play0ad.com it's open source and multiplatform
- will_pseudonym 11y ago
  Thank you! I'm definitely not salivating at getting to play a new Mac RTS with alpha-stage multiplayer, not at all!! :D
- jonbaer 11y ago
  0ad is excellent for quite a number of reasons, first is the history it teaches you, the other is you can grab it @ https://github.com/0ad/0ad https://github.com/0ad/0ad and https://github.com/0admods https://github.com/0admods and really tinker w/ the AI and build meshes,models w/ Blender, +1 for 0ad
  - pcr0 11y ago
    Just got the game :D I'm curious though, where did you find the history lessons? The campaign doesn't seem to have been implemented yet.
- brink 11y ago
  Also, if you can, take the time to donate if you like it.
- pwelch 11y ago
  I'm really excited for 0AD because I want to play AOE2 but only have OS X and Linux. Thanks to the 0AX devs for all your hard work!
  - Qwertious 11y ago
    Like another comment said, you should keep your eye on openage - it's a libre implementation of AOE2 and will run natively on Linux.
TulliusCicero 11y ago
Neat. Man, I'd love to see this happen to Starcraft 1.
- thegeekpirate 11y ago
  It's happening. And not only for StarCraft =) http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id=150010X http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id... http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id=15000XZ http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id...
  - svisser 11y ago
    Also for Command & Conquer: http://openra.net http://openra.net (currently C&C (Tiberian Dawn), C&C: Red Alert, and Dune 2000 with Tiberian Sun on the way).
    - VeilEm 11y ago
      Wow. That is good news. Those games are some of the ones I've had the most fun on.
    - DCoder 11y ago
      And Red Alert 2: YR fans might find Ares [1] interesting: it's an engine-enhancement that fixes a ton of funky bugs [2] and enables loads of new functionality, and popular mods like Mental Omega and D-Day take advantage of that functionality in interesting ways. (I used to be the lead developer of Ares for several years, the amount of reverse-engineering and C++ voodoo involved was awesome.) 1: http://ares.strategy-x.com/ http://ares.strategy-x.com/ 2: https://ares-developers.github.io/Ares-docs/bugfixes/type1/index.html https://ares-developers.github.io/Ares-docs/bugfixes/type1/i...
    - frik 11y ago
      I am a fan of C&C Renegade (the concept of 3D shooter and RTS gameplay is so awesome) and C&C Generals. Would love to see some community projects around them as well. Something like 0 A.D. for C&C Renegade and Generals (mind you both featured the same game engine)
johnloeber 11y ago
I've played a great deal of AoE2. Here are some comments: * The two new expansions are nice. The developers have done an excellent job at maintaining the balance of the game and not pushing any outlandish changes. (After all, the game thrives on a nostalgia factor.) However, it's apparent that it comes from a tiny dev studio. Releases are usually littered with bugs and playability issues. This is a great shame, because they manage to garner significant hype and excitement, only for the release day to be somewhat frustrating for most players. * In fact, due to the small size of the dev team, there usually is a long turnaround period on fixing smaller gameplay issues. This means that most of the more invested players, who are more easily irritated than the casual players, use other, older, more established clients to play the game, where the new expansions are not available. Indeed, the new expansions, while very similar in spirit to the 13-year-old expansions, change the metagame so significantly that at the competitive level, only the 13-year old expansion is played. This deeply fragments the player base. The new expansions, and AoE2 on Steam in general, are mostly played by newcomers. * It's very difficult to get the advanced players to take the expansions seriously because the competitive scene has been basically unchanged for about fifteen years. As such, the theoretical metagame has been nearly perfected, and the random components in game generation do not make a difference to the point of needing true improvisational play. Competitive players have spent months, if not years, carefully practicing minutely differing iterations of the same game scenarios. I've seen professional players end games over early-game mistakes that an intermediate player might not even notice. I consider it a little similar to chess, in the sense that the metagame/opening theory is so well explored that the game can rarely be considered improvisational, but is more like a ballet performance: an extremely well-studied routine that has to be executed as perfectly as possible (which, by the way, means above 400 actions per minute for a top player). Considering the immense amount of study that has gone into the game, and the even larger amount of practice required to become truly good, it is clear that most competitive players would rather keep spending their time on the old game, as opposed to on the new expansions -- the latter would necessitate a great amount of exploration of new strategies, and a similarly enormous amount of practice.
- Avalaxy 11y ago
  Regarding your last point: I really don't like that competitiveness. I don't get the fun in repeating the exact same schedule over and over again just to finish the game as quick as possible. I would rather prefer to build a nice city first and take it slow, but with strategy games that almost never works in multiplayer, which is why I never play them. I don't really get that feeling with FPS games, they seem to be different every single time (although for games such as counter strike that may not be true).
arjn 11y ago
Have been playing AoE on and off for a while now. Still like the game. Wish I had more time to play it. It has certain playing qualities that hold one's interest over time. Even when compared to other more modern games.
mgr86 11y ago
I played a lot of aoe I and some 2 as a kid. Nearly 30 now and have not so much time for gaming. But the online streaming community is impressive and the skill level is high. Also there was a 120k tournament last year for a 15 year old game. It's very impressive.
andygrunwald 11y ago
AoE is great. I was so happy after they released the HD release. The bad part is that there is no native MacOSX version available :(
- duhast 11y ago
  I'm playing it on MacOS using VMware Fusion. Works well.
- Zirro 11y ago
  I have found it to work without issues in Wine.
Aqwis 11y ago
One thing I'd like to see improved is the unit AI, which is frustratingly poor. This would probably annoy some serious multiplayers, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.
- johnloeber 11y ago
  There are custom (modded) AIs available that you can download. I've heard that the Barbarian AI is meant to be able to give even seasoned players a serious challenge. I've also heard that a much stronger AI has been bundled with the most recent expansion.
- renekooi 11y ago
  The HD Edition has a new AI[0] that's much stronger than the old one. It's built by Promiskuitiv and Archon, two well-known AI scripters in the Age of Empires scene :) [0]: http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/540744934297500960/ http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/540744934...
  - Aqwis 11y ago
    As I understand it, this is a bot AI, and not a unit AI. Am I wrong?
  - Avalaxy 11y ago
    How does the new AI differ from the original one? I don't see it in the change log.
pm90 11y ago
AoE 2 in likely the most engaging strategy game I've ever played. I got rather involved in it in college, but was surprised that there were certain "basic strategies" that one had to follow to hope to even survive (e.g. getting to castle age within a certain time for a certain civilization). With the voobly client, its possible to challenge aoe players across the world for a game, and its kinda awesome to cooperate and deal with the mess that comes from playing an RTS game at that level. Probably true for most strategy games, but aoe seems light enough (requirements wise) and has a great enough balance (and the fact that the game is almost freely available worldwide) enables anyone with a computer with a decent internet connection to play.
- TulliusCicero 11y ago
  > I got rather involved in it in college, but was surprised that there were certain "basic strategies" that one had to follow to hope to even survive (e.g. getting to castle age within a certain time for a certain civilization). This is always going to be true for a strategy game. Heck it's probably true in general for any competitive game that that there are certain things that you just have to do. The more competitive the game is, the more obvious this is (which is why you see more people complaining about this kind of thing for Starcraft than AoE), but it's still always present, lurking in the background.
- Fuzzwah 11y ago
  That same realization made me feel very naive, especially since I'd grown up in the competitive Quake LAN scene. My house mate and I would play AoE2 vs the AI as a change of pace. We'd done this enough to get a basic understanding of the game and I would have considered us "pretty good" at the game. I recall the moment when I stumbled onto MrFixitOnline and learned about the concept of Villager Seconds and just how important it was to get that 2nd boar in the very early game. I have a vivid memory of yelling across the hallway to my buddy, "I just found out that we're terrible at this game and no nothing at all".
rmm 11y ago
Played a LOT of AOE2 back in the day. However, I was always more of a fan of AoE1 RoR expansion. Anyone else? Something about the brutal simplicity of it, made it much more fun for me and my friends? Would love to see that "HD'ified"!
- Avalaxy 11y ago
  Oh yes, the villagers beating enemies with huge bones/clubs and the famous wololo :-)
ndesaulniers 11y ago
I still play a ton of Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, which is just a Star Wars re-skin of AoE2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Battlegrounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Battlegrou...
- tough_luck 11y ago
  So this is the game I played years ago. Thanks. I found demo of this game on one of the cd that came with Digit mag.
- rasz_pl 11y ago
  you might like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGvorYrXyxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGvorYrXyxU Star Wars: Galaxy at War Mod - world at war mod
JoshGlazebrook 11y ago
Age of Mythology is still one of my favorite games ever. What made it fun is not the real time strategy, but the custom scenario maps that people could create. This wasn't just the terrain, but the mechanics of the maps themselves. It was part "programming" as well as part design. The multiplayer servers are still online, but the certificate expired years ago. You can force AOM to connect to them with fiddler2, but you have to have an existing account. But now there is the steam re-release, and of course Voobly/GameRanger for the original release, but the steam version is full of bugs that have not been fixed in over a year.
- roymurdock 11y ago
  Slightly off topic but one of my best musical decisions of 2015 was to purchase the AoM soundtrack...amazing study/writing ambient music with just the right amount of nostalgia. If you still have the game CD you can find the files there. For the rest of us...Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003TL16O6?ie=UTF8&qid=&ref_=tmm_msc_swatch_0&sr= https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003TL16O6?ie=UTF8&qid=&re...
- gamesbrainiac 11y ago
  AoM is still my favorite game of all time. Its hard to find a fault with and, and still to this day I can end up spending hours and hours on it to no end. The graphics are pretty awesome. I know there have been a lot of improvements to graphics over the years, but for me AoM's colors and graphics just seem so nice to look at. When it first came out, it probably had the best graphics of any RTS game. The campaign was phenomenal. I can't remember how many times I've finished and then re-finished the campaign. So I can't wait for the new expansion, "The Tales of the Dragon" to come out, which feature the Chinese and their deities.
- drblast 11y ago
  My wife and I played AOM obsessively, it's such a great game. There's a small time commitment, the AI had just the right levels of difficulty to help you work on your rts skills while still having a blast. I always felt like the Atlanteans were slightly overpowered, but other than that the balance was pretty good. The steam version is good but I kinda wish there were an update with low system requirements that fixed some of the bugs in the current version. It's the best LAN game ever.
snydly 11y ago
One of the greatest breakthroughs of my life was realizing that you only had to type "cheese steak jimmy's" once, then ctrl-c, then ctrl-v as much as you want. It was a great day.
- JoshuaRedmond 11y ago
  That's the cheat code for 1000 food[0] for anyone curious. [0] - http://www.neoseeker.com/aoe2-conquerors/cheats/pc/ http://www.neoseeker.com/aoe2-conquerors/cheats/pc/
- junto 11y ago
  Indeed, alongside lumberjack, robin hood and rock on. Even in LAN party multi player mode we used to allow these cheats, as it made the game more fun. Players would build enormous defensives with those resources until the mother of all battles would conclude the game.
- mhuangw 11y ago
  howdoyouturnthison
- skittlebrau 11y ago
  Strangely I am responsible for the name of this cheat code. It's an accidental-turned-intentional misnomer for a place we used to eat a lot during Age2 development called Fred's Downtown Philly.
  - artursapek 11y ago
    If you have written up any memories/folk lore from your days building this game, I would love to read it (and I'm sure many others here would too).
    - skittlebrau 11y ago
      I have never written anything up personally, but I'm sure there is some stuff out there to be found. Get any two former Ensemble employees together, possibly buy them a beer, and you will almost certainly get some stories that sound apocryphal but probably actually happened :)
mhuangw 11y ago
One of my favorite strategy games growing up. It also encouraged a healthy interest in history that persists today.
cwbrandsma 11y ago
As I'm reading this my 14 year old daughter and my 12 year old son are playing a game while discussing strategies and having a blast.
tomphoolery 11y ago
TIL people sitll play AoE 2! I used to play this game all the time at the all-night LAN parties my friends hosted. It was great because the graphics weren't so crazy that literally anyone could play it, so it always commanded the largest amounts of players, other than Counter-Strike: Source.
wnevets 11y ago
I could never get into aoe2 after playing aoe rise of rome for so long.
mrsuprawsm 11y ago
I loved the original Age of Empires (+ Rise of Rome), I remember asking a friend who was lucky enough to have a CD writer at the time to copy it for me; probably the first game I ever pirated. AOE2 HD on Steam is great fun, I've really enjoyed playing it over LAN with friends (and online, although the competition is much harder). Unfortunately a reasonable percentage of games run into unrecoverable issues with the netcode - clients lagging out and going out of sync. It's a real shame and I hope the devs get some time to focus on this, especially now that 2 expansions are out.
thejj 11y ago
I'd like to remind you that there's openage, a free engine for Age of Empires 2. https://github.com/SFTtech/openage https://github.com/SFTtech/openage It will be the future if you wanna accomplish things the original engine is incapable of doing, especially a sane mod API. Help us make it more awesome :)
- danso 11y ago
  Thanks for sharing! I actually thought this was going to point to 0ad [1]...which because it deals with ancient warfare, I had just assumed it was sparked by AOE2 community. Good to know of openage. Out of curiosity...how much do you still play AOE2? I guess that would implicitly indicate how far along openage is...but I was also interested just how much someone has to love a game to rebuild it from scratch :) [1]https://github.com/0ad/0ad https://github.com/0ad/0ad
  - thejj 11y ago
    I'm not playing it much, i'm actually pretty bad at it, but it's totally fun. We mainly play aoc in wine, which works very well on local LANs but is crappy via internet, same without wine, which was the initial spark. Nobody had suceeded in creating a clone with potential at 2013, so we took chances and are still trying to do it the "right" way. I think the last year I played about 40h of aoc, so actually not that much, and haven't played aoe:hd yet.
- neximo4 11y ago
  Does anyone have an OS X build of this?
  - hnnew 11y ago
    It appears you can build here https://github.com/SFTtech/openage/blob/master/doc/building.md#prerequisite-steps-for-mac-os-x-users-os-x-1010-yosemite https://github.com/SFTtech/openage/blob/master/doc/building....
- listic 11y ago
  Is openage ready enough to allow you to actually play games?
rietta 11y ago
Oh! I loved that game as a teenager. Actually, the first one even more so.
Houshalter 11y ago
I have just started playing AoE2 again. I have some complaints. The units are so stupid and frustrating. They will casually walk into the range of enemy castles and towers. They will chase units across the map if you don't put them into defensive mode. If you do put them into defensive mode, they can easily be take out by archers without fighting back. They will open gates and let hordes of enemies into your town. They will stand there and continue cutting wood while an enemy army approaches them and kills their coworkers. The monks won't attack units unless you specifically order them to. Etc, etc. It makes parts of the game very tedious and unenjoyable. The campaigns are similarly tedious. At first it's really fun and challenging, if you have the difficulty right. It's a challenge to figure out how to repel the big attacks and build up very quickly. But after building up, it's no longer a challenge. And to win, you just need to spend an hour clicking through the enemies base destroying their structures. Even though you basically won an hour ago. The multiplayer is terrifying. I tried it once and within like 10 minutes my opponent had surrounded my base with cannon towers and trebuchets. I haven't played it since. The AI scripting is really cool. It's super simple to learn, very easy to modify other people's scripts, and very powerful. You can do a lot with just a few lines of their domain specific language. And you don't need any programming knowledge at all. And it's very extensive. There are tons of variables and functions available that let you do all kinds of things, and it's well documented. But it's also extremely restricted. You can't do basic things like store variables, compare numbers, etc. There are arbitrary limits on how many conditions you can have in a conditional, how many lines you can have total, etc. They are workable, but I have no idea why they are even there. The only people modifying AI scripts in the first place are probably willing to accept if the game runs a bit slower because of all the extra code they put in it. There's also no way to speed up the game. You only get "slow", "normal", or "fast". You need to use Cheat Engine to make the game run a hundred times faster. This is necessary for testing those AI scripts, or getting through those tedious offensive parts I mentioned above. They should have just let it be an option in the game. Same with other variables like population limit, that's restricted to 200 for no reason. If I want a higher limit, I'll accept that the game runs slower. Just let it be an option, even in a hidden menu with a big warning or something. TBF, the new HD edition does let you go up to 500 IIRC.
- marti 11y ago
bronz 11y ago
Check out Feudal Wars. It's really cool. http://www.feudalwars.net http://www.feudalwars.net
OSButler 11y ago
The thing I like so much about it are the different civilizations, which come with their own unique language and music. It's a minor detail and helps a bit with the immersion, compared to just a simple paint job to differentiate between them.
Merem 11y ago
As someone who plays AoE2 from time to time on Voobly, I consider this and the HD versions to be complete separate games, simply for the fact that said expansions are for the HD release but not the original one (original mod aside). So people like me are by these releases completely unaffected.
baldfat 11y ago
I use to play AoE 2 as UConnBBall and wrote for MrFixItOnline. Sadly the website just came down a few years ago. It was an awesome run with that game for me.
praetorian84 11y ago
Can we get an AoE 4 already?
- akerro 11y ago
  We're getting Cossacks 3 on Linux.
xerography 11y ago
AoE II HD [1] and AoE II HD: The Forgotten [2] are currently on 80% discount holiday sale on Steam. Offer ends in 29 hours and 15 minutes as of this writing. [1]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/221380 http://store.steampowered.com/app/221380 [2]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/239550 http://store.steampowered.com/app/239550
anfroid555 11y ago
Number one choice for Erlang ide
necessity 11y ago
As an active player since forever, Steam has ruined this game. It's full of bugs from 1999 and a whole lot new ones -- currently the lobby won't list games, you have to use a third party website. There is a pinned thread on Steam's support forums for a variety of bugs that are common to a lot of players (and the solutions don't always work), there are horrendous net issues ("Waiting for players", "Out of sync"), etc. I just don't play on Steam anymore. Voobly, an unofficial platform similar to Gameranger, + mod community and tournament organizer, has a very active player base, including most of the top players in the game. It has it's own HD patch and several improvements not present in Steam. It's impressive how an unofficial, unsupported, free plataform can be light years ahead of the billionaires at the Valve/Microsoft partnership.
- hmc2323 11y ago
  What's the website?
  - methyl 11y ago
    http://www.voobly.com/ http://www.voobly.com/
- aerovistae 11y ago
  This is not true. I've been playing for 16 years and now I play multiple times a week on Steam; the lobby certainly DOES list games, that's nonsense, I just loaded it right now. None of the people I play with (quite a few) have the problem you're describing. The dev team has been constantly improving things and we now see fewer bugs today than at any point in the past, and it's continuing to improve all the time. Yes, it still out of syncs sometime, but such is life for those of us playing games from '99.
verelo 11y ago
I've wanted to play this on iOS for so long! Very frustrating to see it Windows only still :-( If anyone from MS is here, please please please consider compiling this for iOS, I know a lot of people who would buy it. I believe OpenAge is cross platform, but sadly most friends all use the version they purchased on Steam.
- aerovistae 11y ago
  ...iOS? Surely you mean OSX. This would be impossible to play on a touch interface.
  - Houshalter 11y ago
    There was a mobile age of empires game made a year or two ago. I heard it was shitty and only vaguely based on age of empires.
  - verelo 11y ago
    uh yeah, sorry that was dumb of me :-) Night time brain. Thanks for the correction.
- verelo 11y ago
  I cant edit this any more, but I meant to say OSX. Doh!
brownbat 11y ago
Each entry in that series tells you something about the history of gaming at the time. AOE1 made some great innovations in order to handle "1500 archers at 28.8kbps."[0] Conquerers was the dawn of expansions and ultimately DLC. AoE Online had a bunch of interesting ideas, letting players customize their civilizations ala MMORPGs or MOBAs. Interesting quests too, and good coop for the story mode, something I've always wanted RTS games to pull off better. They did not need to make it an actual MMO with central servers though, and because it never attracted a playerbase / they couldn't monetize it, it was killed off (meaning completely unplayable) in a pretty short time frame. This seems pretty typical for games of today though, tying them to a central server for an unnecessary social or data tracking layer, dooming them to die in a few years when the income slows down a bit. AOE2 was privileged to come from a time where installing a game meant you owned it, and you could probably play it with your kids. Maybe you could even take it apart and rebuild it better. We're living in a world now where a lot of games are ephemeral, the world may have no idea what it's like to play them after a few years, once the servers are shut down to run something newer. [0] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_on_a_288_network_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_on...
- TimJYoung 11y ago
  Re: owning the game - so very true. I'm going to date myself here, but I remember picking out the box for AOE2 with my kids at CompUSA. We played that game a lot, and it was a wonderful bonding experience that we still talk about.
  - TrevorJ 11y ago
    Oh man, my dad and I went to compUSA all the time when I was growing up. Great memories.

451 points by cpeterso 11y ago

If you're a fan of age of empires 2, you should definitely try 0ad http://play0ad.com http://play0ad.com it's open source and multiplatform

will_pseudonym 11y ago
Thank you! I'm definitely not salivating at getting to play a new Mac RTS with alpha-stage multiplayer, not at all!! :D
jonbaer 11y ago
0ad is excellent for quite a number of reasons, first is the history it teaches you, the other is you can grab it @ https://github.com/0ad/0ad https://github.com/0ad/0ad and https://github.com/0admods https://github.com/0admods and really tinker w/ the AI and build meshes,models w/ Blender, +1 for 0ad
- pcr0 11y ago
  Just got the game :D I'm curious though, where did you find the history lessons? The campaign doesn't seem to have been implemented yet.
brink 11y ago
Also, if you can, take the time to donate if you like it.
pwelch 11y ago
I'm really excited for 0AD because I want to play AOE2 but only have OS X and Linux. Thanks to the 0AX devs for all your hard work!
- Qwertious 11y ago
  Like another comment said, you should keep your eye on openage - it's a libre implementation of AOE2 and will run natively on Linux.

TulliusCicero 11y ago

Neat. Man, I'd love to see this happen to Starcraft 1.

thegeekpirate 11y ago
It's happening. And not only for StarCraft =) http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id=150010X http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id... http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id=15000XZ http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id...
- svisser 11y ago
  Also for Command & Conquer: http://openra.net http://openra.net (currently C&C (Tiberian Dawn), C&C: Red Alert, and Dune 2000 with Tiberian Sun on the way).
  - VeilEm 11y ago
    Wow. That is good news. Those games are some of the ones I've had the most fun on.
  - DCoder 11y ago
    And Red Alert 2: YR fans might find Ares [1] interesting: it's an engine-enhancement that fixes a ton of funky bugs [2] and enables loads of new functionality, and popular mods like Mental Omega and D-Day take advantage of that functionality in interesting ways. (I used to be the lead developer of Ares for several years, the amount of reverse-engineering and C++ voodoo involved was awesome.) 1: http://ares.strategy-x.com/ http://ares.strategy-x.com/ 2: https://ares-developers.github.io/Ares-docs/bugfixes/type1/index.html https://ares-developers.github.io/Ares-docs/bugfixes/type1/i...
  - frik 11y ago
    I am a fan of C&C Renegade (the concept of 3D shooter and RTS gameplay is so awesome) and C&C Generals. Would love to see some community projects around them as well. Something like 0 A.D. for C&C Renegade and Generals (mind you both featured the same game engine)

johnloeber 11y ago

I've played a great deal of AoE2. Here are some comments: * The two new expansions are nice. The developers have done an excellent job at maintaining the balance of the game and not pushing any outlandish changes. (After all, the game thrives on a nostalgia factor.) However, it's apparent that it comes from a tiny dev studio. Releases are usually littered with bugs and playability issues. This is a great shame, because they manage to garner significant hype and excitement, only for the release day to be somewhat frustrating for most players. * In fact, due to the small size of the dev team, there usually is a long turnaround period on fixing smaller gameplay issues. This means that most of the more invested players, who are more easily irritated than the casual players, use other, older, more established clients to play the game, where the new expansions are not available. Indeed, the new expansions, while very similar in spirit to the 13-year-old expansions, change the metagame so significantly that at the competitive level, only the 13-year old expansion is played. This deeply fragments the player base. The new expansions, and AoE2 on Steam in general, are mostly played by newcomers. * It's very difficult to get the advanced players to take the expansions seriously because the competitive scene has been basically unchanged for about fifteen years. As such, the theoretical metagame has been nearly perfected, and the random components in game generation do not make a difference to the point of needing true improvisational play. Competitive players have spent months, if not years, carefully practicing minutely differing iterations of the same game scenarios. I've seen professional players end games over early-game mistakes that an intermediate player might not even notice. I consider it a little similar to chess, in the sense that the metagame/opening theory is so well explored that the game can rarely be considered improvisational, but is more like a ballet performance: an extremely well-studied routine that has to be executed as perfectly as possible (which, by the way, means above 400 actions per minute for a top player). Considering the immense amount of study that has gone into the game, and the even larger amount of practice required to become truly good, it is clear that most competitive players would rather keep spending their time on the old game, as opposed to on the new expansions -- the latter would necessitate a great amount of exploration of new strategies, and a similarly enormous amount of practice.

Avalaxy 11y ago
Regarding your last point: I really don't like that competitiveness. I don't get the fun in repeating the exact same schedule over and over again just to finish the game as quick as possible. I would rather prefer to build a nice city first and take it slow, but with strategy games that almost never works in multiplayer, which is why I never play them. I don't really get that feeling with FPS games, they seem to be different every single time (although for games such as counter strike that may not be true).

arjn 11y ago

Have been playing AoE on and off for a while now. Still like the game. Wish I had more time to play it. It has certain playing qualities that hold one's interest over time. Even when compared to other more modern games.

mgr86 11y ago

I played a lot of aoe I and some 2 as a kid. Nearly 30 now and have not so much time for gaming. But the online streaming community is impressive and the skill level is high. Also there was a 120k tournament last year for a 15 year old game. It's very impressive.

andygrunwald 11y ago

AoE is great. I was so happy after they released the HD release. The bad part is that there is no native MacOSX version available :(

duhast 11y ago
I'm playing it on MacOS using VMware Fusion. Works well.
Zirro 11y ago
I have found it to work without issues in Wine.

Aqwis 11y ago

One thing I'd like to see improved is the unit AI, which is frustratingly poor. This would probably annoy some serious multiplayers, but that's not necessarily a bad thing.

johnloeber 11y ago
There are custom (modded) AIs available that you can download. I've heard that the Barbarian AI is meant to be able to give even seasoned players a serious challenge. I've also heard that a much stronger AI has been bundled with the most recent expansion.
renekooi 11y ago
The HD Edition has a new AI[0] that's much stronger than the old one. It's built by Promiskuitiv and Archon, two well-known AI scripters in the Age of Empires scene :) [0]: http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/540744934297500960/ http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/540744934...
- Aqwis 11y ago
  As I understand it, this is a bot AI, and not a unit AI. Am I wrong?
- Avalaxy 11y ago
  How does the new AI differ from the original one? I don't see it in the change log.

pm90 11y ago

AoE 2 in likely the most engaging strategy game I've ever played. I got rather involved in it in college, but was surprised that there were certain "basic strategies" that one had to follow to hope to even survive (e.g. getting to castle age within a certain time for a certain civilization). With the voobly client, its possible to challenge aoe players across the world for a game, and its kinda awesome to cooperate and deal with the mess that comes from playing an RTS game at that level. Probably true for most strategy games, but aoe seems light enough (requirements wise) and has a great enough balance (and the fact that the game is almost freely available worldwide) enables anyone with a computer with a decent internet connection to play.

TulliusCicero 11y ago
> I got rather involved in it in college, but was surprised that there were certain "basic strategies" that one had to follow to hope to even survive (e.g. getting to castle age within a certain time for a certain civilization). This is always going to be true for a strategy game. Heck it's probably true in general for any competitive game that that there are certain things that you just have to do. The more competitive the game is, the more obvious this is (which is why you see more people complaining about this kind of thing for Starcraft than AoE), but it's still always present, lurking in the background.
Fuzzwah 11y ago
That same realization made me feel very naive, especially since I'd grown up in the competitive Quake LAN scene. My house mate and I would play AoE2 vs the AI as a change of pace. We'd done this enough to get a basic understanding of the game and I would have considered us "pretty good" at the game. I recall the moment when I stumbled onto MrFixitOnline and learned about the concept of Villager Seconds and just how important it was to get that 2nd boar in the very early game. I have a vivid memory of yelling across the hallway to my buddy, "I just found out that we're terrible at this game and no nothing at all".

rmm 11y ago

Played a LOT of AOE2 back in the day. However, I was always more of a fan of AoE1 RoR expansion. Anyone else? Something about the brutal simplicity of it, made it much more fun for me and my friends? Would love to see that "HD'ified"!

Avalaxy 11y ago
Oh yes, the villagers beating enemies with huge bones/clubs and the famous wololo :-)

ndesaulniers 11y ago

I still play a ton of Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, which is just a Star Wars re-skin of AoE2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Battlegrounds https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Wars:_Galactic_Battlegrou...

tough_luck 11y ago
So this is the game I played years ago. Thanks. I found demo of this game on one of the cd that came with Digit mag.
rasz_pl 11y ago
you might like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGvorYrXyxU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bGvorYrXyxU Star Wars: Galaxy at War Mod - world at war mod

JoshGlazebrook 11y ago

Age of Mythology is still one of my favorite games ever. What made it fun is not the real time strategy, but the custom scenario maps that people could create. This wasn't just the terrain, but the mechanics of the maps themselves. It was part "programming" as well as part design. The multiplayer servers are still online, but the certificate expired years ago. You can force AOM to connect to them with fiddler2, but you have to have an existing account. But now there is the steam re-release, and of course Voobly/GameRanger for the original release, but the steam version is full of bugs that have not been fixed in over a year.

roymurdock 11y ago
Slightly off topic but one of my best musical decisions of 2015 was to purchase the AoM soundtrack...amazing study/writing ambient music with just the right amount of nostalgia. If you still have the game CD you can find the files there. For the rest of us...Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003TL16O6?ie=UTF8&qid=&ref_=tmm_msc_swatch_0&sr= https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003TL16O6?ie=UTF8&qid=&re...
gamesbrainiac 11y ago
AoM is still my favorite game of all time. Its hard to find a fault with and, and still to this day I can end up spending hours and hours on it to no end. The graphics are pretty awesome. I know there have been a lot of improvements to graphics over the years, but for me AoM's colors and graphics just seem so nice to look at. When it first came out, it probably had the best graphics of any RTS game. The campaign was phenomenal. I can't remember how many times I've finished and then re-finished the campaign. So I can't wait for the new expansion, "The Tales of the Dragon" to come out, which feature the Chinese and their deities.
drblast 11y ago
My wife and I played AOM obsessively, it's such a great game. There's a small time commitment, the AI had just the right levels of difficulty to help you work on your rts skills while still having a blast. I always felt like the Atlanteans were slightly overpowered, but other than that the balance was pretty good. The steam version is good but I kinda wish there were an update with low system requirements that fixed some of the bugs in the current version. It's the best LAN game ever.

snydly 11y ago

One of the greatest breakthroughs of my life was realizing that you only had to type "cheese steak jimmy's" once, then ctrl-c, then ctrl-v as much as you want. It was a great day.

JoshuaRedmond 11y ago
That's the cheat code for 1000 food[0] for anyone curious. [0] - http://www.neoseeker.com/aoe2-conquerors/cheats/pc/ http://www.neoseeker.com/aoe2-conquerors/cheats/pc/
junto 11y ago
Indeed, alongside lumberjack, robin hood and rock on. Even in LAN party multi player mode we used to allow these cheats, as it made the game more fun. Players would build enormous defensives with those resources until the mother of all battles would conclude the game.
mhuangw 11y ago
howdoyouturnthison
skittlebrau 11y ago
Strangely I am responsible for the name of this cheat code. It's an accidental-turned-intentional misnomer for a place we used to eat a lot during Age2 development called Fred's Downtown Philly.
- artursapek 11y ago
  If you have written up any memories/folk lore from your days building this game, I would love to read it (and I'm sure many others here would too).
  - skittlebrau 11y ago
    I have never written anything up personally, but I'm sure there is some stuff out there to be found. Get any two former Ensemble employees together, possibly buy them a beer, and you will almost certainly get some stories that sound apocryphal but probably actually happened :)

mhuangw 11y ago

One of my favorite strategy games growing up. It also encouraged a healthy interest in history that persists today.

cwbrandsma 11y ago

As I'm reading this my 14 year old daughter and my 12 year old son are playing a game while discussing strategies and having a blast.

tomphoolery 11y ago

TIL people sitll play AoE 2! I used to play this game all the time at the all-night LAN parties my friends hosted. It was great because the graphics weren't so crazy that literally anyone could play it, so it always commanded the largest amounts of players, other than Counter-Strike: Source.

wnevets 11y ago

I could never get into aoe2 after playing aoe rise of rome for so long.

mrsuprawsm 11y ago

I loved the original Age of Empires (+ Rise of Rome), I remember asking a friend who was lucky enough to have a CD writer at the time to copy it for me; probably the first game I ever pirated. AOE2 HD on Steam is great fun, I've really enjoyed playing it over LAN with friends (and online, although the competition is much harder). Unfortunately a reasonable percentage of games run into unrecoverable issues with the netcode - clients lagging out and going out of sync. It's a real shame and I hope the devs get some time to focus on this, especially now that 2 expansions are out.

thejj 11y ago

I'd like to remind you that there's openage, a free engine for Age of Empires 2. https://github.com/SFTtech/openage https://github.com/SFTtech/openage It will be the future if you wanna accomplish things the original engine is incapable of doing, especially a sane mod API. Help us make it more awesome :)

danso 11y ago
Thanks for sharing! I actually thought this was going to point to 0ad [1]...which because it deals with ancient warfare, I had just assumed it was sparked by AOE2 community. Good to know of openage. Out of curiosity...how much do you still play AOE2? I guess that would implicitly indicate how far along openage is...but I was also interested just how much someone has to love a game to rebuild it from scratch :) [1]https://github.com/0ad/0ad https://github.com/0ad/0ad
- thejj 11y ago
  I'm not playing it much, i'm actually pretty bad at it, but it's totally fun. We mainly play aoc in wine, which works very well on local LANs but is crappy via internet, same without wine, which was the initial spark. Nobody had suceeded in creating a clone with potential at 2013, so we took chances and are still trying to do it the "right" way. I think the last year I played about 40h of aoc, so actually not that much, and haven't played aoe:hd yet.
neximo4 11y ago
Does anyone have an OS X build of this?
- hnnew 11y ago
  It appears you can build here https://github.com/SFTtech/openage/blob/master/doc/building.md#prerequisite-steps-for-mac-os-x-users-os-x-1010-yosemite https://github.com/SFTtech/openage/blob/master/doc/building....
listic 11y ago
Is openage ready enough to allow you to actually play games?

rietta 11y ago

Oh! I loved that game as a teenager. Actually, the first one even more so.

Houshalter 11y ago

I have just started playing AoE2 again. I have some complaints. The units are so stupid and frustrating. They will casually walk into the range of enemy castles and towers. They will chase units across the map if you don't put them into defensive mode. If you do put them into defensive mode, they can easily be take out by archers without fighting back. They will open gates and let hordes of enemies into your town. They will stand there and continue cutting wood while an enemy army approaches them and kills their coworkers. The monks won't attack units unless you specifically order them to. Etc, etc. It makes parts of the game very tedious and unenjoyable. The campaigns are similarly tedious. At first it's really fun and challenging, if you have the difficulty right. It's a challenge to figure out how to repel the big attacks and build up very quickly. But after building up, it's no longer a challenge. And to win, you just need to spend an hour clicking through the enemies base destroying their structures. Even though you basically won an hour ago. The multiplayer is terrifying. I tried it once and within like 10 minutes my opponent had surrounded my base with cannon towers and trebuchets. I haven't played it since. The AI scripting is really cool. It's super simple to learn, very easy to modify other people's scripts, and very powerful. You can do a lot with just a few lines of their domain specific language. And you don't need any programming knowledge at all. And it's very extensive. There are tons of variables and functions available that let you do all kinds of things, and it's well documented. But it's also extremely restricted. You can't do basic things like store variables, compare numbers, etc. There are arbitrary limits on how many conditions you can have in a conditional, how many lines you can have total, etc. They are workable, but I have no idea why they are even there. The only people modifying AI scripts in the first place are probably willing to accept if the game runs a bit slower because of all the extra code they put in it. There's also no way to speed up the game. You only get "slow", "normal", or "fast". You need to use Cheat Engine to make the game run a hundred times faster. This is necessary for testing those AI scripts, or getting through those tedious offensive parts I mentioned above. They should have just let it be an option in the game. Same with other variables like population limit, that's restricted to 200 for no reason. If I want a higher limit, I'll accept that the game runs slower. Just let it be an option, even in a hidden menu with a big warning or something. TBF, the new HD edition does let you go up to 500 IIRC.

marti 11y ago

bronz 11y ago

Check out Feudal Wars. It's really cool. http://www.feudalwars.net http://www.feudalwars.net

OSButler 11y ago

The thing I like so much about it are the different civilizations, which come with their own unique language and music. It's a minor detail and helps a bit with the immersion, compared to just a simple paint job to differentiate between them.

Merem 11y ago

As someone who plays AoE2 from time to time on Voobly, I consider this and the HD versions to be complete separate games, simply for the fact that said expansions are for the HD release but not the original one (original mod aside). So people like me are by these releases completely unaffected.

baldfat 11y ago

I use to play AoE 2 as UConnBBall and wrote for MrFixItOnline. Sadly the website just came down a few years ago. It was an awesome run with that game for me.

praetorian84 11y ago

Can we get an AoE 4 already?

akerro 11y ago
We're getting Cossacks 3 on Linux.

xerography 11y ago

AoE II HD [1] and AoE II HD: The Forgotten [2] are currently on 80% discount holiday sale on Steam. Offer ends in 29 hours and 15 minutes as of this writing. [1]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/221380 http://store.steampowered.com/app/221380 [2]: http://store.steampowered.com/app/239550 http://store.steampowered.com/app/239550

anfroid555 11y ago

Number one choice for Erlang ide

necessity 11y ago

As an active player since forever, Steam has ruined this game. It's full of bugs from 1999 and a whole lot new ones -- currently the lobby won't list games, you have to use a third party website. There is a pinned thread on Steam's support forums for a variety of bugs that are common to a lot of players (and the solutions don't always work), there are horrendous net issues ("Waiting for players", "Out of sync"), etc. I just don't play on Steam anymore. Voobly, an unofficial platform similar to Gameranger, + mod community and tournament organizer, has a very active player base, including most of the top players in the game. It has it's own HD patch and several improvements not present in Steam. It's impressive how an unofficial, unsupported, free plataform can be light years ahead of the billionaires at the Valve/Microsoft partnership.

hmc2323 11y ago
What's the website?
- methyl 11y ago
  http://www.voobly.com/ http://www.voobly.com/
aerovistae 11y ago
This is not true. I've been playing for 16 years and now I play multiple times a week on Steam; the lobby certainly DOES list games, that's nonsense, I just loaded it right now. None of the people I play with (quite a few) have the problem you're describing. The dev team has been constantly improving things and we now see fewer bugs today than at any point in the past, and it's continuing to improve all the time. Yes, it still out of syncs sometime, but such is life for those of us playing games from '99.

verelo 11y ago

I've wanted to play this on iOS for so long! Very frustrating to see it Windows only still :-( If anyone from MS is here, please please please consider compiling this for iOS, I know a lot of people who would buy it. I believe OpenAge is cross platform, but sadly most friends all use the version they purchased on Steam.

aerovistae 11y ago
...iOS? Surely you mean OSX. This would be impossible to play on a touch interface.
- Houshalter 11y ago
  There was a mobile age of empires game made a year or two ago. I heard it was shitty and only vaguely based on age of empires.
- verelo 11y ago
  uh yeah, sorry that was dumb of me :-) Night time brain. Thanks for the correction.
verelo 11y ago
I cant edit this any more, but I meant to say OSX. Doh!

brownbat 11y ago

Each entry in that series tells you something about the history of gaming at the time. AOE1 made some great innovations in order to handle "1500 archers at 28.8kbps."[0] Conquerers was the dawn of expansions and ultimately DLC. AoE Online had a bunch of interesting ideas, letting players customize their civilizations ala MMORPGs or MOBAs. Interesting quests too, and good coop for the story mode, something I've always wanted RTS games to pull off better. They did not need to make it an actual MMO with central servers though, and because it never attracted a playerbase / they couldn't monetize it, it was killed off (meaning completely unplayable) in a pretty short time frame. This seems pretty typical for games of today though, tying them to a central server for an unnecessary social or data tracking layer, dooming them to die in a few years when the income slows down a bit. AOE2 was privileged to come from a time where installing a game meant you owned it, and you could probably play it with your kids. Maybe you could even take it apart and rebuild it better. We're living in a world now where a lot of games are ephemeral, the world may have no idea what it's like to play them after a few years, once the servers are shut down to run something newer. [0] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_on_a_288_network_.php http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_on...

TimJYoung 11y ago
Re: owning the game - so very true. I'm going to date myself here, but I remember picking out the box for AOE2 with my kids at CompUSA. We played that game a lot, and it was a wonderful bonding experience that we still talk about.
- TrevorJ 11y ago
  Oh man, my dad and I went to compUSA all the time when I was growing up. Great memories.