#AGE OF EMPIRES 2 DOWNLOAD FREEWARE UPGRADE#
Progression to new technologies is done as per AoE 1, with four Ages as you upgrade your Town Hall through Dark, Feudal, Castle and Imperial Ages, new buildings, units and technologies become available for construction or purchase. The excellent fold-out glossy chart explains all, and the technology tree can also be viewed from within the game itself, which is rather handy. Britons have archer bonuses) and a military unit unique to that nation (e.g. Vikings don't get access to the best cavalry, while Mongols don't get the advanced monk abilities), and each nation has distinct racial bonuses (e.g. Each nation has limits on which technologies it can develop (e.g.
The game setting is now Middle Ages, rather than ancient, so for example the Franks, Japanese and Teutons make up three of the 13 nations. The campaigns mix victory conditions quite well, and are far from easy to complete. Multiplayer play is available on a LAN, or via Microsoft's Zone. You can play through these at any of five difficulty settings, or you can instead generate a random "skirmish" map on which to face up to seven computer (or human) opponents. Game StylesĪoE 2 offers five campaigns of multiple scenarios, including a very good tutorial campaign. Rather than write up this review as a standalone piece, I'll skip over the game basics (see the above review for more details) and instead focus on what's new in this version, and how it affects the gameplay. In fact, there's a lot more improvements in the game than you realise, it's just that you take so many interface features for granted now, that you forget how many were absent from AoE 1. Despite not being overly enamoured with the original, I'm happy to report that the improvements in the medieval follow-up Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings, while not individually ground-breaking, add up to a very impressive whole. Our AoE review from late 1997 highlights the game's weaknesses, but it's also worth reading for a basic description of the game mechanics, which remain the same. In a head-to-head feature count with the contemporary Total Annihilation, AoE looked as ancient as the Roman people it portrayed.
#AGE OF EMPIRES 2 DOWNLOAD FREEWARE PATCH#
A patch pretty much fixed those problems, yet others remained - for example the interface was relatively basic, lacking any ability to set aggression levels for units, or to queue production orders. Yet at the same time AoE had a number of problems, primarily in the AI of the villagers and soldiers in the game - they failed to react to nearby events (like their friends being eaten by lions), and if asked to move from A to B would often get stuck at C (where in one case C was a single tree in the open).
The basic premise of taking a few villagers, gathering resources such as food, lumber, stone and gold, building up a settlement, developing an army and crushing your foes was not new, but Ensemble managed to make it look so good that it sold incredibly well. The blend of epic historical conflict, real-time gameplay and silky presentation made it exceptionally attractive to mainstream gamers. | The original Age of Empires sold by the million.
0 kommentar(er)
