Food is the backbone of your economy and needs to be maximized in the early game.
The economy features four primary resources, making it more complicated than some of its competitors - two in theWarcraft/Starcraft universes and one currency in the Command and Conquer line. You start with your town hall and a handful of peasants, and you must build up your economy and your military through the four ages: Dark Age, Feudal Age, Castle Age and Imperial Age. The general skirmish format dumps you onto a map, which can be random or feature randomly placed resources in the dark ages. The unit pathing is still basically on par with those older games, but it compensates nicely by making the individual units very small, thereby reducing the amount they bump into and block each other. In AoE2: DE, I was able to select 70+ units at a time, which was plenty for any practical scenario and significantly reduced the frustration in playing the game. Even Warcraft 3, released years later, was capped at 12. In a game where you could potentially have 400 Zerglings, it's onerous to only be able to select 12 at a time. Warcraft 1 had a cap of four units, Warcraft 2 was nine, and StarCraft, which was released shortly before Age of Empires, had a cap of 12. Even if you remaster that game, that's a pretty significant hurdle to overcome without overhauling some core mechanics. In the original RTS, Dune 2, you could only select one unit at a time. Some of the older RTS games can be extremely challenging based on the UI alone. Now that we've got the (rather long) list of features out of the way, what about the actual game? I'm amazed at how well AoE2 has aged. It's an interesting method of keeping people with ancient rigs from lagging out your multiplayer games. There is the obligatory array of graphic detail options that may be required for this game, as you need to pass a benchmark test before it will let you into multiplayer. There seem to be way more options than I remember from the original game, including one of my favorites: always show health bars. The options screen is loaded with choices for in-game graphics as well as customizing the way your game plays and controls. Watching a few online skirmishes is a great way to get a feel for what to expect in your matches. Perhaps in the age of online streaming, this feature isn't necessary, but as a guy who spent a lot of time downloading replays in these older games, it seemed long overdue.
My favorite addition for the online component is the ability to drop in and spectate any multiplayer game. They even saw fit to include a rating system and ladder (I'm looking at you, WC3: Reforged).
You have the option to create custom lobbies for other players to join in the old-school way, or you can queue up in the match maker for 1v1, free-for-alls, or team games. It's probably a good place to start for anyone looking to move into the online arena, and that's where the real challenge and replayability lies. Of course, you can start up random skirmishes against the AI with a plethora of options to customize the experience.Ī handful of challenge missions teach you some of the essentials in multiplayer RTS, including getting a powerful economy, fast teching, rushing your opponent, and defending against rushes. There's also a score of historical battles, which are single-map missions attempting to re-create - you guessed it - historical battles like the Battle of Hastings. The DE includes all of the campaigns from the original and its expansions, as well as three extra "Last Khans" campaigns with four new civilizations. The original likely won't even launch on modern systems, so DE has some value straight out of the gate, but from there, it gets even better. I did, however, play the original Age of Empires II a good amount, and I had a blast with DE.