Review

AOE2 is very well-crafted RTS. Together with its expansion pack, it does a good job refining the formulaic, standard RTS gameplay. Unfortunately, this traditional RTS gameplay is exactly what I find most regrettable about the game. What kind of gameplay am I talking about? I'm talking about Warcraft. It was the seminal RTS of the great RTS boom of the late 90's, and most everything since has willfully adopted the major tenets of its design: an accumulate-and-spend economy model, individual unit control, quantized tech/skill advancement. Top to bottom, AOE2 is easily the best manifestation of this kind of game (that I've played). Ensemble Studios has done a commendable job polishing the stone. Unfortunately, the stone still has some major flaws in it when you try to measure its color and clarity.

First, a disclaimer: from here on, when I say "AOE2" I'm referring to both Age of Empires II and the expansion pack, The Conquerors, collectively. That's the luxury I have when reviewing a game several years after its release. If reviewing was a science, this process might not pass peer review, but it's not, and I'd wager that Ensemble would rather I include the expansion pack than not, since it contributes greatly to the game's favorable impression. If you want, pretend I'm reviewing the Gold Edition, which has the two bundled together. Now, on to the good stuff. AOE2 has made leaps and bounds in the design of the resource and economy management, and its all due to the little things. When a group of villagers builds a mining camp, they start mining the closest commodity as soon as they're done building. You can queue farms, so that your farmers will replant their farms automatically. Reassign a villager, and whatever they're carrying will be automatically deposited before they assume their new role. There are a bunch of little design features like this and I'm not going to list them all. Suffice to say that their cumulative effect provides for much less frustration and takes a good deal of the 'micro' out of the resource micro-management. One not-so-little feature is the ability to garrison villagers and military units inside buildings. This feature is a major load-bearing beam of the game's design. It changes the nature of the game to the extent that it makes the original Age of Empires look downright busted for not having it, and some may have argued exactly that. It makes fortifications as valuable as they should be, and were, in the middle ages. No longer can you just waltz up a few flat-footed military units and wreck havoc on the populace. They'll muster themselves inside the town center or, better yet, a castle, and dispatch your petty offensive in short order. Build towers and keep them stocked with archers and breaching your gates becomes exactly what it should be: difficult. In summary, Ensemble has done a lot of things right to remove the thorns associated with managing and protecting the economic side of your kingdom. And it's a good thing, too.

It's good because the combat hasn't gotten any less frustrating and still requires a watchmaker's dose of attention and micro-management. Here's the biggest flaw in the combat: groups of units don't engage as a "group". A group of units engages like a single big unit. You can sort of fake it by moving them into the thick of a group of enemies, and just leaving them to their own devices. They'll attack. But because of the unit level AI, or rather the lack of a squad AI, doing so would just be a grossly inefficient use of your troops. Where's the fun in having two large armies clash when its in your best interest as a player to manage your units mostly as a single large unit? You concentrate their attacks on one thing at a time, baby-sitting them from enemy unit to enemy unit. Doing so maximizes the damage done by your units, but also forces you to wrangle with the interface, and saps a lot of the fun out of the combat. Kohan is the best counter-example I know. When groups in Kohan fight, they fight, as you would expect a group to fight. They all mix together and engage in battle, and when they're doing so, you don't have explicit control over every unit. You're the strategic commander, not God. Your job as the player is to make tactical choices regarding the composition of your groups, and to make sure that they engage, or disengage, the enemy under circumstances that are advantageous to you. If you want to be God, play a turn-based game. I'm willing to bet God doesn't have to deal with everything in real time. In AOE2, unfortunately, you do. Your job during combat is to make sure that all of your ranged units take out a particular monk, or a particular elephant, and that your siege units don't inadvertently blow a big smoking hole in the middle of your own troops, and that your monks convert one particular unit or another. It's really not that much fun. The player never gets a chance to enjoy the spectacle of the fight.

For some reason, I think RTS designers are reluctant to allow things to happen in the game that you don't (or can't) explicitly control. This makes it very hard to be strategic, because your attention as a player is constantly being applied to making sure that your individual military units aren't doing something stupid, and because it's hard to resist the fact that they'll be so much more efficient if you babysit them, and because you'll constantly witness them being stupid when you don't babysit them. The combat in these 'strategy' games should be the most entertaining part of the experience. It should be when you get to either witness the fruition of your tactical genius, or the brutal consequences of a tactical blunder, or maybe just the affirmation of a strategic assumption. I've yet to play an RTS that truly accomplishes this. Kohan has come the closest. AOE2 misses by a long shot, as will every game of its ilk, I'm afraid.

While the new features in AOE2 are welcome, and clearly make for a better game, it is disappointing that some of them weren't taken to their natural conclusion. One of the best examples is the ability to queue farms at the mill. Being able to queue them is infinitely preferable to not being able to queue them, but the obvious next step is to allow for an 'always-build' mode. However many villagers I have farming, whenever one of them depletes a farm, they automatically build a new one, and I am charged the cost of the new farm when it is built. This is basically an infinite queue, where the cost is deferred until the farm is popped off the queue. If I'm producing more food than I desire, I simply reassign some of the farmers, and leave the rest to continue about their business. This seems phenomenally more appropriate than having to spend 100s of wood units to buy farms that don't actually see the light of day until much later. In fact, I think all of the queues should work this way. The cost of the unit should be deferred until the unit is actually produced. As it is currently, the queue is like money in a bank that isn't earning interest. I've spent the money to get the unit in the queue, but I don't have the unit. This is inefficient use of resources. In fact, if you extrapolate, your resource inefficiency is proportional to the extent to which you use queues. And if it's inefficient to do something, then you can be damn well sure that the hard-core players won't do it. And thus, if you're interested in competing online (which, personally, I'm not) then it's in your best interest to use queues as little as possible, thereby improving your resource efficiency. And thus one might make the argument that the build queues, including farms, aren't really an improvement in the UI at all, they're just a convenience mechanism for those players who don't wish to seriously compete in multiplayer. I'm being a bit of a devil's advocate here, for the purpose of making a point. It's not that the queues don't improve the UI. It's just that since the cost is incurred when the units enter the queue instead of exit, queues represent a liability for the serious player, as opposed to being a legitimate UI feature that every player could leverage without negative consequence. Queues should be a means of allowing the player to devote more of their attention to strategy and planning, and right now the queues only do that by sacrificing resource efficiency, and that needn't be the case.

Another feature that is welcome but at the same time slightly crippled and irritating is the garrisoning. The problem is that siege units cannot be garrisoned inside castles. There is no logical reason for this. It's not a space issue. There's no rationale I can think of for not allowing siege units to be garrisoned. I think maybe someone at Ensemble realized during testing that allowing garrisoned siege units to continue to fire (as the other ranged units do) was a very bad thing. However, instead of doing the appropriate and correct thing: preventing garrisoned siege units from attacking, they did the frustrating and wrong thing: preventing siege units from garrisoning. So, now when you have a mixed group of military units which need to take protection in a castle, everyone gets to go in except the siege units which are then hung out to dry all by themselves and promptly destroyed. This is especially irritating since the siege units are typically the most expensive units in the game. And don't start yapping at me about how this is realistic according to some fabricated notion of historical accuracy. It's not. This is just plain busted. Siege units should garrison, they just shouldn't fire while garrisoned. It's that simple.

One last major beef I've got with AOE2 is the way villagers are used in association with combat. It's another prime example of the dichotomy of AOE2, where the resource management is a pleasant experience, and the combat is frustrating. Villagers are the only means of repairing buildings and siege units (monks heal other units). Because of this, villagers in fact play a very valuable role during combat. The problem is that repairing can only be accomplished via an excruciatingly manual process of selecting the villagers you want to use, and then selecting the unit you want them to repair, and when babysitting them until they're done repairing that unit and selecting the next unit you want repaired.... and so on. You get the idea. It's akin to the way spell casting worked in the Warcraft series. You selected the spell caster, then the spell, then the target or location of the spell. Wash rinse repeat. It's basically impossible to be doing this and much of anything else at the same time. In Warcraft, it was painfully obvious how tedious the process was when you witnessed the AI's magic casters all hurling their nefarious effects about with the efficiency of a well-oiled machine. It was clear that you would never be anywhere near as prolific with magic as the AI, just because of the sheer mechanics of the interface. It felt like the game designers were asking you to compete with the computer in a contest of calculating the square roots of random numbers. You're going to lose. The same feeling accompanies the task of repairing units and buildings in AOE2. It's just frustrating. The simple solution to the problem would be to allow the villagers to have "command modes" in much the same way as all the other military units. For some bizarre reason, villagers don't play by the same rules as the military units. Military units can be told to 'Guard', 'Patrol', and 'Follow', and until told otherwise, they will follow those orders. Villagers, on the other hand, can't be given any orders whatsoever, outside of their regular domestic chores. But domestic chores are what villagers do, you say, so what's the problem? No problem, until you make villagers the only means of repairing military units, thus in effect turning villagers INTO military units. If they're going to act like a military unit, let me use them like a military unit. I should be able to give villagers a 'repair' order, which they dutifully follow until told to do something else. In much the same way that the monks will automatically heal injured friendlies in their vicinity, villagers in 'repair mode' should repair damaged friendlies their vicinity. Do this one thing and combat in AOE2 would get 25% more funner. And 'funner' is already 25% more fun than fun. If this design tweak sounds petty, then you haven't brought a naval fleet of several dozen ships back to your coastline and had to manually repair virtually every one of them, recognizing that if you could just put villagers into 'repair mode' you'd need only park the ships on the coast and come back for them all in a few minutes.

One more little thing. The replay capability is great, but... the game should give me the opportunity to save a replay at the END of a game, instead of having to check the 'record game' box before the game starts. Generally, you don't know if you want the game until after you've played it, and so if you're interested in replays at all, you'll wind up just leaving the 'record game' box checked all the time, which chews up disk space in a hurry. Most racing games have this figured out. If this is a performance issue, then just make it an option. You can have recording on or off, and if it's on, then at the end of the game, you'll have the option of saving to a specific file.

A note about the single player campaigns. They may be good, they may be bad. I honestly don't really know. I played through two and just wasn't getting into them. This same phenomenon occurred for me with the original Age of Empires. My roommate and I played AOE for a whole semester in college, and neither of us were ever inclined to play the single player campaigns. It wasn't out of any conscious decision, for either game. I just never felt inclined to play them. Part of the reason may be because of the random map generation. This is one of the strongest features of the AOE series. Kudos to Ensemble for tackling whatever horrible technical difficulties impede the implementation of such a feature. It must be really hard, because virtually nobody does it. And with AOE2, there are significantly more options than before. I can't stress how much it facilitates replayability. I wish the games whose gameplay I really truly enjoy could offer up this kind of push-button variability. Granted, some genres just aren't conducive to it, but when they are, and when it's done as well as the AOE games, it makes such a world of difference. Ensemble basically lets players play the way they want, which is exactly the way it should be.

Even if AOE2 was a bad game in almost every way (which, of course, it's not), I'd still put a smiley face on its report card just for providing a very nice cooperative play mode. AOE2 lets multiple players simultaneously control a single civilization. In other words, multiple people can act as a single player in the game. This dish should really only be served with real-time voice comm, like gamevoice or roger wilco. This kind of co-op play is awesome. It's like cooperative co-op. Every RTS game should have this feature. Shame on every developer who doesn't do it.

It's unfortunate that AOE2 has to resort to a cheating AI at the higher skill levels. The resource bonus that the AI gets at the highest skill levels is so great that it will completely dictate your play style. Instead of providing alternative tactical challenges, the AI just does the mostly same thing, only faster because it has such a headstart up the resource curve. Maybe one of these days, someone will implement a strategy game that actually scales in intelligence rather than just forcing you to be more efficient instead of more clever. If you know of such a game, please tell me where to find this holy grail.

Final Thoughts

Is AOE2 fun? As always, it depends on you. If you've been consistently having fun for the last five years or so playing the steady stream of RTS games, then you're doing yourself a serious disservice if you don't get AOE2. I can compare the situation to the Westminster Dog Show. If AOE2 is a poodle, and you don't like poodles, then it doesn't matter that AOE2 wins Best of Breed; it's still a poodle. It's still just a standard RTS game. There are some really nice resource management refinements, but the combat is fundamentally unrewarding and the AI suffers from most of the chronic flaws. Nevertheless, there is still a lot of mileage to be had from the game before the experience gets rote, especially if you've got a few friends to bring to the party.

Tips

• Walls. Walls. Walls. Use tree lines and walls in strategic areas to encapsulate large areas of land. Walls are cheap and even if you can't hold a line, they can give you time to react that you wouldn't have otherwise.