Age of Empires Windows PC Ensemble Studios 1997

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Age of Empires 1 Review

Microsoft released Age of Empires for Windows 95 and NT 4.0 SP3 in October of 1997. Developed by Ensemble Studios of the U.S.A., Age of Empires is an RTS that was inspired by Blizzard's WarCraft of 1994 and Westwood's Command & Conquer of 1995, both of which have their origin in Westwood's Dune 2 of 1992.

Age of Empires employs mechanics from its RTS predecessors as well as concepts from Sid Meier's Civilization of 1991, such as ages, wonders, research, trade, diplomacy and technological advancement.

Age of Empires campaign narrative is impersonal and historical rather than personal and story-driven. Real life heroes of ancient history do feature here and there, but they are not the focus: the empire is the focus. Each of the four campaigns consists of 8-12 historical scenarios that broadly follow the empire in question through the ages of advancement, from Stone Age to Iron Age.

The ages are Stone, Tool, Bronze and Iron. In Age of Empires the Nomad/Stone Age consists of exploring, hunting, gathering and storing resources whereas the other three are agrarian and settlement-focused, though not without foraging.

Players advance their faction through the ages by acquiring resources, constructing buildings from resources, and researching theories or technologies offered by the buildings, which requires additional resources. Once the required number of buildings have been constructed (two buildings of the current age) and the required number of resources have been stored (a surplus of food and/or gold), the faction can begin "researching" the next age. Once the faction advances to the next age all of its buildings are upgraded, which means new units can be generated by the buildings and new research can be conducted at the buildings.

The speed at which a faction advances through the ages is dependent on the resources to which it has access, how many villagers and buildings it assigns to the endeavor, and the order in which buildings are constructed and technologies are researched. Naturally, rival faction proximity greatly impacts the speed of faction advancement. If a rival faction is in close proximity time and resources need to be spent on building up offensive or defensive forces, thereby slowing resource acquisition, building construction and technological research.

Each campaign on offer progressively advances to the Iron Age via a sequence of objective-based scenarios whereas Random Map, Scenario and Death Match modes often offer full progression from Stone to Iron Age within one, unbroken game session.

Not all scenario objectives in Age of Empires are based on conquest. For example, a scenario may involve simply building a Wonder of the World of the Iron Age that stands for 2,000 years (before another faction manages the same feat). 50 villagers can build a Wonder in a minute of game-time, but the Wonder must stand (be defended) for 2,000 years or 15 minutes of game-time.

After winning, losing or surrendering a scenario both timeline and summary screens are displayed, giving players a breakdown on their progression as well as a total score based on their achievements in various categories. There are also sub-screens that display military, economic, religious and technological achievements. The screens can also be called up at any time, during play.

Age of Empires features 12 playable factions based on ancient empires, but only four of the factions feature campaigns (Egypt, Greece, Babylon and Yamato). The other eight factions are only playable in non-campaign modes such as Random Map, Scenario and Death Match. Age of Empires non-campaign modes support single-player mode with up to three computer-controlled factions or multi-player mode with up to eight human-controlled factions, each of which can be friend, foe or neutral.

WarCraft and Command & Conquer only feature two factions, and Dune 2 and StarCraft only three, but Age of Empires factions play very much alike (in comparison) due to its adherence to the history of ancient empires, whereas previous RTS-game factions were fundamentally different due to their sci-fi/fantasy themes (StarCraft especially).

Each Age of Empires faction has bonuses or penalities that barely register when playing through the four campaigns sequentially. However, it is certainly more efficient to play to the strengths of factions whenever possible. Faction differences become more apparent when going up against other human players.

Note that factions are not described in-game and their bonuses/penalties are not enumerated in-game: you need to read the manual, consult the foldout or access the HTML-based help file, external to the game. This is not a huge deal but it would have been easy to add.

No faction has access to every building, technology or unit. All factions have access to basic unit-types (villagers, infantry, cavalry, archers, priests, naval vessels and siege weapons), but not to all variations or tiers thereof. For example, the Persians lack the hoplite, phalanx and centurion line of elite infantry whereas the Greeks lack war elephants and don't have access to the full legion line.

In addition, relative faction strength varies based on the historical era in which the faction currently finds itself. The Age of a faction dictates what it can build, produce and research, which may or may not be subject to bonuses and penalties. One faction may be relatively strong in late-Stone but relatively weak in late-Iron whereas another may be relatively weak in late-Stone but relatively strong in early-Bronze.

For example, Yamato and Assyrian villagers benefit from a 30% movement speed increase. The early game consists of wilderness exploration and resource-gathering; advancement to the Tool Age is dependent on resource-gathering in the wilderness (foraging). It stands to reason, therefore, that Yamato and Assyrian empires will reach the Tool Age before other factions, all else being equal. Thus, Yamato and Assyrian players may attempt an early rush against factions that become stronger in subsequent eras, such as Hittite, Phoenician and Babylonian. Early-game Assyrian skirmishes can be a nightmare for such factions since Assyrian archers benefit from a 40% rate-of-fire increase. In early-Bronze Yamato is stronger than Assyrian in cavalry whereas Assyrian become stronger in cavalry by late-Bronze via chariot archers.

Bonuses/penalties and technology trees of factions generally align with basic readings of ancient history.

Age of Empires unit stats are Attack, Armor, Piercing Armor (missile attack armor), Range, Hitpoints (HPs), Rate of Attack/Fire (RoA/RoF) and Movement Speed. Catapults have splash damage (AoE). Only Priests can regenerate hitpoints, aka self-heal. Priests can heal all non-naval units (including siege weapons) whereas villagers can repair buildings and naval units. There are no medic units or hospitals for healing. Of course, there are no flight-capable or submersible units in Age of Empires.

Consider Persian war elephant cavalry (15 attack, 0 armor, 600 HPs, trample damage to adjacents) versus Greek centurion infantry (30 attack, 8 armor, 160 HPs). When fully upgraded war elephants receive +6 armor whereas centurions receive +4 attack, +6 armor and +2 shield. Whereas (Persian-only) war elephants receive a faction-based movement speed increase of 50%, Greek centurions receive a 25% movement rate increase via Aristocracy research at the Academy. Both cost 40 gold per unit to generate but the war elephant requires 170 food, the centurion only 60.

In sieges, the best units are catapults, catapult triremes (firing inland from shorelines), rapid-fire helepolis and stampeding hordes of war elephants. However, siege weapons require support units because they are glass cannons: a single unit of cavalry can dismantle an entire line of siege engines in the blink of an eye. Indeed, an enraged mob of villagers can make short work of siege engines. Thus, combined armed tactics must be employed. On the other hand, war elephants need almost no support (in the campaigns), but level towns more slowly (but also more safely in that friendly-fire is a non-issue).

Factions that allow for war elephant suit new players (600 HPs is very forgiving of errors) whereas skirmishing with Assyrian archery is for the veterans.

Age of Empires limits faction population to 50 units each but supports marquee selection aka group-bandboxing of up to 25 units (16 more than WarCraft 2 but 38 fewer than C&C). The population limit can be increased to up to 200 via Limit=x command-line switch, but populations above 50 are not officially supported [2].

Population (the number of units) is limited by the number of houses that have been built. Each house or town center grants +4 population. Thus, building one town center and 11 houses grants a population of 48. Building a 12th house only adds +2 due to the 50-unit cap. Every unit has the same population weight or footprint, from a simple villager up to a Juggernaut warship. Population composition can be manually tailored by killing off unwanted units. Note that (immobile) guard towers count as units because players can select their targets. On the other hand, the number of buildings is only capped by resources.

The more units that are assigned to a task, the quicker that task will be completed. This includes attacking, building, gathering, mining, repairing and healing. In other words, the effects of combined unit actions stack provided the units in question have space to swarm around and access targets. Likewise, the more unit-generating buildings one has, the more quickly units can be produced. It is almost always necessary to double-up on certain buildings. Take the barracks for example. One barracks produces one unit per interval but two produces two per interval, thereby doubling the speed of unit production. Or one barracks can produce a unit while another researches a unit upgrade.

Similarly, one "research" building (storage pit) can research one technology and the other another, but the other cannot research the same technology. Again, it is often necessary to double-up on storage pits in order to more quickly research the group of technologies (an icon-cluster) offered by the storage pit. Naturally, scalability is dependent on available resources.

Age of Empires features four ages, five map sizes, five map-types, nine terrain-types, 17 constructable buildings, 44 unit-types, 38 researchable technologies and four main harvestable or mineable resources (food, wood, stone and gold). In addition, there are five difficulty levels, four main victory conditions and fully customizable victory conditions via the Scenario Editor.

Harvestable food-based flora consists only of berries (which are taken to the granary) whereas gatherable food-based fauna consists of fish (tuna and salmon), whale, gazelle, elephant, lion and alligator (the meat is taken to the storage pit or the docks). Gazelle can be herded closer to stores before being slain whereas lions, elephants and alligators fight back. Lions can also attack gazelle. The lack of harvestable flora is balanced by farming, shoreline fishing and deep-sea fishing and whaling.

Farming begins slowly but picks up pace and eventually outstrips fishing, hunting and berry-picking once the empire thoroughly researches food production. In addition, farming is reliable in the long-term since desertified farms can simply be replaced with new ones whereas wildlife and wild plants never regrow.

Unlike Command & Conquer's Tiberium resource, Age of Empires resources do not regenerate over time: even though an entire age has past, not a single fish respawns and not a single berry bush regrows.

As for difficulty, campaign modes are dead-easy whereas going up against experienced human players is where the real challenge lies. Single-player difficulty is impacted by difficulty mode selected, screen resolution and game-speed settings.

On the easiest difficulty setting in campaign mode, only one enemy may attack your settlement per interval, whereas on the hardest difficulty setting five enemies may attack per interval. Multiply that for each unit-generator source.

Age of Empires Engine: Genie

Age of Empires is built on Ensemble's proprietary Genie engine. In terms of controls, mechanics and graphics and animation the engine is eminently capable. The game is 2D and features pre-rendered art assets. The playfield is presented in ¾ top-down isometric perspective. The playfield can be scrolled in eight directions, but the scrolling is NOT super-smooth and screens cannot be parked with pixel-perfect precision. However, the sprites are fluidly-animated and drop-shadowed. The sprite designs and animations are really well done. There are FMV-based intro and outro cutscenes for each campaign (cinematization). The overall presentation is spartan and the user interface is responsive.

Age of Empires terrain is tile-based and employs seven levels of unit-negotiable verticality and four layers of non-engageable verticality via cliff tiles. Stacked negotiable layers form hills whereas stacked cliffs form steep mountainsides with winding trails leading up to the summit. Sloping terrain impacts unit movement rate.

As in Blizzard's WarCraft 2 there are two layers of fog of war, which are based on unit vision radius: unexplored tiles are blacked-out whereas previously explored tiles external to unit vision radius are dimmed. Vision radius is not impacted by terrain height, only by unit vision capability. For example, mounted units have a wider vision radius than infantrymen.

The engine supports three game-speeds and three pathfinding resolutions.

Age of Empires Virtues

• Concepts inspired by Civ and other TBS games
• Historically-themed (earlier RTS games were themed on sci-fi or medieval fantasy)
• Easy-to-use Scenario Editor
• Robust multi-player support
• Random maps put emphasis on player skill and quick thinking, rather than on memorization
• Trading and tributes
• Wildlife acts as both food resource and threat
• The ability to "relieve" enemies of their artifacts
• Priest unit abilities: religious conversion and healing (but WarCraft employed similar "spells" three years before AoE)
• There are no scripted sequences or narrative interjections that interrupt the flow of campaign scenarios (unlike Blizzard's StarCraft of 1998)
• Catapults can target a point on the ground to repeatedly fire upon (in addition to seeking targets)
• Spartan presentation
• Responsive controls and user interface

Age of Empires Flaws

• You cannot queue units for building. You must manually click the building and then a unit icon to generate each and every unit, one by one [1]. Building can "sort of" be queued. If you start constructing other buildings before the previous one is completed, the villagers will circle back after the final assignment is completed and build the others without your intervention (a time-saver when building rows of adjacent buildings, such as houses).
• There are no unit formations. In a game that attempts to represent actual battles from history, one would have thought that formational movement and positioning would be included, but no. That said, archer units tend to form arcs around targets.
• Faction population is limited to 50 units. Hector versus Alexander the Great? Still only 50 units per side. That said, we need to factor in the technical limitations of PCs in 1997. And networking that supports up to eight simultaneous factions [2]. The game animates a lot, not just units.
• Pathfinding is poor. Units often get stuck on other units. Units with faster movement rates will not overtake slower units. A single pathfinding problem can cost you dearly, so beware. This is the biggest criticism, but it is a criticism that can be leveled at many real-time games, of all genre.
• Computer-controlled factions only seem clever in campaigns if their AI (such that it is) is bolstered by scripts or other conditional code.
• Ranged units are all but useless at hitting moving targets unless the targets are moving parallel or perpendicular to their aim; they always fire where the target was at the time of the click rather than where the target will be. Imagine how frustrating it is to watch a hail of one dozen arrows miss their mark on a target that you, the player, could probably hit in real life.
• The savegame register lists savegames alphabetically instead of chronologically with the latest savegame at the top of the list.
• Savegames get corrupted if the progress is saved when a projectile is in flight. Projectiles take flight often. Attemping to load a corrupted save causes the game to CTD. That said, this bug deters save-scumming.
• You cannot have villagers construct buildings if a villager is occupying the tile upon which the building is to be constructed. The villager should automatically get out of the way (as in StarCraft), but doesn't.
• Age of Empires music is not as memorable as WarCraft, StarCraft and Command & Conquer music.
• No stealth mechanic.

Scenario Example: Land Grab (Greek campaign)

You are commanding an Athenian tribe in 2000 B.C. Your force of four villagers and four clubmen starts off in the south. To the east are Tyrinians (yellow), to the north Ionians (brown) and to the west Dorians (red). The Dorians are your target and the biggest threat. You need to take out their five farms and establish five of your own, which means you need to build a town center, two houses and two stone age buildings as well as accumulate 500 food to advance to the Tool Age, which allows you to build a market followed by farms.

At this point, the biggest and most reliable source of food is the generous berry bush cluster in the Dorian settlement to the west. The Dorians are busily harvesting the berries, but the settlement is guarded by clubmen and barracks, which should be your first target. The longer you take to settle, the fewer berries you will have. Note that you should repeatedly right-click targets in order to have your units surround them quickly (because the pathfinding is poor).

After you have taken out the clubmen/barracks, you will be free to build your town center in the middle of the berry bush cluster. Indeed, you can start building the town center even as the clubmen/barracks are being attacked.

To stop the Dorians building a new barracks, more farms, stable and archery range, you should take out their farms and villagers straight after you take out their barracks. Once that is done, no more Dorians will spawn from the town center.

For lumber you should build your storage pit between the two forests to the east of the berry bushes. Tyrinian and Ionian clubmen may attack during this time. Thus, you will need to build barracks, archery range and stable of your own in order to defend your settlement from raids as you build up resources and an army.

Note that Tyrinian archers are difficult to tame if you don't have a few mounted scouts patrolling the southern entrance to your settlement. Computer-controlled shoot-and-run archers can pick off an entire mob of clubmen with ease whereas mounted scouts run down the archers as soon as they are fired upon, which is better than relying on guard towers for defense (which archers rarely fire upon).

Once you reach the Tool Age, you should be free to build five farms and win the scenario.

In this scenario there is no gold to be mined, stone does not need to be mined, and you cannot advance past the Tool Age.

Alternatively, you could target the Tyrinians and establish your settlement in their region. Your settlement would be resource-heavy (fish, berries and gazelle) and be naturally shielded by forest and bodies of water. You could then seal off two entrances with walls and place guard towers just behind the walls, thereby fending off any attack easily and without casualties. However, the Dorian settlement will expand during this time, by building up to 10 guard towers around their settlement perimeter. In addition, the Dorians may take out the Ionians in the north.

Age of Empires: Technical

Age of Empires requires a Pentium 90 MHz CPU, 16 megs of RAM and 1 meg of vRAM. Age of Empires natively displays in 4:3 aspect ratio at 640x480, 800x600 or 1024x768 resolution. The Age of Empires user interface is designed for 640x480. In 640x480 the active drawspace is 640x334 because the UI consumes 146 vertical pixels. Higher resolutions make the game easier by showing more of the playfield. Age of Empires requires DirectX 5.0.

Age of Empires multi-player supports DirectPlay serial, modem, TCP/IP and IPX.

Age of Empires was distributed on 1x CD-ROM and installs to hard disk drive via the Age of Empires installation program. The install size of Age of Empires is 176 megs and consists of 240 files.

Age of Empires Credits

Age of Empires was lead-designed by Rick Goodman, lead-programmed by Angelo Laudon, lead-drawn by Brad Crow, and composed by David and Stephen Rippy.

Conclusion

Age of Empires combines the gameplay of WarCraft with concepts drawn from Civilization, which are two of my favorite games. Overall, I give Age of Empires 8½/10.

The main strength of Age of Empires is its randomly generated maps in multi-player mode. This is Age of Empires' main claim to fame. If you are a solitaire player the campaign modes of Westwood and Blizzard RTS games are superior -- not because they are story-driven, but because they are more challenging, feature better design, and are simply more entertaining to play through.

Even armchair historians won't be overly impressed by Age of Empires' history-lite treatment of ancient civilizations. If you're into history the RTS genre cannot satisfy you: TBS and wargames is where it's at.

This review was based on the original Age of Empires, patched to v1.0c.

Rise of Rome Expansion

Microsoft released Rise of Rome for Windows 95 and NT 4.0 SP3 in October of 1998. Developed by Ensemble Studios of the U.S.A., Rise of Rome is an expansion for Age of Empires. Rise of Rome installs to the AoE install folder, but is run from a separate *.exe.

Rise of Rome adds four empires, four campaigns, five units and four technologies. Rise of Rome also adds queuing of unit production and a gigantic map size. Base game content can be accessed from within Rise of Rome, meaning that queuing is available in base-game campaigns [1].

As its name suggests, only the Roman empire is playable in Rise of Rome's campaign mode.

Rise of Rome scenarios feature sprawling maps jam-packed with walls, towers, buildings and units. Siege warfare and massive reinforced fortifications are par for the course. Overall, Rise of Rome campaigns are more epic and involved than base-game campaigns.

Rise of Rome was distributed on 1x CD-ROM and installs to hard disk drive via the Rise of Rome installation program. With Rise of Rome installed the AoE install size becomes 216 megs and consists of 414 files.

Rise of Rome was lead-designed by Sandy Petersen, lead-programmed by Tim Deen, lead-drawn by Scott Winsett, and lead-composed by Stephen Rippy.

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