As the follow-up to a classic, it was immediately held up to the harsh light of scrutiny and prodded with jaded comparisons. Was this expansion as significant as Rise of Rome was to the original Age of Empires?
What did it add, and how much? How did it change the gameplay, and was the unit balance as keenly honed as a Japanese sword? Could it revitalize the game for those who had drifted on to other, newer titles? Did it enhance multiplayer in any appreciable way?
Given the amount of stuff featured in the original, The Conquerors is indeed an amazing product as far as expansion packs go, offering enough new missions, units and crisp visual flair to practically qualify as the next game in the series. It also corrects a couple of questionable design decisions from the original, but altogether fails to fix some of the more pressing parts.
The fourth, titled Battles of the Conquerors, is a set of eight unrelated missions, each covering a certain pivotal moment in world history. But the singleplayer as a whole is still a tough and grueling affair, with some scenarios degenerating into hour-long grinds.
One recurring issue is the manner in which your men scatter and attack anything in sight when fights erupt, particularly enemy buildings during raids, breaking formation and turning large battles into chaotic clickfests where nothing really makes sense. Some of the improvements demonstrate Ensemble Studios' commitment to playing its own games to destruction and ironing out the wrinkles.
For example, let's take the situation in which you have grouped together infantry with a heavy weapons platform. How often have you watched in horror when, on first encountering an enemy group, your HWP stupidly joins in the action, wiping out half your own infantry with friendly fire. In Conquerors, siege weapons like Mangonels will hold their fire if they are likely to injure your own troops. Speaking of sieges, these become both more realistic and more complex. You can now garrison foot soldiers inside battering rams, which has the dual benefit of giving the ram more oomph and providing your troops with protection during the approach to an enemy wall.
There are some interesting additions to the resource management side of things too. Now, when a villager has finished constructing a building, instead of idly standing around watching everybody else working, he'll set off and perform an action appropriate to that building. So, in AOK you might have set a villager to work chopping trees and subsequently had another villager building a Lumber Camp.
Now you simply get the first villager to build the Lumber Camp near the tree line, safe in the knowledge that as soon as he's done he'll begin chopping away. One major time-saver is that, once you have built a Mill, you can queue farms, so that any you already have will be automatically replanted, even if you are tending to a battle on the far side of the map. As you can see then, Conquerors stretches the term "expansion" somewhat.
The Age Of Empires series might be a bit of a trusty old dog, but it can still surprise you every now and then by getting itself over a few fences rather than just looking on pathetically at all the younger dogs on the other side. How do you improve on perfection? The same way you eat an elephant, one small bite at a time. With five new civilizations to choose from Aztecs, Huns, Koreans, Mayans, and the Spanish , it is almost impossible to pick a favorite one to play -- I currently have four favorites with the Korean and the Spanish topping the list.
It is a really huge dilemma: so many civilizations, so little time. All the civilizations are now better balanced. There is a unique technology available for research for every civilization, just like each one has at least one unique unit. Each civilization poses new challenges and new opportunities.
There is really no way to determine which civilization is "best. Gameplay has been improved with the ability to queue the rebuilding of farms and the ability to immediately start villagers collecting resources once they have built a collection-type building. These small enhancements make a lot of sense. These changes include:. Idle Villager Key - Pressing the period. This is a keyboard-only command; there is no on-screen control for it.
Shang Food Cost - The cost of a Shang villager was reduced to 40 food. The amount of food the Shang player starts with was reduced by For a complete description of all the patch improvements, please read the readme file. If you are playing a multiplayer game, all players must be using the same version of Age of Empires.
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