Age of Empires II
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Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (Redirected from Age of Empires II) Jump to: navigation, search This article is about the PC game. For the Nintendo DS game, see Age of Empires: The Age of Kings. Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings
Developer(s) Ensemble Studios Publisher(s) Microsoft Latest version 2.0a Release date(s) 30 September 1999 Genre(s) Real Time Strategy Mode(s) MP over IPX, TCP/IP, Modem, GameSpy Arcade, or GameRanger Rating(s) ELSPA: 3+ ESRB: Teen (T) Platform(s) Microsoft Windows, PlayStation 2, Apple Macintosh Media CD (1) System requirements Pentium 166 MHz CPU, 32 MB RAM, 200 MB HD Input Keyboard, mouse Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings is a real-time strategy computer game set in the Middle Ages. It was released in 1999, and it is the second game of the Age of Empires series developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft. Because of its commercial success, an expansion pack was released: Age of Empires II: The Conquerors Expansion, followed by a Gold Edition, which bundled together the game and its expansion, and a true sequel, Age of Empires III.
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings is sometimes called Age of Kings, or abbreviated as AoK, AOE2, or AOE II.
Contents [hide] 1 Gameplay 2 Civilizations 3 Campaigns 4 Technology 5 Wonders and relics 6 Scenario editor 7 Random map and artificial intelligence scripting 8 Soundtrack 9 Modifications 10 Online play 11 Other platforms 12 References 13 External links
Contents |
Gameplay
The player controls a society and guides them through four "ages". The game begins in the Dark Ages, where very few buildings and units are available. After a short time, the user gains the ability to advance to the Feudal Age, where more upgrades, buildings, and units become available. The next age is the Castle Age, and finally the Imperial age, which is reminiscent of the early years of the Renaissance.
The player directly controls the citizens, and can order them to move or attack (all units), construct buildings or gather resources (villager units) or a range of other things.
There are four types of resources, all of which are necessary: Wood, food, gold, and stone. Wood is used for building structures, providing renewable food resources and training archers, stone for defenses like Castles or towers, and gold and food for constructing units and researching technologies. Often, one of the difficulties of a certain scenario or map is that it is short one type of resource, forcing players to adjust to this shortage. This can be avoided by playing in a "Deathmatch" game type, wherein the player is given resource stockpiles in the thousands.
The real-world maps available in the expansion (Scandinavia, Central America, Sea of Japan etc) are small versions of real-world territories, with geography very close to their real-world equivalents.
The original game comes with five campaigns, and the expansion adds three more, all of which reflect some event in history, like Joan of Arc leading the French to battle, or Genghis Khan's invasion of Eurasia. There is also a Standard Game feature, which pits a player against a set number of Computer players for control of a map. The usual goal in standard games is to defeat any enemies and force them to surrender, but other goals like building and protecting a special type of building (called a "Wonder") also exist.
In multiplayer mode, up to eight players compete with other nations for world dominance, online or offline. Microsoft Zone used to be the most popular Internet server for The Conquerors, but the Zone pulled its support of the game June 19th, 2006. After a hiatus, Ensemble Studios established multiplayer support on GameSpy Arcade. There is also an open source multiplayer effort called GTADS that allows 1 vs 1 for Age of Empires and Age of Empires II. GamePark also supports Age of Empires, Age of Empires 2 and Age of Empires 2 The Conquerors.
Civilizations
This Age of Kings beta screenshot shows a trebuchet to the left and a siege onager to the right, 8 horseman surround a monk and behind them are archers ands footsoldiers. An enemy castle can be seen to the top of the screen.In the original Age of Kings, the player can choose from 13 civilizations. Each has a distinct personality, with particular strengths and weaknesses patterned on the real civilizations. Each civilization also has some unique units (ships and warriors) with more-or-less historically accurate names, e.g. Mameluke for the Saracens. The game's civilizations are sorted into four different architectural styles:
Western European North/East European Asian Middle Eastern Britons Celts Franks
Goths
Teutons Vikings
Chinese
Japanese Mongols
Byzantines
Persians Saracens Turks
Campaigns
Campaigns consist of a series of scenarios of rising difficulty, depicting major events in the life of a famous historical character, e.g. a famous battle, the building of a famous monument, or some well-known anecdote. Only the William Wallace and Joan of Arc campaigns allow players to control the character itself as a special unit. The campaigns usually start with a range of existing resources, buildings and units already in place, thus avoiding the laborious process of building a nation from nothing, which can become tedious. The original game's campaigns include those of William Wallace (a tutorial campaign), Joan of Arc, Saladin, Genghis Khan, and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa I.
The Conquerors Expansion pack adds 4 more campaigns to the game featuring the new civilizations. In the Attila the Hun and El Cid campaigns, the player controls the said character. In the Montezuma campaign, the player plays as Cuauhtémoc, the last emperor of the Aztec empire. The final campaign recreates various battles in history, such as the spectacular naval Battle of Noryang Point between the Koreans and Japanese, the Battle of Tours fought by the Franks and Moors, and the Battle of Agincourt, in which the player must control Henry V and his army through a heavily fortified Northern France.
Technology
Age of Empires II has a much more advanced and varied set of technology trees than the original Age of Empires. To acquire technology, the player must first construct buildings. Each building offers a range of technology which can be researched, for a price. Technologies build upon each other. As technologies are researched, a wider range of buildings and units become available. Technologies may benefit military units (by perhaps increasing their defense attributes), civil units (villagers can benefit from technologies that make them move faster and therefore collect resources more efficiently, etc), or buildings (e.g. by researching technology that allows castles and towers to fire at units at their base). Technologies vary greatly in benefits and costs.
In the game, technology plays a central role. Early in the game, players must constantly assess priorities and allocate scarce resources between creating new units, upgrading existing units, and researching to upgrade to the next Age. Too much emphasis on researching technology and moving through the Ages without creating military can leave a nation all but defenseless. On the other hand, putting resources into a large population at the expense of progress can lead to defeat if the enemy has progressed and is able to field a small but more powerful attack force.
The number of technologies increase through the Ages, as does the price of said technologies. A special part of the game that was added in the expansion is that each civilization gets a unique technology in the castle when it goes into the imperial age. This technology generally benefits the unique units of the civilization or enable some special upgrade which is not available to other civilizations. In addition to this, some civilizations also have some inbuilt technologies or upgrades, for example, the buildings of the Byzantines automatically get more hit points as they progress into the next age or the fact that The Franks can build castles for much less than other civilizations.
Wonders and relics
Relics are special unique items that are scattered around the map, and can only be picked up by monks. Once placed within a monastery, a relic steadily generates free gold for the civilization that holds it (this reflects the historical realities of the power and influence that possessing famous relics brought to a church). To capture a relic from an enemy monastery, the monastery must be destroyed. The relic will then be expelled so that a player may capture it with a monk.
Monks are vulnerable units (they can only defend themselves by converting their assailant, which takes time). A monk carrying a relic will quickly attract enemy units, so strategies are needed to protect him (e.g. researching faster conversion, sending monks in convoy so one can heal the other, protecting the monk with a military escort, etc). If a monk is moving with an escort, the monk(s) will go to the back of the military escort. However, setting the escort and monk(s) in the "box" formation will allow the monk(s) to be in the middle of the escort, protected from all sides.
It is possible to set the game such that victory is achieved by collecting all available relics, or building a Wonder. This is the case in several campaign scenarios. To win, all the relics must be held for a specific uninterrupted period of time, depending on the size of the map.
Wonders are massive structures that require large amounts of resources and time to build. If a player completes a Wonder, and it stands intact for an uninterrupted period of time, they win. If a Wonder is destroyed before the countdown is finished, the countdown resets. Each civilization has their own Wonder, typically a famous work of historical architecture, as opposed to the original Age of Empires, where each civilization's Wonder was based on their generic architecture.
In addition, the Dome of the Rock appears as a decorative building in Saladin's campaign as do the Pyramids at Giza, but neither can be built by any civilization. Another decorative Gothic cathedral shown in Joan of Arc and Barbarossa's campaigns appears to be also based on the Aachen Cathedral (upon which the Britons' and Teutons' own wonders are based, too). Finally, in Ghengis Khan's campaign the Great Wall of China is present, "portrayed" by several blocks of conventional walls united with defensive towers scattered throughout.
Scenario editor
Age of Kings also includes a built-in scenario editor. It is similar to the one from Age of Empires, in which players can make custom missions and series of missions. The largest difference from the design of the editor of the first game is the use of "triggers". These are used for performing actions once the conditions become true (if they do).
For example, a player can create a trigger to declare victory as soon as a building or unit is visible. A player can create triggers with multiple requirements or results. Killing certain soldiers can change the ownership of a building to another player as well as increase the health of the building. There is a huge abundance of possibilities. If multiple triggers interfere with each other, the game crashes.
To use the triggers in the scenario editor, create a new trigger and assign a condition and effect from the list. Occasionally there are variations to how many soldiers can be assigned triggers too. For example, if a player wants to make 6 soldiers patrol, at times they can only select the trigger for one, and six individual triggers must be made, while other times six can be selected at once.
In the expansion there is an addition of a few triggers. Units and buildings can have their names changed, their health increased, and attack increased just to name a few.
Random map and artificial intelligence scripting
The game CD comes with complete documentation for both Random map and Artificial intelligence scripting documentation present in the Docs folder. The scripted AI performs much better[1] then the games' default AI. The most prominent community for scripting for Age of Empires II is AI scripters. Various other resourses[2] for scripting are also present on the internet. Back in 2000 a contest named AI Wars was held by Heavengames for AI scripting, nowadays regular tourneys take place at AI scripters.
Soundtrack
The CD itself is comprised of two Red Book audio tracks. Track 1 is the game data, and track 2 is the game soundtrack.
Modifications
Many modifications (mods) are available online, as it has basic data files which (with proper programs) can be easily customized and tweaked. Websites such as Age of Kings Heaven offer mods, utility programs, maps, and scenarios created or found by its members.
Also Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, based on the battles of the Star Wars movies and released in 2001, used the Age of Empires 2 Genie engine.
Online play
Age of Kings was available to play online against fellow gamers on the Microsoft Gaming Network, so that you could test your wits against other gamers. It was a very popular game having figures of over 100 people in a room at any one time constantly. Gamers had created their own Custom Scenarios to which they would challenge other gamers to pit their wits against each other. Scenarios such as Castle Blood Auto, Soldier Store, Empire, Radical Blood and Archers Advance.
After many successful years on the MSN Gaming Zone, however, as of June 2006, the Microsoft Zone retired from hosting games, which left a great number of players disappointed. Gamespy was proclaimed as the official successor of the Microsoft Zone, however it was soon realized that not many players decided to join Gamespy. Instead two prominent websites were advertised in the Zone game rooms: Empires Legacy, and Gamepark. After a huge "battle", Gamepark managed to get more players and in the end the two websites agreed that Empires Legacy would link to Gamepark. Gamepark has at any given time about 100 players playing Age of Kings (however up to 1000 players can be found playing Age of Conquerors), equaling the Zone in popularity; Microsoft, though, still supports Gamespy. Other matchmaking AOE clients are, the fully operational GamePark Client, and the soon to be finished IGZ Client.
Other platforms
The PlayStation 2 version was released only in Europe and published by Konami. The Nintendo DS version was released in the US on February 15, 2006. It features a turn based battle mode rather than real time strategy genre used in the PC version. A Windows Mobile version exists for Pocket PC. A version for mobile phone exists (Subjected to country). A version of this game was set for Sega Dreamcast but with the lack of popularity and sales of the console, the game was canned with only a demo existing. A version of Age of Empires II for Macintosh OS 8, 9 and X was published by MacSoft Game Studios.
