Games: Age of Empires II
I was surprised to learn that Age of Empires II is actively developed to this day. I remember the original game, subtitled The Age of Kings, being published during the reign of Edward Longshanks. It was followed by a comprehensive expansion pack, called The Conquerors, shortly thereafter to critical acclaim.
A friend of mine had the game installed on his computer—a fact his mother loathed. “What are you boys going to do with your life!?”, I still hear old Jenny freaking out over our complete lack of interest in education. My friend was terrible at the game, by the way, so I understand his mother’s frustration: at least he could have gone into e-sports had he applied himself more meticulously, you know.
The few times when I would not play football due to adverse weather conditions, I would stay at his place for a couple hours to watch him build up his mighty dukedom at snail’s pace. He would assign a single villager to build all the fortifications, one lass to do all the fishing, and a truly manly man to mine the gold under the beating sun. Then we would just sit there like complete idiots to marvel at the peerless work rate of medieval people.
This is not how you sell a franchise, I know… The game is actually great. I consider it one of the best ever. It still receives patches and new downloadable content because it gets the core gameplay right and has a tonne of things to explore. Casual gamers can enjoy a nice blend of city-building and historical trivia, while seasoned players will find a deep real-time strategy game that shall test their ability to manage resources through space and time as they overcome their foes.
The campaigns are based on historical events, so history nerds will be especially pleased to explore the many cultures they can play as from virtually all corners of the planet. Furthermore, they will be inspired to find answers to the hardest problem of modern science, which is how did those skirmishers carry infinite javelins.
Beside the campaigns, there are exhibition matches with all sorts of rules that are about the intricacies of winning a war through superior control of civilian and military units. Indeed, what we learn from the game once we try to play it at a competitive level is that there is no such thing as an objectively superior army.
Each civilisation has its own strengths and weaknesses, which are expressed through power peaks and valleys as they advance their economies. There is a gameplay logic to this, so that it is fun to play and experiment with all the options. Though even real-world war exhibits the same patterns of force through temporal and spatial magnitudes. For example, the combined armies of USA and Israel may, on paper, be stronger than Iran’s but they have clearly lost the asymmetric war as of this writing.
Concretely, it is a mistake to pick a culture in-game on the basis of whose technology tree yields the strongest units towards the later parts of a match: you may never live that long. At the competitive level, early advantages tend to have a snowball effect. It is thus essential to maintain the pressure high and control the geography of the conflict. Continuous small wins contribute to success much more reliably than a long-planned single killer blow.
What is a bit silly with the latest expansions to the Age of Empires II platform is that the historical window continues to widen. It used to be focused on the European Middle Ages, roughly after the fall of Rome to the widespread adoption of gunpowder. Whereas now you can play as the ancient Spartan infantry as they stand their ground against their primordial enemies of, checks notes, the Jaguar Warriors of emperor Montezuma…
Humans are notoriously bad at drawing clear delineations. If you do not believe me, just ask the neocons at Washington DC to produce a map of the Middle East.
Seriously though, it is cool to get such fan service which doubles as genuinely interesting content. There are probably a few hundred hours that you can put into this game just to get through all the campaigns. Though in practice there is infinite replay value to be had. It is just a matter of how determined you are to distance yourself from society.
What I do consider a negative about the latest additions to the platform are the increasingly gimmicky mechanics that some special forces have. There now are units that project an aura, others that have a charge attack, and others still that can switch forms. While those ideas are cool in their own right, they make for a highly complex interplay of factors: it detracts from the simplicity of just spamming Huskarls at your enemies until they ragequit.