Age of Kings

[Narck]

Anyone here getting excited about it?

I am. It looks really cool. And the same goes for 7 Kingdoms 2.

[ghen]

what is it?

Here's a good place to start to find out:

http://age.gamestats.com

----------------
Dan; Apolyton CS

[Monkey]

This is the only other game to come out this year that i am actually quite excited about. The first was civ CTP and now AoK.... funnily enough I never got into the Tiberian Sun craze... hmm I wonder why....

Please anyone who has it or has played it post your views on it here.... those Gamespot pics had me drooling for months....

[Narck]

Hmmm... I hope they'll have it in the stores here soon.

[J.DeMobray]

Okay, so I picked up Age of Kings on Tuesday and have been playing it pretty much non-stop ever since. (Even neglecting my current game of Test of Time.)

My review:

Someone posted that the units all seem rather generic compared to Starcraft, and although I had never thought about it, that does seem to be pretty correct. Basically in AoK you've got Infantry, Cavalry, Archers and Siege Weapons. As you progress through the ages your Infantry upgrade from Milita to Champions. Although the units have minor differences, the primary advantage is just an increase in attack or defense.

Each civilization also gets unique units, which are usually pretty cheap in comparison to their overall power. The Turks Jannissaries are particularly great as are the Persian War Elephants. The Chinese Cho-Ko-Nu units, however, are a waste of time.

I can't really comment on how the game plays in multi-player situations yet. Sorry.

The civilizations seem pretty balanced. With the exception of the Goths, whose inability to produce any sort of upgraded Guard Tower, coupled with a few silly advantages (Villagers +5 attack vs. Wild Boars?), and a mostly ugly specialty unit make them the obvious weak civ.

THE GOOD:

-15 map types for the random worlds (including two designed just for multiplayer).
-Bombard Cannons: King of the Siege Units, really fast and great attack power.
-Put your units into formation, tell them to defend and they will actually reform their formation after each attack.
-You can now Garisson troops inside your Guard Towers, both of these make border defense really easy.
-When building walls, you can select the Wall icon and then drag your wall across the map mapping it out for your villager to build.
-When moving long distances, the new Waypoint feature (just shift-right click) lets you actually make your guys take the shortest path (or a longer one if you'd like).
-Relics now give a Gold bonus when you transport them back to a monastery.
-Free trade routes, for those of you who don't just want to slaughter your opponents like the gutless dogs they are.

THE BAD:

-For some reason in AoK reality, Archers are weak against Cavalry.
-The Goths: These guys tore down the Roman empire? They can't even build Camels!
-Even when your troops are in formation, they will still do the 'cluster round the enemy building and hit it till it falls down' style of attacking. I would have liked to be able to tell them to hold formation.
-Sometimes when starting a game on the Gigantic map size, the computer opponents will spontaneously surrender.
-Trebuchets are built in your Castle, so when playing as the Britons, Celts, Chinese, Japanese, Mongols, or Vikings (Civs that can't build the Bombard Cannon) why bother building the Siege Workshop?
-Fanatacism (or whatever) no longer exists, my villagers seem really, really slow compared to AoE.

THE UGLY:

-Not enough variety in the appearance of the buildings / units between cultures.
-Villagers still speak gibberish. Different gibberish, but gibberish. (My roommate notes that one of the female villagers keeps saying "condoms".)
-Monks. I don't remember them sucking this bad in the old game. Maybe it's just me.

OVERALL: * * * 1/2 (of 5)
[Maybe * * * * 1/2 if the Multiplayer holds up]

[This message has been edited by J.DeMobray (edited September 30, 1999).]

[Jimmy Liu]

I probably won't go rushing to the stores for aok. I was dissapointed by aoe and looking at the screenshots, it isn't very different from it's predecessor.

[Narck]

Oh I really liked AOE and after reading demobray's review, I want to have it for sure.

[Hedonist]

i just recently downloaded a demo of aoe, and was considering buying it. (it can be found for about $15, as opposed to aok, which i assume is at least 3 times that.) but ... im tempted to go ahead and get aok.

first i have some questions about both of them ... in aok, have they added a "pause" feature so that you can at least take a look around without things getting out of control? ... or can it be slowed down any more than aoe? (i am very used to 7kingdoms, where you can pause and give any orders before resuming play. in aoe, i dont like not having this. you cant be everywhere at once, and the opponent's relentless attacking demands that.)

also ... ive noticed in the scenarios included in the aoe demo that the opponent always starts out with a pretty extreme head-start. is this true for every scenario included in the game? in aok too? is it possible to start a world with numerous kingdoms all at the same start point? or is everything a scenario?

and finally, i noticed the requirements for "aoe:rise of rome" and for aok are both 166mhz, 32mb ram. that is the full extent of my computer's ability. would they run outrageously slow? the demo i have requires 90mhz, and even it slows down sometimes when it gets busy. id love to play the better versipons ... but i dont want the frustration of playing at a snails pace.

thank you.

...

and one more thing ... in aok, when you give a unit orders to go somewhere, do they turn around and go the opposite direction, as they so often do in aoe? i find that REALLY annoying.
[This message has been edited by Hedonist (edited October 01, 1999).]

[Jimmy Liu]

Yep, unless you start on a random map of multiplayer, all the other civs will have a big head start. I'm guessing that this will be the same in aok.

[Hedonist]

so... there is no such thing as random map single player? i cant understand why.

[J.DeMobray]

There is a random map function, and it can be used either for Single Player, Multi-Player, or Team Matches.

[Narck]

I just found out that it's going to take 1 to 2 weeks before I can buy the game here

[shmily_dana]

I was amazed to see that it is completely sold out in Tucson. I've never seen that happen to any of the games I was looking for when they first came out. (SMAC, CTP, BOTF, SFC...)

[Narck]

Ok, on 2nd thought, 7 kingdoms 2 is bad, but Age of Kings is really great.

It's just so damn hard to play

[Hedonist]

what is wrong with 7kingdoms2?

[Tree]

Here's some cool ideas for more AoE sequels-
1. Colonization type game, have to deal with Indians and other Europeans.
2. post apocolypse, "The Postman" the economics would work out fine.

[ghen]

Well, I guess I'll have to go get it FF8 was such a disappointment. I hope this isn't one too...

[Narck]

Seven Kingdoms 2 is a major disappointment for me because it's not diverse enough.

Humans and whatever they're called.
Then you can only build a handful of different buildings.

Sucks. Not worth the $40 i paid for it.

BTW, I just tried some of the cheat codes of AOK. hehhe, you can actually get a viper to drive around with. Funny

[Peter Hennesy]

Any idea what the [realistic] requirmeents are? Im on a p200mmx with 64mb ram and a matrox mystique 220. Do you think it would be a goer? Any advice on otherpeoples expereices appreciated .....

[John-SJ]

PH:

The AoK Heaven Strategy forum had a discussion of computer speed/performance, from what they said there your 200/64 should be fine. You can check out the discussion at http://aok.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/a...dnumber=008438 for more details.

John-SJ

[ghen]

My friend loaded AoK on my computer for me.. So far I haven't been terribly impressed, the buildings are massive! the castle alone takes up a quarter of the screen.
I know they were looking for realism, but its just not practical in a RTS game to have something take up that much room.
Since I didn't buy the game, I don't have the book that went along with it.. but I haven't seen any real improvements over AoE in either units or buildings.
Instead of making truely unique units for the game, they just changed the numbers on purely unoriginal concepts to give the impression of strength.

To compare this with starcraft.. Units in starcraft were so different that if you bunched 30 varied units together (bear with me) like AoK they would die faster than in waves of 10 that were made up of similar units. AoK seems to require much less skill in its build soldiers and fling them against the walls of your enemy fighting.


More later

[ghen]

Well damn, I'm really trying to hate this game but the fact still remains that I played it until 2:30 this morning

[Narck]

Do you play on the zone, ghen?

If so, we should play a game once.

[ghen]

or twice or three times... oh **** lets just start right now!


p.s. j/k lol

[Glak]

Just some comments:

AoK is clearly the best non blizzard RTS out there right now, TS, TA:K and HW don't come close for multiplayer (though I hear they have pretty good single player). AoK is designed for the casual gamer, not the hardcore. It is a long game but not that intense (at least early). It has a very good interface with one major exception: NO ATTACK MOVE!!! I just remapped patrol to attack and use it instead. I also had to remap the center screen on last command to spacebar (for some reason it was on home)

All in all a good game

[Narck]

a bump for the greatest RTS game of 1999

Maybe best game of the year? I'd say so!