Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings

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 is the second main title of the Age of Empires series developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft. Due to its commercial success, an expansion pack was released; Age of Empires II: The Conquerors, followed by a Gold Edition, which bundled together the two games along with a bonus map and game matches recorded by Microsoft strategy experts.

Gameplay
The player has control over 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, in which the powerful castle may be built, and used to produce powerful units including the unique unit of each civilization. Finally, the user can reach the Imperial Age, which is reminiscent of the early years of the Renaissance. Once the user has reached the Imperial Age, they gain access to all the upgrades, units, and buildings that may be built and researched for their specific civilization.

The player directly controls villagers, which are the most important economic unit in the game. The player has the power to order them to move or attack (all units except for trade carts, transport ship and trade ships), construct new buildings, gather necessary resources (villager units), and perform a range of other tasks, such as repair damaged buildings or garrison inside castle or town center for safety.

The isometric rendered landscape features different elevations of terrain. Any unit having a higher elevation than the one it is attacking receives an attack bonus.

There are four types of resources, all of which are required to advance through the ages: wood, food, gold, and stone. Wood is used for building and repairing most structures, used to create farms to provide food resources, and the production of ships, siege engines, and range units such as the various types of archers, and the skirmisher units. Stone is used for the construction of castles, towers, stone walls, and after the first patch, used in the construction of town centers as well. Gold and food are used for constructing units and researching technologies. In most cases, these resources can be traded for one another at the market rate. Often, one of the difficulties of a certain scenario or map is that it has a small supply of one type of resource, forcing players to adjust to this shortage.

Wood is gathered from tree, which are one of the most common resource on most maps. Gold and stone can be mined from deposits found placed around the map. In addition, by building trade carts and trading ships, a player was able to produce additional gold. Food is found at the start of the game in berry bushes that appear near the starting town center of each player, and can also be obtained from hunting animals(deer, boar, or sheep), building farms, creating fishing boats from the dock, and building fish traps.

To advance through the ages, certain requirements must be met, such as the building of certain structures, and the payment of resources.

Civilizations
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: These civilizations can also be classified by their military nature:

Single player
The game comes with five campaigns, all of which reflect some event in history, such as 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. Additionally, a "Deathmatch" game type gives the player stockpiled resources in the thousands from the beginning of the game to work with.

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 said character as a special unit, although Genghis Khan makes a short appearance at the start of his campaign, and in the final mission of the Barbarossa campaign, the player can control a wagon carrying a barrel containing Barbarossa's dead body. 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. The original game's campaigns include those of William Wallace (a tutorial campaign), Joan of Arc, Saladin, Genghis Khan, and Holy Roman Emperor Frederick I Barbarossa. Each campaign consists of 6 missions.

Multiplayer
In multiplayer mode, up to eight players can simultaneously play against each other, or against computer players. While in multiplayer mode, you are not permitted to use the in-game cheats. Previously, Microsoft Zone was a popular online destination for multiplayer, but this service ended on 19 June 2006. Since then, Gamespy Arcade has been named the official matchmaking program by Microsoft. However, other 3rd party services have spawned due to player preference, and Gamespy Arcade's incompatibility with Windows Vista.

The current popular sites to play Age of Empires II online are Voobly or Gameranger.

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. However, too much emphasis on researching technology and moving through the Ages without creating military can leave a nation 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 increases 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 castle age. This technology generally benefits the unique units of the civilization or enables some special upgrade which is not available to other civilizations. In addition to this, some civilizations also have some inbuilt technologies or upgrades. The special abilities of each civilization vary greatly and are roughly based on the specialties of the civilizations as they were in the 10th-14th century. For example, the Mongols can harvest meat 50% faster than other civilizations, the buildings of the Byzantines automatically get more hit points as they progress into the next age, and 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 nearly destroyed. Once the monastery has low enough hit points, 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 and movement, sending monks in convoy so one can heal the other, protecting the monk with a military escort, etc). If monks are ordered to move with a group of other units, the monks will move to the back of the formation. However, using the box formation will position the units so that they form a box around the monks, protecting them from all sides.

A possible victory condition is the collection of all relics or the construction of a wonder. This is the case in several campaign scenarios. To win a relic victory, 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. The Wonders in Age of Empires II are:

* The English Wonder is a jumbling of a number of the sections of the real Aachen cathedral found elsewhere in the game (see below). In addition, the Dome of the Rock appears as a decorative building in the Saladin and Barbarossa campaigns as do the Pyramids at Giza, but neither can be built by any civilization. Another decorative Gothic cathedral shown in the Joan of Arc and Barbarossa campaigns appears to be based on the Aachen Cathedral. Finally, in the Genghis Khan campaign the Great Wall of China is present, represented by several blocks of conventional walls united with defensive towers scattered throughout.

Soundtrack
The following tracks appear on the audio part of the game CD, listed in order of playback. The tracks themselves are not separated, but are instead one long track with floating transitions. The names and times given here are taken from the "Music From The Ages" and "More Music From The Ages" CDs, two audio CDs featuring tracks from both Age of Empires II and The Conquerors expansion, usually only given away by Ensemble Studios as competition prizes. The tracks are composed by Stephen Rippy.

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 consist of conditions and effects. The conditions basically perform a "If..." action, while the effects perform a "then..." action.

Artificial Intelligence and Random Map Scripting
The game CD comes with complete documentation for both Random map and Artificial Intelligence scripting documentation present in the Docs folder. The scripting can be done in any text editor; however a special editor, named ScriptED, has been developed just for the AI scripting of this game. The scripted AI performs much better than the games' default AI. The most prominent community for scripting for Age of Empires II is AI scripters. Various other resources 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 tournaments take place at AI scripters.

An AI scripters league was also formed over at the The Rubber Emporium in January 2010 and has many of the latest and toughest scripts available for download.

Patching
The original release of the game had some crippling bugs which severely interfered with multiplayer mode. The inability to have a timely release for even the quick fixes, which would involve changing a few numbers in some cases such as the Teuton Town Center range, irritated many to no end. When a patch finally was made, Ensemble Studios advised that the fix would only be available as part of the expansion pack. As a significant number of irritated customers began to circulate illegal copies of the expansion pack, as well as discuss this on various popular forums dedicated to the game, Ensemble Studios finally announced that the patch would be released free of charge, on its own. On their official website, Ensemble Studios expressed their displeasure at people trying to get illegal copies of the expansion pack, because they felt something was owed them. The expansion pack was released on August 24, 2000, having the patched solution included in it. The patch by itself, was released a week later, on August 31, 2000, more than a year after the game shipped.

Matt Pritchard of Ensemble Studios stated in an article he wrote for Gamasutra, referring to the problems with not having a patch released sooner.

"1. We still don’t have a patch process

This was a problem area from the AoE Postmortem, and as of this writing it still has not been addressed. I outlined the reasons we needed a process to issue patches for our game in a timely manner in the AoE Postmortem. Additionally, a new reason reared its ugly head: cheating in multiplayer games. At first people found bugs in AoE and exploited them to win unfairly. Then it got even worse. Programs called “trainers” were developed that would actually modify the game’s code while it was running to allow players to cheat. Being the developer — not the publisher — of AoE, we don’t have the final decision if or when a patch is to be released. As a result, all during 1999 our reputation as developers was assaulted by fans who saw us as uncaring about the problems that were driving people away from online play of our games. The topic of cheating in multiplayer games is so extensive I hope to do an article on it in the near future."

Notable bugs and exploitations
NOTE: These glitches have since been eliminated through patches.

Flare and Waypoint bug
One of the ways to crash the game in a multi-player game, was to set a flare or waypoint location at the southern-most point on the map. This seldom was done by accident, but was used by some players who wished to end the game before having to face defeat. It was, as with other cheats, mostly seen in the ranking games on the Zone.

Limitless pauses
If a player wished to irritate an opponent into abandoning a game, he could pause the game repeatedly without limitation. The opponent had no means of overcoming this behavior and could be forced to abort the game giving victory to the repeated pauser.

Fishing boat bug
Construction of any building in the game was achieved by selecting it from a menu, which appeared once one or more villagers were selected. Once the desired structure was selected, the player had only to click at the desired location for it to be built, and if that area was clear of any trees or other obstacles, an outline of the building's dimensions would appear at that location. The villagers would then move directly to that location to start construction. In addition, other villagers could be selected by the player, who then clicked upon the outline, and would thus move to it to assist in its construction.

Although fishing ships did not receive the same build menu that the villagers did, they still counted as build units, and thus could be selected and sent to any build site initiated by a villager. Thus in areas where no villagers had the means to travel due to wolves, terrain, or enemy units blocking their path, they could still set out where a building was to be made, and if near water, a fishing boat could rush over and construct it. On certain maps this allowed for more rapid exploration and expansion, as well as the element of surprise in various situations, a player able to build structures which could produce military units.

Teuton Town Center exploitation
All town centers had a defensive capability that enabled them to fire arrows at enemy units within range. A special characteristic of the Teuton civilization's town centers was a longer range than the other civilizations. In multi-player games, the tactical exploitation of this characteristic made the civilization unstoppable. At the start of a game, all players would have sufficient resources to build a new town center, would be provided with a number of villagers to collect the resources but would have no fighting units. If a Teuton player chose to start the construction of his town center near that of his opponent, the Teuton town center's range advantage would enable it to attack the opponent's town center and the opponent's villagers without coming under attack itself. Because there were no offensive units provided at the start, the Teuton player's opponent had no means of defending his town center from this attack and any non-combatant villagers he created would not survive long enough to collect the materials required to build a barracks, archery range or stable with which to build an offensive unit.

To indicate their unwillingness to play with this imbalance, many game hosts added "no Teutons" in the description of the games they hosted. For many who favored the Teuton civilization for its other special characteristics, this was an unwelcome consequence of the "bug". The patch fixed the problem by eliminating the Teuton town center's range bonus, and requiring the construction of all town centers to use 100 units of the less abundant stone rather than just the readily available wood resource.

Campaigns and Battles
Age of Empires II contains 5 campaigns, with 7 for the learning campaign, and the others with 6 battles, named after the leader of the army you will assume command of during the campaign. These are:


 * William Wallace:Learning Campaign
 * Joan of Arc
 * Saladin
 * Genghis Khan
 * Barbarossa

Each campaign gets progressively more difficult and each battle in the each campaign is harder than the last. The first five battles in the William Wallace:Learning Campaign are about teaching new players how to play the game, although even veterans of Age of Empires will find it useful to practice the new formations and garrisoning options.

The Joan of Arc and William Wallace campaigns are the only campaigns that allow you to control the hero the campaign is named after, though Genghis Khan does make a brief appearance in his campaign.

Reception
Upon release Age of Kings received a positive reception from critics, with an average score of 92% at Game Rankings. Game Revolution noted that "AOE2 is the best looking of the 2D RTS games out there right now." Gaming Age Review noted that the AI sometimes surrendered unexpectedly at the start of games, and was otherwise occasionally prone to serious mistakes. Reviewers such as PC Gameworld's Scott R. Krol noted that the unit pathfinding and AI is vastly improved in AOE2 over previous real time strategy games.

Ports

 * 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 (Subject 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.