By Mike Armstead |
- Age Of Empires 2 Conquerors Torrent
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Released one year after Microsoft originally published the highly acclaimed real-time strategy sequel Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, the official expansion pack, The Conquerors, faces serious competition. The burgeoning real-time strategy genre has grown and changed since Age of Kings, as several impressive fully 3D tactical combat games have emerged in the past year. It almost seems as if conventional real-time strategy games are already dead - as if they've been ousted by such games as Relic's Homeworld and Massive Entertainment's Ground Control, which de-emphasize resource-gathering and focus on 3D tactical combat. But Age of Empires II: The Conquerors proves once again that the classical formula for real-time strategy games still remains effective if executed properly. It's a suitably excellent expansion to what remains as one of the best real-time strategy games to date.
Certainly the most apparent new feature in Age of Conquerors is the addition of five new playable civilizations: the Aztecs, the Huns, the Koreans, the Mayans, and the Spanish. In particular, the Aztec and the Mayan civilizations feature an all-new Meso-American building set, which, together with their eagle-masked warriors and tribal monks, lend these two civilizations a distinct appearance. The Aztecs and the brute strength of their infantry and the Mayans and their hardy archers each play rather differently from the other 16 civilizations in The Conquerors, mainly because they have no cavalry and must instead rely on their powerful foot soldiers. But the other three new civilizations are also interesting: The nomadic Huns are adept at razing their opponents' structures, and unlike every other civilization in the game, they don't need to build houses to increase their maximum population limit. Meanwhile, the Koreans have formidable defenses to help them against just such a threat, thanks to their exceptional guard towers and siege weapons, along with their heavily armored horse-drawn war wagons and turtle-shaped boats. The Spanish are no less powerful, since their mounted conquistadors are armed with deadly short-range firearms, while their missionaries have the notorious conversion abilities of Age of Kings' monk units, but with greater mobility at the cost of a little range.
The five new civilizations in The Conquerors all make good additions to the game, but in spite of their special advantages, they do help demonstrate just how similar all the civilizations in The Conquerors really are. Though each civilization in the game has a unique unit and a new, unique technology available for research, ultimately many of these distinctions are either subtle or straightforward, since all the civilizations basically play the same way. It isn't the case that the 18 different civilizations in The Conquerors are all radically different from each other, although there's more than enough variety available to suit most any particular style of play.
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The additional technologies in The Conquerors are a means of helping further balance the game and also accentuating each respective civilization's unique advantages. Some other universal balance changes affect some of the underused units in Age of Kings and make them more viable. Also, some of the Age of Kings civilizations have been tweaked to make them more balanced with the rest. Some of these changes are particularly noteworthy: For instance, you can now garrison foot soldiers inside battering rams, which not only makes the rams faster, but also lets the ram shield the infantry from archer fire while the troops themselves remain readily available to protect the ram at close range. This makes battering rams a very worthwhile alternative to the trebuchet, whose devastating long-range attack was almost imperative to the success of any battle in Age of Kings.
One of the game's other siege weapons, the stone-throwing mangonel (along with its upgraded counterpart, the onager) was also improved in The Conquerors so that it no longer automatically fires upon enemy targets in the midst of friendly troops. This behavior in Age of Kings caused mangonels to be a real liability, but now these siege engines are suddenly much more effective. Such changes are especially noticeable and exciting for experienced Age of Kings players, who'll doubtless enjoy experimenting with the newly enhanced returning civilizations almost as much as they'll like the inclusion of five new ones.
Age of Empires II players will likely also be interested in the four new campaigns in The Conquerors. Three of these detail the historical leaders Attila the Hun, El Cid, and Montezuma, respectively. These linear campaigns each comprise several lively missions filled with scripted sequences that suggest the sorts of historical trials that brought such fame to these well-known rulers. The fourth campaign is a series of unrelated re-creations of epic historical battles. The computer opponent's artificial intelligence has been enhanced in The Conquerors, not only to make the game easier than Age of Kings for beginners, but also to make it significantly more challenging for more advanced players. Specifically, even inexperienced players should still be able to beat the campaign missions on the lower difficulty settings. Meanwhile, the tougher settings can provide a relentless challenge, as the computer quickly and efficiently sweeps up the resources on the map and rallies a powerful, diverse army.
Though the computer opponent poses a greater threat than before, fortunately The Conquerors introduces several new interface and gameplay features that let you concentrate more closely on combat rather than on unit and resource micromanagement. Most notably, your villagers in The Conquerors are more autonomous than in Age of Kings in that they'll automatically assist each other in multiple adjacent build orders and begin harvesting resources once they finish building a mine or a mill. As in Age of Kings, you'll need to build multiple farms for harvesting food with which to raise your army, but in The Conquerors, you'll be able to create a farm queue so that your villagers automatically replant the crops once they expire. This is very useful for when you decide to stage a major attack and don't want to worry about replanting farms in the middle of battle.
The Conquerors offers even more additions and improvements, such as new map types for battles on snowy or tropical terrain, as well as interesting new game types that emphasize production over combat and an enhanced map editor that gives you more options for creating your own custom scripted battles. The game even comes packaged with a thorough, comprehensive manual that clearly presents all the additions in the expansion, and also lists the relevant statistics for each of the game's civilizations. Many of the improvements in The Conquerors are evidently intended to appeal to Age of Kings' avid player community, which grew to such a size in part because Age of Kings was such an enjoyable, accessible, and customizable multiplayer game. Of course, The Conquerors inherits all these traits.
Virtually every addition in The Conquerors helps make Age of Empires II a better, more thoroughly enjoyable game. Nevertheless, it's true that the enhancements to the interface and the tweaks to the game's balance are more obvious to more experienced Age of Kings players. This is largely because Age of Kings was an outstanding game to begin with - and as such, any improvements in an expansion pack such as The Conquerors understandably provide only a marginal improvement overall. At the same time, the multiple additions in The Conquerors add up to be more than enough to entice Age of Kings players to focus their attention on this ambitious, deeply strategic game once again - and for a long time.
The Age Of Empires series is becoming something of a trusty old dog. You've enjoyed its company for a few years now and you've grown comfortable with it. Not only does it look just like all the other dogs in the neighbourhood (no fancy 3D shenanigans from this beast), it's also somewhat predictable, and the last thing you'd expect it to do is learn any new tricks. But let's face it, that's what gives this series its appeal. It might only sport a tired old three-quarter isometric view, but then again you don't have to readapt your old flight-sim keyboard claw just so you can move the game camera and give orders at the same time. And, unlike some young RTS upstarts I could mention, it still has a healthy dose of resource management, which, believe it or not, some players still enjoy.
Age Of Empires 2 Conquerors Torrent
On the evidence of the beta version we received, The Conquerors sticks firmly to that tried and trusted formula. It would be wrong though to assume that this expansion CD is just more Age Of Kings campaigns given a bit of spit and polish. As was the case with the Rise Of Rome expansion for the original Age Of Empires, Ensemble has packaged up a smorgasbord of enhancements and extras that will have seasoned fans salivating from the moment they read the box blurb.
So What's New?
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The most obvious addition, as you'd expect, is a set of four single-player campaigns. While the Age Of Kings campaigns focused very much on the underdog (William Wallace, Joan of Arc, et al), Conquerors turns its attention to some of history's more successful bullies. So this time you get to play with the likes of Attila the Hun and EL Cid. As before, the campaign games are strung together with a series of vignettes outlining the story in a 'Meanwhile, back at the farm...' kind of way. Unfortunately, the actors providing the voice-overs have once again all been hired from the Dick Van Dyke School of Crap Accents.
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In Search Of New Civilisations
New campaign games are all well and good, but let's face it, they don't add that much longevity. Fortunately, Conquerors adds some spice to the standard single and multiplayer games by sprinkling in a mix of new races, units and technologies.
One of Age Of Kings's strengths is that the civilisations are distinguished not just by different colour schemes and graphics, but also by the technologies and unit types available to them. This is also the case with the five additional civilisations (Aztecs, Huns, Koreans, Mayans, and Spanish) that are included in Conquerors. Huns for example, on account of their being nomadic and preferring to sleep on their horses (or with them, depending on their personal preferences), do not have the ability to build houses. Instead they begin each game with a pre-set limit to their total population. The net result of these differences is that playing each civilisation is a unique experience, and you really do have to use your brain to take advantage of their strengths or overcome their weaknesses. Of the new civilisations, only the South American races are blessed with new graphics.
What's really going to breathe new life into your multiplayer games though, are the new game types. King Of The Hill places a monument at the centre of the map and has the players ranged round the outside. To win, all you have to do is capture the monument and hold it for 500 years. Simple? Well, not quite. The monument is always difficult to get to in the first place. It might, for example, be on an island in a large expanse of water. So first you have to figure the best way to get to it. Then defending it isn't quite as straightforward as it might at first I appear either. That's largely because you are not permitted to build in the immediate vicinity of the monument, so you can't simply capture it and wall it off.
The other two new games seem to have been designed for those who love resource management and those who don't. Wonder Race does away with combat altogether, and has everybody living in peace and harmony. Well, almost. There's still something of a competitive spirit among neighbouring civilisations as they race to be the first to build a wonder and win the game. It's all about how quickly you can gather those resources and how well you spend them.
If you're an aficionado of big battles and the Wonder Race game sounds as if it will bore you to tears, then Defend The Wonder was made for you. In this game variation every civilisation begins in the Imperial Age, and all with a ton of resources to encourage rapid build up of forces. One player though, begins in a walled-off area with a wonder at the centre, and has to protect it for 500 years. Meanwhile, the other players are doing their level best to get together some heavy siege machinery with which to break in and spoil the party. Because of the high-tech level everybody starts at and the lack of any need to research advanced weaponry, this game type makes for some truly spectacular battle sequences.
New And Improved
So, you can see that there are a lot of clearly visible additions packed into Conquerors. What is likely to really make a long-term difference to extending the life of AOK are the improvements that have been made under the bonnet. There are 16 major areas of improvement over the gameplay and features in AOK.
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. It's an AI oversight that many RTS designers are guilty of. 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. As to whether AOE will finally get itself onto the 3D bandwagon - well, I guess we're going to have to wait for Empires III to find that out.