Filling the Gap - Age of Empires II
One byproduct of this little project - a quest to fill my patchy back catalogue of culturally influential games - that I truly didn’t anticipate, was to fall in love with any of these games. To be enamoured, evangelical and kept up late at night by software I assumed to be impenetrably archaic and antique.
But Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings has grabbed me, and refuses to let go. I’ve been thinking about winning strategies all day, and was dreaming about an epic nine-empire battle royale, before I tried it prematurely and got my ass handed to me for ignoring the diplomacy menu. If Age of Empires was as easy to access as the Twitter button, I’d have gotten absolutely no work at all done today.
Okay, so for those of you who are as clueless as me, Age of Empires is a real time strategy game that has you basically fiddling about with three distinctly different areas: building a city, collecting the game’s resources and waging wars with nearby clans.
This level of schizophrenic, multi-management is super overwhelming at first. Modern (console) games just don’t offer this massive array of different tasks to be undertaken all at once. Towards the end of the game, you can have more than a hundred units to individually manage, sending out villagers to chop down trees and build barracks, while simultaneously fighting off attackers with military units.
Despite its markedly different pace, it has a lot in common with Civilization (which I sampled on iPad); you move through periods of history (although cap it off at a Renaissance-style ‘Imperial’ era), and can win in a multitude of ways: from all out military elimination to a more reserved, cultural dominance, as you build the most impressive building of them all.
That’s the one I went for: build a wonder - a giant, impressive architectural feat - and keep it standing for a couple of centuries. But as I garrisoned my villagers inside an almost impregnable fortress, surrounded by stone walls, protected by soldiers, bookended by giant castles and punctuated by arrow-spewing watch towers, I realise I’d inadvertently turned my game into an incredibly bloated version of Plants vs Zombies.
It was tower defence, down to a tee. I mined for resources inside the stone city gates, as soldiers, archers, siege weapons, trebuchets and watchtowers fended off against waves and waves of enemy combatants. I could instantly see the legacy and roots of a game like Plants vs Zombies, and easily see which parts they removed, refined and streamlined to give the thrill of hunkering down behind an unbeatable wall, without the headaches of micro management and endless unit choices.
But it’s incredible for a game to have the flexibility to give so many different ways to play and achieve - I went for making fast friends and played entirely defensively instead of being an nasty, aggressive war lord. Honestly, my choice of play was dictated in the facets of the game I enjoyed most: building an awesome city with a nice bucket of resources always ticking over. I almost want to play the game co-op, me as city-planning emperor, while a buddy takes up the role of general, dealing with all that boring war stuff.
While I’m already pleased to be undertaking this task - I feel hugely more confident in discussing a genre I was entirely clueless to just days ago - I need to play a few more examples to get a proper grasp of the lexicon, conventions and influences in this long-held genre. Plus, a trip to a turn-based example, in Civilization II. I’ll see you there.
