Why Age of Empires 2 is still growing
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https://github.com/SFTtech/openage
It will be the future if you wanna accomplish things the original engine is incapable of doing, especially a sane mod API.
Help us make it more awesome :)
Out of curiosity...how much do you still play AOE2? I guess that would implicitly indicate how far along openage is...but I was also interested just how much someone has to love a game to rebuild it from scratch :)
Nobody had suceeded in creating a clone with potential at 2013, so we took chances and are still trying to do it the "right" way.
I think the last year I played about 40h of aoc, so actually not that much, and haven't played aoe:hd yet.
Probably true for most strategy games, but aoe seems light enough (requirements wise) and has a great enough balance (and the fact that the game is almost freely available worldwide) enables anyone with a computer with a decent internet connection to play.
This is always going to be true for a strategy game. Heck it's probably true in general for any competitive game that that there are certain things that you just have to do.
The more competitive the game is, the more obvious this is (which is why you see more people complaining about this kind of thing for Starcraft than AoE), but it's still always present, lurking in the background.
My house mate and I would play AoE2 vs the AI as a change of pace. We'd done this enough to get a basic understanding of the game and I would have considered us "pretty good" at the game. I recall the moment when I stumbled onto MrFixitOnline and learned about the concept of Villager Seconds and just how important it was to get that 2nd boar in the very early game.
I have a vivid memory of yelling across the hallway to my buddy, "I just found out that we're terrible at this game and no nothing at all".
AoE Online had a bunch of interesting ideas, letting players customize their civilizations ala MMORPGs or MOBAs. Interesting quests too, and good coop for the story mode, something I've always wanted RTS games to pull off better.
They did not need to make it an actual MMO with central servers though, and because it never attracted a playerbase / they couldn't monetize it, it was killed off (meaning completely unplayable) in a pretty short time frame. This seems pretty typical for games of today though, tying them to a central server for an unnecessary social or data tracking layer, dooming them to die in a few years when the income slows down a bit.
AOE2 was privileged to come from a time where installing a game meant you owned it, and you could probably play it with your kids. Maybe you could even take it apart and rebuild it better. We're living in a world now where a lot of games are ephemeral, the world may have no idea what it's like to play them after a few years, once the servers are shut down to run something newer.
[0] http://www.gamasutra.com/view/feature/131503/1500_archers_on...
I'm going to date myself here, but I remember picking out the box for AOE2 with my kids at CompUSA. We played that game a lot, and it was a wonderful bonding experience that we still talk about.
* The two new expansions are nice. The developers have done an excellent job at maintaining the balance of the game and not pushing any outlandish changes. (After all, the game thrives on a nostalgia factor.) However, it's apparent that it comes from a tiny dev studio. Releases are usually littered with bugs and playability issues. This is a great shame, because they manage to garner significant hype and excitement, only for the release day to be somewhat frustrating for most players.
* In fact, due to the small size of the dev team, there usually is a long turnaround period on fixing smaller gameplay issues. This means that most of the more invested players, who are more easily irritated than the casual players, use other, older, more established clients to play the game, where the new expansions are not available. Indeed, the new expansions, while very similar in spirit to the 13-year-old expansions, change the metagame so significantly that at the competitive level, only the 13-year old expansion is played. This deeply fragments the player base. The new expansions, and AoE2 on Steam in general, are mostly played by newcomers.
* It's very difficult to get the advanced players to take the expansions seriously because the competitive scene has been basically unchanged for about fifteen years. As such, the theoretical metagame has been nearly perfected, and the random components in game generation do not make a difference to the point of needing true improvisational play. Competitive players have spent months, if not years, carefully practicing minutely differing iterations of the same game scenarios. I've seen professional players end games over early-game mistakes that an intermediate player might not even notice. I consider it a little similar to chess, in the sense that the metagame/opening theory is so well explored that the game can rarely be considered improvisational, but is more like a ballet performance: an extremely well-studied routine that has to be executed as perfectly as possible (which, by the way, means above 400 actions per minute for a top player). Considering the immense amount of study that has gone into the game, and the even larger amount of practice required to become truly good, it is clear that most competitive players would rather keep spending their time on the old game, as opposed to on the new expansions -- the latter would necessitate a great amount of exploration of new strategies, and a similarly enormous amount of practice.
In this competitive arena, your current 'city' is the culmination of each game you've played under a certain set of meta-rules self-imposed in conjunction with the nuances of playing as a particular civilization.
While an opponent may only see it for a fleeting moment, your actual, current city is how, given specific starting conditions, under the constraints above, your pre-game-plan and ruleset have been tweaked and optimized to the point where they are not actively in need of changing.
The only resource that really matters is time. A nice city is one that cannot be defeated by an opposing 'city' in any arbitrary amount of time and frees you up to focus on the more reaction-dependent offensive strategy.
edit: Experience is mostly from Empire Earth, YMMV
The multiplayer servers are still online, but the certificate expired years ago. You can force AOM to connect to them with fiddler2, but you have to have an existing account.
But now there is the steam re-release, and of course Voobly/GameRanger for the original release, but the steam version is full of bugs that have not been fixed in over a year.
If you still have the game CD you can find the files there. For the rest of us...Amazon: https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003TL16O6?ie=UTF8&qid=&re...
The graphics are pretty awesome. I know there have been a lot of improvements to graphics over the years, but for me AoM's colors and graphics just seem so nice to look at. When it first came out, it probably had the best graphics of any RTS game.
The campaign was phenomenal. I can't remember how many times I've finished and then re-finished the campaign.
So I can't wait for the new expansion, "The Tales of the Dragon" to come out, which feature the Chinese and their deities.
I always felt like the Atlanteans were slightly overpowered, but other than that the balance was pretty good.
The steam version is good but I kinda wish there were an update with low system requirements that fixed some of the bugs in the current version. It's the best LAN game ever.
AoE3 was great too (superb graphics and physics engine - very nice even today), but I wasn't so fond of the timeframe and several design decisions (8 tower limit, no random maps, the trains concept.
AoE 2 has a buggy AI, it gives up way too often. It was an improvement in every respect to AoE1.
AoE 1 was great for it's time. Less units than modern games, so every unit was worth more. One could create unlimited amount of towers - I played tower defence style gameplay in AoE 1 in 1997.
AoE 2 at least had fairly compelling multiplayer with a variety of options. Although town centre rushes were a dominant tactic in the original version...
And the AI is very good in AoE/AoM series (well except for the AI bugs in AoE2, in both the original as well as in the "HD" re-release). Whereas other RTS games (e.g. EmpireEarth) cheat a lot, that's not very rewarding. The developer at least tried to create an AI that doesn't cheat with resources.
Playing an RTS for several hours in multiplay against friends (LAN) is fun (as long both are almost equal). Internet gameplay isn't that fun, when someone suddenly leaves the game, or just doing a common rush strategy. Nowadays some of them found their niche with League of Legends, etc.
For me, AI gameplay in single player is more fun.
This was what I loved about Starcraft: Brood War and Warcraft 3. Warcraft 3 is where the game DOTA came from, and pretty much spawned the entire MOBA genre.
That, and these map creation utilities (including the one from AoM) was what got me into computer programming.
I'm curious though, where did you find the history lessons? The campaign doesn't seem to have been implemented yet.
Thanks to the 0AX devs for all your hard work!
Get any two former Ensemble employees together, possibly buy them a beer, and you will almost certainly get some stories that sound apocryphal but probably actually happened :)
Whatever you did for them, thanks for some really fun entertainment across many years of my own life.
It has a lot of behind the scenes details which I found interesting.
Star Wars: Galaxy at War Mod - world at war mod
Offer ends in 29 hours and 15 minutes as of this writing.
However, I was always more of a fan of AoE1 RoR expansion. Anyone else? Something about the brutal simplicity of it, made it much more fun for me and my friends?
Would love to see that "HD'ified"!
AOE2 HD on Steam is great fun, I've really enjoyed playing it over LAN with friends (and online, although the competition is much harder).
Unfortunately a reasonable percentage of games run into unrecoverable issues with the netcode - clients lagging out and going out of sync. It's a real shame and I hope the devs get some time to focus on this, especially now that 2 expansions are out.
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id...
http://us.blizzard.com/en-us/company/careers/posting.html?id...
(I used to be the lead developer of Ares for several years, the amount of reverse-engineering and C++ voodoo involved was awesome.)
1: http://ares.strategy-x.com/
2: https://ares-developers.github.io/Ares-docs/bugfixes/type1/i...
[0]: http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/540744934...
The units are so stupid and frustrating. They will casually walk into the range of enemy castles and towers. They will chase units across the map if you don't put them into defensive mode. If you do put them into defensive mode, they can easily be take out by archers without fighting back. They will open gates and let hordes of enemies into your town. They will stand there and continue cutting wood while an enemy army approaches them and kills their coworkers. The monks won't attack units unless you specifically order them to. Etc, etc. It makes parts of the game very tedious and unenjoyable.
The campaigns are similarly tedious. At first it's really fun and challenging, if you have the difficulty right. It's a challenge to figure out how to repel the big attacks and build up very quickly.
But after building up, it's no longer a challenge. And to win, you just need to spend an hour clicking through the enemies base destroying their structures. Even though you basically won an hour ago.
The multiplayer is terrifying. I tried it once and within like 10 minutes my opponent had surrounded my base with cannon towers and trebuchets. I haven't played it since.
The AI scripting is really cool. It's super simple to learn, very easy to modify other people's scripts, and very powerful. You can do a lot with just a few lines of their domain specific language. And you don't need any programming knowledge at all. And it's very extensive. There are tons of variables and functions available that let you do all kinds of things, and it's well documented.
But it's also extremely restricted. You can't do basic things like store variables, compare numbers, etc. There are arbitrary limits on how many conditions you can have in a conditional, how many lines you can have total, etc. They are workable, but I have no idea why they are even there. The only people modifying AI scripts in the first place are probably willing to accept if the game runs a bit slower because of all the extra code they put in it.
There's also no way to speed up the game. You only get "slow", "normal", or "fast". You need to use Cheat Engine to make the game run a hundred times faster. This is necessary for testing those AI scripts, or getting through those tedious offensive parts I mentioned above. They should have just let it be an option in the game.
Same with other variables like population limit, that's restricted to 200 for no reason. If I want a higher limit, I'll accept that the game runs slower. Just let it be an option, even in a hidden menu with a big warning or something. TBF, the new HD edition does let you go up to 500 IIRC.
After that, just read the documentation. It's included as an old .doc file called CPSB. Google's cache lets me convert this to HTML if you find that better: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:OxOa-k...
There are a bunch of player made AI's here: http://aok.heavengames.com/blacksmith/lister.php?category=ai
There is also an active community of AI scripters. They hold AI competitions and stuff. There is a forum at http://forums.aiscripters.com/ and an IRC channel at #federationofkings on irc.gamesurge.net . I'm sure they'd be happy to help if you have questions.
It was fun, but beyond casual battles it became too much like exploitation of the engine - e.g. having to destroy farms yourself because you didn't want to give the enemy units experience.
I joined a 4v4 map, and while I still didn't do great, I had other players to back me up. I also didn't feel like I was the worst player in the game.
However just as the game was getting interesting (and I was probably about to get crushed), everyone paused the game and kicked me. Possibly because they blamed more for their lag, possibly because I wasn't that good of a player. They didn't say. It was very discouraging.
But it wasn't as bad as I expected it to be, and I might try playing again some time.
I think the issue is that new players start with a ladder score of 1600, which is WAY too high. As a newcomer (me), it is frustrating because I'll probably lose dozens of games until I finally meet low-ranked newbies that haven't internalised the whole Fast Castle choreography down to the last shortcut. And for players who deserve their score of 1600, it must be equally frustrating to have me on their team and then drag their score down :(
--unit AI does not automatically make optimal decisions to win game for you, you actually have to control your units on a minute-to-minute level and think and pay attention to win.
--"campaigns are boring"
--winning is tedious and takes no effort after you spend an hour building up to the final stages of the game
--people on multiplayer actually know how to play the game beyond the level of someone who has been playing for a day and a half, they beat me, i never played again.
Yeah, if all you're doing is playing single player against AI on low difficult, DUH it's tedious. RTS games were not made to play against the computer. Learn to play properly and get into multiplayer, where the glory and awesomeness never ends.
It's not that the unit AI doesn't "win the game for me", it's that it does very stupid things. It's not that it requires player input, it's that it requires lots of player input. It's tedious.
I didn't say the campaigns were boring. Many of the missions are very slow paced though. The end game is what is boring. A game can go on for hours even after I've basically won.
I have been playing a lot more then a day and a half. I played a ton of it when I was growing up. As well as all the other games in the series. And I have 113 hours on the new steam version. Anyway all I said is that the multiplayer was intimidating to get into, which is true.
>RTS games were not made to play against the computer.
Um yes they were. These games come from an era when not everyone even had internet, let alone fast internet. There was extensive work put into the single player AI, as I mentioned above.
Anyway, I'm not saying the game is bad. Just some specific problems I had with it. Especially coming back to it after many years, it's not really as fun as I remember it being. I prefer Age of Mythology.
I believe OpenAge is cross platform, but sadly most friends all use the version they purchased on Steam.
Voobly, an unofficial platform similar to Gameranger, + mod community and tournament organizer, has a very active player base, including most of the top players in the game. It has it's own HD patch and several improvements not present in Steam. It's impressive how an unofficial, unsupported, free plataform can be light years ahead of the billionaires at the Valve/Microsoft partnership.
The dev team has been constantly improving things and we now see fewer bugs today than at any point in the past, and it's continuing to improve all the time.
Yes, it still out of syncs sometime, but such is life for those of us playing games from '99.