Age of Empires...online?

Yes, we know it's been out for a while now, but why blog about something when you haven't had a good play on it? Experience is everything. So, tonight we thought we'd treat you with a little post about Age of Empires Online, something that a lot of people seem to have been looking forward to. Titus, a veteran player of the original Age of Empires games decided to do a little post on his experience with the game and what he thinks of it. Then, the online game emerges. 

Age of Empires: Titus' Tale

Along side Runescape, Age of Empires was a game I grew up with. When you were as into mythology as much as I was and you had a family of mostly boys you really got into the whole army thing, so having legions and heroes and castles that were fully under your control was awesome. I must have spent forever on the game just preparing to destroy the next town and expand my Empire. The graphics were never particularly amazing but the concepts and the heroes were enough to enthral my impressionable 10 year old mind.

When Age of Mythology came out I was beside myself with excitement, I had the power to destroy at will, I had suddenly become a god to the people I cherished.

Sadly for players my age, it's not as exciting, It still holds many hours of my childhood memories and it is something I will never stop loving but at this age I want something with more adventure, something that I can become personal with, a game in which I am someone.

As much as I adore this game, as far as modern games go this scores low for me becasue there is not much that can be added to a game like this. There are no improvements that can be made because they went to hard to fast at the beginning and now there is nothing. For this I award this game a low GGGGG (5/10 gamer points)

Age of Empires Online

Last month, Titus and I bought PC Gamer as a little treat (along with far too many Marvel action figures) and were both pleased and surprised to find Age of Empires Online. I say surprised, but I believe Titus nearly killed himself with sheer excitement. As soon as I got home I made sure to download it, eager to get started with the fantastic new game. Titus told me Age of Empires was a lot like Heroes of Might and Magic, so that made me even more excited about what I was soon to experience. A world of Greeks, Persians and Egyptians; what could be better?

It took a while for the patch notes to download (I say a while, what I mean is HOURS), but once it was done I was eager to begin. I logged in with my Windows Gamer Tag (noob buster 300 for those interested), and chose my first civilisation. Being a nut for Classics, I chose Greek and named my new city Andros (realm: Alexandria). It felt like the loading screen was going on for hours; I was literally shaking with excitement over the matter. I arrived at my new city to find it looking rather bare, and to see an old man with a big exclamation mark over his head. Being experienced with games such as WoW I figured this meant he had a quest for me – I was right. First quest was easy enough, and after that he continued to give me little missions, and so did the other members of my tiny little city. I even gained a level, which was rather pleasing.

My first quest in my city, Andros

The City and Villages

A majority of quests take place in your minor villages and other cities. The key building in your village is your Village Hall as it acts as the storehouse for your villagers supplies (until you build a storehouse) as well as the main target of any enemies. If you lose your Village Hall to the enemy, you fail the quest/battle. Your Village Hall does have some defence and will attack any enemies that attempt to destroy your village, so if you run out of soldiers your Village Hall acts as a decent defence. As your level increases your villagers are able to build new things and different buildings become available to you. Things like farms and watchtowers become buildable objects and through that you’ll be able to provide extra food and further sight (so you get rid of all the black).

Your city starts off as being rather small, but as you gain levels and new blueprints (see blueprints section below) you’re able to expand your city by adding new and exciting buildings. The other important feature of your city is that a majority of your quests come from the people who live there.

The main non-playable cities can also give you quests. Places like Mycenae will give you quests to complete for them whereas cities such as Sparta hold PvP tournaments for you to attend.

I heard you mention something about getting rid of the black...

If anyone has ever played Heroes of Might and Magic then you will instantly know what I mean about the black. Basically, there is a small area of the map that you can see, all around that area is covered in black. In order to lift the darkness you can move your soldiers/ships towards it so that not only will the black vanish but you will also be able to see the rest of the land you’re questing on.

Quests

The quests take place in little village areas or colonies, and can be built up in each quest (except the timed ones, you don’t always have time for building there). It’s actually quite fun training the villagers, getting them to harvest the essential gold, food and lumber to train more villagers/soldiers. You also have the option to build docks for fishing boats, merchant ships and triremes. The timed quests are a little harder to do alone; especially if you don’t have any friends to help you out or the premium army that is available for purchase from the Windows store (I’m trying to justify spending money on it with my limited funds). The quest rewards can include XP points, money, items, armour/weapons and blueprints. There’s an interesting item – what are blueprints?

Destroying the enemy (red) and burning their houses for a quest.

Blueprints

Blueprints are used to fashion new buildings in your city. These buildings can vary from things like blueprint stores (it’s obvious what this is for) to archery and cavalry buildings for training purposes. They’re very useful in the expansion of your city and can also be used to build things like rows of hedges and statues. Basically, anything that requires building work will require blueprints. You can even find them in the treasure chests that often appear in quests.

Ages: Improving your city

AoE Online uses Ages as a means of levelling abilities as well as tech points (a lot like the talent trees in WoW). There are five (citation needed) Ages that can be achieved by the player, and each Age provides further skills for armies, villagers and production. The tech points do the same and you can choose which trees you add points to each time your city levels up (construction, military etc). Currently, my city is still on the Bronze Age and is rather weak as a result. My tech points are spread relatively evenly between each branch of the tech ‘tree’ and so I am gradually improving skills in each part.

PvP: Your worst enemy

In games like World of Warcraft, PvP is a match between certain numbers of players who are of an equal level range. This is a fair way to fight and the battles are equally matched. In AoE Online, it’s a very different story indeed.

I had a quest to visit Sparta (Oh yes!) so that I could do battle against another player. I figured this was pretty groovy and decided to make my way over and get battling. Sparta was a good looking place – you could see all the young soldiers training which I quite liked.  I found the PvP arena pretty quickly and started up a 1v1 battle and waited patiently for an opponent. I was level six, my opponent level forty. I was only on the Bronze Age (Ages will be explained); he was on the Silver Age. I had a crappy bunch of spearmen; he had archers, hoplites, premium soldiers, and cavalry – the lot. So, naturally, I lost this battle. That’s about the only rubbish thing with PvP; your enemy is often a completely different level to you. Fine when the tables are turned and you can obliterate some hopeless low level (no, I’m not that cruel.../cough), but when you’re the victim of the enemies power you just want to give up.

One of my PvP battles. I lost, of course.

So, how does PvP work on AoE Online?

Well, it’s quite simple really. You start off with a village hall and five or so villagers. The aim is to destroy the opposing player’s village hall. You start out with nothing but your villagers, a block of minable gold, some bushes for food and a load of trees. Get the villagers to work, make sure they collect supplies. Then, you’ve got to ensure that you evolve your village to the Bronze Age for increased power and build some barracks, archers halls, cavalry places...you know what I mean (of course, I only had spearmen). Once your army has been well and truly enlarged you can either wait for the attack or trek off and find the enemy village so that you can burn it and raze it to the ground (insert maniacal laughter). You can use your mounted scout to search for the enemy, but he doesn’t have a great deal of HP, so use him wisely.

Soldiers

Oh, Valhalla is a simple fool. What did he do, you ask? Well, he didn’t read carefully and ended up destroying his army. Here’s the thing. In your city you have a palace which carries your ‘tech points’ and that tech tree (as I so named it) has three branches. Now, I only saw the Economy branch and my eyes seem to have missed the military and utility branches. I thought the branches of the tree were what was shown to me on the first page of the palace. Thanks to that, my army is pathetic and I can’t complete the required quests as a result. To add salt to the wound I just spent £14.99 on the premium Greek pack thinking it would give me a great army; only to learn that is has in fact not given me what I hoped it would and all I needed was to correctly place my tech points. So far, this premium civilisation has given me no joy, but who knows, perhaps one day it will come in handy. For nearly £15 I received four special characters that do my city some good and a set of powerful armour for my soldiers. Yes...well worth the money (sarcasm).

As a result, I can’t really give you any in depth detail on the soldiers as I have not yet experienced it firsthand.

Scratch that. As I was typing this I found a reset button. I have reset all my tech points and can focus mainly on my army as opposed to my economy (which is still important but I’m a battling man).

So, after changing my tech points around I was quick to complete a quest that had been giving me trouble for some time. As I’m only on the Bronze Age I only have three units, but I can tell you a little about each one.

Spearmen: Basic infantry, pretty weak but they do the job.

Hypaspist: Infantry unit, pretty strong and durable. They can go against pretty much anyone. Brute force can get them past most enemies.

Toxotes: Ranged unit. These archers can deal a heck of a lot of damage from a long distance. They are very useful guys to have when defending yourself.  

Sarissophori: Cavalry. These guys are a form of ranged cavalry that do a pretty good job of taking down archers.

Ships

So far, I have Triremes, merchant ships and fishing boats. These are built at the docks and serve their own purposes. The Merhant ships are used for transproting goods, people or soldiers across bodies of water. The fishing boats are required to gather fish from the waters (to build an army etc), and the Trireme can be seen in action below.

Formation!

My Trireme's destroying an enemy Trireme

So, there’s the basic info on AoE Online. Of course, I have to say that this game is highly addictive and I am finding it hard to balance time spent on WoW, LOTRO and AoE Online. As all MMORPG’s are ever evolving and new stuff is always occurring either personally or globally, I don’t see why I can’t keep you updated on what happens in AoE Online as well as the other MMORPG’s that Titus and I play.

This game reminds me a lot of Heroes of Might and Magic ad Master of Olympus: Zeus (one of the BEST games ever), and so I’m going to have to give this one a good score, a big score...an 8/10. It’s missing points because of the PvP. I was really annoyed about that.