Age of Empires: Definitive Edition

Herzog Zwei is not an RTS
Dune 2 is the first RTS

Once upon a time we celebrated a new year at my uncle’s who is one year older than me.
When we got our presents i got some Rainbow Siege and he got a collection of strategic games. He already owned most of them, and i didn’t like FPS games at the time. Especially the Rainbow Six, that we installed then and proceeded to spend a couple of hours restarting the game, lining up our teammates at a wall and executing them. He showed me the games on the strategy CD and i instantly saw what i liked. The disk had Pharaoh (i loved egypt), Caesar II–III, AoE 1–2, and a game that didn’t work, cos pirated CDs are top quality. And that’s how i’ve got into AoE (maybe a bit too much) for no reason.

Age of Empires

I kinda planned to finish AoEDE super fast, but i’m glad i am this unfocused. I started playing it in june 2022, finished the first two campaigns in early july, but finally completed it only now, after trying out nearly all earlier true RTS releases and finishing some. Now i see that this game has some actual innovation, it’s not just a better WarCraft 2 in a new setting, banking on the popularity of Civilisation games.

Today people see this control scheme as the most intuitive and obvious for the genre. But in reality the split between WarCraft 2 and C&C control schemes remained for years. The RTS market was literally made of CnC clones. WarCraft has somewhat improved the GUI, but it was just a Dune 2 clone. CnC came out earlier than WarCraft 2 and was a big evolution over Dune 2. WarCraft 2 controls camp was not gaining momentum, yet AoE joined the WarCraft 2 team, maybe tipping the scales with its own popularity. Ironically, even the remasters of the first C&Cs have the WarCraft 2 controls as an option.

AoE took the peasants economy and upgrades (including town centre’s ages) of WarCraft 2, took the setting of super popular Civilization games, and all the improvements of CnC and combined them together. The three elements that were the most popular or the most evolutionary at the time. That’s why all non-mainstream RTS games are forgotten. When people whine about the supposed “golden age” of RTS genre they can only name *Craft, CnC and AoE IPs. No one remembers anything else, not even the great games.

Not having played AoE for many years, i had a better opinion about it than about AoE2, which basically never left my life, while the times were a-changing.

My biggest beef with AoE2 is the demented combined arms AI. In WarCraft 2, CnC and in AoE mono-unit packs and combined-arms packs behave the same. And they behave the same as solitary units. But in AoE2 combined-arms packs work worse than every RTS before it, and worse than single-unit selection. Meanwhile mono-unit packs, especially ranged forces mostly behave significantly better than anything before. And better than StarCraft.

Instead of the stupid formations no one uses outside of e-spahtsballers for micro and even that happens only at the highest level of PvP, they should’ve added more stances. Like a stance for the current behaviour of shooting from the maximum possible range and spreading in a circle. And a stance for volley shooting, when units don’t stop in their tracks and start shooting until every one in a blob is in range. That would eliminates the undesirable circle spreading or the new butt-bumping in AoE 4.

The unit AI is sometimes even worse than in WarCraft 2. The game does not run on a big grid anymore and the distances are much larger. So military units have trouble seeking targets automatically.

The setting starting with the stone age, and chariots are pretty rare still. Especially in RTS games as opposed to historical wargames. The stone age militia is not that stronger in combat than a peasant. And unlike other games in the series there’s nothing to upgrade in the first age, the task is to reach the tool age.

Interesting how in real life and in Cossacks peasants change allegiance in presence of an army. But in the AoE series, the peasants are the most dangerous units. As long as even one peasant exists, the enemy cannot be defeated.

This is the first RTS to promise that many factions, and to achieve that — it’s the first RTS in which the factions have absolutely nothing unique about them. All you get is minor stats differences and just four sets of architecture. Even wonders don’t have unique sprites, but are a part of the architecture sets. And maybe that’s why there are only four original campaigns — to not let out just how much the civs are copy-pasted.

Ironically, AoE4 made all its fairly diverse civilisations feel very copypasted, because in the post-final age almost all of them have access to basically the same units, or their close replacements at best. But here, post-iron age makes the civs feel different, especially depending on the opponent’s civ.

The differences between the civilisations are not additive, but subtractive. Every civ has access to toy units: stone axemen, archer and scout. But not everyone has even the next tier unit available. While i understand that the toy units are their own category due to the different costs, it’s still annoying that the next tier is not an upgrade. Especially with bowman – better bowman. Peasants throw spears at animals, why not have a spearman as the toy ranged unit? And well, archery is probably 60000 years old, should as well start in stone age. Greek have none of the better archer units. Persians have no academy. Egyptians have no ultimate units at all.

When you start a match you have to think which available ultimate unit you want to invest into, and what units your opponent will use. The cost of the last upgrade is so extreme, that outside of artificially dragging the match out, you will pick only one. If you chose academy units, they can be stopped by helepolises, but if you went full helepolises, a few upgraded stone throwers can melt your army. Your cheap chariots can be a dangerous army, but an opponent with elephants will melt them faster than you can produce them.

Helepolises are hell on earth, if the enemy has nothing to stop them, they are a ranged unit with very high DPS. A pack of them can annihilate everything. No wonder i remember being very disappointed in AoE2 with pointless scorpions.

Farms is the mean to convert one resource into another. Also it’s a fitting mechanic for the chosen topic.

The trade boats are not free gold generators to send to your enemy or to a conquered port. You actually have to pick what to sell and they do the trading with some additional mechanics.

The hoplite line is not trained from the barracks, but from a dedicated building. That’s more clutter. But their slow methodical animations do create some veneer about them. Unlike the proper spear+shield lines they are solitary units, and while they are strong, they still can be dealt with even without ranged kiting. Fully upgraded legions or cavalry can take on them, especially with manual control, when you focus the damage.

Later games have a lot of tolerable levels of semi-real voice-acting for each civilisation, which was another USP. But while the voice lines in this game are iconic, >>units do not speak in any historical language, but neologisms that the designers themselves made up by means such as spelling people’s names backwards. Alas.

The Rise of Rome

With the success of the first game an add-on has followed. The Rise of Rome bridges the giant gap between the greek and yamato campaigns, and also adds one of the most popular ancient civilisations into the game. But being thematic, means all the campaigns are almost always played as the same romans. So if “rome” is not the word that makes you cum the cum of dinosaurs, you are here for a longer ride, than hearing annoying Arthas whine in Warcraft 3.

Being this early to the party, this add-on add-ons the new QoL features that are considered to be absolutely mandatory these days. Now you can double-click a unit to select all similar ones. And you can queue units in the buildings. Imagine playing AoE where you have to build the units one by one, Dune 2-style. The period key can now be used to cycle through idle villagers. They still didn’t put that into the GUI, but that’s something. There’s a new option to increase pop-cap. I don’t think it was ever used in the campaigns, but at least in skirmish you can play an RTS instead of a big party tactics with buildings. 200 is already pathetic, but with 50 you have to plain idle to get to the ultimate units, since you can’t build a big economy.

There are some new units added.

Armored elephant is the new ultimate upgrade for the melee elephant, it improves the AoE and siege damage. All civs that got it, already had an alternative. It could’ve been the main unit for egypt, but they didn’t get the memo.

Camel rider is a new unit which is effective against cavalry. Probably.

Scythe chariot is an ex-ultimate (it’s not shiny anymore) upgrade of the chariot with an AoE attack. Since egypt is a chariot-focused civ, this is basically a gift to them, to have at least something strong in the iron age. The unit has a shield in the original version, which was removed in the Definitive Edition.

Fire galley is a new ship with the legendary “greek fire” weapon. It’s supposed to be a dedicated ship-remover, but as it is not a “trash unit” (means no gold or stone cost) multiple cheap triremes are both more dangerous and have a better range.

Slinger is a memorable and a necessary unit for the time period. Trying to correct their archer dominion they’ve added a dedicated anti-archer. But with no strong upgrades they are not that useful. You won’t amass slingers to deal with helepolises, heavy horse archers, or elephant archers.

Some new technologies are proper good additions to the game.

Logistics — reduces the population count by half for all units created at the barracks. It makes the fights at least a bit more exciting than 5 v 5 drunk brawls. If you play as a legion civ, you can have a solid economy and amass legionaires, whom also benefit from a lot of upgrades. Archers are strong, but i’m not sure they are twice as strong as two legions. And for korea and italia they are a very strong unit.

Martyrdom — it says “sacrifice priests to instantly convert units”. I have no idea what is this and why it exists. No idea how it is supposed to work, and i don’t know which unit is worth 125 gold.

Medicine — monks are very slow even with all the upgrades, but before this they weren’t that good even in the campaigns.

Tower shield — another upgrade to balance the archer spam.

There are four new civilizations, and one new architecture set with the same new wonder. So it’s kinda one civ with 4 variations. The set is pretty, but a bit confusing, and some of the buildings look like they are missing the floor.

The historically popular Carthaginians offer elephants (especially the new ultimate upgrade), helepolis and academy units. Which makes them pretty slow-moving.

Macedonians is another popular civilisation that was missing from the game. And they have no churches, which is fun but doesn’t actually influence the gameplay. They were never supposed to have legions, since their indestructible hoplites were made obsolete by the mobile roman legions. As such they have improved academy units. But also they have the heaviest cavalry, and the horsest archers, and the ultimatest elephants.

Palmyrans can be barely considered a real civilization, or at least a great one. It was just a part of the roman empire, and probably that’s why they were added — they re-use the roman architecture set, and are useful for the campaigns. Horsest archers and elephantest elephants. If you count scythe chariot, well there’s that, too.

Romans have the attack speed bonus for the sword line, and that’s what they have. With no real archers they have alchemyless helepolises as the ranged option. Scythe chariots are the strongest cavalry available. Interesting how romans have no bonuses to centurions despite being the only civ that should have those sprites. Even more so in DE where the shields now have distinctive roman decorations. Wikipedia says that mobile roman legions made macedonian hoplites obsolete. And the roman legion wore these exact armours and shields used for centurions. Tho, you can say that legion represents the later roman legions, the ones from AoE2DE.

Definitive Edition

DOSBox brought back backwards compatibility for the DOS games, but to this day we can’t run a giant chunk of Win95 games. In this decade alone i’ve tried and failed to run many 32-bit games, no matter the amount of compatibility layers and tools i’ve used. Best case scenario there are fan-made patches or this kind of reimaginings. Some years ago vanilla AoE2 already had these purple graphics problems. You had to make a .bat file containing “taskkill /F /IM Explorer.exe EMPIRES2.EXE Start explorer.exe”. Yet my AoE CD from 2007 is working just fine on WinX right now, i didn’t even had to instal the UPatch HD to make it run.

I tried to play Definitive Edition when it was released, to see how it compares to AoE2HD which really frustrated me, but which was still occupying my mind. I was launching it from time to time to pointlessly farm rare achievements. I was sure that the first game is better, especially the unit AI. And well, on the release of AoEDE i lost the tutorial mission five times in a row. On the release the AI was impossibly hard. It was printing units and sending them after you before you even started your economy.

After coming to terms with AoE2HD and its unit AI i was lured into the AoE wiki, and after reading the descriptions of the new civilisations, for some reason i got extremely hyped for AoEDE and AoE2DE, despite knowing for a fact, that the civs are rather repetitive and not that diverse. So i procured myself both games on Steam and started playing.

Not only i thought that the unit AI is better in the first game, you can also see the claims from the devs that they’ve improved it for DE.

Pathfinding was always kinda alright. There were no gathering points. When units were finishing storage buildings they will go idle. Now they gather something fitting nearby. But if you build a storage near gold, the peasants will start gathering wood even if it’s farther away. The army was not aggressive, you had to attack each building manually, but they still loved to burn farms and houses. Now your army is doing at least something. There are unit stances. Aggressive makes them actually attack but the units control is worse than herding cats. A pack of units, instead of attacking something that was two metres away, will spread across the map, going for the most remote corners. Defensive is not that different. Stand in place stance was very weird in the original now it works as expected. Thankfully they’ve added the attack-move functionality. And it will prioritize houses and fields over the enemies that are currently attacking, or towers and military buildings. Priests auto-heal wounded units, in a short range. Scouts auto-attack if they’ve been tasked to attack, or when attacked by a non-gaia unit. Meanwhile enemy scouts were killing your peasant in the original game. The parallel parking was/is violently bad. Pressing gather together did nothing, now you can at least press [Alt]+click to bunch up your doods somewhat.

But the enemy AI became even better at personally kiting your every unit. Stone age archers will annihilate your legions. And AI also jiggles a bit to throw off your aim. And all of that on easy. But if you remove the fog of war, you will see that AI’s city planning is insane. And it spreads its army around instead of keeping the units together.

DE has entirely new graphics. And probably a new engine, especially considering the support for bigger resolutions, and proper zoom. The stained glass in the intro is beautiful. But the style and tone of the game are entirely different. The menus were properly artistic, now they are minimalist. The parchment GUI was replaced with a dark theme. On the top panel you can see your pop cap, idle peasants and the amount of gatherers for each resource. All available buildings are present on the same panel, instead of two pages. But they are represented by logos, instead of proper pictures corresponding to the current age. There’s the global queues indicator for all currently queued technologies and units. And you can have mix and match queues of technologies and units. There’s a proper campaign goal tracker. You can even change the scale of the GUI to match your screen size. You can lookup the technology tree in-game and during the map, instead of having the manual on the table. Pity it’s not entirely clear what is required for what, and what technology benefits which units. Only AoE2HD had the proper tech-tree. Even in Age of Mythology you had to research things first, and then check if the unit was influenced by that. The farms were, like, man-made bushes. They had an impassable hitbox and many farmers could work on one plantation. Now they mirror AoE2HD farms — units can walk on them, and there’s the automatic re-seed button.

The pop-cap was further increased to 250 for skirmish maps. And you can use a pseudo-classic mode. The short sword research was removed The Conquerors-style. Now you don’t need to invent the sword, it is given to you by imaginary gods. All civs got the heavy transport upgrade, which is probably good. Everyone getting the wheel and coinage i dunno about. Logically people don’t need to re-invent the wheel. But gameplay-wise this is a part of many balance changes, which resulted in civilisations having even less character.

The music is remade. Not, like, just re-recorded in higher quality, but it is different. For an example Mean (Ain’t No Hip-Hop in Tha House Mix) uses something like synth windpipes, but in Queen Of Palmyra they use something very conventional-sounding and de-emphasize the percussion severely, while making it more pop than hip-hop.Падает рубль is based on падают листья.

As a modern release this game has many achievements. There are a couple of unusual ones. There’s a dubious achievement for using the map editor. A set of completion achievements for the campaign. And then a ton of thankless grindathon. And there’s no workshop for this release, so you can’t easily download a specifically created map to speed things up. I actually wasted my time on such productive tasks as creating five hundreds catapults, one thousand legions, four hundreds chariots, five hundreds horse archers. All that and many more with the maximum pop cap of 250 per match. Some progress can be done in campaigns, but the campaigns don’t even have all the required civilisations. Destroying 200 temples depends on how many the AI will build. Converting 1000 enemies will require a lot of priests. Centurions do not count towards the hoplite achievement, but other upgraded units do count. It’s like people who do not understand what they are doing, wanted to add achis but they didn’t want to make them trivial, or even playtest them, so they just smashed that repeat 1000 times button. There’re on-line achievements which will work only as long as the servers are up, cos there’s no self-hosting. To get relics or ruins you have to roll dice for them spawning during the map creation.

I was going into this game thinking that i will get all the AoE content and none the headache. But all i got is some of the content and some of the headache. The AI is made to be almost as bad as in back in the day, but the game is nothing like the original experiences. And then there are the remade campaigns.

There are no cool original cutscenes. Not with fixed aspect ratio, not re-rendered, not re-imagined. There’s nothing. Almost all the storylines are re-written, but at least the new sarcastic narrator reads the plot. There’s no indentation in the texts, so they look awkward as hell. The scenarios themselves are often remade, and, like, a half of them are entirely new, not even reminiscent of the originals. The campaign screen had cool tactical maps, the new geographical ones are sterile and have super small text. I can’t see anything on 1600×1200. The AoE campaigns have RoR content in them. But at least both demo campaigns were reworked to be a worthy addition to this game.

Indefinite edition.

I 146% finished this weird game with bad unit AI. It is a half a remake and a half a fan-fiction. And now i have a mind-worm telling me that i have to beat the real original artistic vision games too. I didn’t have that worm when i finished the remastered CnC or HD AoE2.

This is not a definitive edition, not in recreating the original archaic gameplay, not in bringing the original content back with modern mechanics. It is a new game built from scratch, with all the new tech, and a half the old content. Since it’s already so unfaithful, they really should’ve just use a proper AI instead of this joke. You can’t even switch the graphics on the fly, like in some of the old game celebrations. This is properly just a different new game. It’s not a replacement for AoE, AoE is not a replacement for it. And they even promised to make this release obsolete with a DLC to AoE2DE, but out of all the promised campaigns they delivered only four, one of which is a tutorial, the other is a demo.

Past this point it’s all about the campaigns and the scenarios. Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’entrate.

For some reason i’ve never finished the campaigns. Even if i didn’t have the translation at one time, i sure did acquire it later. And, well, the games were finally officially released in late 00s, and i’ve bought two copies of AoE+RoR. And i did finish some games without knowing the language.

For an RTS game there’re very few tactical maps compared to the sequel and to the CnC games. They are fun sometimes, but not when it’s every other one, and you have a very small army against the cheating AI and only RTS controls instead of necessary RTT controls.

For “twelve” “original” civs there are only four campaigns. It’s like they showcased all the available architecture sets and called it quits, before the players saw that the rest are clones. Eight scenarios per a campaign is a bit much. They could’ve had proper, less gimmicky and shorter campaign covering each civ. Some campaign maps can be won by domination instead of the objective.

Tutorial Campaign: Ascent of Egypt
Somehow this tutorial feels less patronizing than William Wallace campaign. And i played both many times. Discoveries has a weird goal — scouting the land with peasants against army. And each next iteration has more enemies in it. Imagine killing the reds, going for a stroll and then losing your last unit to the giant enemy crocodiles. Interesting how this campaign focuses on teaching all the food production methods. In Religion the “ballista” can destroy half your city before being captured. And then it’s also protected by a lot of archers kiting all your units.
It’s a solid tutorial campaign, overall, even if some of the scenarios are under-designed. While it’s a egyptian campaign, it uses greek names.

Glory of Greece
For a historical game, the greek campaign deals with myths. The egyptian campaign had the civilisation as the protagonist. But the greek one feels more like a collection of separate unrelated battles as opposed to the personal stories of AoE2. But unlike AoE4 this still feels more like a real campaign.

The narrator calls meekenæ my cene, in a stupid language that won’t be invented for a millennium.

In Colonization of Ionia you have an ally. I put my troops inside the allied transport, and there is no way to get them out. The Siege of Athens is a bit like tower defence. There’s stone across the water, you have to defend while the enemy still has an army, and then take over the four artefacts.  The enemy has a lot of centurions and some catapults. There’s a bit of gold to the north, an entire land waiting for colonization to the east and a deposit to south-west, where you can put your military buildings. Xenophon’s March is an AoE‘s monk attack map. You start with nothing and have to convert everything you can. But you already start with peasants, and where’s a peasant there’s economy.

Reign of the Hittites
Originally it was a demo and a tutorial. It was remade as a small campaign in the DE. Well, “remade”, as in, they re-created the third map, and then just made two entirely unrelated new maps.

Opening Moves is a proper priest opening. You start with no peasants, and you need to steal peasants. You are limited to the third age and it has the suffocating original pop-cap of 50. The map is pretty, short, and sweet.

Raid on Babylon is really annoying. I dunno what they did try to say with it, but they didn’t. There are free units, so maybe you are supposed to use them for a raid. But then the relic is heavily defended and your free army is trash. If you start building up, the AI will soon start sending their own raids on you. The pop cap is 50 against three AIs and it really sucks. You can’t get a real economy and a proper army at the same time. And hitites suck in age 3, with no good units, no basic upgrades, and no ballistics. You don’t even have improved fishing. Playing a ranged civ without ballistics against this matrix AI that avoids bullets is tough.

I had to restart the map a couple of times because getting enough resources to advance to iron age is extremely challenging. You need to spend your resources on defences all that time — the enemy constantly sends stone throwers and various other units. I dunno, making a base across the river maybe was a better choice. Anyway, i somehow scrapped by, and got fully upgraded towers, after which i’ve started amassing elephant archers.

The way enemy AI works, using non-fully-upgraded melee units is basically pointless — one caveman bowmen can kite your entire army, be it horses or swordsmen. And then the AI doesn’t use just one, and it plops towers right inside your ranks and there are monks everywhere, and ballistas for the dessert. After a very slow and long game i destroyed everything that moves and finally stole the relic.

In The Battle of Kadesh you are stuck in age 3, but your initial army is strong enough to crush the red to the south. Then just accumulate ships and chariot archers to kill every yellow peasant you can see, until there are none. That’s all folks.

Voices of Babylon
Always check diplomacy, on many maps the enemies are marked as neutral.

The Holy Man
The Holy Shit, man
It’s a monk attack map. And i still remember this map from the childhood. It was never good but now it’s broken. You have only one priest and your task is to capture a villager. But when you try to do that with the RNG capture time you have a 50\50 chance to already lose the monk to just one guy. And then after a successful capture in this version there’s a 50/50 chance that every peasant from the entire map will run to beat the holy shit out of you. This is pure RNG just restart until you get a short capture time, and AI glitches so the 50 peasants who want to kill you, fall asleep where they stand.

But that’s not all, once you barely get your base up, its axemen’o’clock against your peasants and one monk. If you survived that by having luck with short conversion times on axemen, before you reach the next age you get raided with cavalry and slingers, then again. Once you save/loaded enough times to appease the RNG you better get a wall of towers and then just try to build an army while the towers defend your base.

You are stuck in age 3 with the tiny pop cap against two enemies. I went composite bowmen as a strong option at this stage for the baby civilisation.

The Tigris Valley
They use the akkadian name sumeru for kengir, and then even pronounce shumers as sumers, a-ha-ha. After the holy hell, the second map is pretty chill. The red relic can be stolen by a transport ship alone. Now you just need to assemble a fleet and harass brown, then build barracks on the shore and spam infantry with some support from triremes, until you can steal the second relic.

Vengeance is a new map and it seems like it’s the consequences of the second hitite scenario. While the city looks the same, the geography is entirely different. The first goal is to defend against ᴍᴀʀɪɴᴇs and build a fleet. There’re some free weak units on the middle peninsula, but with this AI that won’t help much. A good fleet can make the AI depressed and it will resign. In general, the naval battles in AoE are the most fun out of many RTS games, especially of that time period. The main ship costs only wood and even its T2 is decent. With all the upgrades it’s pretty strong for a pure wood price. And then there’s the specialisations with juggernauts and fire ships.

I Shall Return is cool. You have to flee, establish a base, defend against ᴍᴀʀɪɴᴇs, reach the iron age, and retaliate. By the time i got enough food for the legion upgrade, my ships has already domineered the coastline, and the AI has resigned with no units left.

I think The Great Hunt was supposed to be a shorter raid map with a non-producing AI. But you can get a priest, a priest can get a peasant, and a peasant builds a town centre, and that is getting out of hand, now there are two of them. By the time i reached the scripted peasants, i already basically finished researching everything. It still took a lot of chariots and a lot of legions to clear the last island out.

The Caravan is a simple raid scenario. You have two priests, so you can steal every unit on the map.

In Lord of the Euphrates you need to destroy two enemies, one is on the other shore, the other is on your turf. After upgrading the swordsmen it’s easy to secure this shore. Also there are some free units on the right and there’s a free transport ship in the north corner. The low pop cap makes the economy really slow.

The guides say that originally (The Conquest of) Nineveh had no villagers. But in this version you just start your economy, get defences against the yellow ᴍᴀʀɪɴᴇs and then conquer the isle to the right, where you get a ship and an army. Clear out the coast, build military buildings there, and push towards the unfinished wonder.

Outside of the broken AI in the first map, this is a cool story. A rise and fall of the civilisation, starting with just one priest and going through the whole history.

Yamato, Empire of the Rising Sun
When they made the game, they didn’t know that the sequels will go spheres deep into the first game’s timeline. The greek campaign ends in -300 BCE, while yamato campaign soon goes in to CE and ends in the 700s. Stone age naked cavemen are not exactly representative of what you want to see from a nihonese campaign, and neither centurions or triremes.

The Assassins
TIFO
You start with a pathetic non-regenerating AoE 1 hero that can easily be killed by lions in the first 30 seconds. So to beat this scenario you need to find the map on the internet and see where are all the gaia units and the broken monks. Whom you can kidnap and deposit in a different place. It’s an ass level to play it blind because it’s an exploration trial and error puzzle. But if you look up the map it’s easy and short. Just create ranged units and kite a couple of guys.

Island Hopping is a scenario of go there dunno where get that dunno what. You start with a small army and you need to explore the map and find six artefacts, two of which are not marked as gaia on the maps. You don’t need to bring them anywhere tho, so just taking them over with a ship counts.

Capture is a double priest scenario, entirely different from the original. All the japanese enemies are playing as china. TIFO

The Mountain Temple is another remade map, and the japanese enemies again are playing as china. It’s the first nihonese scenario where you finally get to play Age of Empires RTS, and you are already in the third age. Right after the start, yellow’s entire force and all its peasants, come into my  base. It’s possible to kill them all, leaving the yellow’s base open to a counter-attack. But at that time brown will send more ᴍᴀʀɪɴᴇs. One horse is capable of defending against the first waves, a couple more with some upgrades can defend your shores. When ready mount a counter-offensive.

The Canyon of Death is a tactical map, again. You have some good archers so kite the enemies until you reach the boats. Use the boats to take over free units, haul everything to an island and watch the battle.

Coup is again a new map. In this new plot you flip flop between the factions, so your enemy is you from the previous level. It’s an interesting gimmick map. You are inside your future enemy, so you have two choices — pay tribute in gold while you flood the target building with your cheap troops. Or migrate across the river where you can get some free buildings and build up a proper army.

Jinshin War
You are in the iron age and you are given a group of horsies, and a suggestion to defend one AI and raid the other one. Just going all-in in upgrades for the starting horsies allows you to win the map fast.

Fujiwara Revolts is a simple map. You start in iron age, get resources, build an army.

The Rise of Rome
The campaign already starts with a re-made and a rewritten map The Birth of Rome. Your goal is just to build some towers. But you are in the middle of all the enemies and your stupid units will chase random peasants while the enemy force is in ur base killing ur doods. The best decision is just to rush the objective.

Pyrrhus of Epirus gave me severe flashbacks. And yep, here it is The Lion’s Den from Age of Empires II HD: The African Kingdoms. But this time with pathetic pop cap of 50 and a very slow economy.

In The Siege of Syracuse you have to fight against lasguns. The map doesn’t look like the real Syracuse, but it seems to be inspired by ancient Carthage.

The Battle of the Metaurus is another all-new map. After starting you at the fourth age on the previous maps, now you’ve regressed back to the third age. It’s a giant annoying map, as if created to flex their new engine and modern hardware. The design is complex, but untested or just done bad — ships can’t go by the river because of the giant hitboxes. So what was the point of the forward base? You face against two AIs, both are strong carthaginians, and you can’t win against them if you play for fun. They spread like cancer and regrow, while employing strong units to harass you. While you suffocate under the pop cap 50. Fun is not allowed, so don’t waste your time on infantry or cavalry, just go all-in on helepolises from the start and wipes the slate clean.

The Battle of Zama is another new map. You face against two carthaginians, so send the scout to take over the free units highlighted on the map, and rush to heliopolis, to Carthago delenda est.

Mithridates geography looks like you are wiping out istanbul for not being constantinopol. You have a starting army and the tips talk about making a landing attack. But you also have peasants, and enough army to wipe out the left shore and beeline to helepolis. With which you can just colonize the right shore and send your ICBMs towards the goal.

Ave Caesar
The narrator talks directly to you.
Caesar’s Revenge depicts that anecdote about a rich kid cruscifying pirates. But in the game it’s a coalition of three giant nations. It’s a very naval map, and it’s a tad annoying. You start with one dude, you need to take over gaia peasants and build a fleet. So basically sit there, make triremes, and atack-move them towards the enemy.

The Invasion of Britain
You are given an army, and a qest to find the ruins. Well, you can use the ships to clear the shore and let you army roam. but you have a monk and peasants in sigh. Interestingly, you can only build academy. but you still have the upgraded priests to take over all the buildings.

I think The Siege of Alesia is the same event as in the movie. This is an unusual way to depict a siege — one enemy is locked inside your walls, two are outside. If you allow the AI to blossom it will start spamming siege engines. So using the starting army to destroy the outside forces ASAP is a good start, then rushing to helepolises to finish-off the map.

The Battle of Pharsalus is you versus 2 AIs. Romani vs romani. So it will be waves of centurions and siege weapons ruining your helepolis spam. You need to balance between bad roman cavalry and helepolises, or produce a ton of infantry to overwhelm enemy’s centurions. The tips say not to bother with red, but it produces hostile forces in its base is filled with tasty tasty resources.

Imperium Romanum
The Battle of Actium is an absolute asshole map. You are going 1 v 2, red is roma so helepolises will not help you, he instantly fills everything with towers and catapults. Meanwhile brown constantly sends juggernautrs from two opposing sides to kill you, and you have to micro each one while microing your defence for an hour, and brown sends constant landings against your sucky roma towers.

Screw that. There is enough starting forces to, with some luck, clear out red’s TC, and hunt down its peasants. It is possible to wipe out all other buildings too and even have one or two soldiers left.  Now you need a giant fleet to deal with brown and yellow.

The Year of the Four Emperors is another entirely new map. It’s a wonder defence scenario. You start with an army, move towards your wonder, take the free peasants. There’s also free real estate to the right. Orange does nothing, so you can clean it up, yellow spreads out, takes all the resources, and properly tries to kill your wonder. Brown builds its own wonder on its own shore, but there was no timer, so maybe that’s not a threat. You aren’t even playing as romani, but well you have the battlest elephants which can survive the annoying kiting and catapult spam.

In my game red rome went rogue and started stealing my stuff with a priest, including elephants near the wonder. While i was fiddling with diplomacy ex-my elephants properly damaged my wonder and nearly destroyed it.

Ransom at Ctesiphon
You start with a squad, but very soon you get peasants, and can start to build up. Before long you will be attacked by a lot of horses outkiting your legionaires, and by yellow juggernauts. The initial force is enough to go and wipe out yellow. Building several towers ASAP will help against the flood of horses. Then just kill everyone and escort the artefacts.

Zenobia, Queen of Palmyra is a yet another remade map. You have a lot of resources on the map, so just get peasants, upgrade the army and go conquer. The game refused to let me win until i hunted down every fish boat and every transpoort ship. At least it didn’t tell me to destroy all the red walls.

The Coming of the Huns
You will be laughing, but this is another new map. And it is a remake of Age of Empires II: The Conquerors The Catalaunian Fields. You start with some resources, so you can instantly upgrade your swordsmen and economy and get more peasants. The AI tries to raid you, but you can build more walls and towers. Pretty soon huns start building a wonder. But brown army has already destroyed it after it was finished, and then yellow joins in. I suspect that if i didn’t run towards the red to participate, the scenario would win itself on easy.

Enemies of Rome
The DLC that doesn’t care, and forced you to play mostly the same faction for fifteen scenarios, most of which are already starting in the fourth age, at least had a decency to have a map for each of the new civs.

Crossing the Alps
Spoke too soon. It’s a tactical map. Or more like, sub-tactical map. You have no healers so engaging the enemy will be fatal. The elephants are slow, the unit AI is bad, and the enemy plays it like a real skirmish map. So just use all your forces as a decoy and rush the three target units to the finish line.

Third Macedonian War is another remade map. You start in the third age, and you have to deal with three AI players. Your starting army is enough to clear out your own shore, if you act fast. Especially if you start upgrading your hoplites.

The Revolt of Spartacus
FCSM
It is a very annoying map, because of the unpredictable AI. Your goal is to kill red before it kills yellow. Red is post-iron age, with tech unavailable to romani. So he had to steal those horses somewhere. On my first try it started to really mow down yellow. So i tried to build a tower wall inside the yellow’s territory, but red priests took over them all in seconds.
On my second try i decided to go helepolis, but red didn’t even touch yellow this time. The moment i’ve got heles production running, a giant army of maxed-out horses stolen by romani just mowed down my base.
On the third try of hesusmas i started to invest into legion fast, hoping to get at least some swordsmen, before the horses come. But red decided to do nothing for the whole time. And yelloww started killing it. So then i had to march several times around the entire map trying to hunt down every red soldier scattering about.

Odaenathus, Lord of Palmyra is another new map, of course. The AI starts attacking you with horses, so i decided to try camels. After getting to 50 pop and cleaning out the enemy’s base, i had to create a new ranged army because AI still had a ton of ships, and not of the desert kind.

The First Punic War
It’s a small campaign as Carthaginians, based on the demo version for the DLC. Imagine the time when there were demos for DLCs.

The Battle of Agrigentum is yet another new map, who would expect it. You start alrteady in the bronze age. Your army is big enough to destroy one of the AIs, especially after researching the available upgrades. Then the other one starts harassing you. There are six free horses behind the forest on the left.

The Battle of Mylae is, sigh, a new map. It’s a very naval scenario against 2 AIs. The task is to steal the two artefacts, but they are inside the enemy’s tiny cities, so you destroy the enemies anyway.

The Battle of Tunis looks partially similar to the original but there are still changes. You don’t have to wipe out yellow, but behind his city there are free phalanxes that can go over the pop cap. And well if you defeat everyone, you win before you get your wonder finished. Mine was only half done when i’ve already wiped out the opposition.

Should i now just go and play the original game with the original maps and the original storyline now? Perhaps with the UPatch HD?