Age of Empires II HD

After finishing many better RTS games i’ve decided to go back and conquer the campaigns i was never able to finish, in the game i played a lot in my childhood. After all, it’s a new HD release and i’m old and experienced. Well, then i got pissed because the unit AI is one of the worst in history and rage-quit it.

But after finishing AoE4 and being pissed at it, after finishing Warcraft 2 and realising that the combat and units there are pretty terrible too, i started to check out other RTS games of the time to see how they play. And yes i was a bit harsh on the AoE2. It’s not as bad as Warcraft 2 and my rose tinted view of the first AoE was shattered too. Though, i wonder how does it compare to Command and Conquer that predates the whole IP? That’s what i wanted to say but by the time i beat the last set of campaigns, i accidentally finished both C&C and Red Alert. So, yeah, the dogshit unit AI and pathfinding were the norm for the period and AoE 2 situationally is less terrible. If you use combined arms or several specific units it’s comparable. Some of the units are basically a joke, especially the ones that were great in the first game. But when you have a mono-unit pack, especially of the ranged units, the unit AI can perform adequately half of the time.

This game is no competitor to proper modern RTS and it has nothing on Cossacks, AoE3 or AoM. Even AoE4 is better. But it is conditionally playable. And after a massive injection of new content in HD and DE (that didn’t fix AI at all) there are other sights to see in this game besides the actual battles.

HD

Despite being called “HD” there are no actual resolution options. But they did fix the compatibility with old DirectX and allowed the game to adapt to any resolution. So in UHD, without the options the whole GUI is extremely small. Even on a 65″ screen. They re-baked the cutscenes into 16/9. WTH is wrong with them — don’t add black bars, leave it native so it will scale to the nearest edge automatically.

The best addition is the increased tuning of speed. The slower than slowest and the ludicrous speeds are really missing from other games. It’s just the best feature across all RTS games i’ve played. Also, now you can select sixty units at once.

Having more than a ten or two saves makes the menu take a long time to open, even on NVMe 4. Putting them into a different folder makes the load fast again. The game also automatically makes replays and they too affect this.

Being a Steam game they’ve added hundreds of grindathon achievements like win against 100 X or win 100 as X. Good thing you can save in the last second and just reload the same save. For some other idiotic grindy achievements the community created specific scenarios. Some achievements don’t trigger, but at least they don’t track the classic cheats. If you didn’t get the achievement for finishing the campaign — you can win every map of it fast. There is an achievement for finishing The Conquerors, but there is no one for Age of Kings, only for completing both together.

Age of Empires II

It’s kinda a cool idea to represent the long period of middle ages not by the governments (arguably, the roman empire was long enough to fit the AoE1) but by people who came out of the roman empire. That’s why it’s franks and not the frankish kingdom belonging to germans. That’s why it’s teutons, britons, celts who are more french, than the germanic kingdoms bearing french names, goths — all the people, who had inherited WRE in the very broad strokes.

Here, Julix put every scenario in a chronological order. Great work! Though, it’s missing The Forgotten scenarios and is using DE instead.

I like that they’ve reshuffled the units and counters. Instead of having duplicates, there are actual separate entities and upgrade paths. And they have different costs, without becoming useless.

AoE has trash units and good units limited to nations. Like, everyone can invent a bow, but not everyone can build a professional military around it. The uniqueness of the civs was subtractive. Different peoples have access to different technologies. And that’s how they made only a couple of tile sets but sold them as having many civs. And for a historical game that resulted in goofy balance decisions like japanese having roman centurions in full getup.

AoE4 has trash units and strong units universal for everyone and upgradable. Some civs have early horses others early sword, but by the endgame everyone have the same gunmen and knights. It is a late-game equalizer, even with work put to make different costumes the civs still feel the same outside the malians. When there are no artificial constraints, what’s the point of building archers in PvE when you have guns? And spearmen still can do nothing against elephants or final knights. It’s not helped that the unique units usually replace the stock ones instead of being separate. Save us from axe throwers, but doesn’t help diversity.

AoE 2 kept the original subtractiveness, but made it right. Instead of having separate trash units, some civs can’t upgrade some units to full potential. This is an early game equalizer. Everyone can make a bow, not everyone can manufacture a high-tech arbalest. And AoE 2 has no trash units but a collection of specialists. Skirmishers have their goofy behaviour, very cheap and have high defence against ranged attacks. Swords are fast, squishy early siege. Scouts are cheap and very fast raiders. Knights are unit melters. Spears are still useless. They are supposed to take care of the cavalry, but with no armour or HP they can’t even reach it in time, and they are specifically killed by all the ranged units. The dedicated anti-cavalry units are camels instead. What it really lacks is a some small attack ship that costs no gold. In the first game the base ship costs only a little of wood and can be upgraded to a mighty trireme.

Every civ has a unique unit and some cool technologies. This probably is the best paradigm, but scraping the bottom of the barrel results in very cartoony units. Starting with mameluks throwing full sabres, and ending with korean tanks looking like chinese civilian carriages. Still, with the original art-style it looks less cartoony than AoE4. On the release of The Conquerors we actually thought that tanks were historically accurate.

But now almost no one lacks all the line upgrades. It was common in AoE for a civ to outright miss entire unit line. Outside of  spain introduced later i can’t remember anyone missing crossbows. Is anyone stuck with club bouncers? Or at least with the first swords? Before the HD the civs were still more copypasted than not. But with the new architecture sets, new technologies and new civs introduced here it’s way more varied. And DE went even further.

Still, unlike Cossacks, at least every civ has its own voice-lines, adding more charm and feel of the race. And the GUI is better. DE and AoE4 improved it further, by displaying future tech and what is needed to unlock that.

Unlike the older RTS game all the research is unlocked forever. You can’t break enemy’s tech tree by completeing a successfull raid on their lumber mill.

Spies are a great compromise between turning off the fog of war in Warcraft 2 and manually hunting every single damn peasant in the first AoE. Still is missing from AoE4.

Onagers were a siege unit, but now it’s a meme unit existing only to be targeted by cavalry or to kill your own troops. It’s only usable by AI against your archers, because all AI units will always run away from yours. Scorpions were machines raining death. And i still remember just how much i was disappointed when in the sequel i saw them being a joke. They cost a ton of gold, deal barely any damage, take a lot of space so they can’t even target something properly without spreading everywhere, and they have no HP.

For some reason all the aggressive animals were assigned zero food, so you can’t eat lions and wolves anymore.

Since it’s the castle age all the defencive structures were expanded; the name of the game is castle offence. You can finally build gates. And you can build cheap wooden walls with cheap wooden gates to deny some area. Even from allies wanting to steal your gold mines. There is the new outpost structure. A meme created for campaign maps to see enemy destroy them. They cost stone, and even if only a little bit, that’s more than nothing. You can’t upgrade them and they never attack. But you can garrison the real towers. Small units can heal inside, while peasants and real ranged units significantly increase the attack power. And the centre piece is a castle filled to the brim with the best ranged units in the game. There’s a limit to this awesomeness, but it only means that with better units you can use less population to achieve peak castles. Also castles can fit cavalry to heal it. And cavalry archers.
Creating a distraction and building a castle near the enemy is a sure strategy. You can use cavalry to raid out-of-range siege engines and pinnacle castles can melt rams. Two-three full castles side by side can withstand even The Forgotten insane 3D printing onslaught. And then there’s teutons with increased range.
Even without castles you still can use cheaper town centres filled with ranged units to create strong defences.

You finally can walk over farms, significantly improving their usability and easying the town planning.

The parchment palette and realistically-looking models add the veneer of historical accuracy to the game, despite the meme units. It just looks pretty, and the DLC maps are gorgeous. DE looks way too iOS and cartoony in comparison. The OST sounds pretty interesting.

Chapter XIV: Dead fucking AI

Roses are read
The AI is fucking dead
The fucking AI is dead
My notes say “dead fucking AI” in 15 different variations.
The dead AI is fucking dead.
Violets are blue

Command & Conquer, its sequel, Warcraft 2, AoE all have problems with herding cats. Your units are dumb and run around like headless chickens. The best way is to manually show them where to go. So trying to fix that Ensemble Studios introduced formations. The entire selection tries to walk as a unit and keep their distances instead of spreading out. But instead of intended military parades it made the weak AI extra dumb and demented. Many units participate in parallel parking. You want your sheep, peasants, monks etc to gather around one spot, but instead they move in the same formation to a different place and spread around. Worst of all horse archers love to do the same and be killed. The ships are terrible they always can’t decide between a rectangle or a single line.

All mixed arms formations spaz around. The idea was for fast cavalry to protect slow rams, but instead everyone does nothing while being pelted with ranged attacks. When you give an attack order, instead of catching up to the leading units, everyone pulls back while being shot at and slowly tries to do a formation.

Fishing ships seek the nearest port or the nearest fish and that’s can easily be across the entire landmasses. Best case they will be stuck and unproductive, but usually they go straight into the enemy base to be destroyed. Sometimes peasants can’t see forests for the trees. It’s as if the forest blobs and stand-alone trees are separate entities so the peasant’s don’t consider them to be equal sources of wood. Sometimes i saw the same behaviour in AoE4 and DE too.

In skirmish AI still surrenders super fast, both AI versions. That’s why i thought i am good at this game when i was like 11. DE surrenders even faster, you haven’t even started to raid the AI peasants, you’ve barely reached castle age, and it already surrendered. Bumping the AI difficulty won’t help, since it will still surrender too early once you attack, yet it will become extremely aggressive in early game when you just want to chill.

Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings

Is it due to the new patches? Because i finally, after 20 years, could beat the campaigns. But also the slowest speed isn’t slow enough anymore. I think i remember it being even slower in 2013?

William Wallace is a tutorial campaign and it has a story on par with the rest. It was always a good campaign and a good tutorial, starting with absolute basics and then going into the real maps.

So i can now confirm that The Age of Kings has better campaigns than Age of Empires 4, but…

Joan of Arc

After fun and games with Wallace campaign, the second one starts with a scripted escort mission. And then they throw you into the second map where you discover that the new AoE2 unit AI being absolutely braindead is actually a very bad thing for this game. It was herding cats in AoE but at least those were aggressive cats. Now you are limited to 75 units including peasants and have to fend-off three enemies. Any your order to a group of units or combined arms results in them entirely abandoning the attack and running in circles under the enemy fire trying to build Hannibal’s gooseberry from allied human bodies.

Maybe i have a memory of beating it in the childhood. Also maybe i was using cheats. Because i definitely was using them generally at the time and in this series.

But in my solid recent memory of trying to beat it 10 years ago i rage-quit after losing my entire army of knights and catas several times due to the braindead AI being ruined by terrible formations. The first game is herding cats and this is worse than herding cats.

This time i also lost an army of the same composition for the same reasons. But instead of giving up, after beating Warcraft 2 i had a determination to beat the campaign even if i have to use the lowest speed and manually control every unit. Which didn’t help.

So i just plopped my castle offence before the bot’s gates and spammed the enemy with rams into submission.

Now, understanding that many of the units are lava, that mixing different types leads to a disaster, instead of wasting my time scouting the map and memorising the layout and scripts and then executing it, i just read all of that on the wiki.

If you are coming after Age of Empires, this map teaches you that the Age of Scorpion is over, that you need to forget the old catapults and to learn to use rams, rams, rams. The way to play the sequel is to establish the economy and bum rush everyone with rams and as many ranged units as you can get, disregarding any tactics. A tight ranged pack with a hold position command can survive anything but catapults. Since all the civilisations have at least half of the ranged upgrades there is no strict specialisation and any civ can beat AI with a lot of foot shooters. Because horse shooters are not that strong, spread wider and their AI is the worst.

So yeah this is why i was upset all these years. A half of the Age of Kings campaign missions are plain bad. They could be fixed with normal unit AI and increasing the population limits (oh look it’s 125 in the definitive) because with mere 75 units you have to survive against six opponents and have a super strong economy at the same time.

Still, almost every mission here is an RTS, even if some can be rushed. Unlike AoE4, where a half of the maps are stupid battles. But damn AoE 2 is outdated. You have to manually exit campaign missions instead of having an end-screen or a prompt.

The third map is not that hard, but it requires a good economy. I had to restart the fourth map because i lost initiative on the eastern crossing. But plumping two castles asap near both crossings i beat it the second try. The fifth map is a scripted walkie. It can be beaten on the autopilot or require a very precise micro, depending on how unit AI will decide to screw up this time. The last map can be rushed by going straight to the goal or beaten by establishing a strong defence and economy and beating the enemy the proper way.

The story covers several events in Joan of Arc’s life. The cut-scenes are power-points with narration in bad accents. The events in the maps are scripted in-engine and it’s a solid way to tell a story. Making terrible cutscenes that look absolutely nothing like the game really can take you out of the story. Like in the Warcraft 3 pre-rendered cynematycs.

The Saladin campaign is narrated by a dancer with smurfs. It shows the civility of muslims and barbarity of the crusaders. Their initial antagonist is some french knight in an outlandish fantasy armour.

The third map is funny with you not having castle (offence). You have to do with the Town Centre offence. The fifth map can get hairy, but if you trial and error it or look up the wiki it’s fine. The last map is actually pretty bad. I barely made it by using a trick and not from the first try. You have to fight alone against an overwhelming army while constrained by a bad economy and low population cap. I’ll try to play it by rushing the AI in the DE, it’s needed for an achievement anyway. If you look up the enemies they start pretty small while you already have some army.

Genghis Khan has terrible accents and and it’s a very dumb fanfic. The proud to this day nomads are portrayed as orks. In this game Saladin is gandhi theresa and mongols are literally mordor.

The first map is a very cool questing mission. The second one requires a better defence early. The third map can be super hard. Or you can rush to T3 plop a castle right where they are gonna build the wonder and after Jin runs out of units you counter-counter-attack with archers, monks and one trebuchet and get all the time you need. Don’t forget to protect the main base tho.

If you know what to do it’s not that hard because it’s not a reactive game or a planning game it’s a recon game. It’s all about scripts so you were probably expected to restart a couple of times in the time when there was less games and more quicksaves. First you just waste time opening the map with scouts, and noting down the deposits and relics, etc. Then you restart try to build up and note down the time when the attacks come and from where. Then you restart to play it properly. And that’s a very dated idea.

The fourth map should be abused by pre-placing some rams and by destroying as many yellows as you can while you are still allied.

In the last map you need to devise (look up) the solution for the early defence, after which it’s a smooth sailing (of castle offence).

Barbarossa

It’s a campaign about that guy who, i think, did yet another unification of germanic lands, some conquests and participated in the third crusade. Our schools don’t teach much about the european history, or come to think about it even ours, before the empire. And i don’t remember this guy being featured in any educational videos i saw. Another thing is that all historical channels don’t go chronologically but jump from one ruler to another without any order. So this game is so far my primary source of his achievements. During the ending there’s a joke that the narrator was your enemy all along.

While i remember thinking that the knights look cool, i was disappointed with their slow walk speed. But now after implementing all the possible upgrades i reached a strong appreciation of teutonic knights. Those tanks can survive severe beatings while also dealing good damage. And then this civilisation has absolutely extreme castles. I love castles.

I remember at least playing the first map. I don’t know why i never went further (or why i don’t remember that). The first four maps are pretty traditional and all are doable despite the tiny units limit of 75. Now the fifth map is very hairy. You have a tiny army in a hostile land and you have to kite as hell with it to reach your destination. In the last map your emperor has “converted to islam” and you have several minutes to setup your defence and economy before everyone turns hostile. I had to restart it but was successful on my second try.

— / • / —

So, AoE wiki helps with hints and explains the scripts, like warning that enemy gets a wonder so you make an army (or execute a castle offence) instead of building a strong economy. You probably could beat the campaigns by trial and error (i couldn’t) but restarting the same hours-long maps is not fun. The miniscule unit limits are suffocating. But i finally slam dunked this unicorn and conquered my life. I finally beat Age of Kings, and yes it is doable by everyone thanks to modern walkthroughs and the game having quicksaves.

Age of Empires II HD: Rise of the Rajas

This addon addons four new cool civilizations and each of them gets a campaign. It focuses on the region that was populated for centuries, but no one in the west knows about the history of these lands. In my youth i at least heard of Barbarossa or Saladin, yet our soviet education never even mentioned anything of this, despite the region being fairly socialist.

Weird thing is that these are like arthurian-tier legendary people, but it was happening not that far ago. The oldest one is already 500 years younger than Arthur.

There is a number of escort missions but they all are still cool. And in general all the campaigns and all the maps are fun here. But why do the missions goals have bad tabulations and excessive plus signs? The powerpoints now have controls in case you missed a slide.

The maps use all the same sprite sets, but they are so densely and artistically filled that the maps look amazing. In the DE they unified the art-style so Rise of the Rajas looks as cartoony and barren as the Age of Kings, especially in the new cartoony render.

The unit limits are bigger. Even with just 125 units you can match against three hostile AIs even without walls, castles and towers. A stable economy is 10 peasants per 4 resources. Which for Age of Kings meant you are left with a pathetic army of about 30 people.

Le Loi

With a sword in the lake this story is really arthurian. Same as in the Barbarossa campaign the narrator is the enemy. The cool armoured archers supported by healers can take on towers and castles.

So after the campaign i read about him a bit and discovered that the current Vietnam was two separate states as recently as the 1800s. And cham people in the region are struggle israel this whole time and are kinda oppressed even today.

Gajah Mada

The malay campaign has terrible accents. The writing is not as good as Le Loi. What is even happening in the first half?

All ports are cheap towers which means it’s possible to create murder shorelines. Very cool maps. The unique units are just cheap trash zergs.

Suryavarman I

The campaign has JoJo art. Who is the narrator? What’s even happening during the briefings?

The third mission is a rather cool escort.

On paper having ballistas double shot and even mounting them on elephants sounds cool as hell and it looks good. I mean in the context of this game. But in AoE 2 ballistas are a joke. They cost gold, they are fragile, they are giant so they can’t be a tight group, and they do no damage. So while the elephants have a ton of HP, they are also super expensive and super vulnerable to monks. They take a lot of space and even a giant pack can be melted by simple spearmen. The best use for these elephants in the campaign is having a team of monks and stealing the entire attacking army for free. A pack of archers of the same size has a very tight footprint and melts even elephants before they can get near.

Another focus of Khmer is upgrading the traditional elephants. And yes with all upgrades that is a strong unit. But also for that price you can employ a ton of arbalesters with max armour and bracers supported by bombards.

Bayinnaung

Now this is another strong story with clear briefings.

The first map has an optional timed side-quest. The third map has a cool optional mission. But the three opponents don’t fight each other, despite all of them pretending to the same throne. The fourth map is kinda nerve wracking with the time-limit and few units. You can try to play it properly, to fail at it properly several times, memorising the map and the scripts. Or you can look up the map on the wiki so as to not to wander around. Then it is actually manageable and fun even with unruly AI. I beat it even after making several mistakes. Though in this “historic” game it has magic vampires. The fifth map is a micromanagement hell. You are under a constant spam of professionally kiting archers. You have to control two fronts in close quarters. The brain-dead AI gets twice as broken here. It refuses to do what is told and gets stuck in tight corridors. But as a story it is quite a cool map. I hope in the DE they’ve fixed the AI and it is also an enjoyable one to play.

This dude calls himself an equal of emperors of asia. Well if he is right this is a cool story to see. And it is something not taught in schools.

Arambai is a universal short-range archer that is good against everything. But it’s not very precise and a little hard to manage. A good pack can melt castles so it’s a strong competition against the universally strong archers.

Age of Empires II: The Conquerors

I remember being pretty excited to see the new expansion but also i remember it being not really radical. It added some new civilizations. Aztecs and Mayans are the first americans in the game, though i remember wanting plains americans too. Both civilisations have no gunpowder and no cavalry but can use unique fast melee units. Though, them using the same armoured swordsmen and caravels sprites as europeans is goofy. The Spanish have cavalry gunners and cavalry monks. Like when The Rise of Rome went for a specific government instead of the peoples, the add-on to Age of Kings gave up and went for a specific government. The stupid part is that spanish are goths but better, if we don’t pretend that these are ostgoth who merged into italians. Huns don’t need houses, but they use european architecture instead of tents. And well the agrarian technologies. Koreans have carriages with visible horses and scorpions installed. Pity the whole scorpion line sucks in this game. Meanwhile in the navy they have cool and useful turtle ships.

The additional unique research made every civilisation a little bit more varied. For example british archers can now outshoot castles, teutonic castles turn into absolute death machines and japan got “kataparuto”, ugh. There are new tiers for spears and light cavalry. Some new technologies were added, but most of gunpowder research was removed.

The best addition is the re-seed farm queue. Like the best part. And there was a general improvement to the villager AI. Also i just saw that you could garrison units into rams since The Conquerors, but i never used it.

Despite the five new civilisations, there are only three new campaigns. And those are a significant improvement over the horror of Age of Kings. There’s a new tab in the briefing menu called “scouts”.

Attila the Hun

The civilisation is kinda treated as orks, just like mongols. The story is told through bad accents and by some non-hunnic characters. But the envelope is kinda okay due to the stupid joke in the end and its delivery. If it was a video instead of a powerpoint it would be kinda cool.

The campaign is set so far back, it should be played by the AoE rules. If we accept that the technologies in both games are somewhat based on historical facts, having a 400s campaign with 1000s tech is too much of a fiction. And well there’s also the fact that huns ceased to be before vanilla AoE has even finished, or that they were nomads. Meanwhile The Conquerors added them as a faction with an entirely european sprite-set.

The first scenario with branching scripts can be considered as good as Mongols 1. The second map starts with a cool raid before you settle down and start a traditional base. The third map wants to be special too, but it can be finished by just setting up a defence. Now the last map is rather intimidating, but if you devise and successfully implement a strategic plan it is a rather fun objective, looking back on it.

Montezuma

I am pretty sure i never even tried it. You play as Cuauhtemoc who calls Montezuma 2 his uncle, but he was his cousin? It’s a campaign in which you historically lose despite winning the last map. The story talks about metal invaders but both american civs have siege machines, trebs, arbalesters and the same unit sprites for swordsman.

The first map has unit limit of 75, but even with peasants taking up most of that it is pretty easy. The second map is again limited to pathetic 75 units. I did expect the alliance to break yet i’ve built a base inside one of the NPC’s bases anyway. Still it’s pretty easy and can be rushed fast. The third map with the unit limit of 75, has you beating up spanish either by stealing the horses or destroying them. But in the cutscenes the protagonist says that you could do nothing against their metal might.

For the fourth map you need to know what you are doing, because a bunch of the units are south of the starting position while your nearest script says for you to go north. You are supposed to ship around the object and steal some peasants in the east, but i stole additional units (and a priest) whenever i could. Even after losing every eagle warrior i mostly just slowly attacked from the west and destroyed the wonder with barely building any more units, despite having a base in the west and converting every building i could reach. Can be scary but with hard micro herding cats and quicksaves it is an easy map.

The last map again has the suffocating unit limit of 75. It’s not hard, it’s just not that fun playing a full scale war with one bus worth of football hooligans, after you create 35 peasants to barely keeping up the economy.

This campaign is from the point of view of the last aztec emperor against the spanish invaders and it doesn’t shy from mentioning human sacrifices. It would be an interesting story about these events from PoV of one of the peoples constantly raided by aztecs. Something, something let them fight.

Tlaxcalans consider their fight to remain a distinct entity a hallmark of their history, resisting in turn the Aztecs, the Spanish colonial government, the various monarchies and republics of an independent Mexico, and even the claims on its territory by its neighboring state of Puebla.

El cid

The first map starts with a “cinematic” opening, where you kill 2 people for sport and then an enemy scout runs into the arena. It’s a small and a pretty easy battle. The intro gimmick is nice.

The second map is pretty simple and easy too. Build a base and implement defencive deep strikes to steal four relics.

The third map starts with a very limited army, and despite the simple tasks the enemy is quite aggressive. It’s not that hard but requires caution. I understand the story-purposes, but why in the third map we switch to saracens? I bet spain had other notable heroes, who were entirely spanish. And saracens already had their campaign, it’s not even some other civilization that didn’t have anything.

In the fifth map you just take a free city and wait a couple of minutes for the workers to finish a wonder. You don’t even need to defend it afterwards.

In the last map you rush two enemies with what you have and then encounter a tower with bigger range than anything, that melts you ships and regenerates health. You can go around it, but still.

It’s a rather easy campaign so there is no time to feel the new spanish civilisation. And then you spend a couple of missions as saracens and the unit limit is often very low. Not even once i assembled a big army of fully upgraded conquistadors to rain lead on my foes. And well in general spain feels kinda like a cut down version of a generic european civ. Since the campaign is from before The Forgotten there is no secondary unique technology, and there are no new fun things that were added later. Spanish bonuses are pointless, their main technology makes villagers “exceptional in combat” and well the villagers still take a lot of time to 1 vs 1 an enemy peasant. The enemy AI always moves away from the cannon galleon fire so they still can’t kill units and buildings are stationary anyway. The improved blacksmith could be cool, but you never have to go from zero to end-game as spanish, so that’s not noticeable either.

The story is about a stalker who is questioning a woman, who turns out to be a ruler of the city and walks around without guards. She didn’t want to talk at all, but then instead poured her entire life story on the said stalker.

What is the time-frame of this story? She has been the ruler for some time, and she explains how Rodrigo was buried. Then why does the “stranger” ask, “why does a dead man ride through the streets of Valencia”? What man, if Rodrigo is in San Pedro de Cardeña and not on the streets?

Spain is a notorious european nation but it is unknown outside of their fleet wars with britain over the new world. Like, not even that it was ruled by the moors and all that basque and catalan business. I never heard of El Cid until now and i didn’t even pay attention to this name back when The Conquerors was released. Which is weird on my part, i tried to play huns campaign several times but never tried aztecs or spanish. Well, here’s my history lesson. The more you know.

Battles of the Conquerors are adding at least one map to the civilisations missing campaigns. But then again. Two more french? It doesn’t mark the finished battles so you have to remember which ones you already did.

Vindlandsaga

It takes place in 1000 and i think this should be a cut-off for the AoE2 ruleset. But instead of turning such early events into DLCs for AoEDE they started to add more and more pre 1000s DLCs to the AoEDE. Oi FFS and now they outright are porting AoEDE into AoE2DE. Since they never fixed the unit AI in AoE2DE what’s even the point?

This is a viking map and it is above average. There’s a gimmick with “worms” eating ships and the sea having an art-piece in it. The goal is mandatory, even after destroying everything, the game still requires the completion of the objective.

Kyoto

A japanese map. It starts with an assault but then turns into a traditional RTS. That phase begins already in the imperial age, so you can’t even get a feel of the civilization.

Hastings

An additional french map. The layout is interesting but otherwise it’s a limited scenario separated from the french campaign context

Agincourt

It’s an english tactical map. With a limited army it seems as intimidating as Age of Kings campaigns. But it can be either rushed or be a long siege map where the superior range of archers slowly destroys all enemies at 8x speed. And it ends before the objective is complete if you beat everyone.

Tours

Yet another french map and a map that should’ve been in AoE1. It starts with enemies burning numerous farms, but it can be fairly soon converted into typical castle-defense of crossings. That’s the most common gameplay of the era, based directly on pathing from Dune 2 and Warcraft 1-2. If you save the starting army with monks, after the upgrades they are enough to finish up the map.

Lepanto

A spanish map and it’s a naval defence. So outside of playing with cannon galleons a bit, there is no point to use any of their unique units and tech. This is a hard one. Considering that the enemy is scripted and cheats and is able to give you the experience of the D-day, after a couple of tries i just filled the shoreline with palisade. I didn’t bother with the wonder until i got some economy going and implemented necessary upgrades.

Manzikert

It’s a wargame map of a significant size and it can look intimidating. But in fact you just need to rush to three flags and crush with your army 4 towers, 2 castles and just mope the remains.

You play as turks, but you use none of their tech. No gunpowder units are available and you don’t even mine gold. It’s a very easy and brief scenario.

Noryang Point

The map encourages the use of ships. And this scenario has a suffocating population limit. By the time you get chinese troops you are way over and can’t make transports to haul them. In the DE they actually bumped the limit and made the wonder to increase pop. That version is more fun.

So they changed the turtle ship’s design to make it more realistic. And i still remember the originals. Technically that was done in an ancient patch, but in those times there was no internet and the released disk version was what you’ve got. I played the old version until this release so the first time i saw the new sprite was here.

Age of Empires II HD: The Forgotten

This first new DLC was obviously a paid mod. It’s often over-scripted, pushing the engine to where no engine should go. And there’s no voice-over.
Like, that’s an extremely impressive work for a free mod, but couldn’t they hire some local to the maps guys on fiverr to read the briefings? The intros are rather verbose but they don’t say much. The secondary unique technologies is a great addition making the civilisations a bit less samey. But also following the example of The Conquerors they’ve killed cartography. I can understand that researching all the firearms separately was petty, and that cartography is of limited use. But this just reduces the amount of things to do in this game. They also significantly improved the fun in skirmish with 500 unit limit and LudiKRIS size for maps. But it seems the engine have troubles commanding that many units and the responsiveness of AI is lagging.

Magyars is a horsey civ. Their unique unit is a stronger light cavalry that costs no gold. Their technology improves horse archers. Also they have new architecture designs. It stands out from the art-style more than the terrain patches introduced in The Conquerors. And it is shared with Slavs. The ethnicity that occupies most of the territories and has the biggest population in europe first appeared only in this DLC. Since the game goes into late 1500 starting with The Conquerors it’s weird that the civ doesn’t have gunpowder units. The eastern european slavs were stuck with wooden architecture and mounted archers for a long time, but they also instantly adopted the gunpowder by 1400s due to close trade with asia. Earliest cannons, early handguns. And not only under the moscow’s rule, the cossacks were robbing the remains of the horde and taking all the guns they could find too. Also the pan-slavic civ uses mongol’s double headed eagle as a standard.

The civilisation has stronger farmers and infantry, their unique unit is a more armoured variant of knights. And none of that can stand against elite elephant archer spam. Also they have cheaper siege units and are allowed to upgrade to heavy scorpions and i discovered that somehow scorpions can kill elephants better than strong pikemen.

Indians were reworked many times and are absent in the AoE2DE because they were split in four. In this version they have their own unique architecture set. Their technologies are improved hand cannons and gold collection. I reckon it works very good with relics. Their unique unit is elephant archers, combining a ton of HP with the strength of AoE2 archers. And indians have the ultimate upgrade for camel knights. Probably because they don’t have horse knights.

Incas are a simple but interesting american civ. Their special unit is a new spearman, which on paper is a big improvement. But tested against cataphracts they don’t look that good. And returning from AoE they have slingers, but instead of being early siege they have minimum range and with no armour are just an alternative to archer. In childhood i liked playing with skirmishers, they look cool. But with them running away instead of ending rightly every dork trying to get near, they are weak against fast units. Now incas remove the minimum range from them and slingers, finally i can have fun with full packs of skirmishers. Pity they don’t have imperial skirmisher upgrade to achieve an absolute unit of a skirmisher.

Italians are in the same game as goths, and now in DE they also are in the same game as west romans. Now that beats AoE3 in the amount of duplicate civilisations. Italians are a discount race, and the discounts are only for very situational units. For unique offerings they have a variation of champions, that probably can be useful against turks. The castle unit is a variation of arbalesters, that has more armour and on average more damage. It’s pretty strong and can go against vietnamese archers.

Bukhara

It’s a mega giant map and it lets you play with persians a lot. There are lots of text with no voice acting. And considering that that’s plot and objectives you have to pause the game every time and try not to forget about it if it appears in the middle of a battle.

The units’ AI here is much more broken than usual. Even a pack of aggressive horses is constantly getting stuck in an empty field and doesn’t attack enemies.

York

This is so far into the past it doesn’t really fit AoK technology set. It’s a giant map with a good unit limit.

The map starts with stupid invisible cage. But then you have to establish a base and be rewarded with getting to play with a big army of longships. But also you don’t have cannon ships and even a single castle melts your whole new army.

At first it was fun and i planned to wipe out as many AIs as i can. I lost all the ships because the shore line is filled with castles. I first wiped out green, then spent maybe an hour or more on yellow and he still didn’t gave up because it had all those walls. I conquered half of the blue’s territory, but at several hours long i got tired of two infinite rows of pikemen and spear-throwers slowly pushing forward. The AI and unit AI started to utterly break — units were not attacking or moving, the game run at 5 fps on 10900k 3080ti with severe lag. So i just built a wonder to end this. I defeated 1 enemy out 5 and conquered the undefeatable yellow. I hope they fixed it in the DE.

Langshan Jiang

Another early map. It’s about the first use of military gunpowder, but you can create fire ships and cannon ships way before you do an optional quest.

This map is much easier in HD than in DE and more fun, with this “quest”. It’s a naval battle and dumbass unit AI is especially bad for the ships. The naval combat that is not that far from WarCraft 2‘s is really irritating. With time limits this map can be intimidating, but if you wasted a couple of attempts on it and read the wiki it’s more long than hard.

But hey, it’s a zhonghua map even if it starts in the castle age and with a lot of buildings. And looking back on it the gimmick is fine, once you actually stop being stressed over the time-limit.

Pity that the asian civilisations use european designs for their ships. And with different skins in AoE4 it’s not the same as reading about admiral Yi Sun-shin panokseon tactics against atakebune. The ships may look similar but their drastic difference and tactics are fascinating.

Bapheus

I understand why they craved to change the map in the DE, but i’m not sure i agree with the end result.

So the map starts with a simple quest before going into the full RTS mode. But the quest isn’t that easy because you have a limited number of cavalry and there are a number of enemy camels on the map. Even avoiding those there are still two mandatory fights. And after that you get a starting base that is already being attacked by two or three enemies.

On the flipside during the quest you have a stage where almost everyone is an ally and you can gather a lot of sheep. And a stage where the main enemy becomes hostile, but still pretty passive. With no murder holes and with juggling archers it is possible to reduce most of Byzantine to ashes if you have a lot of patience. The hero is regenerating and the buildings are not, at ultimate insanity it is possible to clear the map of all Byzantine castles by hit and run, if not by using light cavalry.

So the map is finicky and is enticing to play it for days with good payoff. If you know the scripts and plan beforehand where to move your base ASAP the final phase is significantly easier than in the DE. And of course the original story is much superior.

The DE map is significantly different, yet both versions ally everyone against you instead of them fighting each other. If they wanted to simplify it they should’ve replaced camels with easier units and give you a monk or two, then move the town centre outside of the middle of the map. Not just cut out the whole quest and awkwardly re-write the plot.

Dos Pilas is probably the best map in the expansion. It’s not voiced and the slides for some reason use spanish cartoons, but.

You play as mayans who don’t have a campaign of their own, and it’s a pretty big map with an early starting age so you can cop a feel of the civilisation. Their unique unit is some weird archer with more HP, but you don’t need more HP when stock arbalesters with obsidian arrows melt walls and towers in three shots. I understand why sad lonely sportsmen would like for it to go away, but it is just so much fun in singleplayer. Rams are unable to deal as much damage to buildings as the archers.

The map is based on a little known historical event which is another good use of the AoE franchise. Though with such writing it’s hard to grasp who, what and why are fighting. It’s right inside the AoE1 territory but you play with AoE2 technologies.

You start with a short scripted sequence of events where you can go on branching paths with the traditional RTS base-building. You begin with a very defensive play against a severe enemy force but then you gain the control of the game and crush everyone. There are also several secondary objectives and quests.

Honfoglalás

This giant several-hours-long scripted scenario continuims time through space deleting your units at time points and giving you new ones. You start very close to AoE1 timeline (7CE) and end the map before the AoE2 timeline (9CE), but already with Caravels (15CE) (the non-cannon galleons in this game).

It’s ambitious to tell a long history in one map, and it adds something playable for magyars. Though pechenegs just stopping in their tracks is dumb should’ve added a line saying something about peace treaty. Also makes it ripe for abuse.

Bulgarians and moravians employ a 3D printing tactic so you have to do castle offence and employ your own 3D printers. The hard part is to find a landing on the moravian land.

The map is a bit intimidating but it is doable. And every time pechenegs are an ally you can venture back to the past and scoop all the remaining resources, and there are a lot of them.

Trying to recreate a creation myth in an RTS engine in just one map is a bit too ambitious for this ancient game. It is interesting but finicky and very long.

Cyprus is absolutely entirely bugged. It is currently being sold for money and they won’t fix it, this is illegal.

I had to use a mod restoring the pre-”patched” version of the map that did work. It’s another scripted scenario. With the tagline “battles of the forgotten” they pulled out literal lionheart. Though i actually didn’t know or remember his adventures with his sister.

First there is a scripted part, then you have to rush targets in a city and you get it as a reward but without peasants. The market does work though, so stockpiling a ton of money and researching everything is the good strategy. Also all of the existing army doesn’t matter since they will not benefit from the upgrades. The next step is to play with naval scripts (one of which was still broken) and then land into a city and rush your hero to one castle and then wait until someone opens the gate to get the second one. After which you gain control of the city and now you need to beat the two remaining opponents. Meanwhile there appears an invisible wall on the sea preventing you from going back.

When it works it’s okay. But then it doesn’t.

Kurikara is a big japanese scenario, but you don’t engage with the civilisation much because you already have a base, just add peasants and spam samurais. Who have broken as hell AI. They should be pretty strong, but while teutonic knights were reliable, samurais just wander around and get stuck on forgetting how to breathe. Or maybe it’s all only in this scenario. Anyway this is the last battle of the forgotten and i didn’t get my achievement. I would be really sad but i saw on the internet the way to fix that.

Win every scenario of the campaign using the cheat code “i r winner”. Then, to trigger the achievement, win any scenario of any campaign without using cheat codes. The quickest scenario is the 1st scenario of the William Wallace Learning Campaign: Marching and Fighting.

I didn’t get Master of the Medieval World as well. So i had to run that process for every scenario of the classic campaigns.

Age of Empires II HD: The African Kingdoms

It features four new civs and they have four new campaigns. For some reason this DLC introduced bad tabulation with pluses and lines in the objectives parchment. Arson is introduced here but i got so used to it i thought that the game always had it. Arrowslits make towers a bit better in most situations but not universally. It makes them stronger against squishy units but worse against ships and rams. The early ships are a great addition. The siege tower was sorely missing setting-wise, but it is of limited usage, it’s even more pointless than in AoE4. It’s awkward to use and isn’t present in the campaigns when you need it. If you have a siege shop you can just make rams, and if you have to rely on the militia line it means you don’t have the siege shop that produces siege towers. Could’ve at least make it super armoured against everything and as a bonus let garrisoned units shoot weak arrows. Could be fun.

The DLC adds many more maps. And the campaigns are somewhat akin to AoK — focused on the specific stories but not over-scripted, and are challenging. But mostly reasonably so. Only a couple of maps went full frontal The Forgotten.

Yodit

Idzi i hliadzi

Ethiopians can 3D print glass cannons, or in the design paradigm of the AoE2 more like glass glass. If you step on it you will get hurt but it’s not the same as being shot at. The HD AI kites with individual archers as good as only it can. All heavy damage units melt them, castles and towers are super effective against them. Only if your economy is extremely strong you can try to just drown the enemy in them.

Or, ethiopians have arbalesters with 18% attack speed bonus. Also stronger siege units mean the usual combination of archers with trebuchets or bombards (or even rams) is even more effective. Scorpions deal some damage too, but as usual their AI is extremely dumb, they are unruly and big and have low HP.

The campaign is based on a story with few sources in the west. Some trader guy tells his son Daniel (?) about the golden veil of zion (?) and how the current queen has become one.

So if you follow the objectives of the first map you get to a nearby village and are instantly flooded with enemies. This is some Age of Kings-tier design. So i went and read the AoE wiki, then used Samuel’s regen and the lack of murder holes to destroy the eastern red camp, run with the princess to the city and then instantly to the win flag. I have no idea what the designers wanted to say with this map, so i find my way to be better.

When you win, a soldier screams that there is hope for Aksum, but the campaign description says that vengeance will come. And wikipedia says that Yodit is famous for destroying Aksum.

The second map is a proper RTS match but with the questing twist of the first mongol map. You need to complete four tasks, while you are under a constant attack by respawning enemies. Nothing that a classic AoE2 tower defence and palisades can’t fix.

On the third map you are supposed to get your economy running and then raid the enemy before they will spawn an army and try to destroy your ally. Or you can fill the allied castle with heavy horse archers and plop one or two castles more nearby and fill them with heavy archer horses. Maybe get some melees for the spare change to raid rams and that’s it.

In the fourth map almost all technologies are available so now you can feel the civ properly. First you need to capture DoW-style nods that trickle the resources, and then you siege the main base.

The last map is a city invasion where instead of wiping out everything you need to sweep the streets leaving the civilian homes intact. The enemy is a bit 3D-printy like Spellforce or the hard AI in AoE3 skirmishes, but it’s fine. The weird tree positions and the terrain make pathfinding outside the city weird on this map.

The story ends on giving another point of view and on the reminder that all “great” historical conquerors are not fun adventurers from the movies, but bloody tyrants, no better than hitler (or pukin). Sic semper tyrannis.

Tariq ibn Ziyad

Berbers have access to three versions of mounted archers but no parthian tactics. Gentoir sound like fun on paper, but it does nothing against buildings, the damage is very low, the minimal range screws their AI even more. Now camel archers are a bit stronger version of horse archers, and can regenerate and can be produced fast.

The  campaign is not orky, but it’s still about bloodthirsty conquerors.

In the first map you arrive on the shore and after some cavalry archer kite of the enemy’s army, you can start to build up. There’s some light defence while you research tech. There are several reinforcements of sizable armies, but they are not strong enough without the support of rams.

The second map starts with an invading army that requires some micro to successfully capture the city. Then you build some economy while being pestered with a lot of small raids. Once a big army arrives it’s enough to almost finish the map, or even just finish it if you play very carefully.

For a Tariq ibn Ziyad campaign the last two missions take place years down the line and are about a different person altogether. Crossing the Pyrenees is another expedition map. You have no heals or siege engines, so you have to kite everything with archers and the hero. And that’s almost mandatory because of the dumb AI, otherwise there will be immense losses. There’s an area with HP-loss gimmick, so it has to be cleared and kited by the hero alone due to his regeneration. Enemies are of course not affected and you can lose your whole army there.

The last map starts with a raid and then you need to build a good defence, the enemies are quite strong and have big bases.

Sundjata

Malians are pretty strong all around. All their tech is very useful and their unique unit is a medium range very high damage archer.

You start the third map with a raiding party and some production buildings, the game is on pause until you free any peasants and then the onslaught starts. So as the game advises you might as well try to destroy all non-peasant and gold-producing camps first.

On the fourth map there are some minor tasks to acquire allies. And one of them started to 3D print gbetos on a cyborg factory for me. For some reason i don’t think breaking the population limit to infinity is the intended behaviour.

On the last map AI forces your hand by starting a wonder, so i just plopped a castle, got some economy, assembled an (HD) pack of gbetos, who don’t need many upgrades, added a couple of cannons and finished the map relatively fast.

The campaign is a bit tough, on most of the maps you need to create a strong defence fast. The story starts as a bit of a poorly narrated mess, but then it gets rather a bit too simple.

Francisco de Almeida

Ah, portugal, such an essential african kingdom. They have stronger ships, better gunpowder accuracy, cheaper units and a weird building generating resources. They are available only in the end-game, take up 20 population, and wiki says half as productive. The only use i see for them is in artificially long battles when you managed to gather all the gold and all the stone on the map.
The campaign’s writing is somewhat messy. Who are all these people? Since when Malik Ayyaz is russian? Well, the last maps get easier to follow and this is the first time, i think, a european power is being orks, instead of asians. You colonise two continents and assault the natives.

The first map starts with a tough defence, then you scout the whole map and restart after memorising it, or just look it up on the wiki. You gather your forces scattered across the map, that are so diverse, that this is one of the most cat herding maps out of them all. They can do barely anything without just spreading everywhere and being stuck in everything Warcraft-2-style.
You destroy three camps and get yourself the economy buildings. But since you are already at the population cap you can just gather all your cats in one place and finish the map. The allied barricades are entirely ignored by the enemy but they really distract your cat army. Navigating the tight streets is a nuisance even if you destroy non-allied civilian buildings.
On the second map you start with a sprawling base, but that would soon be taken from you, limiting your operation to a small island. Your ally doesn’t defend you against anyone, but at least you can cut down the emir’s gardens. With a small trade and a slow economy you can accumulate some army and either help your ally to finish off the objective or do the side quests. Anyway just like the hints say after you finish the main objective you have to finish your ally.
The third map offers a choice between two ways to proceed. It is pretty long and rather nice.
The fourth map is created for feitorias. A lot of slow street fights and a castle offence.
The last map starts with a rather cool task to convert some enemies without killing them. Then a script triggers, all the allies turn to enemies you get overwhelmed, your cannon ships get burned down, your marines get killed, you restart the map, research everything, get all the resources and build castles inside the “allied” bases.

Age of Empires II HD: The Forgotten

The Forgotten campaigns have lots of texts with no voices in the intros. And no voices during the play, which is ass since you have to drop everything to read the lines that appear. The maps are pretty and naturalistic but that breaks pathfinding, the units start to lose their minds in the woods.

Alaric

So before doing the Forgotten campaigns i subscribed to the workshop mod Fixed Forgotten Campaigns for 5.7+ (Alaric, Bari, Cyprus, El Dorado) And judging by the description it does nothing but reverts the last patch that publisher is too lazy to fix after all these years, in a thing they they still sell for real money. And this campaign was not ported to DE but remade anew.

Finally there is a goths campaign, after 20 years i’ve finally seen what they’ve goth. Huskarls should be pretty cool: cheap, big defence against pierce and the siege bonus. But they are not teutonic knights and get eaten by infantry.

After the nonsense of huns in AoE 2 paradigm we just jumped even earlier. But if we consider that the new (well as “new” as The Conquerors from 2000) paradigm for AoE2 is not HRE and feudalism, but the watershed between the roman empire and after the roman empire, then having alaric old yellering it would be a proper point to start the game. In the DE that is.

But also The Conquerors have introduced spanish, The Forgotten italians, The African Kingdoms portuguese. The goths now have nowhere to be, both east and west got duplicates from later times. It’s like mexico vs aztecs in the third game.

But now they are porting the entire AoE into 2DE without changing yamato to the AoE2 ruleset. And with adding pre-Alaric romans as an AoE2 civ despite the alive italians. As a side note after looking up the wiki burgundians seem to fit AoE2 as one of the big successors to WRE.

The legionnaires are visually clashing with AoE2, but in 2DE they made them more period-appropriate and they became entirely not recognizable as romans. Just generic shield dudes, of which this game has plenty.

The first map is a simple tactical one — collect free units and participate in a couple of fights.

The second map talks about getting the land of their own, but you already build a settlement and fill it with castles. You have an army, who could try to kick you out from there? The map has a proper 200 unit limit and a passive enemy AI, until you set off the triggers, but by that time you have like a hundred of huskarls.

The third map is a simple expedition, which ends with a base building. The outro says the line “dark age”. A bit on the nose. For something that wasn’t “dark” nor “age”.

The last map starts with some minor scripted adventure then you can build a base. You can advance to the last age, but you still can’t use the whole technology tree, due to the early age.

This campaign shows a pretty solid example of how to do RTS campaigns. Combining scripted parts with proper base-building makes it less repetitive.

I expected alaric to be the clowning moment of the DLC with its romans, but despite the weird sprites it was a nice campaign. On the other hand that moment is…

Dracula

The campaign is narrated by one of the royal units or his namesake. It doesn’t go for vampires or the defender of christianity tropes. Just a morbid ruler with wins and loses, all the fantasy connections it has are the names of the scenarios.

It’s a super impressive campaign for a mod — many scripts, many civs but as a paid DLC it’s not fitting into the AoE2 paradigm. Instead of playing as new vlachs the campaign flip-flops between ugric magyars and their neighbouring slavs. For some stupid reason in the first mission you play as turks. It’s entirely scripted so there’s no reason for it to not be slavs or magyars like the rest. Like, yeah, vovan is a popular historical personality, but i’d rather have a mono-civ campaign instead. Especially since we don’t have any personal campaigns for many of the civs.

Vlachs are not magyars, but they are definitely not slavs. So one choice would be celts, considering that the word “vlach” was taken from one of the tribes. And celts don’t have a real campaign of their own. Yeah, i get that it’s 300 years too early to represent romanized vlachs during Dracula’s reign. But at least celts have strong castles and have a bonus for herdables.

Since The Conquerors moved the meta from post-romans to kingdoms (awkwardly), vlachs really should be their own civilisation.

If the DLC was to be done properly, they should’ve had some slavic campaign instead. With the post-roman paradigm that would be first bulgarian empire. As a more in-the-line choice it could’ve been kievan rus, second bulgarian empire, croatia or serbia. For a more simple choice we could have had vladimir rus dealing with all the mongol ages, ending with its transition into moscow rus. Kingdom of poland and bohemia would be fine too, but these two were added in the DE. The general slavs still have no scenario or a campaign of their own, because here they are a stand-in for vlachs in a vlachian story.

Or i would take a magyar-focused campaign. Instead of the weird scenario the hungarian invasion of europe could’ve been its own story. These two civs were introduced in this DLC but instead of having their own story they are shoehorned into this one.

Since they removed the cartography this campaign doesn’t have it at all.

The first map is the epitome of this paid mod. It’s over-scripted to hell yet you have to manually click the units to advance the dialogue. This one is not a C&C commando mission and it is not Warcraft 2’s hero escort mission. It’s an attempt to shove a way more modern paradigm into the ancient engine not designed for cinematic linear maps with scripts. When i “first” started the map the ship got outright lost (because no cartography) so i had to reset it. The rest of the tasks are alright. You play as turks, for an insane reason.

In the second map you play as hungarians, for some reason. For the gimmick you can capture and hold independent villages, some of which create some troops sometimes. If you wait long enough the allied AI can win this map for you.

The third map is rather annoying. First there is a pretty cool sequence to capture an enemy’s town. But once you do it after some time, not enough to set up a strong economy, you are being harassed from five sides, and magyars send big raids to kill personally Dracula. You snooze, you lose.

If you try to bid your time, one of the enemies starts to build a wonder. So I basically covered a wood camp with a second castle, rushed to cannon galleons with some support and cleared that. But by that time there is no point in engaging the raiding side-objectives, since your cannon galleons can clear all four support villages and the turkish town is already pretty ruined. You play as mostly slavs, for some reason.

The fourth map starts with an awkward scripted cut-scene. The second phase is you sitting and waiting while your towers kill 500 goons. The third phase is you using regenerating vlad for kiting to kill some troops and to destroy poorly defended buildings with your small force.

The fourth phase is you defending a castle. It’s a little bit more proactive this time. You have to destroy all the siege engines with your troops and then wait for 15 minutes while your towers kill goons. Once the script had stopped the castle kicked out all the units and vlad was stuck, so i had to load the game and wait again. In the last phase you attack-move with the army and flee with your hero back to the same castle. The end.

Cool scripting bruh. For a mod. But as an AoE2 scenario it’s all the fiddling and no strategy nor tactics outside the part where you are killing your own civilians. Chill, arthas.

The last map is pretty too, but the pathfinding suffers a lot. It starts with you having a ton of resources and an access to weak units. You need to tug-of-war-raid small camps 3D printing units. After you win, the scenario lets you keep your army but you are very soon attacked by a big force, and attacked very hard. And they don’t stop coming and they don’t stop coming. So i reloaded and instead healed all my units off the grey monk at max speed and assembled them near the lower castle. Once the script started i instantly sent the units to take the side objective, while focused all my economy on building a castle with murder holes. When it was finished i garrisoned all the remaining archers. With you being limited to low-tier tech you need to defend hard while the ally tries to harm the enemy. When you accumulate the necessary resources for the side objective the script improves everything. With your economy running you can easily clean out the slavs and then 3D print your forces to tug-of-war turks back from where they are coming. Their base is well defended and can melt 60 cavaliers in exchange for a couple of buildings.

There shouldn’t be a dracula story without vlachs or at least celts, and even as is you can’t feel the slavs nor magyars as a civ, because most of everything is script-driven.

Bari

The first level is a tactical scenario through space and time. You have an AoM siege tower that shoots arrows and some army. first you defend your trebuchet while it disassembles a small city. Then you kite some small packs of enemies for many minutes. During the naval portion your warships disappear once you are done with the tower, before you can finish off the enemies. So in the next portion you have a bunch of them still wandering the harbour behind the locked gates and you have to come up with some ᴍᴀʀɪɴᴇs. Then you get enough soldiers and resources to finish the last objective of destroying the castles. The invisible walls are always cancer and the scripting is plentiful.

The second map starts with a tactical adventure. It’s super scripted with manual dialogues, again. And your starting armies are super small so you have to play off garrisoning and local monks for heals. Then you get a city with respawning resources and have to destroy every economic and army building in Bari.

That constantly spams units and easily melts 60 elite cataphracts. Especially with AI units working fine and yours getting stuck and having fits of alzheimer, unable to find their way and be stuck inside terrain. I ended up first clearing the near shoreline. Then spammed the north shoreline with galleys to get ports, barracks and a church. Then accumulated 60 cataphracts and invaded with 60 rams. Constantly making reinforcements i finished the map. The goal says you need to destroy only some buildings, but with how The Forgotten puts buildings inside buildings i had to flatten the entire city.

The last map is a rather simple scripted adventure with you running some errands and going home. Thankfully your crossbows melt everything at slow speed with manual targeting.
It’s very seeneemaateek, but not too strategic.

Cool story bro. The campaign is fun enough but could be even more fun if it was in a game that can support it. It’s all scripted and not very agey or empiresy. You kinda play as byzantine but you sit in an italian city. Only the second map allows you to build something and that is limited too. So it’s cool that byzantine finally got a campaign of their own, but you never properly play as them. Anyway, i am not impressed by the performance of cataphracts, generally. Maybe they can be better with all the upgrades.

Sforza

The first map is another quest. You kite some enemies with your regenerating hero (or heal your army in allied buildings), do some quests and then destroy a castle.

In the second map you kill a couple of bandits, travel across the river and destroy some buildings without resistance. Then you travel across the second river and get some army to defend. After which you need to get back. Meanwhile a big pack of cannon galleons attacks and if they destroy your transports those will respawn. With half the capacity. And then all the galleons move to the spawn point and attack the spawning transports.

So i had to scatter them away wasting transport after transport until i could break the blockade and have barely alive transports near the shore with my troops. I couldn’t go back with these so i crossed the wrong river, hauling 80 troops in packs of five, then sacrificed the transports, moved across the land to the shore behind cannon galleons’ lines and had to haul all troops again with newly re-spawned transports.

Then you get some more resources, four peasants and a lot of buildings. I already hauled my solid army here so i just got some research done, built some fire ships and stuffed some towers with ranged units. The defence was pretty easy, but some of the attacking units got lost and i couldn’t find them. So i’ve sent the peasants that i’ve kept alive to very slowly gather more gold and researched spies. After i finally saw the last remaining enemies and finished them, the map showed a weird scripted cutscene and that’s the end.

It should’ve been very easy and fast, but i had to circumvent several poorly set up scripts and it took a lot of time.

The third mission starts with a faux-stealth segment. You can do the objective or explore and push funny buttons to hinder your enemy. If you are petty you can also hunt down all the pikes. If you are extra petty you can heal near the monk and aggro most of the deployed enemy forces with kiting. If you are extremely petty you can change your stance with the orange and destroy most of everything.

In the second stage you are finally given peasants and can play italians strategically. You have twenty minutes to come up with a defence plan. There are some dork-ships in the left corner and if they are killed you will lose. The purple guy often sends there small forces and when the timer runs out seven cheat ships with a lot of HP and attack will come for the allied ships.

The third stage just asks you to go to the initial enemy camp and clear it out.
The map is pretty big and it’s filled with units and separate trees. So your units will be pretty demented and will be stuck everywhere. But if you survive the second stage — it’s pretty easy.

The fourth mission is a simple one. You get gold over time, acquire ranged units and bombards, and clear out several passive camps. After destroying three castles there also will be a small fleet, and purple will start to produce a lot of rams if you didn’t finish it off. The galleys will be dealt with by towers, especially if you garrison them from the nearby archery range. The cannon galleons should be hunted down. The AI will mercilessly kite you with crossbows that outrange both your ranged units, so dealing with the cyan archery ranges is a priority.

In the last mission you finally play a proper RTS, even if without some of the tech. Very soon after you get your peasants the AI starts to strongly insist on offering you to get bent and even spit-roasted. So i restarted, rushed to set up a castle with murder holes, filled it with archers, built a second one and defended for some time. Once i traded (f/w) for more stone i built two towers to finish up the gold. There’s probably a faster way but that was my way. After getting the necessary research and accumulating a full pack of skirmishers i started to PTFO. I was expecting a backstab but i didn’t know what exactly to expect or the directions of attack. After finishing three objectives a timer starts and a giant army pours towards your base and toward the right corner of the map. If i knew i could’ve filled it with castles, but instead i had to scramble up defences. Once the timer runs out the last objective is to just bring your hero to the flag.

Well, it’s not voiced, but it was a fun enough campaign and a fine story. It could’ve been just touched up, instead they entirely absolutely re-made it for the DE.

Prithviraj

The first map is very impressive. It’s short but it offers three ways to finish it. I went to visit the love guru. The wiki says that other goals are a small-scale RTS attack to destroy a castle, and a kiting adventure against wild animals. With DE outright scraping it, the definitive edition is not that definitive, but just one of the alternatives. If you want to see all the campaigns you have to also play the HD. At least for all The Forgotten content. And Rise of the Rajas have much more beautiful maps than the cartoony iOS look of DE.

You start the second map with three built bases but few peasants, no economy, and a lot of enemies. Your goal is either to conquest several of them or complete their quests. It’s a fun map, even if The Forgotten pathfinding is going insane here.

The third map starts with a scripted stealth section. And i think i skipped the second part, because spies revealed some setup in the right corner, but i just went directly home. Then you get most of the city under your control. There’s an amount of wood, but very little gold, yet the enemy wants to ruin your life pretty fast. I traded for stone got a castle, got all the relevant upgrades and started to fill the castle with elephants from trade. Once i was defended i made a pack of skirmishers and cleared out the gold mines. The countryside is filled with even more quests. The secondary quest with relics is weird. You rob and destroy their temple and that’s why you are their friend now? The last thing to do is just to destroy two castles.

The last mission starts with a battle where you can command only one small pack and you have to make it count because your victory would be almost pyrrhic. Then you are given few peasants and should build your base. From time to time you will get free units which would be a great army in AoK but which can’t even survive here. You have to flatten two modded strongholds which 3D print units faster then you, disregarding the cost. They can cut through your full 60 pack of archer elephants supported by 10 monks. I think you can weaken the left stronghold by doing several quests. And while the goals put the right stronghold as a secondary objective your primary still demands to kill the dude inside. The right city can melt a pack of imperial camels or a pack of champions without too much damage. I’ve used an onager to cut through the forest behind the right city, built three full castles at the entry near my base, put trebs in the clearing to get to the towers and production buildings, and still the stream of elephants was often slipping through to hunt my trebs. In a war of attrition with my very strong economy i finally finished it off after significantly hurting it with trebs. And then the script blocked the trading path between my market and the allied base. Theoretically i could pivot into trading by sea, but i already had a lot of peasants on that side so i just built another market. With 1,5 packs containing handcannons and 15 monks i just finishing off the weakened left city. Good thing the AI is somewhat passive. It defends with whatever it has, but if it was made to attack the player’s base in full 3D printing force it would be a very hard map, instead of a long one.

The story-cards tell an old-fashioned passion over sapience love story, and it all was making me remember Bajirao every time, despite it being about a different ruler. It’s a fun enough campaign properly balancing scripted and RTS parts in proper dosage.

El Dorado

In the first map you play as dirty invaders. You do some quests, rob some temples, then kill 100 attackers and that’s it.

The second mission is divided in two. In the first part you can ride with two phat conquistador heroes to clear out the strugglers. The keyword is “two” the archer is named, but he doesn’t regenerate and is mission-critical. In the second part you kite a small army out of a village with your hero and do two quests. For the third quest you need to defeat a 3D printing enemy with strong defences while having a very small pop-cap and being stuck in the second age. I had to build several archeries right near the enemy walls to print my units faster than it.
And yet the hardest parts of this map are kiting a stupid boar without it being killed, and collecting llamas without your allies eating them.

The third map is an ambitious serious waste of time. You have to navigate a nightmare jungle labyrinth filled with angry girls trying to kill you. Your food resource is dwindling which leads to your troops losing  health until death. You have a choice between clicking peasants to get some food or maybe killing them to get more. There are some quests but this was fairly annoying so i didn’t explore the whole labyrinth. Instead of dealing with food scarcity i just parked my troops near the monk and some of them have survived the hungry times, while i’ve used the regenerating hero to find more peasants and quests. I suspect you don’t even need your troops since i reached the goal only by transporting the hero.

The last mission is the first one where you can build. But you have no gold and no trade. So you can either conquer some spots on the right where they 3D print units, have fortifications and a swarm of angry ships against your transports, or you can go do all the quests on the left. The goal is to get 15 upgraded ships. So either you can go all-in and PTFO after finishing the quests, or you can spend the quest gold to upgrade skirmishers or spearmen and launch an invasion. With such limited amounts of gold you still can’t research and try everything.

It’s an ok story, but most of it is told through stupid journal entries. It’s short and easy and you play as bad guys, but come on, everyone in the Age of Empires is a bad guy. It’s even called “empires”. There was no reason to just remove this campaign instead of polishing it up and adding an inca campaign.

— / • / —

After i lowered my expectations by playing Warcraft 2 and AoE instead of mememberring, and after i conquered Age of Kings and was impressed by Rise of Rajas i can’t be too harsh on it anymore. But AoK is still trash and the achievements are insane, The Forgotten is not voiced and thoroughly bugged for your money. I think about entirely replaying everything in DE. If they’ve fixed AoK campaigns, then that thing can actually be a good game with its massive size. Despite the remade Rajas maps looking bland and them not fixing formations and pathfinding.

Compared to DE, HD still has the original big and unusual maps and campaigns of The Forgotten DLC, even if it has to be modded; the pan-indian civilisation; and several really cool technologies that were nerfed or removed in the DE. So no, DE didn’t make HD obsolete, DE is an additional AoE game, it doesn’t have anything from the real The Forgotten. And its game as a service nature added some new problems, but that’s for later, if i survive.

You fall to your knees and catch your breath
You’re finally safe from Shia LaBeouf…