Friendly splash damage from your catapults has been annoyingly kept, but battering rams can now be loaded with infantry for increased speed, making them more of an asset in battle. Even fights are usually fun as long as they’re not too massive (and thus harder to control), and the game is a blast when played against live opponents. Building drop-off points near wood, gold or stone deposits will now make villagers instantly go to work, and you can also queue up farms for re-seeding, essentially leaving your town on autopilot for considerable spans of time. And an altogether much too long and grinding campaign mode, with missions taking forever to complete even on the lowest difficulty level (which is now ‘Standard’).ĭespite these harsh complaints, I can’t pass over the fact that both the interface and gameplay have seen improvement. Along those same lines we still have some frustrating CPU behavior – lone scouts just wondering into your camp even as far as the Imperial Age, and who just run around pointlessly despite being directly attacked your base getting harassed by single enemy units who immediately get wiped out, pointlessly distracting you. The AI is the perfect multi-tasker in this confusion, continually targeting the right counter-units and churning out fresh troops, and is still extremely stubborn in both campaign and skirmish maps in admitting defeat (you always get that one villager slipping away and building anew). This is an almost universal issue with the RTS genre, but it could have been easily fixed with a few added AI options.Īny semblance of order brakes down the minute you assault a town. One recurring issue is the manner in which your men scatter and attack anything in sight when fights erupt, particularly enemy buildings during raids, breaking formation and turning large battles into chaotic clickfests where nothing really makes sense. But the singleplayer as a whole is still a tough and grueling affair, with some scenarios degenerating into hour-long grinds. It’s an overall impressive package, with spoken introductory briefings making each campaign feel like an embelished historical narrative, complete with twists and turns and broken alliances. In this set, the Battle of Agincourt and the Japanese naval invasion at Noryang Point rub virtual shoulders with Charles Martel’s defense of Tours and Erik the Red’s acquisitive interests across the Sea of Worms. The fourth, titled Battles of the Conquerors, is a set of eight unrelated missions, each covering a certain pivotal moment in world history. From the trials of El Cid and Cortez’s invasion of the New World to Attila’s flagrant disregard for Roman borders, three of these scenario-sets cover extended military and colonization campaigns. Given the game’s title, there should be little surprise that its four new campaigns feature some of history’s most notable land-grabbers. It also corrects a couple of questionable design decisions from the original, but altogether fails to fix some of the more pressing parts. Given the amount of stuff featured in the original, The Conquerors is indeed an amazing product as far as expansion packs go, offering enough new missions, units and crisp visual flair to practically qualify as the next game in the series. Was this expansion as significant as Rise of Rome was to the original Age of Empires? What did it add, and how much? How did it change the gameplay, and was the unit balance as keenly honed as a Japanese sword? Could it revitalize the game for those who had drifted on to other, newer titles? Did it enhance multiplayer in any appreciable way? Above all, was this “good enough” to be an expansion to Age of Kings?įor those with short attention spans, the quick answer is “yes, but with a few reservations”. As the follow-up to a classic, it was immediately held up to the harsh light of scrutiny and prodded with jaded comparisons. This is particularly true for add-ons to poor or mediocre games, which only their dedicated fans want to play, but in some ways these titles are the lucky ones. Age of Empires II: The Conquerors has some pretty neat expansions.Įxpansion packs have it tough. download full version, found originally in our GamesGames Gallery. You can play Age Of Empires 2: The Conquerors without the CD in the Drive and you can enable this with game fixes.
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