Trivia
In the German gaming magazine GameStar (issue 03/2000) Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings was named as "Best Game in 1999". In the following issue it received the same award in the reader's voting.
In the German gaming magazine PC Player (issue 01/2000) Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings was named as "Best Real-Time Strategy Game in 1999".
Between 1999 and 2000, Age of Empires II (PC) won a single Gold- and three Platinum-Awards from the German VUD (Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland - Entertainment Software Association Germany) for selling more then 100,000 units (Gold) and more then three times 200,000 units (Platinum) in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. As the Gold-Award is not counted into the Platinum-Award, all four awards total in between 700,000 and 1,700,000 units sold.
Contributed by
Xoleras (66951) on Apr 09, 2008.
Age of Kings, during its development, was subject to many changes. Some things that were cut out of the final game are...
- A fifth resource: ore. Was removed because it made the game too complex.
- Outlaw units. These were intended to function like wolves, guys that belong to no player and attack you if you get near. Were removed because they were too annoying.
- Sea walls. These were supposed to be built by ships and could withstand a good amount of damage. I'm not sure why they weren't included.
- Dolphins: you were supposed to be able to fish these like any other sort of fish. Microsoft forced Ensemble to remove them!
The interesting thing is, all of those things and more are still hidden in the game, buried inside the .dat file. If you reverse-engineer the game, you are able to access them, and add them to custom scenarios. Templates have been released that contain all of them.
Contributed by
Maw (827) on Oct 21, 2004.
The MSN Gaming Zone is notoriously easy to hack, and cheaters are rife in Age of Kings games. A programmer named Tormentium released an unofficial patch for AoK (1.0E), which is supposed to make the game harder to hack. Too bad it doesn't work.
Contributed by
Maw (827) on Aug 24, 2004.
This occurs during the Saladin Single Player campaign, during the mission in which you secure Jerusalem. If you strike down the Knights Templar leader (a hero unit), he declares, "If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you can possibly imagine!" This is obviously a reference to Obi-Wan Kenobi dueling Darth Vader in "Star Wars: A New Hope".
Contributed by
Ingold (125) on Jul 06, 2002.
Was awarded real-time strategy game of the year by PC Gamer magazine for the year of 1999.
The EULA of this game includes a clause which prohibits the use of Age of Empires 2 in a nuclear plant.
Dry dock technology decreases the amount of gold a trade cog brings back home. The reduction can be at least 33% in some cases.
It seems to be balanced with the ship speed increase so that the productivity of trade cogs remains about the same as before dry dock research. In some cases I had slightly better gold income (gold/second) before the research of dry docks than after. I did not make a thorough testing with many different distances, but what I did was test it in a deathmatch game too, to be sure it does happen in real games.
Source - From a post by SimMayor realsimmayor@geocities.com
on the AoE2.com forum
http://www.coolboard.com/frame.cfm/mb=902460962910918
