Age of Empires II: The Conquerors

The Good
My first reaction upon hearing of The Conquerors was "an Age of Kings expansion pack? That game was practically perfect! What could they possibly add?" There were no glaring bugs or horrible gameplay features that needed fixing, and even on the content side Age of Kings felt far more complete than most historical strategy games on the market.

The sad thing is, many expansion packs are nothing more than glorified patches, released to fix bugs that shouldn't exist in the first place at additional expense to the user. With The Conquerors, Ensemble Studios delivers a true expansion loaded with millions of small improvements and additions. None of which the game couldn't have survived without, but that's a testament to Ensemble Studios insane drive to improve upon perfection.

There are three new story-driven campaigns with seven missions each, and another one containing 10 miscellaneous missions. You can play as the Aztecs, and change history by defeating the Spanish (this is an Ensemble Studios quirk, allow the player to be the underdog), join Attila the Hun on his rampage across the Roman Empire, or fight the Moors as El Cid Campeador. All of them are quite good and improvements upon Age of Empire II's campaigns. The population limit (annoyingly low in the original) has been raised and there's more variety in the missions than simply building up from scratch and destroying the enemy.

The most striking addition to the game is you can now play as Mesoamerican civilizations such as the Aztecs and Mayans. There is a whole new art set for these cultures, as well as new terrain (you can play in South-American jungles, with jaguars instead of wolves and turkeys instead of sheep). The Mesoamerican civilizations can not build horse units but have very robust economies to compensate.

The other new civilizations are Spanish (who have the powerful Conquistador unit), Huns (who do not need to build houses and have a great speed advantage because of this), and Koreans (who are a very good defensive civ with bombard towers, cannons, and greater stone mining abilities). All of these civilizations slot in perfectly with the existing civilizations, and are neither hopelessly weak nor unfairly overpowered. For advanced users, The Conquerors allows you to extend the lifespan of the game by creating your own random maps (the data is now stored in text files that can be edited in Notepad), meaning you can change how many trees, sheep, deer etc there are, change how hilly the terrain is and whether it's snowing or not, and even mess around with the player's starting positions so that all players in the game spawn right next to each other. I recall there always were a few gamers who thought the vanilla Age of Kings random maps were a trifle unfair, but the game's new functionality should allow users to iron out even the smallest of imbalances.

Other changes include smarter villagers (as soon as they finish building a resource dropsite like a lumber camp or gold mine, they immediately go to work), the ability to queue up farm production (basically, when a farm is exhausted you can make villagers automatically replant it rather than doing this yourself) and smarter siege weapons (catapults no longer auto-fire if they could hurt your own troops).

All of these things basically continue the original design goal of Age of Kings: create a game as user-friendly and micro-free as possible. The thing I liked most about Age of Kings was you were free to plan large-scale strategy and economic development rather than getting bogged down in the minutiae of running a town, and The Conquerors makes this easier than ever.

The Bad
Nothing. The game was rock-solid to begin with and The Conquerors only improves it.

The Bottom Line
One of the few expansion packs worth full-game price. There's a huge amount of value in The Conquerors. It's incredible that they could (and would) take a near perfect game and make it better.

The Good
the 5 new civiliztions and the modifications to the existing civilizations help to balance the gameplay. The new gameplay modes adds new twists to the formula giving the game even more replay value. The new campaigns are unique and exciting. the minor tweaks with the villagers, after they build a mine or lumber camp they automatically start harvesting resources, are also a welcome change. The ability to ato-queue farms also is great for the end game when you're trying to vanquish your foes

The Bad
Some of the civilazations are still not as strong as most of the others.

The Bottom Line
This is 1 of the best RTS games ever made. It does everything right.

The Good
This time, we get 4 new campaigns, 5 new civilisations (two of them, Aztecs and Mayans, use their own tileset) and 11 new units (most of them are unique units). All civilisations (even those from AoK) have their own special technology, unavailable to other civilisations. There are also 3 new gameplay styles in Random Map - Defend a Wonder, Wonder Race and King of the Hill.

The Conquerors contains few interface changes, such as reseeding farms and more intelligent villagers (for example, after building Lumber Camp they automatically start woodcutting).

Graphics and sounds remain unchanged from Age of Kings. Encyclopedia is now much bigger.

The Bad
Unlike Rise of Rome, there aren't any units which radically change gameplay (like Scythe Chariots and Armoured Elephants from RoR), and player who choose Aztecs and Mayans due to historical reasons can't build Stables, so they lack of good counterpart of Mangonels and Trebuchets. And once again, eastern Europe is omitted in game.

The Bottom Line
Well, if you liked Age of Kings, you will also like The Conquerors. You should at least download a trial version to give it a try.