Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings

aka: AOK, Age of Empires 2, AoE2
Moby ID: 368
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

In Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, the player takes control of one of thirteen civilizations, including the Chinese, Goths, Britons, and Vikings, among others. The player starts with a handful of villagers, through expansion and careful handling of the economy, the player can advance up to the point where powerful war machines and well trained masses of troops will be the player's to make and control.

There are three distinct ways to play, one of which the object is to hunt and kill the other player(s) king, however there are a lot of options for each, anywhere from what type of map to start on (including coastal, gold rush, arabia, and rivers) to what the maximum amount of units are allowed.

The player can also play online at the Zone vs. up to seven other players, or via a TCP/IP connection.

Spellings

  • 世紀帝國 II:帝王世紀 - Traditional Chinese spelling
  • 帝国时代II:帝王时代 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

488 People (171 developers, 317 thanks) · View all

Design
Lead Programming
Programming
Lead Art
Art
[ full credits ]

Reviews

Critics

Average score: 88% (based on 62 ratings)

Players

Average score: 4.0 out of 5 (based on 247 ratings with 9 reviews)

Fun....in the beginning

The Good
This game needs a lot of strategy. I enjoy games that take thought in order to win, rather than just total hack-and-slash. Without thought, you will probably lose.

The graphics are very crisp and nice, and I enjoy the various ways the troops die. I prefer the nice look of the Vikings, and the interesting Aztec/Mayan buildings.

The sounds in the game are sound good, and give the impression of the sound of battle as troops fight.

By far the best thing about the game is the map editor. It is very fun to create a featureless desert, with two huge armies in the middle of the map, resulting in a quick, but violent, battle. The test feature allows you to give your map a test run to see how it works, so that you don't have to leave the editor and create a new game to try it.

The Bad
After playing for a little while on one level, the computer just repeats itself and fails to do anything new. You get bored and just resort to cheats to win, and do the same in subsequent levels.

The Bottom Line
Buy this game if you enjoy large scale strategy battles.

Windows · by Boris Stovich (26) · 2004

One of the best RTS games of all time

The Good
A great mixture of Warcraft II and Civilization. Great graphics, nice music and very deep gameplay make this one of the best RTS games ever. Many civilizations to choose from, lots of units and many little facets in the game make for a long entertaining and sometimes frustrating game experience. The interface is complex, but still easy to learn. It's mainly a multiplayer game, though. There are single player campaigns and there are random games against computer opponents but they are only there to train for the battles on the net.

The Bad
The computer AI has some weaknesses like the computer's settlers stopping their work and following a unit endlessly when being attacked by a scout. Marvels can make easy wins for fairly poor players. The game frame rate drops down a lot even on faster computers when you move large numbers of units and can make huge battles a pain.

The Bottom Line
A good mixture of developing a civilization, exploring and real-time battles. All in all a great game especially in multiplayer mode.

Windows · by Robert Teichmann (415) · 2000

The best RTS since StarCraft.

The Good
Ever since Dune II, the conventions of the Real-Time Strategy games have been pretty much set. You gather a lot of resources, build some military to defend with and advance your technologies, then build a LOT of units and fling them at the gate. They are usually 2D, isometric, with good production values, and online play. Very few RTS games (such as Homeworld) manage to break this mold in any way. And while AOE2 doesn't exactly break new ground, it manages to execute this formula better than any game since StarCraft.

Produced by Ensemble Studios, the takes as its setting the medieval lands of Europe and Asia. The folks at Ensemble deserve credit for their exhaustive research and commitment to historical accuracy in this game. While I don't think there were many epic skirmishes between the Japanese and the Britons, it's a refreshing change to have something other than plasma beams or exploding dwarves in an RTS.

You start off with a Town Center, a couple of villagers to gather resources with, and eventually, buildings that produce infantry, archers, cavalry, and siege weapons. The elaborate chess system of strengths and weaknesses between the varieties of these units is amazing. For instance, a special kind of infantry is very good against cavalry, but is helpless before archers. But a special archery unit specializes in killing standard archers, and those are in turn easily disposed of with a siege weapon. Very intricate. Thrown into the mix are Monks, your standard healers, except they have the amusing ability to "convert" enemy units, and eventually enemy siege weapons and buildings.

The isometric landscapes of AOK are very good-looking, and actually play active roles in your game. For instance, you may need to use a certain siege weapon to bust down the forest separating you from the enemy. Archers firing from cliffs receive a bonus, and vice versa. And be sure not to herd your sheep too near those wolves. The interactive environments are very detailed. And although only four types of architecture (Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Arabia, and Asia) are used, each of the buildings is to scale and beautifully rendered.

The sounds in the game are spot on. A nice touch is that the farther the action from the center of your viewscreen, the weaker the noise. And the elegant music tracks range from nondescript to amazing. Very solid audio.

And while most RTS games only give you 2 or 3 sides, AOK offers no less than 13 different civilizations. While there is only one unique unit per civ, they are made to play very differently by giving them certain percentage bonuses to certain types of buildings or units, and taking away their ability to produce others. For instance, the Goths have powerful infantry, and villagers that hunt exceptionally well. But since they are unable to build advanced defenses, they are one of the worst races in the game. Very intricate.

The single-player campaigns are very well-done, telling the stories of actual heroes from the era, including Gengis Khan, Joan of Arc, and my personal favorite, Saladin. The tales fit surprisingly well in the context of the game itself, and the objectives are challenging without being frustrating.

Also included is a powerful Campaign Editor, which lets you design and customize every aspect of your campaign. Virtually everything the designers could do, you can, with the nifty Trigger system and even the ability to add custom .avi intros and endings to your episode.

The Bad*
First off, this is a Microsoft game, so the MSN Gaming Zone is your one and only option for multiplayer. Expect nothing even close to as efficient as Blizzard's Battle.net. And once you get online, multiplayer games usually devolve into a race to see who can build the most Town Centers. It's just not very fun.

And the enemy AI isn't much of a help either. Once you've played a few games on each difficulty setting, you can easily spot patterns in the computer's thinking. However, Ensemble helpfully included a how-to guide for programming your own AI, so some alternatives should surface via the Internet.

The voice acting for the single-player campaigns in universally horrible. The William Wallace training campaign in particular sticks out. Why can't they just hire a Scottish guy to do the voices?

And while Ensemble put "Advanced" commands that tell your units to auto-patrol, escort, and the like, they have a very thrown-in feel. The unit AI, nothing to write home about from the start, gets really hilarious when a unit is told to guard something.

Finally, the micromanagement of the economy, while a nice novelty at first, gets tedious once your focus shifts from foraging berries to building an unstoppable military force. You're expected to take time off from coaching a battle royale against the enemy army to go back and tell your villagers to reseed farms. More unit AI would be appreciated. [This was fixed in the excellent Conquerors expansion pack to the game, but this annoyance in particular I would have liked to see addressed with a free patch as well, rather than gouging us another twenty bucks.]

The Bottom Line
Many of AOK's flaws are just as bad or worse in other RTS games, and the nearly flawless presentation of the game, combined with a robust gameplay system, make AOE2 a winner, and the best game we've seen from MS since Minesweeper.

Windows · by Anatole (58) · 2001

[ View all 9 player reviews ]

Discussion

Subject By Date
Missing Unnoficial Add-Ons? Photon Fighter Dec 22, 2023
Partial credits? Mtik333 (29526) Jan 6, 2022

Trivia

1001 Video Games

The PC version of Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Cut content

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.

Dry Dock Technology

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

EULA

The EULA of this game includes a clause which prohibits the use of Age of Empires II in a nuclear plant.

Online servers

The game's online servers (which were hosted on MSN Gaming Zone) were shut down on 19 June 2006 in the wake of MSN Games' shift from "CD-ROM matchmaking service" to casual online games.

Pre-release

Before release, multiple pre-release versions were released on Internet warez sites. According to Matt Pritchard, they usually were only one or two weeks older than the latest in-house versions. It seems they came from various sources, including press previews, Microsoft test versions and even from Ensemble employees. They were also multiple attempts of hacking Ensemble's server and network.

On a lighter note, the German magazine GameStar bribed one of the official webmasters with "German beer" for some exclusive screenshots.

References

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.

Sales

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.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 2000 (Issue #188) – Best Weapon of the Year (for the Trebuchet)
    • March 2000 (Issue #188) – Best Interface Design of the Year
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – #16 Top Game of All Time
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • 1999 - Best Game (Editors' Vote)
    • 1999 - Best Game (Readers' Vote)
  • PC Gamer
    • 1999 - Real-Time Strategy Game of the Year
  • PC Player (Germany)
    • Issue 01/2000 - Best Real-Time Strategy Game in 1999
  • Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland (Entertainment Software Association Germany)
    • 1999/2000 - Gold Award for selling more then 100,000 units in Germany, Austria and Switzerland
    • 1999/2000 - Three Platinum Awards for selling more then 200,000 units in Germany, Austria and Switzerland (Every award is counted individually

Information also contributed by Heikki Sairanen, Ingold, jeremy strope, Maw and Xoleras

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    The webmasters show a lot of dedication of their site, they even took a visit to the ES office. Updated regularly and has contests for war stories and other things. Nice looking ubb forums in which to post.
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  • IGCD Internet Game Cars Database
    Game page on IGCD, a database that tries to archive vehicles found in video games.
  • King Arthur's Castle - Camelot
    Updated regularly and a nice stylish design. The team of webmasters seem to be very dedicated and it has shown so far.
  • MrFixitOnline.com
    Probably the best site to improve your game skills. Many tactics, a strategy forum, recorded games and much more.
  • Planet Age Of Empires
    A very good website with tons of info and files, including recorded games, maps, scenarios, and AI editing tools. Also has a large forum.

Identifiers +

  • MobyGames ID: 368
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Contribute

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by Rynok.

PlayStation 2 added by Xoleras. Macintosh added by Jeanne.

Additional contributors: MajorDad, P Boughton, Robert Teichmann, Dr. Elementary, Unicorn Lynx, Dapy, Maw, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, Plok, Victor Vance, FatherJack, Flapco.

Game added November 2, 1999. Last modified March 3, 2024.