Age of Empires

aka: Age of Empires 1, Age of Empires: An Epic Game of Empire-Building and Conquest, Age of Empires: Bâtissez votre civilization., Age of Empires: Ein Spiel über große Zivilsationen und Eroberungen, Age of Empires: Un juego épico para crear y conquistar imperios, AoE, Dawn of Man, Diguo Shidai, Microsoft Age of Empires, Tribe
Moby ID: 384
Windows Specs
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Description official descriptions

In Age of Empires, players are able to manage a tribe with their mouse. Command them to build houses, docks, farms, and temples. The player advances their civilization through time by learning new skills. The game allows the player to advance through the Ages: The Paleolithic (old Stone Age), the Neolithic (new Stone Age, or the Tool Age), the Bronze Age, and the Iron Age. If the player would rather get away from the historical aspect, the game offers a random terrain generator and a custom scenario builder.

The game has four resources: food, obtained by either hunting, foraging, fishing, or farming; wood, which must be logged by hand; stone, which must be mined; and gold, which can either be mined or obtained through trade with other players.

As a real-time war game, Age of Empires naturally revolves around gathering resources and producing units.

Spellings

  • マイクロソフト エイジ オブ エンパイア - Japanese spelling
  • 世紀帝國 - Traditional Chinese spelling
  • 帝国时代 - Simplified Chinese spelling

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Credits (Windows version)

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Reviews

Critics

Average score: 82% (based on 40 ratings)

Players

Average score: 3.8 out of 5 (based on 164 ratings with 11 reviews)

Old, but still good RTS.

The Good
Age of Empires contains 36 missions divided to 4 campaigns. All of them has good historical description. Moreover, you can play on randomly generated map. You can set numbers of enemies, resources, civilisations (there are 12 civilisations to choose - each of them has different line-up of units and technologies) and more. There are various ways to win - you can destroy all your opponents, capture all artefacts, build a wonder and even more.

Obviously, you can't win without army - you can train axemen, horse archers and hoplites. Additionally, you can construct chariots and catapults. Your army can be upgraded by researching technologies. You should also build towers and walls to protect yourself from enemy's attacks. And believe me, computer player is hard to destroy and likes to attack you frequently.

Naturally, there is multiplayer. Even today you can find somebody to play it using TCP/IP or Internet. Graphically the game looks good, despite being only a 2D game.

The Bad
Unfortunately, controlling your army is difficult. There are no formations, and your soldiers can spread out or lose their way in narrow places.

In AoE also appears frequently very annoying situation - you have to destroy every unit of your enemy to win, so if there's single enemy unit and it's on the other side of map, you have to find it and destroy it. You can spend a lot of time searching of this unit...

Your units lack of proportions - for example, your stables are as big as your catapults, and your little transport ship can carry 5 elephants bigger than ship itself. There are 4 sets of buildings instead for 12 civilisations - Egyptian, Greek, Mesopotamian and Asiatic. So, Phoenicians use Greek tileset, despite the fact that they were unrelated to Greeks in any way, and Sumerians use Egyptian tileset. Moreover, units' appearance doesn't differ in the game, so you can train Greek hoplites when you are playing as Japanese.

Game uses a CD audio music or MIDI music, but watch out - some re-releases don't contain CD audio music, and MIDI music isn't good enough to listen to.

The Bottom Line
If you like RTS games, you should play it - it's one of most influential games in the history, and it's very entertaining, despite few flaws. Just download a patch, disable music and set the highest resolution. You can still download a trial version, which contains 6 missions unavailable in full version.

Windows · by Sir Gofermajster (485) · 2009

Another great conquer the world game.

The Good
This game was very, much a Civilization with improved graphics. I was really, surprised at the time that Microsoft coould put out a game like this. A very, good game with excellent graphics and sound for the time.

The Bad
The peasants were pretty stupid, and path finding for the AI was always a problem.

The Bottom Line
Advance from a stone age tribe to a classical empire, beating the tar out of your neighbors along the way.

Windows · by Jeff Watts (18) · 2001

Admirable, but not truly lovable.

The Good
The production values in Age of Empires (AOE) are simply outstanding. The graphics are quite luscious, and we're not just talking about the terrain tiles, units, and structures here. There are all kinds of brilliant little touches, from scrumptious-looking flora (palm trees, berry patches, etc.) to exotic fauna (deer, elephants, lions, crocodiles…even birds soaring overhead!).

The soundtrack is also splendid, with appropriately sweeping music and juicy sound effects (including the unit responses made popular by WarCraft II). I especially appreciated the sounding of the trumpets that alerts you to battle action occurring somewhere.

Equally impressive is the instruction manual, which not only does an adequate job of explaining the game, but is also full of historical background info on the civilizations that appear in the game. It takes me back to the glory days of MicroProse and its thick, beautifully-written and -illustrated manuals. Which makes sense, as AOE designer Bruce Shelley previously worked with Sid Meier on a few MPS classics, including the almighty-and-everlasting-king-of-them-all Civilization.

Finally, I have to admit that AOE includes a long list of features that I wanted to see in an RTS following the overwhelming success of Command & Conquer and WarCraft II. Most obvious is that the subject matter is human history, not the cheesy sci-fi/fantasy of the aforementioned games – a huge improvement in my book! There are a slew of playable civilizations instead of the then-standard two sides. There are campaigns, scenarios, and (best of all) random map and deathmatch options which generate a new playing field every time. I don't much like set scenarios and campaigns in real-time strategy games (historical wargames are another matter); I prefer the infinite variety of random maps. I'll admit right now, then, that I didn't play through all of the AOE campaigns. If I wanted to play a story, I'd get a Sierra or LucasArts adventure! Strategy games should let you make your own story, and AOE does just that.

Still, I give AOE kudos for having the scenarios/campaigns for those who want them, as well as what seems to be a quite robust editor. Same goes for the multiplayer options. I'm a solo player, so I have never used them, but they were a no-brainer to include given this type of game.



The Bad
Remarkably, once you get past all of the slick presentation and the impressive laundry list of features in AOE, you eventually discover that the actual gameplay isn't all that good.

Command and control issues are guaranteed to sink any real-time game. AOE has MAJOR issues. The unit pathfinding AI is absolutely appalling, regardless of the setting you select in the Game Options screen. As a result, the player feels more like a diaper-changing, hand-holding babysitter than a god or a general. Making matters worse, the pretty—but also pretty useless—isometric perspective can actually get in the way of selecting and moving your units.

The worker units are quick to abandon their tasks when attacked, but they don’t resume their work when the threat is over. They pretty much just stand in place, slack-jawed, presumably waiting for the Stone Age Godot. And heaven help you if your worthless workers should complete the task you assign to them, as they are usually too incompetent to take the intiative and find something productive to do with themselves.

You can build walls, but you can’t build gates. You actually have to manually delete a section of wall in order let your troops enter and leave your own compound. Give me a break!

The military units are generally cool, but they seem a bit unbalanced. The siege weapons seem especially overpowered, given their very high hit points/power/range. As a result, walls and towers aren’t as effective as you might think they should be. Granted, this is hardly ruins the game, but it does make AOE seem biased against the defensive player.

There are no build queues, which just heightens the game’s overly ADD-friendly, clickfest atmosphere (although AOE is admittedly deeper and slower than most RTS games before it). No unit formations, either. I don’t care if those weren’t considered standard features in RTS games at the time. They should have been standard all along.

Not a single one of the victory options feels truly satisfying. Pure conquest mode drags things out long past the point where you know you’ve won. Building a wonder certainly looks impressive, but it means you can pretty much play a whole game without much contact with outside civs—pretty boring, really. The artifact and ruins options almost seem like cheating. Maybe that’s why there is no High Score list or Hall of Fame. No need to preserve your achievements if they weren’t that big a deal in the first place.

Farms frequently "go fallow," which means you constantly have to rebuild them manually. This gets to be ridiculous. It doesn't add anything to the game but busywork, and it isn't even really in keeping with the "realism" found in the rest of the game. In Real Life, buildings rot and need repair over time, but AOE doesn't force you to fritter away your time rebuilding them!

You can build docks to trade with other civilizations for resources (well, gold, at least). This sounds like a good idea, but it is usually more trouble than it is worth. And sometimes the other civs don’t even build docks, which renders the whole trade issue moot!

There is a dearth of information. I find this especially disturbing given that this is allegedly a strategy game. How the heck am I supposed to plan and manage when I have almost no data to work with? How many houses have I built so far? Farms? Archers? Hoplites? Who knows?! Apparently I'm supposed to just "guesstimate" these details. Yuck.

Before playing AOE, I thought I liked Warcraft 2 in spite of its shallowness. After playing AOE, I think maybe I loved Warcraft 2 because of its shallowness. Or rather, because of its elegant simplicity. AOE’s designers seemed obsessed with piling on more stuff, to the general exclusion of making genuine improvements to the RTS genre (which has always needed a lot of improvement!). This isn’t a crime or anything, but it is disappointing.



The Bottom Line
I wanted very badly to love AOE. I respect and admire it, but do I love it? Well, no. I like it as a friend, nothing more. In short: a beautiful but flawed game, and something of a missed opportunity.

Windows · by PCGamer77 (3158) · 2005

[ View all 11 player reviews ]

Trivia

1001 Video Games

Age of Empires appears in the book 1001 Video Games You Must Play Before You Die by General Editor Tony Mott.

Demo version

The demo released is worth getting, even for those owning the full game. It includes a tutorial campaign featuring the Hittites and two maps not present in the full version.

Documentation

Being a RTS, it's surprising the printed manual in the UK release only covers the game basics, but the game includes a large online help file worth hundreds of pages of both game and historical information. Guess it's true that digital information does save trees.

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.

Sales

In 1998, Age of Empires has won both the Gold- and 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 200,000 units (Platinum) in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. As the Gold-Award is not counted into the Platinum-Award, both awards total in between 300,000 and 700,000 units sold.

Awards

  • Computer Gaming World
    • March 1998 (Issue #164) – Outstanding Multiplay of the Year
    • June 2001 (Issue #203) – Introduced into the Hall of Fame
  • Game Informer
    • August 2001 (Issue #100) - #81 in the Top 100 Games of All Time poll
  • GameSpy
    • 2001 – #14 Top Game of All Time
  • GameStar (Germany)
    • Issue 12/1999 - #14 in the "100 Most Important PC Games of the Nineties" ranking
  • Interactive Achievement Awards (Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences)
    • 1998 – Computer Strategy Game of the Year – Won
    • 1998 – Interactive Title of the Year – Nominated
  • PC Gamer
  • April 2000 issue - #21 in the Readers All-Time Top 50 Games poll

  • Verband der Unterhaltungssoftware Deutschland (Entertainment Software Association Germany)

    • 1998 - Gold Award for selling more then 100,000 units in Germany, Austria and Switzerland
    • 1998 - Platin Award for selling more then 300,000 units in Germany, Austria and Switzerland

Information also contributed by Luis Silva, Maw, PCGamer77 and Xoleras

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Contributors to this Entry

Game added by MajorDad.

Macintosh added by Jeanne.

Additional contributors: Ummagumma, Andrew Hartnett, Unrealist, Unicorn Lynx, Maw, Havoc Crow, formercontrib, Zeppin, Litude, Paulus18950, Patrick Bregger, Plok, Rik Hideto, Victor Vance, FatherJack.

Game added November 5, 1999. Last modified March 6, 2024.