Age of Empires II

• 1. Introduction

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  Outside Microsoft's offices in South Korea, street sellers once offered pirated copies of Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings. The 1999 real-time strategy game, built by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft, had leaked in unfinished form before its release. Pirate sites passed those builds around, and illegal copies were sold across the Pacific Rim. Ensemble Studios was disappointed, but the black market hints at how badly people wanted to play. In the game, you guide a medieval civilization from a handful of villagers to a fortified empire while rivals compete for the same land. How did a sequel that ran a full year behind schedule turn into a classic? What made its economies, armies and computer opponents work? And why do players keep returning to it?

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• 2. The Missing Year

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  Before the first Age of Empires was even finished, Ensemble Studios had already signed a contract with Microsoft for a sequel. The designers chose the Middle Ages as a logical step forward from the ancient world of the original. They wanted the wide appeal of the first game without building a near copy of it.

  The plan called for a finished game within a year, reusing the Genie engine and much of the earlier code. Several months in, the team saw that they could not reach the quality they wanted on that schedule. They asked Microsoft for another year.

  As a compromise, Ensemble built Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome, an expansion pack that was easy to produce and could ship for Christmas 1998. To hit the new deadline for the sequel, the studio hired more programmers, artists and designers. Players had long complained about unit path-finding in the original, so the team completely redesigned the engine's movement system. In the end the game took two years, 50 full-time employees and a budget under $10 million.

  The studio also wrote a new terrain system, with 3D presentation far beyond the first game. Programmer Matt Pritchard felt the artists had grown across two games and said the new game showed off their improved talent. Yet Pritchard also complained that the art team still had no tool for managing its assets, while other departments gained new tools for design and play testing.

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• 3. Opponents and Patches

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  Industry veteran Mario Grimani led Ensemble Studios in building a new artificial intelligence for The Age of Kings. Critics had faulted the first game because its computer opponent played fair, never giving itself extra resources or other advantages a human could not use. That made it easier to beat than opponents in many rival strategy games. The studio wanted a stronger system that still refused to cheat.

  The sequel also added a triggers system to the scenario editor. Triggers show messages or set off actions when pre-set events occur, and the improved AI strengthened the editor as well. In the single-player campaigns, the AI and the triggers worked together regularly.

  Matt Pritchard had complained after the first game that Ensemble had no way to issue patches. Several bugs in Age of Empires had allowed extensive cheating in multiplayer, and Microsoft promised the studio a patch process for the sequel. When The Age of Kings shipped, several bugs needed immediate attention, yet the process was not ready. The first patch arrived 11 months later.

  Pritchard also criticized Microsoft's DirectPlay networking interface, saying its lesser-used parts were poorly documented and tested. Communications programmer Paul Bettner would try to solve a problem, and the DirectPlay developers would tell him it could not work because of known bugs that nobody had documented. Despite all this, a demo went out on the 16th of October 1999, with the learning campaign, a sample random map game and play over the MSN Gaming Zone.

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• 4. Ages and Economy

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  A typical random map game of The Age of Kings starts in the Dark Age with a Town Center, three villagers and a scout. Some civilizations begin with more villagers. From there, a player climbs through the Feudal Age and the Castle Age to the Imperial Age, which echoes the Renaissance. The Castle Age stands for the High Middle Ages, and together the four Ages span a 1,000-year timeframe. Each advance opens up new units, structures and technologies, but the player must first construct certain buildings from the current Age and pay a sum of resources.

  Villagers do the work of the economy, and they come in male and female versions that perform identically. Four resources drive everything. Food comes from hunting, berries, livestock, farming and fishing, whether from the shore or from boats. Wood comes from felling trees, gold comes from mines and from trade, and stone comes from stone mines. Gatherers drop off their loads at depository buildings: the town center, mining camp, mill and lumber yard.

  The marketplace lets a player sell wood, stone and food for gold, or spend gold on the other resources. Prices shift with every transaction. Markets and docks can also earn gold by sending trading carts or cogs to foreign markets and ports. The farther a unit travels, the more gold it brings home, and once a destination is chosen the trading continues automatically and indefinitely. Trading with an enemy's market is allowed, but opposing units may attack the traders.

  None of this can grow without limit. A population cap, set between 25 and 200 in steps of 25, controls how many units a player can field, and houses, Castles and Town Centers raise the usable ceiling.

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• 5. Armies, Monks and Wonders

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  Five kinds of military unit fill the battlefield of The Age of Kings: infantry, archers, cavalry, siege weapons and naval units. The three human classes follow a rock-paper-scissors pattern. Infantry hit buildings hard but struggle against cavalry, so the spearmen and pikemen who counter horsemen carry attack bonuses against them. Each civilization also gets one or two unique units, which are more powerful but obey the same pattern.

  The monk is the odd one out. Monks can convert enemy units to the player's side and heal allies. They also carry relics to a monastery, where the relics steadily produce gold, and more relics mean faster gold. Once one player holds every relic on the map, a timer appears for all players, and holding them to the end wins the game.

  Two management tools debuted in this game. The idle villager button points out workers with no assigned task. The town bell sends every villager into the nearest Town Center, Castle or tower for safety. Garrisoned units, especially archers, make those buildings fire more arrows, and a Town Center cannot shoot at all without someone inside.

  Castles can build trebuchets, train a civilization's unique units and fire volleys of arrows. A Castle normally requires the Castle Age, although some game options hand out one as early as the Dark Age. After reaching the Imperial Age, a player can build a Wonder, an expensive non-military structure shaped like a landmark of that culture. In many modes, building one starts a countdown. If the Wonder survives, its builder wins.

  Conquest is therefore only one route to victory. Deathmatch mode starts everyone with large stockpiles, and in regicide each player gets a king, and killing every rival king wins.

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• 6. Peoples and Campaigns

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  Thirteen civilizations stand in four architectural families. The Britons, Celts and Franks build in a Western European style. The Goths, Teutons and Vikings share a Central European look. The Byzantines, Persians, Saracens and Turks use Middle Eastern designs, while the Chinese, Japanese and Mongols have East Asian ones. Each people has its own economic, technological and military strengths, a team bonus in team games, and sound bites spoken in its native language.

  Stephen Rippy directed the soundtrack and has since done so for every game in the series. For in-game music, his team blended elements from many cultures into one mixed sound. The pre-game music was written to suit each individual civilization. Campaigns about historical figures promised a theme at least rooted in the figure's own culture.

  Five campaigns come with the game, each centered on a different civilization. The William Wallace campaign for the Celts serves as the tutorial, teaching movement, gathering and army building during the Wars of Scottish Independence against King Edward I Longshanks. In the Frankish campaign, the player leads Joan of Arc against the English in the Hundred Years' War. The Saracen campaign follows Saladin as he repels Crusaders, and the Mongol campaign traces Genghis Khan's conquest of Eurasia.

  The fifth follows Frederick Barbarossa, whose Teutons expand the Holy Roman Empire. Campaigns are numbered by difficulty, with Wallace the easiest and Barbarossa and Saladin the hardest. In the Wallace and Joan of Arc campaigns the player can control a unit based on the namesake, while the others use guiding spirits who give orders for the army's commander.

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• 7. Sales and Verdicts

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  In January 2000, only three months after launch, Microsoft reported two million copies of The Age of Kings shipped. The game topped sales charts in the United States, Japan, the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Australia and South Korea. In the United States alone, it sold 469,376 copies by the end of 1999, earning $20.2 million. That was the second-highest domestic gross of the year, behind only SimCity 3000. It stayed on top 20 lists for two and a half years.

  In Germany, the game debuted at number one on the Media Control charts in October 1999 and had spent 17 weeks in the rankings by March 2000. It earned the VUD Platinum award within a month, a mark of 200,000 sales across Germany, Switzerland and Austria. By the end of February 2000 it had reached Double-Platinum at 400,000. In the United Kingdom, ELSPA gave it a Platinum award for at least 300,000 copies.

  Metacritic's aggregate of 21 critics gave the game 92 percent positive. Eurogamer's Geoff Richards observed that its list of improvements over the original ran longer than a page. GamePro singled out the idle unit button and town bell. GameSpy's Carlos Salgado liked the player profiles and customizable hotkeys, and IGN noted that villagers now helped with defense and even combat. AllGame's Michael L. House said the native-language sound bites built an atmosphere that suited the era.

  Not every reviewer agreed. PC Zone called it essentially an update of a two-year-old game, and AllGame found units hard to tell apart. IGN wondered why the studio could not hire an actual Frenchman for the French accent, and argued the civilizations were too alike to match the battlefield impact of StarCraft or Tiberian Sun.

  The awards followed. GameSpot named it Strategy Game of the Year for 1999, and PC Gamer US called it the year's Best Real-Time Strategy Game, saying it polished the genre and then polished it some more. At the 3rd Annual Interactive Achievement Awards, it won Computer Strategy Game of the Year and Computer Game of the Year, and tied with Thief: The Dark Project for Outstanding Achievement in Character or Story Development. IGN later ranked it 53rd of all time in 2005, and a 2023 GQ poll of games journalists placed it 98th.

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• 8. Afterlives

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  In 2001, LucasArts released Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds on the same engine, heavily influenced by The Age of Kings. GameSpot said Empire Earth borrowed most of the controls and interface features of The Age of Kings, and some keyboard shortcuts as well. Rick Goodman, who had designed Age of Empires and The Rise of Rome, designed Empire Earth. GameSpot's Scott Osborne argued that Cossacks: European Wars drew heavily on the same gameplay.

  The Conquerors expansion arrived in 2000 with unique technologies for each civilization and five new peoples. The Aztecs and Mayans represent the New World, with their own architectural style, and the Huns, Koreans and Spanish joined them. Later the original game and that expansion were packaged together as The Gold Edition. Konami released a PlayStation 2 port in 2001 for Europe and 2002 for Japan, and the Macintosh version also came in 2001. A Nintendo DS spinoff followed in 2006, and In-Fusio made a simplified Java mobile version in 2005.

  The MSN Gaming Zone, which hosted online matches, closed on the 19th of June 2006. Services such as GameRanger picked up the community afterward. In 2005, Age of Empires III moved the series to the European colonization of the Americas. Age of Empires Online arrived in 2012, but executive producer Kevin Perry said new additions were no longer cost effective, and its servers shut down on the 1st of July 2014.

  Hidden Path Entertainment began a high-definition remake in 2012, led by original lead programmer Matt Pritchard. Age of Empires II: HD Edition appeared on the 9th of April 2013 with Steam multiplayer and widescreen support. Metacritic scored it 68 out of 100 from 20 critics, who found it changed little, though they praised Steam Workshop integration.

  Three expansions followed. The Forgotten, based on a fan-made mod called The Forgotten Empires, added the Incas, Indians, Italians, Magyars and Slavs, and raised the population limit from 200 to 500. The African Kingdoms, released on the 5th of November 2015, brought the Berbers, Ethiopians, Malians and Portuguese. Rise of the Rajas, on the 19th of December 2016, added the Burmese, Khmer, Malay and Vietnamese, each with a fully voice-acted campaign.

  Microsoft announced a Definitive Edition at Gamescom on the 21st of August 2017, with 4K graphics. It launched on the 14th of November 2019, and between that release and the lockdowns of 2020 the game saw a resurgence in popularity.

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