Age of Kings

[Ben]

Lewin hates this game...

I don't though! I brought the game over to my grandparrents one day, and my uncle saw it. My uncle (who was staying for the holidays at my grandparrent's house) decided to hook up the computers and play mulitplayer. Thus, I have played AoK for some time now, which is why I havn't been on the KaM forum a lot lately.

ANYWAY heavengames has a great AoK site for anyone interested. http://aok.heavengames.com Check it out. I recommend Tsubasa's Tale, Sabatos Holy Grail, A Call to Arms, and Piece by Piece, the Third.

All of these require the conquers edition.

Anyone ever play these?

This has to be one of the classics, I'd definitely recommend this to anyone who plays rts games. Out of the Age of Empires games I'd have to say Age of Conquerors is the best (that is my opinion though) which is the expansion for Age of Kings. The first Age of Empires is ok, better though with its expansion Rise of Rome and from what I've seen of AOE3 I don't really like, its majorly changed ruining its continuity. I want to get the now official 2nd expansion of Age of Kings, Age of Forgotten Empires which apparently adds a lot more including: 1000 population limit, siege towers (map editor only), palisade gates and 5 new civilisations plus more.

[Ben]

Totally agree. TC is much better than AoE3. As for Age of Forgotten empires...I don't really like it. It sure does a lot in the way of balance, but I don't like the artwork and the widescreen patch for it looks worse than in The Conqueror's 1.4RC patch. Other things that are missing in Forgotten empires that were added in the 1.4RC patch are multi-building queuing, villagers who gather food from hunting won't drop it if they switch to farming (for example. All food is treated like this now), and new triggers in the editor. It is for these reasons that I still like The Conquerors more. Hopefully they add these to FE someday

I'm hoping they release AoFE on disk.

[Ben]

Not to be pessimistic, but that's very unlikely. The nature of the expansion is founded deeply in a fan-made mod, so it seems strange that they'd make a disk for it. In addition, PC gaming is heading to all-out virtual for the game purchasing.
I've noticed you seem averse to downloading things off line

There's always hope. I prefer a hard copy to have on hand.

[Ben]

If I'm not mistaken, AoFE HD costs money, but the free version (created by fans for the original game) is, well, free. You could download it on put it on a DVD-R or DVD-RW; then you'd have a hard-copy.

Well it can be downloaded as a mod for free, I should probably think about getting it sometime.

@Ben,

I haven't played KaM in a long while, as I have been playing Age of Empires 2 (from Steam). The AI is much improved since the original version of The Conquerors!

Just in case you're interested, below is a replay of me playing single player (of course..., right!) 4 vs 4 in Acropolis. I have no idea how others pan out with the new AI, but this is one of those abnormally difficult scenarios which I thought was worth sharing.

Acropolis 4v4

I play with the following parameters in single player:

I used to play the original game on the Hardest difficulty 3 vs 5 (and sometimes even 2 vs 6 on the Mediterranean map), but since the AI is so much better now, I just play on Hard and 4 vs 4!

[Ben]

If you're interested, check out the AIs "Brute Force" and "Renaissance Bot" from the workshop. These AI personalities are stronger still, but even they are no match for "Barbarian" from original AoE II. The fan-made patches for the original AoE II allow for some very clever AI scripts that put all but master players to the test.

If you're interested, check out the AIs "Brute Force" and "Renaissance Bot" from the workshop. These AI personalities are stronger still, but even they are no match for "Barbarian" from original AoE II. The fan-made patches for the original AoE II allow for some very clever AI scripts that put all but master players to the test.

I am very interested. (Five star ratings!) I went to Steam and got both of them. I will try them out soon. Thanks!

I tried both of them out. I didn't notice much of a difference between the HD AI and "Brute Force". I did notice that "Renaissance Bot" seems to like to attack you with a big army all at once rather than constantly like the HD AI.

I don't care for "Brute Force", as it actually seems to be easier with my type of play; and "Renaissance Bot" seems to be of equal difficulty to the HD AI, in my opinion.

Also, I switched my Malians AI ally civ with Magyars, and now me and "my team" are undefeated so far.

Again, thanks for letting me know about these!

[Ben]

I'm disappointed that they did not work out for you. I have found that these AIs work better than the standard AI.

If you ever pull out original AoE II someday, please try Barbarian. I know that you're more of a singleplayer guy, so Barbarian might not interest you as much since it really does play like a human in many ways.

Age of Kings is my preferred AoE game and I played it for a while. AoE3 is decent but imo not as good.