Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings is a real time strategy video game developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft. Released in 1999 for Microsoft Windows and Macintosh, it is the second game in the Age of Empires series. The Age of Kings is set in the Middle Ages and contains thirteen playable civilizations. Players aim to gather resources, which they use to build towns, create armies, and defeat their enemies. There are five historically based campaigns, which constrict the player to specialized and story-backed conditions. There are three additional single-player game modes, and multiplayer is supported.
Despite using the same game engine and similar code to its predecessor, development of The Age of Kings took a year longer than expected, forcing Ensemble Studios to release Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome in 1998 instead. The design team focused on resolving significant issues in Age of Empires, but noted on release that some problems remained.
Reception of The Age of Kings was highly positive. The significant number of new features was praised, as were the gameplay improvements. The Age of Kings received “universal acclaim”, according to video game review aggregator Metacritic. Three months after its release, two million copies of The Age of Kings had been shipped, and it topped sales charts in seven countries. The game won multiple awards and is today considered a classic of its type, having had a significant impact on future games in its genre. The original Age of Empires II and its 2000 expansion pack, The Conquerors, were later released as The Gold Edition. Age of Empires II is now considered one of the greatest games ever made.
An updated high-definition graphics version of the game, Age of Empires II: HD Edition, was released in 2013. The HD Edition includes the original game and the expansion The Conquerors, as well as new campaigns, civilizations, and updated graphics for high-resolution displays. Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition, a remaster, was released in November 2019.
Gameplay
Age of Empires II is a real-time strategy game that focuses on building towns, gathering resources, and creating armies to defeat opponents. Players conquer rival towns and empires as they advance one of 13 civilizations through four “Ages”: the Dark Age, the Feudal Age, the Castle Age (being the High Middle Ages), and the Imperial Age, reminiscent of the Renaissance—a 1000-year timeframe.[4] Advancing to a new Age unlocks new units, structures, and technologies, but players must first build certain buildings from their current age and then pay a sum of resources (typically food and gold).[5]:31
Civilian units, called “villagers”, are used to gather resources; they are either male or female—gender does not affect their abilities. Resources can be used to train units, construct buildings, and research technologies, among other things; for example, players can research better armour for infantry units. The game offers four types of resources: food, wood, gold, and stone. Food is obtained by hunting animals, gathering berries, harvesting livestock, farming, and shore fishing and fishing from boats. Wood is gathered by chopping down trees. Gold is obtained from either gold mines, trade or collecting relics in a monastery, and stone is collected from stone mines. Villagers require checkpoints, typically depository buildings (town center, mining camp, mill, and lumber yard), where they can store gathered resources.[6]
Each civilization can purchase upgrades that increase the rate of gathering these resources. Players can construct a marketplace for trade; players can trade wood, stone, and food for gold, and use gold to buy other resources. Market prices fluctuate with every transaction.[7] Furthermore, markets and docks can also generate gold by using trading carts or cogs which are used to visit foreign markets and ports; once they return to the player’s market/dock, gold is added to the stockpile. The amount of gold a trade unit earns on each trip is related to the distance it had to travel to a foreign market; more gold is earned on longer trips. It is possible to trade with enemies’ markets or docks, but the player’s trading units may be attacked or destroyed by enemy units in the process. Players do not need to keep trading manually, as once they select the port or market the trading units infinitely continue to trade.
There are five campaigns in The Age of Kings, containing historically based scenarios such as Genghis Khan‘s invasion of Eurasia, Barbarossa‘s Crusade, or Saladin‘s defence of the Holy Land. In the Joan of Arc and William Wallace campaigns, the player can control a unit based on its namesake; in others, players take orders from guiding spirits representative of the army’s commander.[8]
Additional game modes are available to the player in The Age of Kings.[9] One mode, random map, generates a map from one of several randomly chosen map generating scripts, with players starting in the Dark Age with a Town Center, three villagers (or more depending on civilization), and a scout unit. The game can be won through military conquest, by constructing a special building known as a Wonder and keeping it standing for a certain amount of time, or by obtaining control of all relics on the map for a set amount of time. Deathmatch mode allows players to begin with large amounts of resources, creating a focus on military dominance, while in the regicide mode each player is given a king unit, winning by killing all of the other monarchs.
Units and civilizations
Every player has a limit to the number of units they can create—a population limit—but may not immediately use the entire potential population.[7] The population capacity, which can be capped at anywhere between 25[10] and 200 in intervals of 25,[11] is based on the number of houses, Castles, or Town Centers—the main building in a player’s town—which have been built. The Age of Kings introduced two significant new features for unit management: the idle villager button, which helps players identify villagers that have not been assigned a task, and the town bell, which sends all of the player’s villagers into their Town Center, Castle, or tower for safety;[12] units garrisoned within these three buildings, especially archers, increase the building’s firepower (towers fire more arrows with units garrisoned inside) including the town center, which cannot fire anything at all without someone garrisoned there.
The Age of Kings also includes five types of military units: infantry, archers, cavalry, siege weapons, and naval units. Certain types of infantry, archers, and cavalry are “counter units” with special defenses against other types of units. The three human classes of military generally follow a rock-paper-scissors model. For example, infantry are generally powerful against buildings but weak against cavalry, thus the infantry counter units—spearmen and pikemen—have attack bonuses against cavalry.[13]
Each Civilization in The Age of Kings has one or two special units that are exclusive to that Civilization. For instance, the Britons have access to longbowmen, an archery unit with increased range. These Civilization-specific units are generally more powerful, but still follow the basic rock-paper-scissors model. The monk is a special kind of military unit that has the ability to convert enemy units to the player’s civilization, and to heal allied units. Monks are also used to collect relics, which accumulate gold once held in the player’s monastery—the more relics are captured, the faster the gold is accumulated. Collecting all relics on the map is one method by which a player can win a random map game, depending on the victory setting.[14] Once a player has all the relics in their monasteries, a timer is shown to all players. If an opposing player does not destroy a monastery holding a relic after the set time, then that player wins.
Players choose to play as one of 13 civilizations split into four architectural styles—Western European, Eastern European, Middle Eastern, and East Asian—that determine building appearance in-game.[15] The civilizations have varying strengths and weaknesses with regards to economics, technology, and battle, and each has access to one or more different, very powerful “Unique Units”.[16][17] Additionally, each civilization provides an individual team bonus in team games.[18] To add variety, each civilization has a set of sound bites in its native language that are uttered by units when selected or instructed to perform a task.[19]
Buildings
The buildings in The Age of Kings are split into the economic[20] and military buildings categories.[21] Buildings can research technologies and upgrades that increase economic, military or unit-based efficiency, as well as provide resources for the player.[20]
The most important economic building is the Town Center, where villagers are created, all types of resources can be stored, some technologies are researched, and the player can advance to the next Age. The Town Center can fire arrows at enemy units if villagers or archers are garrisoned while enemy units are within range.[22] Other economic buildings available include storage buildings for resources, farms, docks (the dock may also produce several military ships), and houses to support a higher population.[23]
Military buildings include unit-producing buildings such as barracks, archery ranges, stables, and castles, as well as defensive buildings such as walls and towers.[24] Military buildings can perform research to improve the abilities of military units, increasing their strength, defensive capabilities, or other attributes.[21] Castles are a key offensive and defensive building as they can build trebuchets, train the civilization’s “unique unit/s”, and fire a hail of arrows at enemy units within range, with garrisoned units firing extra arrows.[25] Castles can only be built after a player has reached the Castle Age, although in some game options, players begin with an already-built castle as early as the Dark Age.[26]
After advancing to the Imperial Age, players can also construct a Wonder, an expensive non-military building. On many gameplay modes building a Wonder triggers a victory countdown; unless it’s destroyed within a certain timeframe, the building player wins. Every civilization’s Wonder is in the shape of a landmark unique to that historical culture.
Single player campaigns
The Age of Kings shipped with five campaigns, each having multiple playable scenarios that progress a story line, and each centered around a different civilization. The Campaign of William Wallace (Celts) serves as a tutorial campaign, and teaches the player how to move units, gather resources, and build armies to defeat the enemy. It takes place during the Wars of Scottish Independence against the English, led by Edward Longshanks. In the Frankish campaign, the player leads Joan of Arc against the English in the Hundred Years’ War. The Saracens campaign features Saladin and his efforts to repulse Crusaders in the Middle East, while the Mongol campaign documents Genghis Khan‘s conquest of Eurasia; finally, the Teutons campaign reveal Frederick Barbarossa‘s ambitious expansion of the Holy Roman Empire. The campaigns are sorted numerically to distinguish difficulty—the William Wallace Campaign being the easiest, and Barbarossa being the most challenging.