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MacSoft, $39. Requirements: PowerPC 603e 150MHz, 32MB RAM, System 7.5.3+, 70 MB HD.. For more information, visit MacSoft at http://www.wizworks.com/macsoft/.
Review by Bill Jahnel
Age of Empires is a hard game not to like. But it’s an even harder game to love.
Age of Empires was originally written for the PC and MacSoft has done a superior job of translating this best-seller. AOE has elements of Civilization II, but really parallels most closely with real-time strategy games like Warcraft and Starcraft. It has some ideas that were novel at the time AOE was released. It has robust campaigns and interesting variants between different civilizations with unique or missing units that affect single and multiplayer strategy. But AOE suffers from a selection interface and unit AI that is primitive by today's standards and the lack of connectivity between Mac and PC players limits the major reasons to choose this title over rival offerings in the RTS market.
Conquest of the Old World
In Age of empires, you become the controller over one of the Earth’s early civilizations and guide them to technological and military superiority over a period of multiple ages. The move from one age to another is predicated on your hoarding and spending of various resources. Those resources are gathered in ways that are similar to most real-time strategy games, except in two implementations: One, the resources you gather are much more diverse than your average RTS game (food, wood, stone, and gold) and two, gathering food resources can be done through a number of different ways (fishing by shore or boat, hunting, gathering berries, and eventually, with the right technologies, farming.)
The rest of the game plays relatively similarly to any RTS game you’ve played before: you move to gather the most resources the quickest, pump out peasant-type units, and build up military and technology while scouting out for your enemies. Military units in AOE are all historically-based and come in three flavors on land (Calvary, infantry, and archer units) and siege units that can be either land or water-based.
Age of Empires also has one "magical" unit, the Priest, who can heal your units or chant and convert other enemy units to your side.
The units are well-balanced with the exception of the siege engines, which specifically are most dangerous on water since their speed, maneuverability, and hit points make them less fragile than their land-based siege counterparts.
However, its when you actually turn to play the game that Age of Empires is showing its empirical age.
The Age of Warcraft 1.5
There are three major problems in Age of Empires. Two of them frustrate the single-player experience, and two of them frustrate the multiplayer experience. Among the three problems, they effectively stamp Age of Empires with the wax seal of mediocrity.
Problem number one: Control and AI of your units.
Age of Empires units prove themselves, when under your command, to be less bright than the dumbest peon unit of Warcraft II. Villager units have an incredibly small range of awareness and often idle themselves when within sight of another mass of resources to continue their task on. Farmers whose farms are exhausted sometimes decide to help out the neighboring farmer Brown, whereas other times they just stand idly by discussing their hoes. . . however you wish to interpret that. I have had infantry units on the bottom of a hill and bowmen standing on the top of the hill to use a height advantage who seemed more interested in picking their noses than plucking their bowstrings. Pathfinding is rudimentary and getting caught on stone cliffs or rivers is not uncommon for units with long ways to travel.
Part of the problem lies with the Age of Empires control interface, which was nice when AOE came out but lacks some of the rudimentary expectations of a modern RTS game. For example, if you have a crowd of bowmen hanging around in the midst of axemen or if you have two different types of chariots, you can’t double-click on a type of unit and have all of those units be selected. While you can pre-select a series of units to be a group and recall that group, in the heat of battle I’d rather be able to quickly be able to select all of my archers or artillery and get them the hell back; similarly, I want to be able to grab my Calvary and have them break into the archers and priests.
Your units also get confused on the way to their targets. They sometimes seem to get sidetracked by inconsequential things, and they can be banging on a building to bring it down and never notice that a villager with a club is slowly pounding them to death. Unit awareness was not predictable, so that sometimes it seemed they knew what to do and other times their awareness was totally lacking.
This interface problem is compounded with a lack of other features that help a gamer Age of Empires does offer some attempts at helping this problem out. Units can be assigned waypoints to try and not have them get stuck on the scenery on their way to a battle. New military units, when completed, make a sound that indicates they have been produced. But these small amenities pale in comparison to those things that are lacking. I kept on wanting to hit the spacebar to center the screen on the last noise made on the screen so I could get to a battle or new unit quickly, a la Starcraft. Often in the middle of defense of my town it was too hard to distinguish villagers from bowmen and I found my people running hither and yon in chaos. A lack of easy visual discernability between archer chariots and hand to hand chariot fighters made mobilizing a combined arms chariot force frustrating. And villagers who are hunting have to be tended to and babysat by you in order to get them to another task when they have finished gutting the carcass they’ve been working on. Sadly, this makes the most innovative part of Age of Empires (the multiple options in gathering food resources) also one of the most tedious in real games.
Problem Number Two: Enemy AI.
I have heard folks talking about how smart the Age of Empires enemy Ai is, and I cannot help but wonder if they are playing the same game I have been playing. I think the problem lies in that most people do not register the difference between tactical and strategic AI: AOE has good single unit tactics, passable to rotten combined arms tactics, and mild to rotten strategic AI.
When a single unit attacks one of your units of the same strength, the computer is very likely to win. The reason for this discrepancy is a simple but important tactical control the computer exerts over each of its individual units, particularly its archer / siege units. The computer can relatively quickly gauge that its archer has a range of 3, 4, 5, or however many steps from your units, move to the edge of that range, fire, retreat, and repeat. Since your control of your units is (charitably) less precise, the computer can get more mileage for its money per ranged unit. This is where the single unit tactics are the strongest. You see an almost exact replication of these tactics when the computer uses its Priest units, since the routine is relatively the same.
Combined unit tactics are somewhat less impressive. In scenario-based games, if the computer was pre-loaded with certain units combinations (such as it was given a boat with a siege weapon, a calvary unit, and a foot soldier or two) the computer was able to mobilize these units with moderate effectiveness. However, when called upon in later stages to find and attack you, the computer generally just throws everything it has at you all at once. It also instantly seems to communicates the knowledge of your position and maps to other computer AIs as if they had the Writing advance from the Bronze Age. Thus the world often comes knocking on your doorstop very early in the game and the challenge is to hold off what are often superior forces (in the case of a campaign scenario, ones that were already given to the computer, or in an individual map, the superior numbers of all of the various AIs working together) until you can tecnologically lap the competition and start wiping them out.
Strategically, the game’s AI engine suffers tremendously. It seems to start with a basic decision of how it wants to engage in conquest (heavy on priests, or heavy on calvary, whatever) and then sticks to that single-minded goal without adaptation. Once it finds what it deems the quickest or most efficient attack vector to your position, the computer will not deviate from attempting to use that very same path of attack no matter how well fortified that position has become. For example, I was on a map where a river separated me from my opponent and there were multiple places where the computer could choose to cross. Both of the computer opponents who were left kept attacking from the south and never chose to attack from the west, even though I was less well-fortified from that direction. Later in the game the computer has problems when it wishes to expand its gathering. Gold, a previous material in mid-to-endgame, can be harvested faster if you build a storage pit next to the mines. Yet more than once the computer insisted on creating a long, vulnerable line of villagers walking tremendous distances back to the computer’s main city. (In fact, that’s how I once located one of the gold mines I had missed . . . the computer probably could have gotten much more of it scot-free but it insisted on marching a villager line across the map leading em right to the gold mine and him) Sometimes the computer also inexplicably ignores a handy lode of resources not too far from its position.
Does this mean that Age of Empires is not a challenging game as a single-player game? The single-unit tactics and better control of the computer over its units do create an early game challenge, as there are pitched battles for you just to survive or at least hide from your opponents. But a few strategic towers and holding off the computer long enough made for a sense of inevitability for me in mid to endgame.
Problem Three: DirectPlay.
Age of Empires has one redeeming factor: the darn thing is still HUGE on the PC side, despite its age. Ergo, one of the values of owning AOE on the Mac would be that it could act as a doorway to a vast number of opponents. Would be, that is, were it not for Microsoft, who has conveniently not made their game connectivity technology of DirectPlay available to the Mac platform, forcing MacSoft (and any other group translating a title using DirectPlay) to come up with their own, unique connectivity scheme.
Bottom line: you can only play with other Mac players on the Internet. And if you want a matching service to find other players, look for third-party solutions such as GameRanger (http://www.gameranger.com) since you won’t find any included in here. (To their credit, MacSoft has made AOE more gameranger friendly with the 1.2 patch to AOE.)
Aging Empires
Age of Empires is not a bad game. But to use its own metaphors, AOE is a Tool Age game with Stone Age unit control and connectivity in an Iron Age world of real-time strategy games. There is much here that is charming and interesting, including AOE’s takes on the rise and fall of historical empires. If the main reason I purchased games was based on their charm, the rating for Age of Empires would be higher. But games are meant to be played, and compared to the even-now bloom-off-the-rose age of Starcraft, Age of Empires makes $40 seem a little steep a price to play for a game that is merely quaint. |
