Here's a post from the Qt3 Settlers 7 thread that explains what's great about it better than I could. I will say it's on my shortlist of strategy greats. I wish there was a demo you could check out.Originally Posted by unic
I found Stronghold, and especially Crusader, to be really fun games that hit an ideal balance between city building and RTS combat. Check out the demo.
I think I may have actually put too much weight on your request for "base-building" RTSes and have recommended a bunch of games that make base building the star of the show. For combat RTSes from that last few years that include some form of base building, the best would have to be RUSE and Supreme Commander 2.
Another AoEO question:
The treasure chests on scenario maps - do people bother with them? I often find that when I've finished the scenario, there are still several chests left to find... it is worth the trouble? Or is it better to move on to the next scenario?
Depends on if you want the loot or not. I never finish a map until I've collected all of them (with a couple of exceptions, usually defense maps where sallying out of my base to take them is prohibitive) and you can get some very nice items from those chests. Otherwise you have to rely on quest rewards and buying items yourself.
There's no right or wrong answer, really. If you don't feel it's worthwhile, then you don't have to bother.
I logged back into this game after a friend asked me to join an alliance mode that was introduced in a new patch recently. In my home city I noticed the yellow plus sign above the Tech-tree building. I look and see a gimped version of the tech tree. What The Fuck?!? The Market no longer trickles resources, guard towers and walls are missing their Age IV upgrades, and several other upgrades are AWOL. I didn't even bother allocating the reset points. I logged out and advised my friend that I am done with this game. For me, this new gimped Tech-tree is the straw that broke the proverbial camel's back. I guess some kind of AOEO market research somewhere must have shown that most people were too confused with all the previous options, so they simplified it.
No, the changes were not to dumb down the tech tree, but to generate greater strategy in the game during play.
A lengthy explanation can be found on our blog here. But the main point is that the old tech tree, while appearing more complex, actually had many false choices and automatic selections. Some of the old techs were boring, so no one ever picked them; and some were so good that everyone picked them. That's not good gameplay.
More importantly, however, was the fact that selecting the options in the old tech tree locked you into a gameplay style before the combat ever began. Let's say that you invested heavily in archer technology so that your archers were gods among men. Then you start a game, and the enemy (whether AI or player) starts sending massive amounts of cavalry at you. You're at a large disadvantage, through no fault of your own. Your invested archer tech is largely pointless, and you are missing the infantry upgrades you 'should' have selected, even though you had no way of knowing that you were facing a large cavalry force.
With the new tech tree, while you still earn techs as you level, the in-game gameplay is much more balanced. You can still specialize your units, but without the opportunity cost of the locked-in tech. So when your enemy comes at you with rock, you can still select paper with no disadvantage, instead of trying to wield your very shiny scissors.
I apologize that you found the change disconcerting, but it was not done to dumb down the game--in fact, far from it. I would recommend that you try a game or two with the new tech tree before declaring it gimped. You can also check out all the other significant changes we have made in recent months, like the Alliance mode you mentioned.
AOEO is up on sale during the Steam Summer Sale. We put together a special Steam-only bundle that includes an exclusive city vanity item.
Also, we just announced the next major Update: the Anniversary Update, with plenty of new content and features.
Kevin,
I've been grinding away in skirmish mode all night, and I've yet to win a game. In fact, I've never won a game of Age of Empires Online against a Standard skirmish AI. As a veteran RTS player, I simply can't figure out what I'm doing wrong. I've never played a skirmish AI that is so precise, overwhelming, and unrelenting at normal difficulty level.
Are the Standard AIs only intended for owners of premium civilizations? I'm using a level 10 Celt army, and I've dutifully kept up with campaign missions, crafting, and buying gear (Gear Score 7) so I can defeat a Standard AI. I've been patiently waiting for the ability to purchase Empire Points with my surplus MS points so I can upgrade my Celts to premium, but now I'm not so sure. I don't want to continue playing AoEO unless I can progress at a reasonable rate by playing 1v1 matches against the AI (I've yet to encounter skirmish quests that reward any other match-up).
Are you capping the AI's maximum age or are you playing against it unrestricted? If you're only level 10 then you should only have the third age, but if you don't specifically disallow it the AI will have the whole tech tree available to it which would be a considerable advantage.
Generally speaking, the AI will start to show some cracks if you put a lot of pressure on it and keep it from expanding. It's not terribly hard to starve it out if you keep it from claiming mines all over the map, which it's very prone to doing and leaving a little too lightly defended. If you try to play passively it's going to grind you down, but more aggressive tactics pay some very serious dividends.
Yeah, the AI is definitely stacked against you until you've done some grinding to level up your city. Until then, dial it way down and maybe even bring a friend, AI or otherwise. This isn't like a typical RTS where you're supposed to be able to play the AI right out of the box.
-Tom
It's hard to answer without knowing specifically how you are playing. The Celts in particular are built for an early rush; the lack of Age 4 for you is not a problem, but if you are letting the AI get there, you are in trouble.
For starters, turn the difficulty down or bring a friend (AI or otherwise), as Tom suggests. You might consider trying a Greek or Egyptian civ for a few levels too; they're free, and the playstyles are pretty different.
If you can post more specifics, I can try to offer more help.
Thanks for playing!
Blurf... Been busy today... finally reached the evening, lets relax with a game I bought during the Steam sale... Ah, Age of Empires Online.
Heard good things here, thought I would give it a go again (after being dissapointed by the whole GFWL stuff during the beta) now that its on steam. Even bought the summer special during the sale.
Long story sort, Steam easy download, nice and quick install. Ace so far. Start the game... Guess who's back... the dreaded GFWL gatekeeper... first it takes ages to log me in... (Why so long on PC, when 360 is almost instant?) then it says I need a product key, but no key is to be found. No clue on where to find it either. Long story short.. Steam ace, GFWL still a farce!
Silly game and silly me for giving this another go. Shame that a, by many accounts, decent game is hidden like this. Take a look at, for example, World of Tanks and discover how this kind of thing is done...
Disappointed! (And feeling stupid for falling into the GFWL trap again. At least I avoided buying any other GFWL games during the sale Pffft)
I'm back to Krater, an indie game by a tiny studio... that actually manages to let me play the game.
Sorry for your trouble, Custodian.
Here's the workaround for that GFWL bug:
To find and enter the LIVE access code:
Exit Age of Empires Online
Go to start --> Programs --> Microsoft Games for Windows Marketplace Client and launch the GFWL Marketplace Client.
Sign into the marketplace client with your LIVE username / pass (Same as you use to sign into the game).
Navigate to the Download Tab
Select “Age of Empires Online”
Click “View Game Keys”
Write down the LIVE access code.
Launch Age of Empires Online and, when you receive the error simply press “Try Again” and enter the LIVE access code in the space required.
Sorry for your troubles. I hope you can find the time to try again.
KP
My experience of losing over and over again to the Standard AI (usually Village Elder) is that I'll be the first to field a group of 10-15 Barracks units and bang on his peons and buildings for a bit, fail to have much of an impact, and then steadily get pushed back and overwhelmed by his superior counter armies over the next 10 minutes. I always explore the whole map with my scout at the start of the match with ample shift-clicks on the mini-map, do a good job of continuously building peons and houses during the match, and prioritize getting a group of Age 2 units built and attacking ASAP, though I find myself spending a frustrating amount of time waiting on resources for that. If I was better at assigning and micro-ing peons to precisely extract the necessary resources at any given point in time and had memorized exactly how each military unit performed against every enemy unit, I would be able to take down the Standard AI without trouble. But that takes time to learn, and I'm surprised the second easiest AI seems to require so much from players.
I haven't tried other Civs at the Skirmish Hall yet because I'm trying to win 1v1s against Standard AIs to complete quests. I'll try other match-ups when quests reward me for them.
I did manage to cheese my way to two unsatisfying victories after posting the other night. In the first game, I limited the match to Age 2 and zerged the Village Elder to death with several waves of Barracks units. No idea why he didn't counter me with his usual superior army after my first attack. I bumped the max Age to 3 in the second game, and parked a group of about 10 peon-ganking stone slingers at the back of the ranged AI's base, between his Town Center and a row of trees. He dutifully fed me peons and spear throwing units, one at a time, for 10 minutes while I built up a killer wad of bowmen, slingers, and battering rams. Occasionally he'd shift his peons to a resource drop to the southwest, and I'd move to resume ganking. I could tell the AI mostly had no idea how to respond to what I was doing. Both games ended with the AI dispersing peons to build isolated guard towers and resource drop buildings all over the map, insuring 5-10 minutes of whack-a-mole before I could claim my victory. Either the AoEO AI was punishing me for my cheese, or it needs a lesson in competitive RTS etiquette from the Starcraft 2 skirmish AI :)
Thanks for all your help, Kevin.
· With your initial attack, try to kill the AI’s villagers, instead of its buildings. The AI must gather resources to make units—resources aren’t cheated in for it—so if you hurt the AI’s economy, its subsequent attacks won’t be as strong.
· Focus on building up your economy. Without memorizing build orders, you can have a great economy by sticking to a few simple rules:
o Unless you are aging up, constantly produce villagers.
o Build storehouses very close to the resources you want to gather. The gather rate is very high in AoEO, so the time your villagers spend walking greatly impacts your income.
o Minimize idle villager time: bind your “find-idle villager” hotkey to something easily press-able—like the space bar—and hit it a lot.
· Know the basic age2 counters: spearman counter cavalry, long swordsman counter infantry, and slingers counter ranged units. If you attack your units’ counters when in battle—and throw a few druids into the mix—you’ll come out on top more often than not.
Not sure if this is helpful. I'll keep relaying what I can if you have more questions.
Thanks for playing!
Well because of you guys working so hard I'll give it another go, when I've some free time for that kind of thing again.
KUDOS for keeping at it!
Thanks. I'd love to hear any impressions that you may have.
As I've told Kevin before, I really like AoE Online. They've done a lot of good work with it.
Sadly, I'm a little lost after first few hours of play? Which civs are free? Can I play any of them to a certain level? What's gated as needing to "pay to play?" When I first looked at AOEO the Egyptians (or Greeks) were free Civs and you had to buy access to the other ones. Now I'm able to access any of them, but seems that ?high level? content
on each is gated? Am I right? I wasn't able to find a FAQ on the website that clearly told me what's free and what's not..
oh...this FAQ?! (duh) http://www.ageofempiresonline.com/en/faq
Last edited by Andon; 08-01-2012 at 08:15 AM. Reason: FAQ!?!
Right. Currently, Greeks, Egyptians and Celts are all free to play. You can play them all the way to level 40 as free civs. You can't do some things, notably equip the best gear, or use some of the paid expansions like the Skirmish Hall. But if you play a free civ long enough, you can earn enough in-game currency to buy the premium version of the civ or those other perks.
We also offer one Pro civ, the Persians. They start at level 20 and have very little unique quest content. They are intended primarily as a PVP civ or high-end player alts.
When we launch the newest update later this month, we will be releasing another Pro civ, as well as a new Quest Pack for any civ to use, plus lots of other fun stuff.
Hope that helps and is a little clearer than our FAQ, which I see now seems awfully dry.
Anniversary Update is live. Lots of nice changes.
I recently got my wife into the game, and she likes it even more than I do. It's nice having someone to do lots of co-op missions and skirmishes with.
I was sad to see the pricing on empire storage. ~$2 for 4 slots? Ouch. Plus, in good faith, I misunderstood and thought everyone got 4 slots for free.
I'll probably pick up the new Fertile Crescent quest pack soon. I'm an altaholic who doesn't play super often, so I still haven't reached level 20. But finally almost lmost there w/ the wife now.
Also, Kevin, re: that annoying product key bug... My wife hit that problem when she was starting up for the first time. We discovered that entering a wrong xbox live password as a brand new user (or maybe a fresh install?) does NOT tell you that you entered a bad password -- instead it asks you for the product key.
By asking you for the product key, 1) it implies the Live password was correct, which it was not, and 2) it confuses the piss out of the user to ask for a product key in a game where there's no product key.
That's a really nasty bug.
I'm not sure if this is the only repro, but I'm positive it is one. I tried typing in garbage as her password, and could repro 100%. Once we finally recovered her real password, we entered that and all worked well.
In case you hadn't pinpointed that yet, I hope that helps. I can't fathom how that made it through. That seems like a major and fundamental bug which can scare away new users (like possibly Custodian above.)
Thanks, Slantz. I'll pass that info along.
Anniversary update includes a new Pro civ, the Babylonians, plus a booster for all civs that contains quests for levels 20-30. In other words, no more Argos if you're sick of it.
Plenty of other changes too, like the new milestone bonuses to reward altaholics, and the observer mode for PVP players.
I'm happy to answer any questions anyone might have.
http://www.pcgamer.com/2013/01/03/ga...mpires-online/
Age of Empires Online ending new content production as it’s “no longer cost-effective”.
Why would you link to a blog post about the story rather than the story itself. You people on the internet, man. :(
It's too bad they're basically freezing the game as is, but it's not unexpected. Microsoft managed to bring it around pretty well from the horrible state it was in when it was released, but I just don't think there's much of a market for playing RTSs like a long drawn-out MMO grind. Age of Empires Online did as well as it could given the model it had to work with.
-Tom
Yup. Not a surprise at all.
Also, this part of the blog is hilarious:
Yes, it is dying. The player count is already south of fun and will slowly shrink away to nothing.Is AOEO dying? No. Nothing is changing for the existing game. You can still do all the things you do today; we’re not taking away anything you already have. There will be no new civilizations or features, that’s all.
Hilarious, perhaps, but factually true. We're not shutting the game down-- we're not NCSoft or Zynga or EA or anyone else that shut down live games this week. As a player, you lose no functionality or features or content. The game is the same.
You are of course correct that players are leaving over this, which I know will happen. I struggle with it logically, because it doesn't make much logical sense, but emotionally people feel as if the game is somehow less now that there will be no significant new content. Hell, I feel that way too, and I know better.
We don't charge a subscription fee. Any new content would be paid for by the players only if they wished it. And frankly even then, they could earn the in-game currency to buy it by just playing the game anyway. So again, this announcement should have little practical effect. Yet it clearly does.
The takeaway, I think, is that the promise of unreleased content has value to players, and in the absence of that we perceive a loss.
It's a blurring of the line between games as a service and boxed retail here as well. Few companies announce that they are finished making DLC for a game; they just go off and make the next roman numeral of that game. Of course, companies are roundly derided for making DLC at all in some quarters, and here we are getting pilloried for not making any more. It is hilarious, I agree.
Kevin, I certainly don't revel in your misfortune. I'm one of the people that really wished things had turned out differently for AoEO. I feel that the whole launch strategy was mishandled, but that's not your fault.
Then later in the official thread for the blog announcement this was posted in response to a question about why bugs won't be addressed:What about bug fixes? Fixing any remaining bugs and addressing balance issues will be slower and, frankly, more difficult for the team. Some may, in fact, be unfixable. We will be watching carefully in case any critical bugs appear.
That's pretty much the death knell for any game that's supposed to be online-only with a heavy competitive slant. Is it any wonder that the players are going to all leave?The developers for the game were primarily at GPG. The Microsoft staff are primarily community moderators, who are very capable of excellent support for the game but not software developers. The server maintenance, etc., is also Microsoft, and does not change as a result of this announcement.
I certainly see your point for the PVP crowd, who do need both a large server population and constant attention.
But like virtually all games with PVE and PVP modes, less than 10% of the user base were PVP oriented. For PVE players, truly nothing has changed. The game is in a good state bug-wise.
Not disagreeing with you. In fact, I'm agreeing with you, while shaking my head bemusedly and sadly.
Speaking on behalf of the PvE players out there, and I think the only detriment will be the reduced buzz about the game and the realization that "this is it." There's someting that hurts a game which emulates a world whenever you hit any kind of hard border, and that's essentially what the franchise did. AoEO will probably lose out to the new, shiny games in the marketplace even moreso than it otherwise would because of that. Again, no fault of your own, as that's pretty much the inevitable cycling down of the userbase.
Then, the lesson at large, has not yet been learned. Real PC gamers do not want F2P nor M.M.O.G.s nor DLC nor micro transactions. We want single player games, preferably on disc (DVD) with no online activation or DRM. We do not want games that have expiration dates. We want traditional PC games; single player or single player with a multiplayer component.
Age of Empires Online should never have happened. It should have been Age of Empires 4 with a great single player campaign, at least 30 hours long, with great cinematics and voice acting, and a robust multiplayer component. It should have been PC-DVD, selling for $40-$50.
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