Age Of Empire 2 - The Age Of Kings only by greathassan

Information:
Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings (often shortened to AGE2, aoe2, AoE II or AoK) is a real-time strategy (RTS) video game developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft. Released in 1999 for the Microsoft Windows and Macintosh operating systems, it was the second game in the Age of Empires series. An expansion, The Conquerors, was released in 2000. A PlayStation 2 version was released by Konami in 2001, and a Nintendo DS spinoff, Age of Empires: The Age of Kings was developed by Backbone Entertainment in 2006. The Dreamcast port, by Konami, was canceled.
The Age of Kings is set in the Middle Ages and contains thirteen playable civilizations. They are the Britons, Byzantines, Celts, Goths, Teutons, Franks, Mongols, Chinese, Japanese, Persians, Saracens, Turks and the Vikings. 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 overwhelmingly positive, and the game scored highly on review aggregators. The significant number of new features was praised, as were the gameplay improvements. Some reviewers were critical of the presentation of units—they were seen as bland and uninteresting—while others considered The Age of Kings to be overly similar to its predecessor, Age of Empires. 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 has had a significant impact on future games in its genre.
Gameplay
The Age of Kings focuses on building towns, gathering resources, creating armies, and destroying enemy units and buildings. 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 (The Middle Ages), and the Imperial Age, reminiscent of the Renaissance—a 1000 year timeframe.[1] Advancing to a new Age unlocks new units, structures, and technologies, but players must pay a sum of resources to advance to the next age (typically food and gold) once selected technologies are researched from their current age, and certain buildings are constructed.[2]
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 using 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.[3] Each civilization can purchase upgrades that increase the rate of gathering these resources. Players can construct a market for trade; players can either trade wood, stone, and food for gold, and use gold to buy other resources. Market prices fluctuate with every transaction.[4] Furthermore, docks can also generate gold by using trading cogs which are used to visit ally ports; once they return to the player's port, gold is added to the stockpile. The amount of gold a trading cog earns on each trip is related to the distance it had to travel to an ally port. More gold is earned on longer trips. It is possible to trade with enemies' ports, but the player's trading vessels 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.[5] The William Wallace campaign is a tutorial that guides new players through the basic processes of the game, such as moving units, gathering resources and building before moving on the campaign play proper.
Additional game modes are available to the player in The Age of Kings.[6] One mode, random map, generates a plain map, with players starting in the Dark Age with a Town Center, three villagers, 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.
Civilizations
Players choose to play as one of 13 civilizations split into four architectural styles, West European, Central European, Middle Eastern, and East Asian, that determine building appearance in-game.[7] The 13 civilizations are: Britons, Byzantines, Celts, Chinese, Franks, Goths, Japanese, Mongols, Persians, Saracens, Teutons, Turks, and Vikings.[8] The civilizations have varying strengths and weaknesses with regards to economics, technology, and battle, and each has access to a different, very powerful "Unique Unit".[9][10] Additionally, each civilization provides an individual team bonus in team games.[11] To add variety, each civilization has a set of soundbites in its native language (except the Goths (who speak German) and Byzantines) that are uttered by units when selected or instructed to perform a task.
Units
A Celtic player in the Feudal Age. His Town Center is visible and has several farms surrounding it; villagers of both genders work there and elsewhere to gather resources. A scout on horseback is also at the ready. Military buildings such as the barracks, archery range, and stable are visible, as well as economic buildings — the market, blacksmith and mill. The right-bottom corner of the screenshot shows the player's walls and a gate.
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.[4] The population capacity, which can be capped at anywhere between 75[13] - 200,[14] 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 a player's villagers into their Town Center, Castle, or tower for safety;[15] 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 can not fire anything at all without someone garrisoned there.
The Age of Kings also includes five types of military units: infantry, archers,cavalry, siege weaponry, and naval units. Certain types of infantry, archers, and cavalry are "counter units" with special defenses against other types of unit. 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.[16] Each Civilization in The Age of Kings has 1 or more special unit that is 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; relics accumulate gold once held in the player's monastery — the more relics he has captured, the faster the gold is accumulated. Collecting all five relics on the map is one method by which a player can win a random map game, depending on the victory setting.[17] Once a player has all five 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.
Buildings
The buildings in The Age of Kings are split into the economic[18] and military buildings categories.[19] Buildings can research technologies and upgrades that increase economic, military or unit-based efficiency, as well as provide resources for the player.
Multiplayer
The Age of Kings supports multiplayer over the Internet, or via a local area network (LAN). Up to eight players can take part in one game, with all of the single player game modes available. The MSN Gaming Zone supported the game until the service closed on June 19, 2006. Alternative services at GameSpy Arcade and GameRanger and Voobly and Hamachi were recommended as a replacement.[25]
Custom Scenario
The Age of Kings features a user-friendly campaign/scenario editor that can be used to create fully customized battles and missions with unique objectives (Triggers) and victory conditions that are set by the user. The NPCs in the campaign/scenario editor automatically possess fully functioning artificial intelligence, so minimal programming is required. It is also possible to string user-created games into a whole campaign in the same way as with the historical campaigns, including videos.
Development
Prior to the completion of Age of Empires, Ensemble Studios had signed a contract with Microsoft for a sequel. The design team chose to set The Age of Kings in the Middle Ages as a logical progression from the ancient era setting of Age of Empires. The design team was conscious of attempting to capture the broad appeal of the first game without making the game's design too similar. Nonetheless, they attempted to appeal to the vast demographic who played Age of Empires.[26]