Age of Empires is a real time strategy game that allows you to develop a civilization of your choice into a powerful Iron Age empire. The game was developed by Ensemble Studios and published by Microsoft on the 26th October 1997. The game is a major success having sold more than 20 copies. The following year, they release the first expansion pack called Rise of Rome. Rise of Rome features 4 new civilizations.
There are 4 styles of civilization and each style has 3 civilizations. The 4 styles of civilizations are Greek, Egyptian, Babylonian, and East Asian. The first 4 eras account for a large part of the game. These 4 eras are Stone Age, Tool Age, Bronze Age, and Iron Age. The 12 civilizations are actual civilizations that were in existent from Stone Age to Iron Age. Each civilization is unique with its own set of attributes and technologies.
At the start of the game, you must get the villagers to collect the resources. Villager is the lowest level of unit in the game. You control the villagers. You can direct them to do a variety of tasks such as chopping wood, foraging, mining for gold, construct/repair buildings, and construct naval vessel. Sometimes, when an attack occurs, you can tell the villager to engage in a hand to hand combat.
In Age of Empires, there are priests who oversee the religious buildings. The priest has the ability to heal allied units. Priest is a non combat unit. Combat units in the game include Clubmen, Archers and Infantry. The soldiers may mount on chariots and war elephant during the attack.
There are a few types of ships in Age of Empires. Fishing boat is used by the villagers to catch fish. Trade boat is used for trading gold. Transport ship fetches villagers to the other side of the river. Warship is used by the combat units to launch an attack on the opponent land based units. There are 2 types of warships including Galleys and Triremes. Galleys can shoot arrows at the enemies. Triremes can shoot bolts or catapult large rock toward the enemies.
You need to gather these resources to build an army, navy, buildings and procure advance technology. The resources that you have collected must be stored in the storage pits. In this way, you can go back to the storage pits to obtain the stored resources and use them
when there is a scarcity of new resources. Some resources like tree cannot come back after you have harvested it.
There are 4 campaigns that you can undertake. In each campaign, you are to meet a number of objectives. The scenarios in the campaign are based on the real historical events that have occurred in different civilizations. The Random map feature allows you to generate a new game with a different map. Age of Empires feature a multiplayer mode can support up to 8 players.
Doing research on technology can help you in making advancement in the game. The technology becomes increasingly expensive as you progress in the game. This is because it becomes more and more difficult to collect the needed resources to carry out the research. You can carry out research on a wide range of categories. For example, you can do research to enable the villagers to gather the resources faster.