Age of Empires Online

[Chainsaw Hobbit]

I've been playing Age of Empires III for years now, and have quite enjoyed it. The graphics are a little crappy and a few aspects annoy me, but its overall quite a fun game.

I have just discovered the existence of this new "Age of Empires Online", and don't know what to make of it. I don't find the bright and cartoonish graphics particularly appealing, but the MMO-like gameplay intrigues me. Should I try it out?

[King_of_GRiffins]

I've given it a short try. It plays like a normal RTS; you collect resources with villagers, make buildings, pop units, and attack with your horde. The MMO aspect of it takes control of the tech tree; in a game you can only advance up to an age that you've researched/leveled into, or use buildings or units that you've invested points in. You can equip types of units with different item bonuses. You can also get materials from chests and quest, use those to make or buy new items, and equip them to your units.

Right now, the game seems to be about only one age(bronze-ish) and only a few races (2-3 player races, 1 AI specific race of badass bandits), so it's not really the exact gameplay I'd expect out of a "research yourself through the ages" type of game.

There are two things I dislike about the game. The first is that it's requires to maintain a constant connection. My connection is occasionally flaky with no warning, and losing 30 minutes of progress building up on a map is painful. Any type of resume feature would be wonderful to counteract any concern over that, but they don't have any implemented.

My second gripe is that being free to play, there is a system through which you purchase additional parts of the game like the third race, items, buildings and missions. Naturally, the purchasable use items are competitively better than the normal use items. I'm fine with the system as a concept, but it still ruffles my feathers that my time playing isn't equivalent to paying $5.

It also uses the windows Live system, but at least it doesn't do much more than keep track of achievements.

[Chainsaw Hobbit]

I've given it a short try. It plays like a normal RTS; you collect resources with villagers, make buildings, pop units, and attack with your horde. The MMO aspect of it takes control of the tech tree; in a game you can only advance up to an age that you've researched/leveled into, or use buildings or units that you've invested points in. You can equip types of units with different item bonuses. You can also get materials from chests and quest, use those to make or buy new items, and equip them to your units.

Right now, the game seems to be about only one age(bronze-ish) and only a few races (2-3 player races, 1 AI specific race of badass bandits), so it's not really the exact gameplay I'd expect out of a "research yourself through the ages" type of game.

There are two things I dislike about the game. The first is that it's requires to maintain a constant connection. My connection is occasionally flaky with no warning, and losing 30 minutes of progress building up on a map is painful. Any type of resume feature would be wonderful to counteract any concern over that, but they don't have any implemented.

My second gripe is that being free to play, there is a system through which you purchase additional parts of the game like the third race, items, buildings and missions. Naturally, the purchasable use items are competitively better than the normal use items. I'm fine with the system as a concept, but it still ruffles my feathers that my time playing isn't equivalent to paying $5.

It also uses the windows Live system, but at least it doesn't do much more than keep track of achievements.

That actually sounds like it might be pretty cool. I'm going t try it out, and am completely willing to invest a small amount of money if I like it. After all, with the other AoE games, you had to pay initially.

[Smight]

Avoid like plague,
not becouse game but becouse you have to use windows live, just got hacked and got charged around 300 $ to my paypal account, even if I somehov manage to get mone back never using that again

[Chainsaw Hobbit]

Avoid like plague,
not becouse game but becouse you have to use windows live, just got hacked and got charged around 300 $ to my paypal account, even if I somehov manage to get mone back never using that again

Well... um... wow.

I guess that's good enough reason to avoid the game and Windows Live all together.

[king.com]

Yea after playing through the dow 2 games and gettting used to how terible Games For Windows Live is, its definitely not great to see it in Age of Empire Online. Fortunately Im really enjoying it, enough to buy the premium greek civ.

Twilight described it mostly except. 2 races currently (Greek and Egypt with more coming). Races are free but you need to pay to acces 'premium' civs and you get everything for that faction (apparently theres some pay content coming but nothing I know of except for the Battle of Crete wave based mode which isnt anything special) .

The game is a mix of Age of Empire 2 and Age of Mythology with Egypt using priests to heal and buff buildings. Four ages, Copper, Bronze, Silver and Gold with the same standard set of units for each. Different being that buildings go down faster than they ever did in AoE 2 so you can attack town halls with nothing but infantry and expect success.