The King of Real Time Strategy games...

The Total War series may have incorporated morale and troop drilling, while the Command and Conquer games offer a touch of surreal humour and, as Bojeeva pointed out in his Top Ten, Dune II started it all, but for me the pinnacle of Real Time Strategy games remains Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings, a game which has eaten more of my time over the years than any other.

Developed be Ensemble Studios and released for Mac and PC in 1999, AoE II used the familiar RTS template of gathering different food and construction resources using villagers, and constantly making decisions about whether to invest those resources into more villagers for increased gathering, into technology that would make your resource gathering more efficient, or into military units, because eventually either you’d be making a grab for the opposing player’s territory, or you’d be defending his grab for yours.

So far, so familiar, but Age of Kings had more up its regal sleeves than an economy to micromanage and pretty villages to build. The rock-paper-scissors system that made each type of military unit vulnerable to the skills of at least one other added an incredible amount of fun to the game, as long as you and your opponent didn’t cheat and look up the appropriate counter measures. Ah, the joy of building a huge army of rapid-firing Chu Ko Nu Chinese Crossbowmen and marching them into enemy territory to turn their soldiers, villagers and fields into pincushions, and the yelps of frustration they’d let out as they tried to build an opposing force of skirmishers in time. And with so many unique units, the pendulum could swing back and forth. It took me ages to figure out the rather obvious counter to War Elephants, and until I did all my city building efforts were ground to rubble by the tusks of those armoured Persian Pachyderms.

Even after you’d been playing long enough to master every counter and start building appropriately well-rounded forces, there was still plenty of fun to be had in AoE II, like building your own maps and scenarios with the content editor or engaging in novelty battles like playing a Regicide game by hiding your king in a castle and then building eight more castles around it to see if your opponent could smash their way in before the time was up. And don’t talk to me about UDGC, who needs LittleBigPlanet when you can download enormous fan-made campaigns from AoKHeaven?

It was all great fun, but why so different from any other Real Time Strategy game? Well, just as the rock-paper-scissors approach balanced the combat neatly, the game as a whole was equally balanced. It wasn’t until I moved on from Age of Empires II to Rise of Nations and even Age of Empires III that I realised just what a perfectly honed game AoE II was. I’d moved on to new games to see whether the staggering number of units and technologies, ranging all the way up to nukes and aircraft carriers would add something to the game, but in fact, all they added was chaos.

Sure, faster processors and greater memory allowed us to field armies of two hundred, with jeeps, tanks, light infantry, fighter jets, helicopters, ICBMs and machine gunners, but the move to dozens of different units and the introduction of hundreds of individual upgrades reduced the careful micromanagement, inch perfect manoeuvres and considered timing of last gen RTS to a chaotic shambles, a mess of disparate troops thrown piecemeal into battle in the hope of eking out a painful victory. Gone were the careful crescendos of orchestrated destruction, and while the high tech chaos that replaced them was far cooler to look at than AoE II’s pseudo-3D ever managed, it just wasn’t as satisfying as seeing a perfect plan perfectly executed.

So, I’ll be on IGZones in five minutes, see you there…