Is the Age of Empires series dead?

[Harkimo]

Dark Rain worked very well with Bowman. I think.

The cheats in AoE were so much better than in II. And there were so much more of them

[Ca Putt]

Was that only my scruffy version or did the cheat actually disable tasking them on enemy units? same for ICBM, tho destroying buildings at the other side of the map was worth it.

Also there were plenty of maps(especially costom ones) that were just:
behold the mighty 200 pop Army of Armored warelephants, Centurions, Legionaries, Cataphrakts and Heavy catapults(and some archer folk, Elephant archers or Elite Horsearchers), here take this Towncenter and three Villagers to defeat them.
Don't get me wrong, all missions were perfectly doable. But the starting odds were often just entirely mad.

Aom tried getting more usefull funny units in, but in most cases reroll the Godpowers and reviving them was just so much more efficient than a purple hippo, a forkboy and a Lazerbear.
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Imagine not that these four walls contain the Mighty Owl of Thebes. For, gentles all, beauty sits most closely to them it can construe

[peugeot407]

You didn't even need custom maps for that... The Pyrrhus of Epirus mission (I think it was the second one in the first of the Rome campaigns) was just that, starting out with barely anything and trying to defeat a vastly more powerful enemy...


peugeot407
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SAOL wrote: "North America, South America, pish posh they're the same.
Spawn of greater nations."

[Hoop Thrower]

And even that doesn't come close to the odds you face in the Holy Man mission...
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[peugeot407]

True...


peugeot407
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SAOL wrote: "North America, South America, pish posh they're the same.
Spawn of greater nations."

[Ca Putt]

Holy man?, wasn't that the first one of babylon where you have one priest and have to defeat two stoneage villages? - loved that mission.

I remember downloading a costom campaign about the rise of the hittites, In every friggin mission you started out with one TC 1-5 vills and had to fight an enemy that FILLED half of the map. Also Age of Chess was a rather difficult campaign, tho mostly cheats did not actually help you
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Imagine not that these four walls contain the Mighty Owl of Thebes. For, gentles all, beauty sits most closely to them it can construe

[Harkimo]

What was it about? (For somebody who was a tick to young )

[peugeot407]

Reign of the Hittites was indeed rather nice... It was also a peculiar campaign, because it was included in the demo of the game, but not in the full version, so somebody had to go to the bother of porting a campaign into the game that was specifically made for the game by the developers of the game, but not released with the game...


peugeot407
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SAOL wrote: "North America, South America, pish posh they're the same.
Spawn of greater nations."

[Ca Putt]

no no no it was a costom campaign, it could be "underhand dealings of the Hatti empire" or maybe "rise of assyria" or possibly some other one. The Demo missions were rather balanced-easy - but I too never got why they did not include it into the game, but i guess that was the idea back then: demos were obligatory and most people first played the demo thus would not be interested in replaying the missions there. I'm pretty sure there were quite some games with unique Demo content.
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Imagine not that these four walls contain the Mighty Owl of Thebes. For, gentles all, beauty sits most closely to them it can construe

[SAOL]

I sort of miss demos in general.
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[Harkimo]

Yeah. The last demo I played was for Star Wars. It was great. Nowadays, the only demos being released are for Xbox and PS3. Sad.

[The Dude]

There are still demos on PC, they're just called Betas.
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Alea iacta est.
-The die is cast-
-Julius Caesar

[SAOL]

Not the same thing though. Demos used to be available even after a game had been released. That is commonly not the case with betas. Usually it also takes more of an effort (registration and so on) to take part in a beta test, and they are often limited in time ("you can only play during these two days").

[Hoop Thrower]

I remember having downloaded some equally ridiculous campaigns for AoE2, I recall one of the ottoman conquering America (kinda funny in hindsight) where you started with a single ship and a handful of Villager against South America totally covered by enemy civs.

Oddly enough I've never seen too many custom campaigns for AoE3...
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[Ca Putt]

Probably because the Aoe3 editor was broken. And did not have a simple "campaign" feature like aoe1 and 2.

There are still quite some demos floating around, however there are an awfull lot of games that don't feature any. Most of the games I really play had demos, most of which I played beforehand: Aoe3, Shogun 2 Total war, Mount and blade, War of the roses, Gratuitous space battles...

Among others(like release dates), one reason probably is the enourmous involvement of internet into gaming. Steam offers free weekends from time to time and it is really easy to find a let's play of virtually every game(just lately I found some on "day of the Tentacle" and "Seventh guest", oh the memories).
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Imagine not that these four walls contain the Mighty Owl of Thebes. For, gentles all, beauty sits most closely to them it can construe

[Harkimo]

I came across some really hard scenarios in the Age of Chivalry campaign. Great mod, though.