Age of Empires Online - Page 10

On April 20 2011 13:12 AndyJay wrote:
Got the chance to play it during lunch break, got to level 5. First impressions are really good, looks very crisp and clean in animations and graphics. Plays like AoK, 4 resources and drop off points, unit queues/garrison/walls etc. There is an A-move button but not sure what the hotkey is. Everything seems to be hotkeyed but only some things tooltips show up what the hotkey is so it's a bit confusing.

Control groups work fine, there is auto formations and queued waypoints. It really is very close to AoK mechanic wise, with the notable exceptions hold fire and patrol. One annoying thing is you don't get specific unit information (that I could see) for hit points/dmg/armor although all upgrades through items/research is very specific which is good to see (eg. +13.5% attack vs infantry).

Basically all the 'persistant crap' which encompasses benefits gained from singleplayer seems to be just a way of specialising your 'civ'. For example, it's as if you're playing AoK but instead of choosing one of 14 races you custom build your own race with it's own features/drawbacks. This is done on a unit or unit type level of equipping items (which are unlocked through completing sinlgeplayer missions), an example being equipping boots of +2 armour to your archers, and also through a tech tree. The tech tree looks like a AoK tech tree with separate tabs for military/economy/utility and as you progress through the singleplayer you get more points to unlock more of the trees.

If it only takes 10-15 hours to unlock the full breadth of your tech tree and get a good set of items I can see this game working competitively, in a fashion similar to WoW pvp. That is, pvp is always available from the early stages but is going to be unbalanced, until everyone puts in enough time. Once you put in enough time and reach the 'cap', everyone has the same options and the playing field becomes level.

Of course WoW competitive pvp is a bit of a joke because instead of 10-15 hours to hit cap it's more like 200-300 (extremely repetitive) hours. The levelling in this however seems to be more of a different way of doing a normal single player campaign so it shouldn't fall into the same trap.

I still have no idea how the micro-transaction system works or how matchmaking is handled, but I'm going to put some serious time into this game over the easter break to see how far I get. Pretty sure Portal 2 won't get looked at till I've put a lot of time into this game... so yeah, I'm really enjoying it.

On April 23 2011 22:07 GertHeart wrote:


Sorry but WoW PvP was much harder than you think it was, There are videos on Youtube of people getting 2k Arena rating with no clothing at all just using their skills. Also I was one of the people who challanged myself at that game. And yeah getting gear improved my win rate, but not my skill rate.

On April 25 2011 11:49 DannyJ wrote:
One of the early WoW arena seasons my druid partner wore nothing but greens and we get top 10 in the 2v2 bracket. It has NOTHING to do with skill, but rather major racial / class imbalances. Anyone who think WoW is a good test of "skill" is sadly mistaken, for obvious reasons, and it really isn't a good comparison to an rts games.

On April 27 2011 09:14 duk3 wrote:
If you want to see gameplay (master league in SC2, good in previous AoE games) check out this stream:
http://www.justin.tv/themista

On April 25 2011 11:49 DannyJ wrote:
One of the early WoW arena seasons my druid partner wore nothing but greens and we get top 10 in the 2v2 bracket. It has NOTHING to do with skill, but rather major racial / class imbalances. Anyone who think WoW is a good test of "skill" is sadly mistaken, for obvious reasons, and it really isn't a good comparison to an rts games.