Age of Empires 2… total war. Today I shall be playing as the Britons against 6 French
teams at once. Why not 7? You might ask. Already done that. But before I reveal to you my Fantastic-Frank-Fest,
it’s time to go back in time. One last time.
Back, back, back.
Picture this: it’s the early 2000’s. Everything was perfect and Justin Bieber hadn’t even
been born! Probably. And my sister and I were having a gay old time over LAN. When we weren’t
playing Heroes 3, would be on Age of Empires 2 for hours with our kings and castles. Of
course, I always won. But games wouldn’t end until the King was killed. Although harmless,
he could run at terrifying speeds, scuttling about the map like a posh Gollum and hiding
in the bushes, hoping that I wouldn’t find him. But I always did.
I took twisted delight in finding increasingly cruel ways of defeating her king. My personal
favourite was to trap him in an arena against a battering ram.
Then we moved on to fighting together against the AI. Those games would be long, full of
sieges and assaults. One of us would hold them off for as long as possible. If we were
lucky, reinforcements would arrive in time. It became a staple at LANs on an even larger
scale! 4 of us against 4 bot teams. The size of those battles was incredible! And there
would always be that person who stayed away from the fighting and tended to their crops
or whatever. All the time, we were refining our strategies.
Perfecting the early game routine. And finding the ideal setup to have a good, fun game that
ultimately resulted in a win.
I even found it fun to play alone against the AI. One day, I defeated a medium-difficulty
enemy. It unlocked an achievement. How about that. Then I tried against 2 enemies at once
and got an achievement for that as well! For some reason I skipped 3 and moved straight
on to 4 enemies at once, all teamed up against me.
And I beat them as well. But the achievements didn’t end there. They went up to 5, 6 and
even 7 enemies at once! But- 4 was hard enough! How could anybody possibly go up against 7?
Many of you won’t know what this game’s like. A single medium-difficulty enemy isn’t
hard. You can advance faster, get armies faster and generally beat them without too much hassle.
But 5 of them at a time… wow. You’ll defeat one army, only for another to immediately
come at you. And then another. And another. For every unit you make, the enemies combined
produce 2 or 3. For every chunk of meat you harvest, they collect 2 or 3. And let’s
not forget the population limit: as just a single team you’re stuck at 200, while they
can have over 1000 units in the map at once! And they all want you dead. That’s not fair.
And the longer you play for, the more it moves in their favour. Eventually, you can hold
them no more and they begin pouring into your base, destroying everything in their way.
There’s nothing in First Person Shooters to compare with that slow, painful, inevitable
defeat that you get in Real Time Strategy games. You know you’re beaten. They know
you’re beaten! But it’ll still take another 40 minutes before they choke you completely.
You’re stuck doing everything you can to stay alive, building emergency bases in unexplored
corners, stashing villagers in the hope that they aren’t found. Anything. All in the
hope that your opponent will have to go to bed.
Of course, you don’t have that glimmer of hope when up against the AI.
But I wanted those achievements. I had invested a good amount of my life into this game! I
was pretty good! Obviously not as good as the people in the comments section of this
video. But still pretty good. So one day, I had an idea. I set up a game
against 7 enemies, all teamed together. And I gave myself every advantage I could think
of. I used the ‘original AI’ because it’s easier. Played on Black Forest because you
can hide away behind your walls… at least for a time. I had everything visible, because
otherwise everything isn’t visible. Of course, the greatest advantage I gave myself
was to play as the British and to make the enemies French.
But there was one last trick as well. I set the population limit to 25.
In a game of villagers and armies, setting it this low would limit the AI. They’d buy
up 25 villagers and wouldn’t have enough left for anybody to attack me! All I had to
do then was to find a way of defeating THEM, with just a handful of units.
I managed it. And today I’ll recreate it, only against
6 enemies because I really want all of the achievements.
First bit of the game was the same as normal… only a bit easier since I didn’t have to
think about building lots of houses. The important thing was to research stone walls to keep
the enemies out for as long as I could. That, and to steal as many of the enemys’ turkeys
as possible. It’s tradition. I didn’t manage quite as many as the Great
Turkey Pillage of 2016, but it was enough to show I wasn’t messing around.
The stone walls were researched and I quickly blocked everything up.
One of my villagers suffered a terrible fate at the hands of 3 jaguars.
Then all went well for a while as I gathered resources.
And then, suddenly, my population went down with a serious case of the heart attack.
This left enough space within my population limit for a tribe of monks to be created out
from the monkery. These 7 wise men then launched an attack on the purple enemy team.
Monks have a special ability. They can convert enemy units to your team. The problem is that
this takes a while, and monks move slowly and don’t have a lot of health.
This first fight was a hairy one: they attacked me with swordsmen. My only weakness!
I nearly lost a monk, but all survived this first encounter and I even had a possie of
converts to protect them from now on. I continued to steal troops and villagers
from the purple’s side, building an army far greater than the population cap intended.
But even this army wasn’t going to win against a town centre filled with peasants, all firing
arrows out. Luckily I had 1 battering ram in my army and
he gradually bulldozed all of their important buildings, returning to safety once in a while
for a repair. If he goes down, I’m DOOMED! It wasn’t all fun and games. A throng of
jaguars swarmed my villagers and I lost a few. But I don’t care much about them. Of
more concern were my irreplaceable monks: the key part of my invasion plan! In this
first base, I lost 2 and was down to 5, but I had defeated the first enemy. Only 5 more
to go! We trundled over to the second base, which
was a bit more advanced. This one had a wall around it. No problem- my battering ram could
deal with that. What I couldn’t seem to deal with, it seemed,
were intermittent attacks from grey. Stupidly, my monks got blocked and I lost a few more
of them! This was poor. My conversion force was barely enough for my plan to work any
more. Plus, villagers kept coming back to seal the
hole in their wall, which was a major inconvenience for me.
They fooled me once. Then they fooled me twice, teaming up with
the yellow team who summoned another hoarde of jaguars to screw with my villagers.
These suicide gate-building villagers simply wouldn’t stop trying to build a wall!
Eventually I got around this by building my own gate there, claiming that bit of the wall
as my own! A bit messy, but it did the job. But then: my biggest challenge yet: an enemy
castle! One battering ram alone wasn’t going to do this. And my army would get slaughtered
by arrows before it would fall. And I no longer had the monk-power to convert
many enemies to my side. It would be a slow, painful process of stealing 2 or 3 enemies
every time they attacked me. It would take hours and hours and hours to do!
The OTHER option, I guess, would be to suicide rush my whole army and then build another
army of monks, starting the process again. That would also take hours and hours and hours
to do. Just like when I did it back in 2016.
But I couldn’t be bothered, so I just built a wonder instead.
Now I can sit back and enjoy my accomplishment. I have truly mastered a game from my childhood.
… …
…I’ll be right back.