| Title | Age of Empires Online is ready for its close up |
| Author | Tom Chick |
| Posted in | Games |
| When | June 18, 2012 |
If you've been holding off for Age of Empires Online to finally gel, now's as good a time as any to try it..
Read the full articleI like the idea of being able to get new content via the empire points as an alternative to just spending money. Any idea if people who played it before the change will have empire points, or do they accumulate from this point on?
Has there been any new content or redesign of the missions? I remember the game was repetitive in the late game quest chains, having to fight elite units that completely broke the unit balance.
Empire points have been a key (yet underutilized) part of the in-game currency for quite some time. I'm sitting on about 700 and I'm around level 26, so given that the cosmetic stuff costs between 20 and 40, that seems entirely reasonable.
Josh, good questions. Existing players get 500 empire points and I believe new players get 100 empire points.
I can't speak to the missions, but if you check the update I linked, they have a lot of good information about reworking the AI, and particularly scaling the skirmish AI. So it sounds like they're trying to tune the difficulty level using a finer tool than bludgeoning us with elite units.
Im delighted to see that Microsoft is still dedicated enough to make big changes to something that was not working well - at least in this instance ;)
It's really encouraging to see how much of an overhaul Age of Empires Online has gotten, especially considering how little of an overhaul Civ 5 has gotten. Sure, they're apples and oranges, but since I've been playing both, it's hard not to compare.
I don't pretend to have any insight into the inner workings at Microsoft and Gas Powered Games, but we did a podcast with Kevin Perry, the Micorosoft producer for Age Online:
http://www.quartertothree.com/...
I can't help but think he's been instrumental to a lot of the changes in the game.
Just loaded up for the first time in several months and tried a skirmish against the ai and got toasted. I don't know if the balanced issue with the AI according to the forum was in effect or not.
One thing I noticed was the rock paper scissor balance was more pronounced then I remember. Axemen which were anti infantry were chewing up units faster. While anti archer units were not doing much against infantry units.
Now if we could get a Rise of Nations reboot/sequel the world would be a more complete place. Rise of Nations Online?
I'd never played RoN, but I've been extremely impressed so far. AI enemies are way more agressive than AoE or Civ V in my opinion.
Not sure you'll see this, Josh, but please try again. We borked up some of the AI upgrades, but got most of them fixed in a patch that went live today.