Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors Expansion

Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings and Age of Empires 2: Conquerors are finest Real Time Strategy Games I have played. The game focuses on building towns, gathering resources, creating armies, and destroying enemy units and buildings. Players conquer rival towns and empires as they advance their own civilization through four "Ages": the Dark Age, the Feudal Age, the Castle Age (The Middle Age), and the Imperial Age, reminiscent of the Renaissance—a 1000 year timeframe. Progressing to a new Age unlocks new units, structures and technologies, but players must pay a sum of resources and construct certain buildings before advancing.

Players choose to play as one of 13 civilizations split into four architectural styles, West European, Central European, Middle Eastern, and Far Eastern, that determine building appearance in-game. The civilizations have varying strengths and weaknesses with regards to economics, technology, and battle, and each has access to a different, very powerful "Unique Unit". To add variety, each civilization has a set of soundbites in its native language that are uttered by units when selected and instructed to perform a task.

Civilian units, called "villagers", are used to gather resources. These resources can be used to train units, construct buildings, and research technologies, among other things. The game offers four types of resources: food, wood, gold, and stone. Food is obtained by hunting animals, gathering berries, harvesting livestock, farming, and fishing. Wood is gathered by chopping down trees, gold is obtained from either gold mines, trade or having a relic in a monastery, and stone is collected from stone mines. Villagers require checkpoints, typically depository buildings, where they can store gathered resources. Each civilization can purchase upgrades that increase the rate of gathering these resources. Players who construct a special building, the market, may acquire or sell resources for gold. Market prices fluctuate with every transaction.

There are five campaigns in The Age of Kings, containing historically-based scenarios such as Genghis Khan's invasion of Eurasia, Barbarossa's Crusade, or Saladin's defence of the Holy Land. In the Joan of Arc and William Wallace campaigns, the player can control a unit based on its namesake; in others, players take orders from guiding spirits representative of the army's commander.

The Conquerors Expansion adds four additional single player campaigns. These are based on Attila the Hun's rise to power, Montezuma's defense against Hernándo Cortés and the adventures of El Cid. The fourth campaign, "Battles of the Conquerors," is actually a group of unrelated single scenarios, each based on a significant historical battle. These include the Battle of Agincourt, the saga of Erik the Red, and the Battle of Hastings, among others.

I already played this games once and completed all the campaigns at moderate difficulty setting. But now, I decided to play this game again at hard difficulty setting. The reason for playing this game now is, some of my friends, Alagappan, Sairam, JyothiSwaroop, Niku are interested in playing this game online and thats why I installed this game. But now, I started playing the campaign along with the multiplayer games that I play with my friends...

Age of Empires 2: Age of Kings Official Site: http://www.microsoft.com/games/Age2/
Age of Empires 2: Conquerors Official Site: http://www.microsoft.com/games/conquerors/

A Screenshot taken after finishing a Multiplayer game with my friend Algappan:
aoe2,screenshot,marching,army, age of empire 2
See my score... I am the first player SaiTheSpartan :)

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