After their crushing defeat in the last tournament (1 - 4 for ES), ION Storm has won 4 - 2 and surprised many people. Congratulations, ION has shown that the Ensemble staff is not unbeatable ;)
| January 31 |
How to use ICQ
I have written a short guide to ICQ and how to use it in order to set up AoE matches. It is written for people who are new to ICQ; as you will see, it is quite easy to use.
| January 30 |
Gamesmania's reader have chosen the game of the year
At Gamesmania, the votes for the game of the year poll have been counted. Age of Empires only got the 3rd rank (maybe because they did not count "AOE" as a vote?) :(
What surprises me is that Quake II did not get more votes (even less than Tomb Raider).
| Rank | Title | Votes |
| 1 | Jedi Knight: Dark Forces II | 27% |
| 2 | Tomb Raider II | 14% |
| 3 | Age of Empires | 13% |
| 4 | FIFA 98 | 11% |
| 5 | Quake II | 10% |
| 6 | Diablo | 9% |
| 7 | Riven | 7% |
| 8 | Total Annihilation | 5% |
| 9 | Blade Runner | 2% |
| 10 | Dungeon Keeper | 2% |
CGI programmers wanted!
I plan to add a lot of CGI scripts to this page, but I do not have enough time to write them all alone. If you are familiar with CGI programming in Perl and HTML, then please join the crew :)
Server statistics
Server statistics have shown that only 10% of all readers leave this page after reading the news. This is a very good result and will encourage me to improve and expand all sections of this page as soon as I have more time. One of the things on my list is revising some of the old strategy pages - a few of them are still from the beta version, and thus a bit dated.
| January 29 |
New FAQ: how to use scenarios
Even though there is a hint in the main page of the scenario section, a few people have missed that information, so here is the answer:
To use a scenario, simply copy it into the scenario directory in your AoE folder. Campaigns belong into the campaign directory.
To play the scenario, choose "Single player, scenario", for a campaign, select "Single player, campaign" in the game.
Single player scenario preview maps
If you make a single player scenario and do not want that the mini map is shown in the listing (because it may reveal something), please tell me that when submitting the scenario. The same applies to campaigns. You can give me a different picture to post if you like, as long as it has roughly the same size and is smaller than 10 K.
Poll: interim results
Because I have not only given the options "Yes" or "No" in the poll about Starcraft, there are some interesing insights: while 1/4 of all people will buy the game anyway, roughly half of them will try the demo first, and only few people listen to reviews. I am pretty sure that this would have been different two years ago, when you could not obtain demos as easily as today over the Internet.
| January 28 |
New scenario and an awesome campaign
A new single player scenario has been added; and Joey has made the biggest and best campaign ever made! Don't miss "Trojan War", a campaign with extremely varied and challenging maps and a lot of interesting historical background information. You will not be disappointed.
I have won an award!
This "forced" me to set up an awards page :)
Thanks to all people with a good taste ;)
A new mod pack - new tribe names
There is a tribe name patch made by Mike Lovell that replaces the ancient tribe names by modern ones - have fun!
New link
A new link to Taskmaker's page has been added to the links page.
New strategy guide
Gamers Extreme has started a strategy guide, the AoE Bible: "The strategy guide is updated every week, and will cover basic,
intermediate, and advanced strategies. The first installment covers basic
multiplayer strategies."
| January 27 |
Get 300 free arcade games!
Great news, found at Slashdot.org: Version 0.30 of MAME (Multi Arcade Machine Emulator) is out, and there are over 300 games that you can play on it! This means good old Space Invaders, Pac Man, Zaxxon, Ghosts 'n Goblins, Commando and more games are back :) You can get them at the MAME page.
New scenarios and a new campaign
A single and a multi player scenario have been added, along with a new campaign - get them at the scenario section.
Poll results and new poll
The RTS poll had a clear winner: AoE won with 66 out of 74 (89 %), Dark Reign got 3 (4%), Total Annihilation 5 (6%) of the votes. So the AoE community agreed officially that AoE is the RTS game of the year :)
The new poll asks another RTS related question: Will you buy Starcraft? It is missing a few features that modern games should have: TCP/IP, high resolutions (> 640 x 480), but offers excellent graphics and a free battle.net league.
| January 26 |
U. S. mirror page moves!
The U. S. mirror page moves to a faster server at age.gamesmania.com. Please update your links and bookmarks. The old mirror page will stay for a while, and the cgi scripts will also still run there; however, I will remove some of the files as soon as I have time.
CGI problems
Due to technical problems, the message board was not available for some time, and you could not join the ICQ list. Thanks to Dan who helped me out, everything is working again now!
Two AoE pages shutting down :(
Two of the best AoE pages are shutting down during this weekend,
Izdol's AoE page and Rob's
The Unofficial AoE Web Site.
Izdol's page has one of the best strategy guides on the net, and Rob's page has one of the largest scenario collections. Both Izdol and Rob cannot update their page anymore due to lack of time (caused by work or school). Izdol's page will still be accessible but no longer updated; there is no official statement yet about the Unofficial AoE page.
Two AoE pages coming back :)
Shaf's and Methos' page are now again being updated after a long time of no updated. You will find them at the links page.
| January 25 |
Top selling games
PC Data has
released first of the year sales figures. Age of Empires is the only RTS game in the top ten. Thank to ActiveNet for this information:
| Rank | Title | Publisher |
| 1 | Quake II | Activision |
| 2 | Riven | Brøderbund |
| 3 | Tomb Raider II | Eidos |
| 4 | Myst | Brøderbund |
| 5 | Flight Simulator 98 | Microsoft |
| 6 | Sierra Pro Pilot | Sierra |
| 7 | Frogger | Hasbro |
| 8 | Age of Empires | Microsoft |
| 9 | Red Baron II | Sierra |
| 10 | Links LS '98 | Access |
Campaign walkthrough
Gamespot has a complete guide to all AoE campaigns. If you are stuck somewhere, check it out for more info. I do not suggest reading it otherwise because it will spoil the game if you know the scenarios in advance. Since this page is primarly centered about multi player games, it will never have such a walk through (it is not needed anyway for most scenarios).
Another IE security hole
"Flaws in the security of Microsoft's Internet products allow malicious hackers to steal users' private encryption keys and impersonate their victims, security experts said.
Either use Netscape, run Linux, or do not surf :) The whole article can be read at Techweb.
The flaws are so serious that one expert advises users not to surf the Web until a fix is found."
| January 24 |
Super unit upgrades
The new strategy page about Iron Age super units takes a closer look at these upgrades. Are they worth the high price? Read everything about it! Thanks to Vostok and Leo for contributing to that section.
| January 23 |
AoE speed changer
The program worked only for Win NT. Aether has made a new version that also works under Win 95 and should work for any configuration:
"Here's the new version; I've also included the C++ Builder source in case anyone cares how it's done or wants to go further with it."
Some additional notes about this: The game does not necessarilly work well at an arbitrary speed setting. Funny things can happen, like units getting stuck on each other, or villagers never reaching their exact point of destination. On the other hand, using a very high speed setting is great for testing a new AI or scenario. Try it!
DirectX 5.0a required for the patch?
If you get an error message like "DirectX 5.0a required", download DirectPlay 5.0a. This should fix that problem.
"Dark Rain" cheat
Danny sent this one in: "I noticed
that not only can the stealth archers turn into trees, but they can also walk on
water."
| January 22 |
AoE speed changer
Aether has written this utility:
"Here's a little program I wrote to change the speed setting in Age of Empires. The game gives you the options of Normal, Fast, and Very Fast, but with this program you can set the speed to any value between 0 and 255."
It did not work on my computer but you might want to download it (146 K) so you can try it on your computer. You will find more information about it on the documentation page.
Kali in Swiss newspaper
There is an article about Kali in the "Internet Diary" of "Das Magazin" ("the magazine"), a weekly supplement of one of Switzerland's largest newspapers. Online services like Kali are not well known here (as is the Internet as such - most people do not have a clue about it).
"Duke Nukem, Jedi Knight, Age of Empires? (...) Not one person plays here, but two or more; the electronics is not the opponent but the instrument. The usually surrealistic war games demand ... the utmost reaction, strategic thinking and ability to abstract. (...)
Speaking of Kali, do not forget to download the 1.31 revision C update for AoE 1.0a.
Kali is the largest game site in the Internet: 170000 people from 65 countries play against each other on 600 servers. Of course not simultaneously - at January 5 at 4 pm GMT there were 4361. They sit either next to each other or in different continents: brothers and sisters in arms."
| January 21 |
Game of the year 1997
Tanarus and Age of Empires are leading neck and neck in Avault's Gamers' Choice Award poll. Make sure you vote for AoE! Tanarus is the best Internet game of the year 1997, and thus has a greater potential of voters among its players.
My poll has shown that Gamesmania's staff has not chosen the right game to be the RTS game of the year. After all, the people who voted at my page are completely unbiased ;) well, maybe not :)
| January 20 |
Game of the year 1997
Gamesmania has set up a poll for the Game of the year 1997. Unlike in other polls, you have three choices and are not bound to any preset titles. What surprised me was that Gamesmania had chosen Total Annihilation and Dark Reign to be the best RTS games of 1997. So I have set up my own poll about the RTS game of the year 1997 - which one was it: TA, DR or AoE?
Gamers' Choice Award 1997
Duncan McKissick from Ensemble Studios sent me this mail:
"Hey bud! Please put this link on your front page and tell everyone to vote for AoE as best game of the year and Best RTS game! Thanks a ton in advance!"
He was referring to the Gamers' Choice Award where you can also vote for your favorite game. Seems to be a voting day today ;)
New links
I have added new links to two new AoE pages - "SimMayor's Age of Empires Place" and "The Temple".
| January 19 |
Sea strategies page finished!
Finally, I have finished my page about sea strategies. It covers all important aspects of managing resources and a navy at the same time. It is a must for all AoE admirals out there ;)
More cheat codes
| Black Rider | Rider with 20 attack and 20 armor. It comes back as a catapult after being killed. |
| Dark Rain | Transforms all of your composite bowmen to stealth bowmen - they look like trees when standing still. |
Q&A with Bruce Shelley
Bruce Shelley, lead designer of AoE, has made an interesting statement in the interview at Gamecenter:
"We will definitely follow up the great success of Age of Empires with future games of the same type. We like being one of the few real-time strategy game developers working with historical topics and will probably continue in that area. We are working now on the design of Age of Empires II, but it is too early to say much about that now. It is still very much in the research phase. There is some discussion of an expansion pack for Age of Empires, but, again, it is too early to announce anything."
| January 17 |
Multiplayer save games?
The fact that a player dropped in the ES vs ION matches made the discussions about a save game feature come up again. Most people do not consider the asynchronous network model, though. Saving the game is not as easy as it sounds:
"We can do multiplayer saves. (...) Getting the data isn't the problem -- it's getting the same exact group of players back together again in exactly the same way. Trust me, the system doesn't work when you have to rely on this -- that's why we're working on a model that could save multiplayer games on one system regardless of the other players and also allow any other player to take up any other player's position when resuming."
SebION: "After my lone scout discovered both our opponents had no significant military force, I told DaBug I was charging. My first target was Saint, because I felt he represented the greatest threat, but not for long. :-)"2nd Game: ION Storm 2 - Ensemble 0: Pooky, Dopey, and Slicer vs Desperado, T_R_U_C_K, and McBane
Pooky: "Slicer started with his Assyrian rush, crippling T_R_U_C_K. He had nothing, was in the tool age and was a total wipeout."3rd Game: ION Storm 2 - Ensemble 1: Noel and Romero vs Soth, and BigDog
Noel: "At this point I thought everything was fine, because I had just made it into the Iron age and I was pumping out the Triremes. I was wrong."4th Game: ION Storm 3 - Ensemble 1: (ES player dropped) DaBug and SebIon vs Hellwood and BigDog
Noel: "I should add that everyone here had a blast playing the way-cool Ensemble guys. I'd recommend that they go back and practice, but I'd rather they hurry and finish AoE 2!"5th Game: ION Storm 3 - Ensemble 2: Pooky, Dopey, and Slicer vs Optimizer, Archangel, and McBane
Pooky: "Seems we proved too much of a match for our first game, so they brought in some of their best."6th Game: ION Storm 4 - Ensemble 2: Noel and Romero vs Soth, and BigDog
SebION: "They ran at least 3 waves of attacks trying to break John, but John was HARDCORE pissed! He wasn't going to let go that easy."
| January 16 |
ION Storm strikes back!
After their crushing defeat in the last tournament (1 - 4 for ES), ION Storm has won 4 - 2 and surprised many people. Congratulations, ION has shown that the Ensemble staff is not unbeatable ;)
We beat down Ensemble, 4 to 2! Hardcore beatings. We will rule them down from here on out...
| September - January 15 '98 |
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