Rise of the Rajas is out next week

It's nearly 2017, and I'm marveling at the fact that Age of Empires II HD is getting official new content.

Forgotten Empires and SkyBox Labs are putting the finishing touches on Rise of the Rajas, a Southeast A??sia-set expansion slated for Steam on December 19, 2016. There's four voiced campaigns, more civilizations (Burmese, Khmer, Malay, Vietnamese), batt?le elephants, and mangrove forests.

It's a strange but awesome sight to see a game like this running at?? high resolutions. We've gotten lucky with some of these re-releases and reworks, even if they do have their own issues. I'd love to see certain other strategy games touched up and expanded upon. (I'm looking at you, Blizz.)

Here's the civilization breakdown for Rise of the Rajas:

• Burmese – Assemble the largest empire in the history of Southeast Asia through a legion of Battle Elephants that can demolish the most powerful of defenses. The Burmese unique unit is the Arambai, a ranged cavalry unit with a deadly but low accuracy attack.
• Khmer – Construct the largest religious monument in the world and amass an immortal army of devastating siege weapons. The Khmer unique unit is the Ballista Elephant, a mounted scorpion that can be upgraded to fire two bolts simultaneously.
• Malay – Conquer Southeast Asia with the vast island empire of Malay and upgrade your docks to harbours which can shoot arrows. The Malay unique unit is the Karambit Warrior, an extremely cheap infantry unit that can quickly overwhelm its foes.
• Vietnamese – Lead your people to independence and wage guerilla warfare with an extremely powerful arsenal of ranged units. The Vietnamese unique unit is the Rattan Archer, a heavily-armored ranged unit that is effectively impervious to enemy archer attacks.

Besides that paid content, performance fixes are still coming along. "We've had an open beta over the past few months to identify and correct a few performance issues, and with your help we've managed to reduce desyncs by 90%! With today's announcement of Rise of the Rajas, we're also pushing these performance upgrades live to all of our players for free. Among other things, this makes multiplayer matches much more stable, AND we've added multiplayer restore back in, so if you ever DO lose a match in progr???ess to a desync, you can get it back and pick up where you left off!"

A??nnouncing Age of Empires II ?HD: Rise of the Rajas DLC! [Age of Empires]

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I hear the drums echoing tonight

The team at Forgotten Empires is keeping the real-time strategy dream alive in 2015. On Thursday, Age of Empires II HD will get a new expansion called The African Kingdoms.

Running down this latest trail?er, you can expect to find four fully voiced campaigns for the new civ??ilizations (Malians, Berbers, Ethiopians, and Portuguese), reworked water battles, and a Sudden Death mode.

As for new maps, we're looking at five random maps, eight real-world maps, and ten special maps. With that latter group, the developers hope to "challenge team? play in unconventional ??ways" and "force players to cooperate."

Lastly, there's going to be improved AI and balance updates, though Forgotte?n Empires hasn't gotten into specific changes yet. Look for detailed patch notes on November 5.

I'm happy to see games like Age of Empires and Age of Mythology still going strong, but I'd be even happier if Blizzard would remaster the classic Warcraft titles. They know we want it.

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What a time to be alive

Two years later, Age of Empires II HD is still going strong. So strong that, according to producer Ryan Chaply, more people have spent 50+ hours with the game than there are actual humans living in Little Roc??k, Arkansas (~200k, says Wikipedia). Better give them something new.

The community team behind The Forgotten, an expansion for Age of Empires II HD released in 201?3, is once again collaborating with Skybox. Their next official, still-unnamed expansion will add "new civilizations, campaigns, game modes, units, and more." And if you want to stick with the vanilla game, "you can look forward to additional support and features that benef?it every owner."

More immediately, the developers pushed out an update yesterday that should improve team battles an?d game performance for lower-end machines. Also, support for Windows XP is out (RIP).

Age of Empires II - The path forward [Steam]

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The Forgotten is out now on Steam

I had to do a double take when I heard that all these years later, Age of Empires II has a new expansion out. The Forgotten was originally an unofficial mod before its team collaborated with Skybox Labs for a commercial release. It's available this week as $9.99 DLC for Age of Empires II HD on Steam, a?s is newly-added Steam Workshop suppo??rt for mods.

Okay, so what's in here? Five civilizations, including Italians, Indians, Slavs, Magyars, and Incas; four campaigns, one of which is about Dracula; the LudaKRIS map size; integrated Twitch streaming; Spectator mode; and the modes Capture the Relic and Treaty (also known as No Rush). Makes me happy to see AoE live on, even if ?it's by way of an HD re-release.

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Having technical issues? This might help

Those of you who happily bought Age of Empires II: HD Edition for nostalgia's sake only to encounter a slew of technical issues, heads up: a new patch for the game might do the trick. "We’ve got a giant excel sheet with threads, posts and tweets bucketed into categories, and sub sheets for various issues, including information to help us try to get the issues we’re seeing resolved," reads a post on the official Steam forum.

To opt in for the patch, right click on the title in your Steam library, hit "Properties," and choose "Betas." There should be an option for "performance" on the drop-down menu. Fixes include frame-rate and performance improvements, especially for high-end machines, and a bunch of miscellaneous&?nbsp;changes to multiplayer. Speaking of which, if you go for this, know that you can only play against other folks who also have the same build.

From the sound of it, this is only the beginning of what's in store. The ?post also talks about an upcoming in-game option for full screen multimonitor and mouse-bounding. Let us know if this current patch was able to do much of anything for you, dear readers.

Patch Notes for ‘performance build’

• Frame rate & performance improvements that increase frame rates up to 50% on low end machines and up to 500% on the high end systems previously experiencing frame rate issues.
• Visual fixes:
  
  • Windows DPI scaling no longer zooms the in-game perspective 
  • Default scroll speed increased
• Multiplayer fixes including:
  
  • Quitting a multiplayer game triggers a resignation instead appearing as a ‘drop’
  • Private lobbies stay private
  • Quick match no longer crashes
  • Long Steam usernames no longer cause crash
  • Hotkeys for multiplayer are correctly saved
  • Lobby now enforces that you only play multiplayer with the same build version
  • Visual indications of players in your lobby and in game who have low frame rate
  • Better networking verification prior to entering game (prevents getting stuck on the voting screen)
  • Performance warning if you have high ping to one other player who isn’t host or if your data is being relayed
  • Multiplayer quick match speed defaults to normal
  • Quick match has additional map size filter
  • Multiplayer Lobby doesn’t lock to a region for displaying games
• Achievements fix: Single player unlocks achievements properly

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I guess you can teach an old dog new tricks

Age of Empires is one of the older strategy game series. Before Supreme Commander, before Sins of a Solar Empire, before even StarCraft, there was Age of Empires.

As a fan of planning and scheming, the series has been a staple to my PC gaming diet for some time. You could not believe my excitement when I saw that there would be an HD remake of both Age of Empires II and the Age of Conquerors expansion for?? Steam. Middle ages, here I come.

Age of Empires II HD Edition 
Developer: Hidden Path Entertainment, Ensemble Studios
Publisher: Microsoft Studios
Released: April 9, 2013 (PC)
MSRP: $19.99

Those of you that haven’t played AoE II in a while will probably have some pretty fond memories of the?? aging strategy title. You’ll likely think of it as one of the greats; spectacularly innovative, well-balanced and displaying a level of?? detail that would make Renaissance painters blush. Then … you’ll start the game.

As great as it might be, the number of changes that have been made here are the absolute bare minimum. T?here are no HD textures, all of the original sound effects and voice clips have been kept, and none of the mechanics have changed. Everything is exactly as we all left it -- for better or worse.

Little in AoE II has aged ?as well as one might hope. Those used to more sophisticated strategy games might find this golden oldie a bit frustrating. There’s no auto-explore, no unit command queues, no building queues, selecting a group of units will often select stray workers, control groups are pretty limited both in terms of number of units you can select and number of control groups allowed, and worker AI leaves quite a bit to be desired.

Even so, there’s a kind of purity to the whole thing. Micromanagement and care are a lot more important than they have been in years and the lack of affordances and hand-holding gives a rougher but sometimes?? more precise experience. I found myself setting rally points much more effectively, and I would often dedicate five of my control groups to villagers or workers specifically to help cycle through economic management. For example, in my main lumber-gathering camps, I’d keep one worker in a control group so I could easily reposition the camp, and jump to that group of workers for quick action.

Additionally, I became much more careful with base construction patterns and the arrangement of my buildings and supply lines. Keeping? everything organized with so little help from the computer is har??d enough, and I figured working around my own foolish base design would make the whole thing intolerable.

This bare-bones approach encourages a much more aggressive, and obsessive style of play. There’s no room for complacency; you can't afford to stop moving or quit paying attention. Quite unlike StarCraft, which is often the same for the first three minutes or so of every match -- build worker after worker, secure more food, then crank out some military. At the very least, AoE will have you manually scouting and switching between various starting food sources while also securing housing, wood supplies, and getting everything set-up for the tech advance?ment. It’s different enough each time that it’s never the same game twice.

Each of the civilizations is also fairly balanced with a few small exceptions here and there. Generally speaking though, the game is a very appropriate gauge of an enormous number of tactical as well as bigger-stra?tegy skills. The game moves fast enough with other competent players that you’ll need to be pretty aggressiv??e to keep up, without being so inaccessible that newer or less well-practiced players will be doomed before they ever start.

Similarly, the campaign will take you through some of the more interesting, albeit distressing, moments in the middle ??ages. It’s all more or less historically accurate, though handled with a fair amount of tact, such that it never veers into unnecessarily offensive territory. If you can teach your children how to play effectively, it’s honestly not a bad tool to teach them a few things about major historical conflicts. I remember learning about the Az??tecs and the city of Tenochtitlan from this thing. Enough that I can still spell that city-name properly with one try. Whoever said games weren’t effective teachers?

In all seriousness though, this game is fantastically well-made, even if it a little rough around the edges. Some of the bigger issues with trying to run the thing on modern computers (such as the color bug, and the mouse scroll bug) have been fixed. Plus AoE II now supports a huge range of monitor resolutions, which is nice, even if we’re still stuck with these old textur??es, but there is Steam Workshop support so th??ings could change down the line by fans.

Yeah, it actually took me longer than I’d like to admit to notice and fully grasp the importance of that inclusion. It’s only been a few days since the game dropped and there are already a pretty decent set of HD texture packs, gameplay tweaks, and tons and tons of other goodies. In the same way that Skyrim took my initial investment of 75 hours and magically extended that to something in the neighborhood of 500, the Workshop for AoE II ;is an amazing bonus. And, combined with access to ??m??ultiplayer via Steam, it's really the only addition the game needs.

All told, while a little frustrating if you’re not into tons of micro-management, Age of Empires II HD with the Workshop and updated multiplayer featur?es is an excellent title. The brilliance of the game&r??squo;s design is still there, you just might need to look past its age to see it.

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Expansion pack included

Age of Empires II, the 1999 strategy game from Ensemble Studios, is getting an HD remastering and coming to Steam. Age of Empires II HD Edition will hit Steam on April 9, a mere month away. This HD-ified title will also include The Conquerers expansion pack, and is being developed by Hidden Path Entertainment, since Ensemble Studios no longer exists.

Steam Workshop integration and multiplayer lobbies will also be included, turning this into one of the most desirable HD releases in recent memory. There is information on the official website, as well as a link to a Steam store page??, which shows the price ?at $19.99, temporarily cut to $17.99.

Age of Empires II HD arriving April 9 [GameSpot]

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