Civ V is terrible, they butchered the last game and didn't put anywhere near it all back in. I haven't played in about 5 months despite still putting in about 10 hours a week to Civ4.
I stopped playing AOE when Shogun:Total War was released. The best game of this type is still Medieval Total War 2, followed closely by Rome: Total War. These can be picked up for buttons nowadays. Classics.
Shogun Total war was alright but it wasn't a multiplayer game. I ended up not bothering to actually manage the armies in real time and just simulated battle as you almost always got the same result.
Both Empire: Total War and Napoleon are Multiplayer Mick, they are straightforward battles though as the strategy elemnet does not work with Multiplayer, the thing with AOE was it's all about gathering reources and attacking with no real tactics. Total War are proper wargames. Best Multiplayer game ever is Starcraft.
I put enough hours into Age of Empires 2 to say it was all about tactics at the highest level, I used to spend hours upon hours learning different rushes as well as practcising vs the computer with humans on our killer team strategies.
Rome:Total War was unreal, especially with the Total Realism mod installed. Bigger map, more playable civilisations, and no fecking war dogs! The biggest problem with it was the diplomacy. All the AI players were just rabid, and only wanted to attack you. Kind of frustrating when Rome is cutting its way through France and Spain, and the Spaniards will completely ignore this to blockade your ports and ambush your armies until the Romans have killed them and can move on to you.
"rushes" being the key phrase Mick. In Total War you can flank and charge from the rear causing chaos, I don't think that level of tactics exists in AOE I,II, or 3?
AOE wasn't realistic battle like Total War but it was certainly very strategic, especially with the mix of having to upkeep an economy. We would play 3 v 3 with two guys I had played hundreds of hours with being on my team. In one of our best strategies I was the economy builder, I was very good at quickly building a monster economy that if survived plus 20 minutes was unbeatable. One of my other team mates would be the rush guy, he'd have his first units ready for 12 minutes to prevent other guys rushing. He'd send a couple of suicide units to every one of the other team to bug them, make them stop concentrating on economy and start building defensive units. Even if they didn't succeed at taking any of his units or economy down it distracted the enemy from their very disciplined economy building. Our third team member would go for the half way house, going economy until 16 mins then going military. Just in case they attacked with a sizeable army then. We'd lure the other guys into an early war of attrition with my two team members sacrificing units en masse luring the other team in to a false sense of security just for on 25 minutes for me to burst in with a monster army with the highest techs and wipe everyone out. So in summary to say that game had no strategy element to it is wrong, we'd develop hundreds of different strategies involving hours of practice. It wasn't just a battle, it was the mad escalation of a 'rock, paper, scissors' methodology on how you go about your economy and also which units fight well against your enemy's units - trying to spy and keep tabs on your enemy to see which hand they were going to deal.
My record was a 3.57 pop 200 choson rush, that I spent hours fine tuning, with farming etc too. On the strategy side, controlling resources, creating a defence, knowing when/where/who to attack took skill and practice...So many wasted/fun hours...
I too played it many moons ago. I thought I was doing really well. I spent quite some time collecting workers, wood, etc. I thought I had a small well defended little community going, but then suddenly out of nowhere, these chariot mounted arseholes just tore in and wiped me out in no time flat. That was enough for me.
I stumbled upon a classic game from years ago... Command & Conquer! I found the 'Tiberian Sun' version the other day... what a blast from the past - got to be a decade old at least! Still good gameplay even if the graphics aren't great. Loving 'skirmish' mode! ...
Used to spend ages on Medieval: Total War. Awesome game, until for no reason the massively over-powerful Huns came and took over Europe without warning. Never beat them. Bastards.
My tactic for them was to have a big crusader army, with some cannons or elephants, in the middle east. Never take on the Hun armies directly, just pop out of the desert and sack their cities, loot the place, then offer it as a present to the Vatican. You get loads of cash, no city to defend, move your troops on to the next settlement behind Hun lines, and the Vatican will love you, and call crusades on the Huns when they try to take their city back. Eventually they run out of money and troops, and all the other nations can wear them away.
never played medieval but in medieval 2 when the *****ls and the ****s with the elephants came in was always when i got ****ed up. only managed to beat them both once. had as much of the world as possible before the invasion and was mega rich. built about 3 huge armies to fight each of their single armies. cost a fortune but i conquered the whole world.
Yes the *****ls were a bastard to defeat. See-saw battles to hold Jerusalem and Tyre which tended to end in defeat for the Crusading armies. I eventually ahd to cheat to win as the *****l Armies were too big and usually Elite too.
I was on Medieval II as well. I had a massive Scottish empire, covering half of Europe, the Middle East, and America. I never conquered the whole world though. They're remaking Shogun:Total War, it'll be interesting to see how that turns out. Never played the original
