Age of Empires II: The Conquerors Expansion Review

Attila the Hun is finally going to crush the Romans, The Aztecs are about to conquer the lands near Mexico, and Hernan Cortéz are starting to fight absolutely dahhling... Our guest writer dives into the new world of Empire-strategy before the game hits the shelves!

Tested and written by Ørjan Eide, published 23rd August 2000

Yup, we are talking about Age of Empires II: The Conquerors Expansion. To give you a clue before starting off, this new baby basically is Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings with new campaigns, civilizations, maps, gameplay improevements and more. Worth the money? You'll find out.

One of these improvements has made it unnecessary to replant your farms all the time, because now you can queue up farms and your villagers automatically will replant them for you, but it doesn't end there; the villagers has become smarter as well. The developers at Ensemble has done a good job improving the AI of the villagers.

As much as five new civilizations has been added to the original. And all civilizations, including the old ones, have gotten a new unique technology. This adds more depth to the civilizations and makes them more different. Also, the unique units of the new civilizations is really exiting. Like the Koreans have two unique units; a war wagon and a turtle ship. Both of these look magnificent and you should play as the Koreans sometimes just to try them out! And the Aztec Jaguar warrior is a new unique unit which you should get to try out. The Aztecs fit really good into the new tropical tile set.

Has it annoyed you that your own Mangonels, Onangers and Siege Onangers kill your own units? Well, if they have they won't do that anymore. Now these siege weapons won't fire if they may harm friendly units. Also there has been other improvements to siege weapons. Onangers, Siege Onanger, Mangonel, Scorpion and Heavy Scorpion now do more damage, and you can garrison units in rams. When you garrison units in a ram, you increase the speed and attack of the ram and the garrisoned units is as good as immune to arrows.

Another new unit available to all the civilizations is the Petard, which is a demolition infantry who carries barrels of gunpowder around and is very good at blowing up buildings, walls and siege weapons. Ensemble also have added a new light cavalry unit, the Hussar, and some new technologies like the thumb ring which makes your archers a lot better. And heresy which makes your people die instead of being converted of enemy priests or missionary which is basically a mounted priest, but they are, together with the Conquistadors, the Spanish unique unit.

If you are into playing AoK multiplayer, you have - as mentioned - several new civilizations to use and there are three new game types; King of the Hill, Wonder Race and Defend the Wonder. There are also more maps and winter and tropical tile sets. On the winter tile set units leave footprints in the snow - and on tropical maps you herd turkeys instead of sheep and you fend off jaguars instead of wolves.

All together, The Conquerors Expansion is a very good expansion pack. So, if you already have Age of Empires II, and think it has became a little dull, or just hate to replant your farms all the time, it is definitely a game worth considering!

	+   Improved game interface +   New and spiffy units, techs and campaigns... +   ...as well as cool tilesets and multiplayer functions		-   Repetative music

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