AOE - 0.a.d.
I'm not a huge gamer, I prefer first person shooters and strategy games. Back in the mists of time when home computers burst onto the market I, along with many others in 1997 purchased Age of Empires a game originally developed by Ensemble Studios the game was and still is a phenomenal success for Microsoft, selling in excess of 20 Million copies. The game is a historical strategy game offering you a choice of 12 civilizations, each player starts in the stone age and progressively builds up their empire by collecting resources and upgrades enabling you to advance your civilization to the classical period. Along the way you will be periodically attacked by the other players (Either your friends in Multi-Player mode or the AI), this is to either hinder your progression or, if possible, defeat you. Ultimately you will have to destroy your enemies unless required to capture a relic or kill their king.
AOE had four instalments and covered many historical periods from the Roman Empire through to Age of Empires III "The war Chiefs" covering early America and native Indians but also including European conflicts with British, Dutch, French, German, Ottoman, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish forces.
I loved Age of Empires (I even bought the original tee-shirt ☺) but around 2000 I started to get into Linux. Back then there were virtually no games that would run on that platform or at least no games I wanted to play. I did install AOE under an application called Wine. It's not actually an application but it is easier for non-techies to understand if you call it an app. Wine is an acronym for "Wine Is Not an Emulator" and is what is known as a compatibility layer capable of running Windows applications on other Operating Systems such as Linux. AOE ran reasonably well with varying levels of success depending on the Linux Distribution I happened to be running at the time, however it would often freeze or go a bit crazy sometimes, so much so that I stopped playing.
Around 2014 I started playing 0.a.d. a free, open-source, cross-platform strategy game that is clearly a direct decendant of Age of Empires II (Medieval) the game itself certainly has the look, and in some cases, feel of AOE with almost a carbon copy of the advancement criteria. There is a long standing joke within the Open Source community that by the time 0.ad. finally reaches release most of us origial players will be dead! 0.ad. has been in Alpha for what feels like an eternity.
Currently, 0 A.D. is still in alpha phase, which means an early experimental phase. It is playable, and you can already download and test the game, but some features are still missing.
I play the game pretty regularly, I mostly play on random mode which lets the game choose the map played. The AI can be pretty vicious sometimes which means I do play on the wimpy Easy mode against three opponents. Sometimes it feels like there is something wrong, if I didn't know any better, I'd say the thing was cheating when suddenly, out the blue an opponent appears with a large force that seems to have superhuman strength. I wouldn't mind so much, but generally, more often than not this happens when I've hardly upgraded any armour, and there are little resources to be had in the location my city is based in. Even with these minute issues, it's still a great game which I thoroughly enjoy playing most nights. If you've ever played AOE download 0.a.d. it's free! Have a play and maybe come back here to comment.
Hey I took the time to read your post now follow and upvote me you bald fart!
(kidding... I didn't read)
Okay , I did. I loved playing AoE back in the day. I even recently picked up the AoE2-HD version. I'm not as fast as I was when I was younger, but I still enjoyed it very much. I'm going to look up 0.a.d. , thanks for the tip!
LOL
I still have AOE 1 and 2 around here somewhere and a milk crate of other game of the era.
Hey ;) If you liked AoE, maybe you want to take part in the first steemit AoE tournament - check it out: https://steemit.com/gaming/@steemleague/steemleague-the-1st-age-of-empires-ii-hd-tournament-on-steemit-is-coming
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