Overview

The Big Three

There are three, and only three major RTS franchises currently in play. With due respect to the excellent Homeworld and its even better expansion pack, a title and a half don’t make a franchise. For a while, there was only one – Craft. Be it WarCraft or StarCraft, Blizzard had the Midas touch with its Craft games. With the release of Red Alert II, we saw the C&C series come to life again after a long lull that followed Red Alert’s release. In all this time, there has been one successful upstart, one franchise that was forged on its own strengths in the internet age, not the dark eras before them. I speak, of course, of Age of Empires. The hows and whys of it I cannot guess, but Ensemble Studios succeeded in breaking through. At a time when Microsoft was known as a publisher of decidedly questionable titles, Ensemble put them on the map as a force to be contended with.

The campaign map

Weeds ahoy!

Ajax isn't the brightest bulb

What really made Age of Empires different was its historical, real-world setting. Obviously it wasn’t a true history, since there’s no explaining contact between the Carthaginians and Sumerians, but Ensemble gave each nation a unique flavor by giving them bonuses and a special unit or two. Greeks had access to the phalanx and the Shang had production bonuses to reflect the economic might of China. Even the dominance of cavalry archers in multiplayer matches, though somewhat difficult to explain in ancient terms, wasn’t out of place historically. The Mongols devastated the flower of European nobility using their light, mobile cavalry with composite bows that could pierce armor.

The sequels

Age of Empires II: Age of Kings was the real killer app. Age of Empires had a large but very tight fan base, and outside of that circle it received little attention. It was Age of Kings that brought the AOE games to public spotlight. Consider, even when forced to use the inferior MSN Gaming Zone service, there were at times as many Age of Kings players as there were StarCraft gamers on Battle.net’s USEast or USWest servers.

Looks yummy

Nooooooooooooooo

At least we're boars, not pigs

Age of Mythology plans to continue the trend of growth, though it has apparently taken a different path than people expected. For one, the timeline hasn’t advanced forward, we’re actually back in the Age of Empires eras with the return of two original civilizations. The Norse are from more modern times, but were included to help the second departure from the AOE norms – mythologies. For the first time there will be unnatural units in the series. Age of Mythology, as the title suggests, is strongly connected to mythological settings and units.