Age of Empires II Definitive Edition

[The Brain]

Have you tried putting your back into it?

[viper37]

Having fun, except I remember now that I actually suck at this.

I'm OK on maps where water separates me from the AI.  but in a land map, I find the AI always manages to attack me from multiple areas, and I can never recover enough to get back at it.

I think the trick is to build walls as quickly as possible and towers/castles to protect yourself.  Agressivity in skirmish pays off, but in the campaign, the ennemy is often already setup with towers and castles, so it's hard to attack its peasants.

[crazy canuck]

And as luck would have it, picked it up this morning in the Steam sale 

[viper37]

I will revise my judgement on this.

Yes, it is a very fun game, at first.  I like that it's connected to history, albeit a tad warped, sometimes, it does stimulate me to look on Wikipedia for historical events or characters I don't know much about (particularly the asian campaigns).

However, it does get repetitive.  And aside from 1 or 2 unique units, they mostly look the same.  Play the Aztecs of the Inca, and you get men-at-arms and two handed swordsman like France or Portugal.

AoE 3 is much better in that regard and I anxiously wait for the DE to be released for that one as well.

Also, I tried AoE 1 DE, and it looks really bad, so I ended up returning it.

[Syt]

You could play Star Wars: Battlegrounds, which is AoE2 in Star Wars paint. It's available from GOG and has 6 factions: Empire, Rebels, Republic, Confederacy, Wookiees, Naboo, Trade Federation, and ... Gungans.

"Should you play SWGB in 2019?": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDGatw1Ti9g