Enemy Sighted!
I never got into sourdough or crochet during lockdown. I also didn’t manage to write a word. I drank a lot of strong Polish lager and, where permissible, walked around the local Mapperley Park estate, peering up the drives and through the windows of the rich people who lived there. The rest of the day was spent playing computer games from when I was a child.
Like many children, I never had a particularly completionist approach to playing games. I’d usually run out of steam at some point and set about the real fun: trying to break them. Running against walls to try and glitch through and access a ghostly, unrendered zone. Playing with a friend and attempting to sabotage them by pushing them off a cliff. In Halo my friend and I would play a game we invented called Warthog Rumble, which involved each getting into one of the game’s humvee-style vehicles and attempting to overturn the other and run them over.
The first game I got back into during lockdown was Rollercoaster Tycoon, where the primary avenue for breaking the game is murdering people in rollercoaster crashes. The theme park you design is populated with obstreperous little sprites who spend their whole time vomiting, complaining about being lost or saying that “I’m not paying that much to go on The Big Bastard” (you are able to name all of the rides you design). As they teem like ants and befoul your exquisitely designed park, it’s only natural that your thoughts turn to slaughter.
There were simple, reliable methods of murder. Just by clicking on a guest you can pick them up with an enormous hand, where they wriggle and thrash under your demiurge grip. You can then drop them in a lake, where they struggle helplessly for a few moments then sink below the surface. Though superficially satisfying, this doesn’t quite scratch the itch. Watch one drowning, you’ve watched them all. Happily, you also have the option to crash a rollercoaster.
This isn’t just a button you can press, like on Sim City where you can trigger the invasion of a Kaiju and watch it crush all you have built. You have to maliciously misdesign it. The most foolproof method is to build a rollercoaster which operates via a launch pad, generating the train’s thrust instantly rather than through the much more laborious exercise of gravity. Using this correctly entails making the upwards-facing track long enough that the train loses momentum before being launched off the end, and then slides safely back down.
Use this incorrectly and you can fire a rollercoaster full of guests directly into a courtyard full of hundreds of milling victims. Use this incorrectly and with the precise exercise of skill, you can even do it from some distance away. Or have two rollercoasters crash simultaneously into each other in mid air, shedding burning metal and twisted limbs across Fairyland Adventure Park.
The Big Bastard has crashed!
Setting fires was my preferred method in The Sims, though much like Rollercoaster Tycoon drowning was also an option. Add a diving board but no steps to your swimming pool and your Sim will enter the water and then swim helplessly for several hours before succumbing to exhaustion and drowning. I once did this by accident with a new family I made in Simville, inadvertently murdering myself (the Jan character had come around to visit). To add insult to injury I was then haunted by my own ghost, who would storm around the garden shrieking at people and put them off from using the new hot tub.
Fires in the Sims usually happen with some degree of randomness, unless you’re foolish enough to place a large fur rug next to your open fire. The build menu is then locked as soon as the fire starts, presumably to prevent you from simply selling all the items about to be consumed in the blaze. This has the unhappy side effect of preventing you from deleting all the doors and windows, trapping your Sim into the now sealed room with an out-of-control blaze. This means that you have to trap them first, and wait for nature to take its course.
One of my proudest moments when I was about 13: I burned a Sim to death, and then managed to also set fire to the Grim Reaper who came to harvest her soul.
Mass slaughter is de rigueur in Age of Empires II. It is a wargame, not a bright, primary-coloured sim. It then becomes a question not of death but of scale. The easiest method is to create a custom map, and fill it entirely with your own units and those of the enemy, ideally with some sort of chokepoint on the map so that their foolish troops huddle together under your barrage, hundreds flattened by volleys of arrows or siege weapons. There are few pleasures more visceral in gaming than a Siege Onager shot landing a half dozen glowing orange balls onto some waiting Arbalests.
Age of Empires is not like the other games on this list, however. It is not like Theme Hospital or Worms. Though it occupies a similarly nostalgic position — the original game came out in 1999, and would go on to be regarded as one of the best games ever — it is not a relic. There are tens of thousands of active players. A LAN tournament was recently held with a total prize pool of $138,000. Much of this can be put down to the release of a dramatically upgraded version of the original game in November 2019 — Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition. Just in time for lockdown.
I’m not sure when exactly I became serious about Age of Empires. At some point I went from idly reopening it, continuing my slow regression to childhood, to looking up youtube videos and guides on professional play. To doing research, posting on the subreddit, watching replays of my games to determine where I went wrong (almost everywhere, to begin with). My story isn’t unique. In fact the AoE community is full of people who did exactly the same thing. Millennials in their 30s, lost during lockdown, falling back into the things they found comfortable when they were younger. Things they remembered playing with their older brothers, their dads or their friends. And then, totally by accident, realising that the game is still really fucking good.
At the highest point of my Elo (AoE uses the same ranking system as chess) I would have been the 142nd best player in the country (out of about 1600 total), or within the top 10 -15% globally. This is, by any reasonable measure, the best I have ever been at anything. If and when Age of Empires becomes a recognised measure of social hierarchy, I will be firmly within the aristocracy. It has had the unfortunate side effect of making it impossible to play a casual game with any of my friends otherwise on board with the nostalgia kick. I am simply too good. It’s lonely at the top.
It’s hard to say exactly what is so good about AoE. Part of it is its isometric graphics — most things on the screen are not full 3D, but fixed side-on images. This makes the design much cleaner and more attractive, because it doesn’t need to be rendered from several angles. This has enabled it to maintain a simple kind of beauty well into the age of 1080p and shooters so realistic you can see the light die in a terrorist’s eyes.
It has extraordinary depth but also enough simplicity in its fundamentals to allow most people who have played a strategy game before to pick it up. There are five basic resources — wood, food, stone, gold, and population cap. Buildings are made from wood and sometimes stone. Villagers — the basic economic unit, who collect the resources — are made from food. They collect food from farms which are made from wood. Military units are made from some combination of wood, food and gold in varying quantities. Houses are made from wood, and need to be constructed in order to expand your population.
That’s it. You can go and play now if you want. Many do. For some, Age of Empires isn’t a wargame at all. The fighting is an unhappy side effect of playing the game, to be deferred or avoided for as long as possible. Rather what they want to do is farm. They want to wall up their settlement, and lay down housing estates. They want to apportion an area as arable land, and another for a network of military buildings. They want to erect castles on top of hills, so that their rulers can look out across their lands. In a more abstract sense, what they want to do is allow those fine-toothed economic gears to turn. They want to harvest the wood to build their monasteries and universities, and they want to collect the food to create the builders. They want to make things, not burn them down.
Now, perhaps you do want to fight. You soon learn that the game is built on a series of rock-paper-scissors interactions. Skirmishers defeat archers, but are themselves run down by cavalry. Spearmen defeat cavalry, but are vulnerable to the ranged attacks of archers. Siege weapons can be used to destroy buildings or large, clumped-together groups of units. Monks convert enemy units to your side. With this basic knowledge you can win a game of Age of Empires by killing your opponent.
Okay: now you want to be good. You want to think strategically, and maximise your economy and military. You do a little searching around and learn something called a build order, which will allow you to most efficiently create military units as quickly as possible, while still growing your economy. You learn that you need to pay close attention to how many villagers you have on each resource, because you need 8 on gold if you want to produce archers from two Archery Ranges at once. Now you’re really cooking. Perhaps you’re even playing online, and defeating other players who have their own build orders and strategies. You enjoy it even though you get a kind of sick anxiety from it, and you need to go for a walk after a stressful game.
This isn’t enough for you. Build orders don’t last all game, and you find yourself making poor decisions thereafter. You need to see the game in its entirety. You need to recognise that there are particular moments in games where they are won or lost. Where you reach a stronger unit marginally faster than your opponent, win a fight, and seize the initiative. Where you learn about the strengths and weaknesses of the civilisations you have both chosen, and recognise that your knights have more hit points than your enemy, so they will be forced instead to make pikemen, or monks, or camels. And then you make sure that you use a unit to go and scout that, and plan your response in advance. You judge whether you have a stronger economy, or better units in the late game. You map out the entire game based on a thousand variables.
You do all this, and you’re still only fine at the game.
I could go on, endlessly abstracting upwards until reaching the best players in the game, who see the map as a major general does a whole country, covered in a dozen potential futures, margins of error, places where the initiative can be seized in exactly 31 seconds as long as your opponent doesn’t do something else in the 30 seconds leading up to it. Who are managing not just 21 villagers but 150, clicking fast enough that they have to wear special wrist protection. The point is only this: Age of Empires is as difficult as you want it to be. Easy to learn, and near impossible to master. The greatest players in history still routinely make the kind of mistakes that anyone can. You can always win, and you can always get better. It’s intoxicating.
Here’s why I like Age of Empires: I’m slow. Whether it’s my relative age or some more inherent failing, I can’t click very fast or think very fast. Competitive RTS games use a metric called APM — Actions Per Minute — to represent the speed of players. It is a measure of both physical and mental dexterity. Professional Starcraft players can click faster than most people can think, and this is one of the main metrics of their dominance.
Not so in Age of Empires. One of the most enduring professional players, an avuncular Serbian in his 40s called DauT, is well known for his slowness. Others are equally notorious for their sluggish clicking and grey beards (by gaming standards anyway, DauT and JonSlow are still substantially faster than your average player). The reason this doesn’t matter is because the game is so surpassingly complex and strategic that you can get by just by being smarter than your opponent. It is pleasingly cerebral, where esports are so often frantic, energy drink-fuelled things, the preserve of the young and hyperactive.
Not that it doesn’t come with its downsides. A few months ago I got a bad infection in my elbow. I was baffled by its source until the doctor pointed out that the skin on my elbow was very dry and cracked. This is from resting it on a hard table while playing hours and hours of Age of Empires. I was secretly pleased to receive an authentic esports injury. It also has a habit of consuming my day, because when you’re winning you just want to play again, and when you’re losing you want to just win one game so you feel better, and then you can quit and go and do the things you were meant to be doing (washing, eating, using the toilet).
The Age of Age of Empires won’t last forever. There will come a time when it’s only played by the last remaining hardcore. The former professionals, who make a living from streaming and winning tournaments, will have moved on to other games or gone on to get real jobs. Some of them already have — outside of the very very elite, it’s hard to make a living as a professional. Until then though, you can find me with the other aging millennials, cursing the villager that gets killed by the boar and the hole I didn’t see in my wall.
GG.
