MrFlibble, on 23 April 2019 - 10:25 AM, said:
What about EE2 and Empires: Dawn of the Modern World?
I played the demo versions a bit, watched some videos and read about these games. What I did not realise is that
EE2 was made by Mad Doc Software who originally produced the
Art of Conquest add-on for
EE while Stainless Steel Studios went on to develop
Empires. (This is something I did not realise back when the games came out originally.)
Basically, the first
EE is the closest to
AoE in terms of gameplay, and actually the visuals are pretty similar except now in full 3D. As far as I can tell,
Empires more or less follows the same route but limits the scope to medieval times and modern warfare. The multiplayer/skirmish demo of
Empires is only limited to the WW2 era, making it hard to judge how it compares to the
AoE games. It certainly feels odd that you still have to order your citizens to chop trees, mine gold and forage berry bushes to produce WW2-era infantry and tanks. Also for some reason, citizens only initiate the construction of buildings which then build themselves up, although this might be some special power of the British side only (?).
Empires also has these prolonged campaign cinematics that feel overly dragged to me, and Wikipedia states that the singleplayer portion was not the main focus of development anyway.
EE2 on the other hand seems to innovate a bit (that is, compared to the basic
AoE formula) and actually gets somewhat more similar to
Rise of Nations. You have territories that you can occupy by building city centres, unlimited resource deposits, diplomacy that seems more versatile when dealing with the AI, and quite a bit of macro features, yes it still more or less retains the
AoE kind of feel to the overall command of your settlements. It does require some getting used to.
There's also a project called
Empires Apart which kind of follows the footsteps of
AoK apparently but I gather it doesn't have a single player component as of yet.
On a related note, when I first played the demo of
Age of Mythology it really felt like a "return to the roots" of sorts in the franchise in spite of the mythological elements.