Up there with one of my favourite games of all time.

For those switching from OG or HD, the quality of life features are already worth paying for. The highlights for me include being able to shift-queuing actions (a la StarCraft 2), automatic farm reseeding for easier late-game macro, and more hotkeys to take advantage of (such as "Select All [BUILDING]").

For those that never played AoE2 before, it is a very difficult game to get good at. While every civilization shares the same tech tree so there's only one bin of toys to learn, utilising everything effectively takes of lot of learning, practice, and patience, but nailing everything it takes to beat a skilled opponent is truly euphoric. It's taken me months of really cutting my teeth on all the mechanics to finally and consistently beat the extreme difficulty AI.

While the advanced tutorials help with learning dark age and feudal age economy, I feel like they don't properly teach you how to focus an economy for early aggression, such as adding a "drush" (three militia and your starting scout to create problems for your opponent and using the chaos generated to gain an economy advantage) to a Fast Castle strategy, or learning how to attack early with scouts or archers. The game does teach you one Fast Castle build order, but it's the 25+2 market+blacksmith kind that will get you into a lot of trouble on open maps, such as the very widely played Arabia.

I learned a lot by watching streams and high level games. The competitive community is still extremely active, and you learn a lot by seeing how pros balance their economies, their unit choices, how they react to situations, and just how completely different you need to tackle each of the maps and the civilizations to gain every advantage.

I love games with big challenging walls to tackle, and this game presents a ton of small pieces to focus on to put together a full game. While it can be overwhelming, if you're able to identify said pieces and you're able to get slowly better at putting the puzzle together, Age of Empires 2 is an extremely rewarding, fun game. I know I'm still bad, but what excites me is that I know when I boot it up tomorrow I can continue to improve.

Up there with one of my favourite games of all time. For those switching from OG or HD, the quality of life features are already worth paying for. The highlights for me include being able to shift-queuing actions (a la StarCraft 2), automatic farm reseeding for easier late-game macro, and more hotkeys to take advantage of (such as "Select All [BUILDING]"). For those that never played AoE2 before, it is a very difficult game to get good at. While every civilization shares the same tech tree so there's only one bin of toys to learn, utilising everything effectively takes of lot of learning, practice, and patience, but nailing everything it takes to beat a skilled opponent is truly euphoric. It's taken me months of really cutting my teeth on all the mechanics to finally and consistently beat the extreme difficulty AI. While the advanced tutorials help with learning dark age and feudal age economy, I feel like they don't properly teach you how to focus an economy for early aggression, such as adding a "drush" (three militia and your starting scout to create problems for your opponent and using the chaos generated to gain an economy advantage) to a Fast Castle strategy, or learning how to attack early with scouts or archers. The game does teach you one Fast Castle build order, but it's the 25+2 market+blacksmith kind that will get you into a lot of trouble on open maps, such as the very widely played Arabia. I learned a lot by watching streams and high level games. The competitive community is still extremely active, and you learn a lot by seeing how pros balance their economies, their unit choices, how they react to situations, and just how completely different you need to tackle each of the maps and the civilizations to gain every advantage. I love games with big challenging walls to tackle, and this game presents a ton of small pieces to focus on to put together a full game. While it can be overwhelming, if you're able to identify said pieces and you're able to get slowly better at putting the puzzle together, Age of Empires 2 is an extremely rewarding, fun game. I know I'm still bad, but what excites me is that I know when I boot it up tomorrow I can continue to improve.