Everyone knows that this is the hands-down best RTS that has ever been made up to this point. And it's difficult to argue that considering this is a remaster to a game that is 20 years old at present.

But while everyone can tell you how tight the gameplay is, how deep the strategy is, and how beautiful the graphics are, I want to talk about what I think is the real secret to this game's success: graphical scale.

By graphical scale, I mean the size that units, buildings, resources, and other assets take up on the screen in comparison to each other. Scale is important because it determines what objects you are most likely to pay attention to during gameplay because they take up more of what you can see, and it's easier to pay attention to changes in their position or animation.

Most RTS games know this, and you'll find that any competent developer will know to make more powerful or more important objects larger than smaller ones. The problem in games like the Command & Conquer franchise, or the Starcraft franchise, is that while those models may follow this principle, they lose any consideration of real-world scale. They may make a very powerful unit larger than anything else, but in order to fit it on the screen, they have to scale it down to be practical. For this reason, you have have enormous spacecraft carriers that are about the size of a motorboat when placed next to the infantry that might crew them.

Age of Empires II manages to both use scale to communicate importance, while keeping the units real-life scale mostly consistent to each other. Castles dwarf the villagers that build them, rams look like they can hold the number of infantry the game tells you they can. Walls look like you would need a ladder to get over. Cavalry units are the size of a horse with a human riding it (Which sounds stupid, but go look at a Warcraft Knight and tell me his mount isn't the size of a german shepherd).

Some units, naval in particular, still break this rule, but being restricted to water means that you often don't have to see them in close comparison to the rest of the game's assets. And even then, they make the ships as large as they can without making it impractical for gameplay.

The scale also applies to textures themselves. Buildings are designed to be consistent in their detail with any other building. Doorways, staircases, windows, roof tiles, barrels, crates, and so on, are all consistent in size and detail no matter the actual size the building takes up in the game. And after spending some time attempting to 3D model some of the buildings, I also appreciate how much thought has been put into the implied internal floorplans of these buildings.

I could talk endlessly about where else this attention to detail shows up, but suffice it to say that it succeeds both in communicating gameplay importance to the player while simultaneously immersing them in the grounded, believable, and recognizable realism of a historic setting.