The Best Strategy Game You Never Played: Age of Mythology

The early 2000s was the golden age of

strategy

game

s and real-time

strategy

was its king Command and Conquer Age of Empires Warcraft and Starcraft were household names selling millions of copies, each RTS was so popular that Its mini

game

s ended up generating their own genres. like Tower Defense and mobas, after their immense success with Age of Empires 2, Ensemble Studios wanted to expand, they were already one of the most experienced and skilled developers and they wanted to take everything they had learned to make something new, fresh and amazing. Thus Age of Mythology was born and the game didn't sell very well, it wasn't a failure by any means, but it just couldn't steal from the titans of the time.

Look at this graph, the red bar is Age of Mythology, it was difficult. In my opinion, Age Mythology is secretly one of the

best

real-time strategy games ever released and 21 years later, I'm here to talk for a completely reasonable period of time why we're going to talk about every campaign and decision on the design of game mechanics. and anything else I can think of because Age Mythology is amazing and deserves it, we're also going to talk about the things it doesn't do well because it may be one of my favorite games, but that doesn't mean it's perfect. or immune to criticism for a little context.

I've

played

this game many times growing up, and to prepare for this video, I did a full playthrough on Titan difficulty and a full playthrough on Hard difficulty. Being the hard difficulty game because I want to show everything and while Titan is absolutely possible, sometimes the overwhelming difficulty can limit the player's freedom and strategic expression, meaning I wouldn't be able to show some of the really interesting things that also They are kind. It sucks and yeah this game is getting remastered soon so I probably should have waited for him to make this video but I was really excited so I hope you don't mind.

With that said, let's begin the journey through one of my favorite games. Right off the bat our protagonist was introduced to arcanthus in a dream, he relives an old battle against theerys who, as far as I can tell, is not actually a mythological figure and is just a therapeutic riding group. He is approached by the goddess Athena, who gives him some arcane background: he is a powerful admiral of Atlantis who has run out of real opponents and is stuck fighting weak pirates, but his service to his homeland is not complete. Dark times are coming when Arcanthus wakes up, we are informed about the main deity of Atlantis, Poseidon is angry and it could be because the Atlanteans are not helping the Greeks in the battle of Troy and then a damn Kraken attacks in the first mission.

The world of Age of Mythology begins, which is better understood if you don't think about it too much. Four thousand year old Egyptian. civilizations sit next to the 2500 year old Greeks and the 1000 year old Vikings no one questions it, it's just how it is more important that each of these civilizations exist mythologies, from the raw Sun God to the Frost Giants and Hercules, all They are real, there is no doubt to question it. This is a brilliant setting for a game. Real-time strategy games often struggle with faction identity, whether all the factions blend together and are difficult to distinguish or they are so incredibly separated that everything is strange and difficult for new players to process.

Age

mythology

is a fantastic shortcut when I talk about a centaur, the vast majority of people say yes, horse on the bottom, person on top. I know that it manages to quickly and cleanly create a unit that is unique but not confusing, it's fantastic. way to create a game that is both accessible and evocative while I've been talking, the tutorial has been happening waves of pirates and Kraken attacks from the sea and I push them back, this tutorial is a pretty simple clinic on unit movement and control of the army in At least it is on lower difficulties.

I didn't realize this when I

played

as a kid, but upon returning to the game I was really impressed by something Ensemble managed to do here. Tutorial missions are a really difficult part for game developers to solve. a way to make a game accessible to new players, giving them information in a digestible way, but without making the first parts a horrible experience for experienced players or repeating playthroughs, this quest is one of the

best

examples of how to do this that I have had. Seen, the mission is specifically designed in a smart way on the lowest difficulties, it is designed so that the player can win only with his initial forces, all he has to do is focus on moving his army and fighting occasionally, the game will tells the player that they can produce more forces from the barracks and archery ranges, but do not pressure them if they do not have the attention to do so now.

That's for the next mission. This is true whether you're playing on easy or moderate difficulty, but. If you are playing on Hard or Titan to keep enemies at bay, you have to use all these tools that the game gives you. You have to build more workers to harvest more resources and train more troops to fight pirates you can't trust. With just your initial strengths, new players can take things slowly and experienced players are instantly thrown into the fire and none of that required any artificial changes to the game. This is the first little look at how Ensemble really understands how to make a good RTS in this. point in their history and it won't be the last after amassing a pretty solid army, the final push comes, it's a great force, but hooray, the Atlantean reinforcements have arrived to save the day and somehow I didn't realize there was two groups of Atlanteans. until the last moment, screams after the pirates retreat, the anonymous theocrat at least I assume his name is not actually the theocrat mentions that the Krakens are creatures of Poseidon, the patron deity of Atlantis is obviously angry with them for some reason, oh, and the attack was a faint to steal Poseidon's. trident, so he will be doubly angry now the mission ends with the greatest father energy quote ever.

Arcantos tells his men to prepare to board the ships to hunt down the pirates and his Sun Caster appears and says, "I can come, no, I need you here." in case they come back, I don't know why I love this, but it perfectly sums up the feeling of a child or little brother who wants to participate, but arcantos is just trying to find excuses to keep him at home. I don't know if it was intentional, but it's wonderful once Arcantos boards his ships, quickly detects more pirates, and lands his forces on this island to set up camp.

This is the first mission structured around building things and I like how it doesn't. Keep your hand here if you really don't know how to play, the game offers a couple of tagged how to play missions that provide basics on unit movement resources. Collection and production of anything besides the basics. Basic concepts that the game gives you freedom to discover. In a fairly relaxed early game environment, my goal is to advance to the classic era because the Ceres era focuses on shocking ages. I know that once you reach a certain requirement you can spend a good amount of resources to advance to the next age and it unlocks a lot of new things in its four ages in total, but here we can only reach the second age to do that.

I need many resource courses. There are four main resources in the game. Wood and gold are the simplest that villagers can cut. Trees and digging gold mines to obtain these foods is a little more complex with some options such as wild animals that can be hunted, bushes that can be gathered, domestic animals that can be herded, and farms that can be farmed. All of these activities are done by villagers, so I want a lot of them. These three resources constitute the human parts of the technology tree. Each human unit costs gold and food or wood. Each unit upgrade costs one or more of these.

This is also true for each faction in order. to advance to the classical era I need a temple and 400 food I harvest food to pay the workers I use it to harvest more food wood and gold I build some fortifications I build a temple and start to advance to the classical era and this is where the

mythology

of the era really sets itself apart when you click to advance, a screen appears where you can choose between a couple of deities to worship each deity, providing a host of benefits, useful divine power, unique upgrades for the faction, and access to a powerful unit of myths because it is our The main deity is Poseidon.

My first choice is between Aries and Hermes. I will choose all of them over the course of this game, but for today I will go with Aries with the temple finished and Aries worshiped. I can talk about the final and most interesting resource. Favor Favor is used to pay for God-specific upgrades as well as part of the cost of mythic units, and each faction generates favor in a different way. Greeks are by far the simplest and most straightforward villagers that can be assigned tasks in a temple and that Temple will generate favor based on how many villagers worship it with diminishing returns now in the classical era and having a decent economy.

My objective changes to gathering an army and destroying the Pirate City Center. To do this, I'm going to enlist the help of Ares. mythological unit, the cyclopes. Cyclops are big, bulky fighters that deal incredible damage and can literally pick up enemy humans and throw them around like dolls. They are amazing and also expensive to balance things out. I make an army of light infantry to help and I talk like that. they are archers and head to the anime they are decently defended with some egyptian units and new bite myth units as well as some towers and infantry but this is mission two so it's not too scary.

One of the reasons I chose the cyclops is that he deals crushing damage that is super effective against buildings, allowing me to ramp up the enemy base faster. I'll talk about God's powers a little later, but worshiping Ares also gives me the power of pestilence that allows me to temporarily disable the Pirates' unit production during the fight. with this combo I can barely win the fight, join up with my reinforcements, take down the center of the enemy city and force the camouflages to retreat while arcantos corners the pirate captain on a small cliff, jumps and sails over a giant, whatever it is . but okay, the Atlanteans recovered the Trident from him, so they sent him home and headed off to join the siege of Troy.

Before we move on to the next mission, we have to talk about something that they don't really say between here and the In the next mission, they go to the siege of Troy, they like to mention it as a potential thing to do in mission one and then there's just no connective tissue between these two, we'll just be in Troy on the next mission and we just have to move on, the narrative in the early stages of Age of Mythology is strange, once things get going it makes a lot more sense and it's internally consistent because it follows events, but at first they skip a lot of things and just wait.

You should know what's going on, but honestly, that was pretty true in a lot of games in the early 2000s, so it was normal now that we're in Troy, we get to meet and greet some real mythological figures. Oh, I forgot to mention this, but arcanthus isn't actually a mythological figure, he's the original character in the ensemble they're adding to these events, but I guess that's how all myths start, so maybe he is now. arcantos joins forces with king Agamemnon and then meets up with his old friend Ajax as Well, Ajax is by far the best character in this game and I will take every opportunity later to show you why Agamemnon gives us a place to start our base , but the Trojan fleet comes and attacks our landing ship.

We have to eliminate both. of Trojan ports to stop them in a similar way to the last mission, we start mainly from scratch, but as expected, the Trojan threat is significantly more real than the pirates. They send out some raiding parties early and can get pretty nasty if they catch you off guard. Greeks, we have an answer to the temple can build the Pegasus myth unit for very little money, they fly and can see that's it. I grabbed four of them, looked for possible attack platforms and put them there to detect incoming assaults, the two docks are fortified behind. walls, so I want a heavy hitter to take care of them because each faction's campaign is only 10 missions long and there are a ton of gods to try.

The game gives you access to technology very quickly in Mission 3. I can already reach Age 3 of 4 and choose to rush. I can choose between Dionysus and Aphrodite here, but I want my daiyo boy because he has one of my unitsMythical favorites as I advance to the heroic era under your guidance, let's talk about the powers of God at the peak of On the screen there are four icon spaces, each one represents the power of a god of each era, the first is of the God elder one you start with, the second is for the lesser God you worship to advance to the second age, the third for the third age, etc., these powers.

They are generally weak in the lower ages and later on they are stronger, for example, Poseidon's powerful lure makes a rock that has wild animals walk towards it so that he can hunt them for food. Dionysus, on the other hand, is a bit more combat-oriented, as I Advance to the Heroic Age. I get two attacks in quick succession, the first hitting my infantry and the second being a cavalry attack which makes things look pretty sketchy, but when the fight started I finished my upgrade to the Elder. and gain access to the bronze power giving my human units in an area a huge increase in durability for a minute and a half.

This allows me to barely defend myself against attackers. I have a lot to say about the design of the God power and we will get I'll see this later, but all the powers of the Greek, Egyptian and Norse gods can only be used once per game, which means that bronze is off the table for me for the rest of the mission. That's not why I chose Dionysus, although I wanted the mythological unit of him, the Hydra or as my twitch chat keeps asking why are there dinosaurs in this game? As the Hydro takes out enemies he gains more heads, each head attack allows the Hydra to kill more enemies and gains more heads up to a total of five after getting a couple of Hydras and archers to cover them.

I continue to the first dock, the Hydra design is great, not only is the basic idea amazing, but it is also a fantastic, self-limiting design. The five-headed hydras are absolutely overpowered, they are monsters, but you can't just spam them because they need killing blows to get their heads, so a lot of them will end up splitting the kills, getting a bunch of bad hydras. It's a brilliant way to reward players for taking care of their units without letting things get out of hand. The first action falls easily and Agamemnon complies. reinforcements I need because the scratch the surface objective is super unique, there are two docks that need to be destroyed and each one is defended by an increasingly stronger group of enemies, no seriously, that 2015 design that Blizzard was so proud of which they did a whole campaign, yes Age of Mythology was doing this 13 years before them so this is actually a really awesome trigger for 2002, the second dock is reinforced with a lot of infantry and two colossi possibly the strongest mythical unit in the game.

I don't really want to fight it, but I don't have to while assaulting the first Trojan dock. I was building two of my own and trained Dionysus' second mythical unit, Skyla. I looked up the pronunciation of this one, please don't understand. angry with me, he is the same as the Hydra but he is in the water. I use a Skyla to clear the waters of Trojan ships and build a couple of transports. Agamemnon gave me some cavalry that I took to the bases. The doors draw enemies outside and Skyla confronts them. naval defenses while my transports unload and attack the dock the mission ends without me having to fight the final defenders this will not be the last time the Trojans are defeated by some trick on horseback with the Trojan docks below Agamemnon presents arcanthus to Odysseus and gives his plan to end the war, these two break down the main gate of Troy, which is sure to be an easy task.

Ajax charges in and defeats all the defenders and then Agamemnon, you know, rescues Helen. Equal glory to all Agamemnon apart from this mission. does an amazing job of showing something very very difficult to do, how to restrict a player but not force them into a specific solution, the mission starts with a warning that our base has no gold, this is a big problem because all the units humans in the game It costs gold to train, there is no gold, there is no army. What's so amazing here is that the mission is super open about how to solve this problem.

It gives the player some suggestions on various ways to obtain gold, but

never

requires any of them to do so. The first and easiest solution is to attack the enemy gold mines and claim them, but the caveat is that these mines are almost empty. It's easy to extract the entire map here. The second solution is to avoid gold altogether, while all human units cost gold. units always cost one resource and favor, for example these Minotaurs only cost food favor, making them a great early game option. Here the game doesn't tell you this directly, but starts you off with a bunch of free favors just in case and the third one.

The option is my favorite. There's brilliant design here that subtly teaches the player the mechanics of the game in a non-intrusive way while also being thematic and strategic and then someone ruined it while I'm exploring. I eventually find some donkey trading caravans. Caravans that a soldier tells me about. They tell us that these supply gold to Troy and if we destroy them they will train fewer troops. This is really cool, it serves as a mechanical device that allows the player to harass the Trojans and teaches them that trade caravans exist and can generate gold, which is useful here, someone was very clever here in developing the quest and I'm 99 sure that someone else who developed the quest didn't understand it and ruined it because on the left side of the map there is a city center where the trade caravans are. transporting money to Troy the way Trade Caravans work is that they automatically patrol between the market where they are built in a city center, each successful loop delivering free gold.

I think originally the city center was the market and acted as a teaching tool showing players the building they needed to get this free source of gold at some point in development someone took out the Troy City Center and placed it. traded with the Market position without realizing its importance, this denied players the visual aid to understand how trading works. The evidence for this is that deep in the Trojan base there is a market and if you attack it, a Trojan soldier exclaims that the Greeks seek to destroy our market, if we lose our trade, it will seriously harm us, like my friend, this market is in the middle of your base, where your armies have to be dead for me to reach it, this voice line would make a lot more sense if the market was outside trading with Troy.

The path I take in this mission is a little of everything I start with Minotaur. production and use that Force to attack some gold mines, the Trojans counterattack a little, but overall it's going well. I build a series of walls to restrict Trojan movement and harass their caravans with Odysseus while holding a market in my own caravans once. I have a strong economy. I produce a large army of Hopalite archers and Heliopolis siege towers to assault the front gates of Troy as I approach the enemy base. They show a very frustrating mechanic in the game. Not all God's powers are equal and a ceasefire is established.

Fools, the Trojans use God's power of ceasefire, this creates a mandatory 60 second period in which no unit on the map can attack in RTS. 60 seconds is an eternity. I don't know if this power is considered strong or weak and frankly it doesn't matter, it's uncomfortable and frankly boring to sit here unable to fight the enemy, an unnecessary pause right at the climax of the mission, but I won't let it diminish in the fight, which is actually quite fun, the Trojans do a fantastic job defending. I have a large army here and they made a great attempt to contain it.

I had to shoot with High Ground catapults while using my Siege Towers to get through their fortifications and the Temple. They continued to send defensive waves from the city and eventually became organized and competent. I managed to take my towers to the gate of Troy, protect them and it falls. What I like about this mission is how many different ways there are to approach it. I've used a couple different ones to get gold here or avoid the gold problem and there are probably others I haven't even thought of, while the end result is always the same, the process that various players follow to deal with this restriction allows for a lot Great self-expression and gameplay.

I just wish they would fix the market problem, the Atlanteans. runs towards Troy, but Ajax's backup is flanked by a Trojan relief. The Arcanthus Force makes the decision to turn back and rescue his brother and then, of course, destroy the outpost where these attacks are coming from so they can continue the Trojan campaign. The map here is very wide. and open, there are multiple paths the Trojans can take when attacking with forces, so I thought Cavalry would be an awesome thing to use here and the Greeks have a couple of great mythical units to support that style, so it seemed like a situation in which everyone wins.

It's probably no surprise that the Centaur is considered a Cavalry unit, they are fast and powerful archers that can also support my Centaur. Here's an interesting, probably unforeseen problem with the design of the Gods in the old system. The game wants to give the player a good chance. A little boost here, this mission begins in the Ajax camp and it stands to reason that he has progressed as a manager. We're already starting at age number three, but that means my first two minor gods have already been chosen for me. He wanted to take Hermes for the centaur and Aphrodite. for the neemium lion, both are fantastic additions to my Cavalry set, but the set gives me Athena's Minotaur and Dionysus' Tall Hydra.

Both units are slow and the things I've already used aren't what I want to show and they're also just not good in these big open fields instead of going for tactically inferior units I'd rather just not create mythical units. This quest, which kinda sucks at the bottom right of the map, is a small Agamemnon base that is allied with us, isn't it. He creates units, but we start with a donkey trade caravan headed to his command center. This is another nice wordless tutorial that tells you about the trading mechanics that you can trade with your allies and generates even more gold than normal using my Cavalry.

I start exploring and find a relic. Relics are items that heroes can collect once delivered to a temple. Provides quite powerful bonuses on a permanent basis. Almost all quests have relics hidden in them, sometimes they are multiple and they all have bonuses selected specifically for the quest. well, most of the time this Relic is Apollo's catara, when I install it in my temple it increases the movement speed of all my villagers, this not only allows them to escape from danger faster but also speeds up the delivery of resources when they have already done it. harvested, it's cool, cool, the relic mechanic is really cool, there's a big problem in RTS development where players are incentivized to buckle down and sit at home turtleing until they have a maxed out supply army and then attack after 30 minutes of basically doing nothing.

Relics reward players. to go out and explore by checking every corner of the map to find out what's going on, it also naturally teaches people about the value of exploration and gets the creative juices flowing. Actively scanning the terrain makes it easier to come up with mission-specific strategies. and then The Relic's reward is usually well thought out, they help you on the mission and can help you come up with new and unique strategies, once again giving you that dopamine hit of a loot box where you

never

know what you're going to do. Find it, but it's a loot box specifically crafted for you, you never know what it is, but it will be worth it.

A five-star mechanical genius solves a ton of problems and is fun, it's so good I'm not going to rate anything else with stars. In this video, let's now talk about something incredibly stupid. As I explore with my cavalry, I find a group of Trojan farms. Farms provide food, but cost resources and harvest more slowly than hunting animals. The advantage is that you don't have to take the risk of taking your villagers to the center of the map and getting gored by a boar once we find this area arcanthus says we can steal these farms, build a barn here and get some of our villagers grow them, this is obviously intended as a teaching moment.

They're neutral and anyone can work with them, so let's save some money and take theirs, but these farms are like half a screen from the enemy base. Look at this, it's crazy, no one in their right mind would take all their workers and bring them directly to These farms are killed by the enemy, so I do it, but I build afortress, the most expensive defensive building the Greeks have, perhaps to keep it safe. The Greeks have two cavalry units that I hope to defend with the hippocan, it is an anti-archer cavalry. and the prodomos is a specialized anti-cavalry unit even though I can often engage large swaths of enemy infantry.

This is one of the things I love about RTS. My Cavalry can get extra damage against other unit types, but damage isn't everything. Having the mobility advantage means I can always fight in the position I want. I can hit the flanks, circle the enemy and always have the concave despite being countered on paper. There is only so much strategic flexibility I can get out of my units. It's not alone. Rock, paper, scissors. Besides, none of this mattered in my stupid farming village. The village died in the first attack. I was trying to get some petrovolos catapults so I could attack the enemy, but their area damage ended up hurting my Fortress more than it helped.

I can't get it. about how they wanted you to just farm here moving into one of the worst bases I've ever seen and just pretending like it would be fine, it's all weird after building a new Stronghold. I besieged the enemy base but managed to find it. a big enemy attack as I move forward, I surround them, execute them and then run to take down the Trojans before they can rebuild the petrobolos. They don't deal incredible siege damage, but they overwhelm everything, making it easy to break down the gates and bring in the cavalry. once i'm on the mission the bronze power makes me resistant to the remaining defenders and the false base as we celebrate we get word that this was a distraction and Agamemnon has been attacked everyone is fed up with Troy winning every time than us. gain an advantage we are counterattacked and rejected we cannot win the direct fight the walls are too good and they burned Agamemnon's house it is time to abandon that frontal fight and be a little clever so that the boys hatch a plan Poseidon is the lord of the horses in Atlantis a defeated general gives up his horse when he is hit a horse yes, a big wooden horse a I don't understand if he will fight I love Ajax the plan is to build the Trojan horse I don't need it explain what the Trojan horse is, as if let everyone know that we are on the same page here, this video is long enough as this is the mission where the most known moment of the Trojan War happens and the mission is an amazing and horrible part. one is probably the weakest layout in the game, the northwest half of the map is Troy and the Greeks are on the left and the rest of the map is a bunch of nothing, there are no hidden relics or strange events that would prompt me to take bad bases, You can't find a single piece of interest, all you can do is sit down and build a defense and then build the horse, so I start doing that pretty quickly the first raid appears and the mission shows off its only mechanic.

I fight these horses for a moment and then they start running if they return to Troy. A large wave of attack is sent out. This mechanic sucks if it were retreating infantry or something, sure, but these are mounted cavalry. They are fast even when I chase them with slightly faster dogs. I can't catch them before they reach Troy in theory. I think one is supposed to run away and then you are supposed to use the power of Zeus' lightning bolt to kill him. but there are two of them, what am I supposed to do? It doesn't have two rays.

I guess this gives me extra attacks or something to deal with, which will give me something to do, but it still feels wrong. I eventually hit the 1000 wood and Horse construction can start any number of workers can build buildings at once in this game, so I use a lot. I'm pretty sure it would take about an hour to build. Sorry, doesn't Agamemnon have a weapon if we get it? He's on this mission and there are guys out there punching people in the face, no wonder his forces are broken. His commander thinks he's a fucking jowlin monk.

What is happening here to defend? I choose to worship Apollo and get the Manticore I start with. a lot of faith and the Manticore costs wood and I also need to build the horse so it felt natural as the horse nears completion the Trojans send out a pretty big attack and it's time for the manty to shine their quills do nothing . They deal a lot of damage but hit an area and destroy smaller targets fairly quickly. It's a decent unit whose downside is that it usually costs too much supply and is difficult to fit into large armies, but in this mission where I'm trying to finish very quickly and never reached the supply limit, it works very well, restoring the power of God keeps me alive and the manticore Melts the enemies, the wooden horse ends and it's time to move on to the second part, unlike the first part, the damn rocks at the beginning are a stealth segment arcanthus Ajax and Odysseus enter Troy and they have to go through carefully to find a way to open the door and let the allies in.

They find a heliopolis guarded by a cyclops, so I do as stealthy as I can and ask Zeus to throw down a damn lightning bolt. bolt in his head after grabbing the siege towers I walk towards the main gate and crush it once below Agamemnon's armies appear We join together and start slapping we have to kill three fortresses the first objective is on the right I use my catapult no no petrobolos Note that for some reason these are called catapults so they can be fired from a distance for the last two fortresses. The game just says: Hey, you didn't do enough.

Here are two charges of the fourth-level divine power meteorite, have fun and it's fun. like a meteorite, I was going to ask why they gave us the power of an Egyptian god and not a Greek one like an earthquake, but I don't care because it's really nice to look at and everything is booming. The first part of the mission wasn't really necessary. Existing was boring, but the second part is amazing and one of the key memories I have of playing this game as a kid is great. Now that Troy has fallen, it's time for the children to part ways.

Arcantos wants to return to Atlantis. But his ships have seen better days, our boy Ajax kindly offers to show us the way to the port town of Viol Close and we accept him as they sail, we are introduced to a very interesting character and he walks through the treetops. And he is taller than the trees and his voice throughout the garden is thunder sent to breathe. What did Kim say? This is gargorensis, the cyclops with a goat-legged trident and he will be our main antagonist of the game. I just love him. The design is so interesting that they could have chosen anything as the main villain and a cyclops poet is not something I would have ever thought of.

The Cyclopes in The Odyssey are portrayed as big, stupid brutes that no one would mess with. Sorry, I can't understand it. through that without laughing it's such a bad joke i love gargarences so much on the other hand it's well spoken and cultured they also introduce us to one of his lackeys kemzen and they tell us that the pirate Minotaur camos is also his follower also they digging a tunnel but Nothing else becomes clear as Ajax and Arcanthus land near Ayal and find him in flames. The bandits have attacked and taken everyone hostage, including the Centaur Chiron, so let's save them and finally this allows me to talk about heroes seriously, this has been an integral mechanic of the game, but there has been a lot to talk about so far , it was seven missions before I could board it, but before that we find a captured centaur who rescues them, they tell us that the city is under attack and that we have to eliminate the enemies.

Returning to heroes in the late 90s and early 2000s was the beginning of the golden era of RTS, Warfare in Age of Empires and Starcraft's Command and Conquer were incredibly successful and developers were paying attention to the problems, one of them was hero units, often quests. It contained plot-relevant units that were significantly stronger than normal ones, but if they died, the mission would theoretically end. This is incredible, the super powerful King Arthur charging through the enemies leading the charge, but in reality the fear of losing them was too great, people would hide their heroes in the back of their base because if they died it was Game Over Age of Mythology and Warcraft 3 were born from developers who tried to study this problem and solve it.

The old mythology system is simple but really effective protagonist characters like Ajax and arcanthus can run out of health and if they do they collapse after a while, if you have forces in the area they can get up and try to fight again, but they have very low HP, so if you don't remove them and heal them a little, you'll probably fall again. It's a good system. I never feel bad about having these legendary badasses leading the charge and if you go too crazy with them, they'll die in the middle of nowhere and you'll have to. go on a rescue mission, which is another bonus objective in itself that was called foreshadowing because of how it will be a lot of fun while securing the city center.

Ajax and arcanthus fall and it's not good that my Centaur takes a lot of damage, but I don't lose the game, it can still be recovered after securing the city. I can use the round buildings to generate more forces. I also found a couple of relics that give me a steady trickle of money to work with this is what I would do. It's normally called a no-build quest where there are no villagers gathering resources or production, but this quest has a bit of production, is very limited in scope, and ends up being a pretty good design as a result.

Non-construction quests are usually puzzles that use Tool Sets given to you to complete the quest, but here half of our army is written in stone, it's the Centaur on the heroes and then the other half is produced from these buildings in whatever combination you want to be allowed to produce. at the halfway point it lets you solve the puzzle your way instead of just being told what to do and that's awesome, we still don't get to choose our divine powers, although it seems like every time the game pre-assigns them to me, it's the same three and honestly, a little variety would be nice after producing an army.

I secure the eastern part of the city and explore some more. I find a vault of Abundance. This structure can be captured by standing next to it and once secured. Give a splash of each resource. I really appreciate how it often feels to go down random paths in this game, so it's worth exploring. It's fun. Chiron is imprisoned behind a medical fortress. I prepare my final attack and start pushing. They use the power of the Serpent God to stop me. down, which summons some really mediocre snakes and then after taking them out, they bring a giant army to attack.

It's a bit inopportune, although the army is intimidating and I'm not sure if, buddy, you're going to fight off the attack by moving in this game. It's occasionally buggy and will move around and command you, but this is the first time I've seen this happen in anime. It's unfortunate that the game crashed in the climax and the enemy army just went into the meat grinder and fed my hydras, but oh. Well, what are you going to do? Chiron thanks Team A for the rescue and tells them that the chemical team, the man we saw with gargorensis was the one who organized the raid, took the prisoners and put them to work on something, so of course we have to do it. rescue him as the team moves north, they reach the most disconcerting obstacle of all, a wall, as a result, the Scooby-Doo team does the only thing they can think of, they split up and look for resources, I'm not going to lie, this It's a very artificial setup. the game wanted to split us into two bases and made sure I went on the mission, on the other hand, it's quite interesting.

I start with two town centers, which means I get double the production of villagers, but one side only has wood and the other. He only has food and gold. I need to form a strategy around this kind of forced resource distribution, first of all, farms can be built with wood that provides the eastern base with a food source, but the most important thing is that Apollo exists, the mission design is that both sides are divided. up and sealed by walls, outposts and even more walls once they fight in the middle of the map, there is a place to join and join forces, but if you researched until the third age and worship Apollo, his divine power is the step to the underworld. a deployable tunnel that quickly moves units from one side to the other.

I can't tell if you're supposed to override the quest mechanics like this because it's so, so obvious or if it's just another weird oversight and somehow everyone in the trials just chose Dionysus. instead there is no right way despite the connection, the mission finds me low on food and I need to go through a lot of fortifications to get to the two fortresses I need to destroy at the top of the map, so let's kill two birds of ashot. I'm going for a mostly ranged comp here, the peltilist is an archer who specializes in fighting archers, they mix well with my more rounded toxicities.

I use them both to cover my petrobolos catapults and to finish things off. I worship Hera to get the unique unit of her, the Medusa. As I start to clear them up, I think it's a good time to talk about unit abilities. Medusa obviously has the ability to turn enemies into stone and as expected, it's amazing. Basically every mythical unit and hero I've talked about has some kind of Special Ability that you've probably noticed Arcantos raise a spear in the air, considering the entire army turns blue quite frequently that's a benefit that applies. Every skill in Age of Mythology is automatically cast by the unit and all have cooldown timers, no mana bars. or something like that, this is an interesting and very deliberate decision that allows players to create unique, exotic and tasty units without requiring the player to break their wrists to use all the abilities in combat.

This is a huge advantage and I think it was implemented very Well, initially here I was going to talk about how I think there should be a micro potential for Elite Esports players like you, like me, but then I started watching Medusa and I actually think that This system is interesting in a way. It helps balance things dominated. Medusa's ability to turn units to stone and kill them instantly is incredibly powerful if you can hold her off as long as you want until the juicy objectives arrive, but you can't if Medusa. is fighting, it will turn things to stone, it will continue on cooldown and the incredibly powerful ability has counterplay now, that's really cool, does the benefit outweigh the lack of micropotential for 99 of the players?

Maybe it sucks for professionals, but I think enabling such cool skills and making them accessible is really important and I'm glad it exists. I've been a Supply Captain 140 for a while. This is because urban centers give 15, 20 with an improvement and houses give 10. And you can. It only has a maximum of 10 houses, unlike other RTS. Urban centers can only be built in specific areas called settlements. They have a white icon on the minimap and look like a group of shacks. This is a very fascinating mechanic that encourages fighting for map control and rewards. To progress, the game's supply limit is actually 300, but that would require 10 town centers with upgrades, which is basically impossible.

This means there is always a trade-off: a player will get more supplies but will have to use a larger army to control more. territory while the other has less supply but does not extend as much. I really like systems that encourage interaction with the map. It's very well thought out and subtly encourages healthy gameplay as I secure the center of the map. Gargoruncher shows that we are not the only ones who have high level Divine Powers, he gets angry and drops the power of the meteorite on my left base, destroying it completely, then uses the Egyptian Rock myth unit to transport the minotaurs in a Colossus and secure the area by destroying my passage to the underworld.

I don't want to deal with it so I move on, unfortunately for gargorensis. I also have a fourth level power. He unleashed Hera's lightning storm and absolutely melted the remaining Greek army. From there, my petrobulls have free rein to besiege the fortresses unharmed and they do not want to be. Eclipsed Gargarences does some poetry to me and then deploys another set of meteorites and then runs like a coward towards this cave he was forcing the prisoners to dig. Also this is a small thing, but look at the game Fades to Black here, it never really likes it. inside the cave or even nearby, I think this is because they had the entrance as a solid building and couldn't figure out how to get him in, it doesn't really matter but it's kind of fun to chase the cyclops around.

In the tunnel the heroes get their first idea of ​​what's really going on here is a huge Ram Siege on an equally large gate guarded by soldiers and chimeras, they don't know what it's for but these guys aren't really the type to stop and They think, so they decide to crush first and ask questions later they instantly give us a large wave of Centaur reinforcement to support our heroes with this Force. We begin to clean towards the ram. There are a lot of mythic units in this Mission and they are not weak. The Chimeras are particularly dangerous with their jets of fire they can burn down most units in an area quickly while I'm cleaning this is the perfect time to talk about heroes uh no, not like we did before the main protagonists Ajax arcanthus Chiron that guy of types can do everything I fell down and I can get back up, but Hiro is also an archetype of units that have some pretty good advantages, first and least, every time you go up in an era, the heroes get increased damage and defenses, it is good to make them scale well.

More importantly, the heroes have a big showdown against mythical units, which makes sense, at least half of mythology is made up of heroes fighting the beasts of legend, while all this is going on, Odysseus is literally fighting Polyphemus. . Heroes deal additional damage to the myth. They take damage from them and are immune to their special abilities, such as being turned to stone by Medusa or being thrown by the Cyclops. This mechanic is great in the campaign, allowing the opponent to feel the diverse array of powerful units without having so many overpowered abilities flying around. You find that you just fall to your death, but these heroes aren't powerful enough on their own, they really need a supporting cast to help them.

It's a really good balance and this quest shows it off well after exploring a bit and finding some mythical friends. and gathering some reinforcements that appeared in the starting area, I moved to take the battering ram. The battering ram's initial defenses are nothing to write home about, but the mission doesn't end there. The battering ram has 30,000 HP and now takes 1-5 damage from attacks. I have to defend myself against the waves of attack and at the same time maintain pressure on the battering ram. If I take too long, the battering ram will destroy the door and I will lose.

This is a really nice design for a defense mission. It gives the player a lot of options on how to do it. They want to tackle all the problems they face as additional reinforcements arrive and give me more tools to work with as waves of mythical units descend on me. I opt to keep my hand-to-hand combat on the battering ram so they don't do it. I have to spend time moving back and forth while my toxicities and Centaur can move at a distance and defend. I try to keep my heroes committed to the mythological unit so my jump lights can be safe, but things get seriously dangerous in a world where the average human is sitting between 50 and 100 HP, a 30,000 HP RAM is a little bulky as the RAM runs out, I go all out.

I saved Hera's thunderstorm power to keep the coast clear and managed to take down the RAM and I feel great, the gate on the other hand has seen better days with 3,000 or 45,000 HP, but that's not my problem. Carverances then seems a little annoyed that we have the audacity to follow him, but he tells us that there are many entrances to Tartarus, so it's not a problem that this one didn't work and then, to show us that he didn't care, he bombards us with an earthquake and collapses us with a collapsed exit, we venture into Erebus, the Greek underworld.

In fact, it was established that we were on Arava's last mission, but still, Shadows approach us and begin to guide us. The mission mechanics are unique and I quite like it. Every human unit we have, including heroes, has a dramatic reduction. Vision radius, but shadows can see very well, we have to use shadows to escort our forces and scout forward, but shadows also have a second purpose: they can sacrifice themselves to destroy an enemy in one hit. This is another example of incredible levels of player choice, the mission is once again full of mythical units and although the first unit we learned to kill with shadow is obvious, the rest is left up to the player, you can choose your Least favorite mythic units to remove shadows.

They are also abundant, they are not a limited resource, if you use them too early and lose the game later, it could have been because you didn't save them. This is one of those quest designs that were obviously inspired by descriptions of the Greek underworld. It's often written as a deep, murky mortal darkness creeping through everything, it's not the fire and brimstone that a more Western audience thinks of the underworld, so I'll just ignore all the fire and brimstone it was completely made of. the last mission. and the beginning of this mission was a second, let me, let me Google a justification, okay, it's uh oh Zeus, it's uh, it's the FL river flag marathon, it's the river flag marathon, the underworld river Everyone's favorite ancient Greek, yes, that's it. they just had to put it in as a fan favorite which is why it's on fire once we get past the fire the mission is dark which makes the next objective even brighter.

There are three relics throughout the quest that must be collected, each of which is guarded. By a progressively stronger group of mythical units, we do not deliver the relics to the Temples for bonuses here, but rather carry them with us to the end. I love the contrast between the dark caverns and the glowing relic, it's amazing and I swear to Thor it's bronze. and restoration again every time we do a non-building segment we receive bronze and restoration as our 2nd and 3rd level skills appear, it wouldn't have been that hard to give a little variety here, this game is packed with awesome stuff. and awesome powers to choose from and then they choose the same ones every time in this campaign, as I understand, having longer lasting units is good, healing in one area is good, but come on, Aphrodite's curse turns people into pigs, let me do it once. a while or tease some new abilities that will be unlocked later that worked with Troy on the meteors, those are Egyptian on the God powers thing, this is the last time we'll be with Zeus for a while so I should probably mention this.

I don't think God's power system is as good as it could be and Ensemble agrees that each Greek, Egyptian and Norse power can only be used once with permission and that causes problems, you know that feeling when playing a game and keep all your rare consumables? items until the end of the game because you never know when you're going to need them. The divine powers feel this way constantly. One of the best examples is the power of Zeus's lightning bolt, because Zeus is a protective deity. We've started every mission since number four with his power what it does is kill exactly one target enemy at the beginning of the game, you never want to use it because targets just aren't important enough for individual axemen to be populated in any way, not even a Minotaur or something for your game Absolutely no power, but later in the game there are four siege towers, three chimeras, six cyclops and a whole army of humans supporting them, that's too much, so let's wait until next time to see if there is more impact, that's what happens every time and even when I use the skill.

I always feel like I should have kept it a little longer. I never end up using it in this mission and this isn't the first time it's happened in mission 5. I had basically already won so I used it on a random goat because I'm a sociopath in mission 7 I strapped on a catapult even though it was useless in the fight at the end of the mission because it was the odd one out and then in Mission 8 I didn't use it at all. and the design done makes it very difficult to feel like you did something rewarding because you always feel like you could have used it better.

Later the Titans expansion addressed this problem by giving the Atlantean faction multiple uses of some Divine Powers with an intermediate cooldown which was a good solution to the problem if you play Atlanteans for three of the four factions it is still an issue and yes , I said four, we'll get to that. I don't want to sound too negative here. I love the powers of God. They're amazing, they're cool, and they still feel incredibly used to this day, which is why I want to be a little more reckless with them. After all, we are toys of the gods.

What's another Bowl for a second set of guns blazing? nothing for them so this is a small promise to myself for the rest of the game. I'll make sure to use all my divine powers very aggressively for the rest of the game and I'll never regret it. The design may be problematic, but I'm not going to let that get in the way of my fun as I reach the end of the mission, having overcome theunits of myths of the Infinite and gathered three relics, we arrive at the three temples, one of Hades and another of Poseidon. and one for Zeus, the three patron deities that you can worship as the Greek arcanthus, being the good boy that he is, he brings a relic to Poseidon's temple, but Poseidon left this poor boy in red and he doesn't get any messages, so this It is a question. for you and the audience between Zeus and Hades, who do you think would be most interested in giving our heroes passage off this earth, the famously erratic and unpredictable God of gods who is probably turning into an ostrich right now to woo his next wife or the deity whose kingdom you are in, who lent you his Shadows to guide you to these temples and was described as Socrates as a great benefactor to those in his kingdom, who grants so many blessings to those of us on Earth, yes, of course they go to The Temple of Zeus, okay, rant at the last minute.

Hades is not a bad guy, he is not the devil, he is not an imitation. Loki voiced by James Woods. Different cultures have very different representations of what the ruler of the Land of the Dead would do. Look and act like I feel like this might have been a good time to correct some of those misconceptions, albeit in a subtle way, but thanks for the stairs. Zeus, have fun like an emu or whatever. Our heroes escape from the underworld, but they have no idea. Where Zeus has taken them, fortunately, they quickly encounter a mantra that gives them two options.

The Oasis is surrounded by the followers of the Gods. We can go get murdered or help fight them. They are looking for a treasure of honors. The forces have discovered it and she wants to dig it up, so we decide to be friends with a nice lady and go to the battle stations. This quest serves as an introduction to playing as the Egyptians, one of the unique points of Age of Mythology that I think really makes the highlight is that the main campaign spans all three factions in a contiguous series of stories and quests. I don't think I've ever seen an RTS do that before and it's really cool, it makes everything greater than the sum of its parts Greece is the faction that works more like a traditional RTS faction designed to be easy to learn and teach the game mechanics.

The Egyptians are more of a middle-of-the-road faction and have some interesting things to do, but I should talk first. about the mission design, it's quite tactical, we start with no town center or temple and we can't build either, this means we have the 12 workers we started with and we can't build more, so don't lose any because it will be a bad time. three valleys leading to the oasis Seth's followers will attack through all three and attempt to destroy our position. The condition for winning is to use the villagers to remove the rocks covering the artifact. More villagers is faster, but you need to collect resources and build units to survive. creates an interesting balance between collecting resources and completing the objective if this sounds familiar, yes this is exactly how the first part of the Trojan Horse mission worked, but this time you can't just have 30 workers perform Blitz in an instant , is significantly more.

Strategically dense, this Mission also gets a pass because the factions introductory Mission and if there were too many things going on, it would be overwhelming to help with the economic problems. The Egyptians have a few tricks up their sleeve. The first thing is that their buildings are free, like half of them, but that's still crazy. Houses upgrade buildings and resource collection points are all in the house. This allows me to accumulate money to build a large army and help out even more. I have divine power. OK. I need to talk about something very quickly. Don't know.

I want this video to be demonetized. I spent an incredible amount of time on it and if I slip up on something and the algorithm decides to hide the video, I'm in a horrible place, but that will make some of the Egyptian parts awkward if you look at the bottom center of the screen. , there is a small flag icon. If you look to the right of that icon, you can see who my patron deity is. I'm not going to say that word, it has taken on additional meanings over the last 20 years and continues to speak. about worship or glory of them could trigger YouTube's automatic moderation systems.

This is because in the past they tried to use YouTube as a platform to post recruiting videos and YouTube went crazy with it like they should, but I don't know if that auto moderation is still in effect or if I'll get caught in the crossfire, so I will not risk it if I say something about my patron goddess in this campaign, I am referring to her to help my economy even more, my patron. The goddess has the power of prosperity, which gives me 50 seconds of almost double the extraction rate. This is combined with the fact that the few Egyptian buildings that are not free cost gold instead of wood due to wood being a significantly less important resource than the other factions that are actually really cool, while Ancient Egypt It had many more trees than today, it has always lacked really big trees for Flow's big construction projects.

This is an incredible way to represent the relative differences that real societies had during In this first Egyptian mission we only have access to the barracks units, but here they function very differently than their Greek infantry counterparts. Cavalry and archers. The Greeks had a paired system, two units where one acted as a generalist and the other as a counterattack, for example with archers. the toxicities had a pretty strong matchup against everything with a 50 bonus against infantry, while the peltast did much less damage to each target, however, it did four times as much damage to other archers.

All units in the Egyptian Barracks are counterattack units that take things to the extreme. The ax is an infantry that does four times other infantry, the spearman four times cavalry, and the slinger four times archers, they are all brutally effective or useless, there is no middle ground, but they are also cheap for this mission. I end up concentrating Spearman and The Axemen, assuming that archers would be rare, after getting a good army, I take all my workers and place them at the excavation site, I divide my Force into two parts and intercept the siege weapons that the enemy is sending me as the attacks increase.

Difficulty near the end, nothing to worry about and everything ends unceremoniously. Manra has unearthed the sword of Horus that defeated Set in the past, so obviously Gargarence's servant Kempsit wants it as part of his plan. He has captured the temple of Osiris. It contains a guardian that will awaken if given the sword, so we get moving. I feel bad for the guy who has to carry the pointy end quickly. We meet enslaved workers who are being forced to mine gold for kempsat. We unemployed the guards and freed the miners. Now to escort them back home, the path contains mummies, a top-level Egyptian mythical unit that can not only instantly kill human forces, but also raise them as undead minions, they are difficult to stop and I lose a villager and some soldiers, luckily I have four heroes at the moment with Amano joining our forces so we can fight, then they use the power of the snake on me, summon snakes and they are really unimpressive, they keep doing this in missions without construction and in It never really has any impact and I kinda wish they would stop when they got to town.

The citizens thank me for freeing them from a life of mine and gold and pledge to fight for our cause, so I send them back to the gold mines. Listen Kemps, he may not be a good guy, but he. He knows how to build an army, how do I know? Because a giant army of death and demise is at the bottom left of the map. I have to get to the guardian before this Force goes through all the cities despite it being mission 2 of the Egyptian campaign. In fact, I have a lot of tools available. Level 3 can be reached and now I can also create mythic units.

We're also following Raw, who gives us the rain power that temporarily triples our farming speed. The skill is very buggy in the base game. I don't say this anywhere, but if a farm is not close to the city center, it doesn't give any food production bonuses, which is awesome when your introductory quest has all the farms on one side, but that's not all for bugs, for some reason rain also increases the user's wood collection rate by 50 without saying it, everything is a mess, the Titans expansion fixed the proximity issue, but the wood bug is still up the present day.

One of the most interesting things about Age of Mythology is how the production of favors is completely different for each faction, while the Greeks have to dedicate villagers in temples to worship the Egyptians, they built monuments, there are five monuments in total , each of which costs progressively more food and gold to produce, as well as taking a while to build once their forever passive favor is done, which is really nice and would be even more favor if I remember to deposit this relic that arcanthus holds it, gives me more faith regeneration and I sat here like a fool holding it for half the mission while I was two feet away from the temple.

To defeat Chemzit, I decide to spend my favor on the Scarab, a living siege weapon that I honestly think is kind of cute, just me, okay, scarabs are big, bulky, rampaging buildings, and they're not that bad against either. soldiers, as a complement, I get a pack of Slingers to build up my existing forces with chemical equipment by taking the second of three villages. I feel the need to move on. Can I take a moment to talk about what my army looks like here? I love having this wall of scarabs in front of the rest of my forces it's one of my favorite things about this game where the addition of the mythical units and humans to give them a sense of scale creates these awesome armies that you just can't see anywhere else place when he crashed into Seth's defenses. he rushes in to intercept and my god this guy has a ton of drives.

Seth's whole gimmick is that he has evil animals, hippos, giraffes, Crocs and even rhinos, he supports them with an army of chariot archers. I managed to get through the front doors, knock down a tower, and Dent. the army of him, but I lose the maximum force that all my heroes fall in enemy territory, to be honest, I was skimping a little. The Armory contains upgrades for attack and armor for human units, but they are quite expensive, so I tend to take the attack. upgrades and I hope things work out after my beetles died the rest of my army went down very quickly but this time things didn't work out so I'm not going to skimp, I'll get my armor upgrades I'll try to quickly form a force of axeers spearmen and slingers reach the set before he can redo everything he lost and the second wave goes significantly better despite my beetles getting stuck in the back, his Chariot 4 not being replenished enough, and his corrupted animal missing.

First line, we rescue the The heroes destroy the fortress, burst the door and take the sword to the guardian, but the mission is not over. Now I have the guardian and it's time to crush Kempsich's giant army. This is supposed to be cool. I remember thinking when he was a kid that it was supposed to be like this. Be great and then be completely disappointed, the guardian is effectively Immortal, he kills everything in one hit and deals damage in an area, but he is slow and has no skills, which makes the final fight attack him and fall, it's really clumsy in no way. horrible, but the guardian probably needs something like triggers that throw god powers at the enemy or anything really is a bit flat, so what's the chemical pool doing?

Why is he conquering the temples of Osiris if it killed him? Well, mythology is strange, so Osiris was killed, but they don't kill him, they divide him into parts, we reunite the parts and we get the old man back, but if any of them are destroyed, then Osiris is gone. The game never directly explains why we want Osiris to return. I don't really know much about him, but Amana wants him back and that's enough for me the mission is a tug of war we get ambushed all our heroes are knocked out and the cart starts moving down the ravine towards the enemy base whoever is next The car is controlled by whoever takes the car to its base wins.

These are great tug of war missions, they are fun and we get right into the action. We start with a lot of money, which is great, but this mission is super incomplete. I sent Chiron to the top right because I saw a relic, not this relic. do anything it just doesn't have text when I put it in thetemple does nothing they just forgot let's talk for a moment about the main gods. I've also called them patron deities because I played Dungeons and Dragons too much in high school. but they are the same: you start with a god you worship.

I really wish the game did a better job of explaining when and why a god is your main god. At first it was Poseidon, which was obvious right when the war for Troy began. changes to Zeus which makes sense that the Greek forces were for Zeus and then kind of obscures the fact that Zeus is the one who helps arcanthus specifically later on for the first Egypt quest we get our patron goddess and then in the mission 2 we get raw. which is actually mentioned when they talk about the rain spell, which I appreciate and here I am, you know, the villain, the guy who killed Osiris, the one who wants to get parts of his body to destroy him, okay, this never becomes To mention, it has zero. plot significance and never appears again, the only explanation I can think of is that this quest was basically never tested, so no one realized that the wrong Elder God had been established.

Sorry, I'm not going to stop you, you already missed like 20 of these, the mission is also ridiculously easy: you start with a full base, a billion of each resource in the bank and you just have to attach the units you want and it will easily overwhelm anything the enemy sends, regardless of difficulty. I opted for a force of new bites. the brilliant unity of the myth of the jump. I wanted to support Monroe who also has a jump attack, but the enemies keep walking past my Skirmish force and not attacking them. A couple scripted ambushes happen, but they're all a joke and I finished the mission in seven minutes.

This is by far the least polished mission in the entire game. I'd really be interested to know what happened here. Most games usually have problems like this hidden towards the end and we're right in the middle of it. How did this happen? Do you have any information please put it in the comments because I would love to know that after rescuing the Osiris piece things go back to normal and the game starts to improve again, we move to the center of the Osiris Kingdom which I wish had a name and I need to take our piece of Osiris to satna.

I had no idea who satna was so I had to look him up. Apparently he is the son of Ramses II, his real name is. I don't know if they just expect you to know because I had no idea who it came from, or it was satna anyway, Amanda then walks away mid-sentence and a group of men in chemical outfits surround Ajax and kemset arcanthus, then They monologue for three seconds and send them to jail, they don't pass. nor do they charge 200 per manra now only praise our patron goddess for the help and our patron goddess responds with night shipping in a stack of mythological units.

This is one of the missions that I remember most when I was a child, since we are in the sacred place. Osiris city there isn't a ton of resources there is some wood some farms and some gold mines what there is is an absolute ton of monuments normally the Egyptians can only build one of each monument to generate favor but a Monera can move around out of 15 here, giving income from absurd favors, in theory this mission actually allows you to build normal units and fight like a standard mission, but no, let's be honest, this is the mission where you build mythic units en masse and all of them they know and we get some new ones.

The Scorpion Man ones, uh, The Mummy Returns, came out while this game was in production and you can tell they were inspired by the movie and by that I mean it kind of stinks of the Sphinx, on the other hand they are awesome units , they have a solid volume can. smashing things hard has an area of ​​effects and vortex attack and they are quick to boot and then there is the oh no uh petsu chose yes petsutros these gold adorned crocodiles shoot laser beams from their head at an incredibly long distance. I was actually doing a little research on this part to make sure I could pronounce petsu ele correctly and it turns out that petsuchos are not strictly mythological units, but rather they were crocodiles that lived in a very real city called this crocodilopolis, which is just lovely, like The ancient Egyptians would do it.

Order these Crocs with gold and worship them as descendants of Sobek the crocodile god, in fact petuchos means descendants of Sobek and then I got to thinking why the hell Sobek's descendants don't have the sound that far back so I did some more research . and it turns out petsu chose is actually the ancient greek translation where sutros is the mistranslated spelling of Sobek so it shouldn't be petutos it should be pet Sobek The Offspring of Sobek so first of all put it together Ensemble and second Son 4 in the morning and I thought I had made decaf while writing the script, but it was accidentally caffeinated coffee and this has caused me to go on a completely pointless trip down this rabbit hole and I make no apologies for it.

You saw how long this video was. be when you clicked on it and there is no reasonable world in which it is going to properly respect your time here, which is why I ask you the question if the petsutros or the pet Sobek are the offspring of Sobek the God and Sobek is a crocodile and These They are also crocodiles, do you think God should be worshiped in order to unlock them? Because if you respond to Hathor, the cow goddess of dance, love and joy, you are right, but you are also deceiving. These gods are so unrelated that they don't even appear. on each other's Wikipedia pages while they were in Ensemble, why did they take a real-life crocodile who wears fancy jewelry and is literally named after a deity and didn't include that deity in the game, gave it to someone else , they used a strange translation on the name and placed a laser? lightning bolt in his head the only reason I went down this rabbit hole is because I saw the name sobeck and recognized him from a video of Guy from the H-bomber.

It's been two hours now and I haven't done anything productive. What we were doing? mission The mission is great, we have to take a Monroe to a dock to sail to the ancient Egyptian Alcatraz and rescue the children. We can head straight there where we can fight Kenzet's elite guard or we can attack the Citadel and drive the guards away. I go to the Citadel and get completely smoked. I end up dropping production on all mythic units besides the Sobek pet because they have enough range to kill my enemies before they reach me. These white cloud units are priests, they are an Egyptian anti-myth. unit that would really convince a smart person to stop building only mythical units, but I've been googling crocodiles for hours and how I've lost all executive functions, so I make a lot of laserheads until I can master their production and take down the Citadel .

Forcing the elite guards back, I was able to walk to the dock and continue the mission, but I'm still angry, so I continue pushing deeper into the red base. Kill all the things there and then go after the elite guards. I didn't need to kill them but I did need to get justice for my pet Sobek and the mistreatment by Ensemble they needed this. I needed this finally with all the enemies dead. I bring a mantra to the dock, get a transport and Ensemble, why can't the crocodile swim? How did you screw up this unit so badly?

What did he do to you? Why are you like this? All they want to do is live with their friends. In Crocodilopolis, stop dirtying them anyway, a modern one says that she has to convince a nearby port to give her their ships. We go there, she literally doesn't tell them anything, and the entire port town becomes our friend, including this giant turtle who can swim in the sea. The reptile that can swim took my fleet, caught the enemy's attention with a large turtle, and dropped a manra on the GG island. I won't do Crocs again because they deserve a happy retirement after all this abuse before Mana and imprisoned arcanthus arrives. the opportunity to talk to gargorensis the cyclops wants to know what god is giving arcanto so much support that he has been able to achieve the things that he has Lord Poseidon watches over all the people of Atlantis Lord Poseidon you are dumber than I expected I may have less desire to fight after I take your head off.

I will deal with all of you in due time. We have more pressing matters to attend to in the pyramid of Osiris. When I first saw this I thought I was going to have to be critical of Oh Gargorensis. telling everyone where he's going why the villains always do that and then I remember they're literally in the holy city of Osiris and the most important thing here is the pyramid so it's not like they're giving away vital information. We can give this a pass when the mission begins, we escape from the prison and a small fleet of transports, Arrow ships and Big Turk come to rescue us.

There is an allied base in the south that will help us, so we head there. This quest is Fantastic and one I always enjoy, unlike most quests we get to see the layout of the entire map. Once we get a base, we have to retrieve our Osiris piece and escape the city, and Kamos will repeatedly move the piece around the city over time. The city is huge and takes up the entire eastern landmass of the map, but before we can do that, we have other problems: we start on a smaller landmass and share it with a cloak base, and to make matters worse, Kamos also has a pirate base.

That constantly sends naval attacks against me, but if I can take down a lighthouse on the peninsula, we can stop the attacks to deal with all of these problems. I have to develop quickly to be able to do it. I use one of the defining mechanics of Egypt. the pharaoh shortly after any game, when egypt starts, you spawn a free pharaoh. They are heroes, so they handle mythical units well. They have good healing ability, but their true strength comes from the Empower skill. The Pharaoh can empower one structure at a time. and the benefits are crazy: a building under construction finishes 74 units and technologies faster build 30 defensive structures faster attack faster resource drop sites create money from nothing and monuments create favors 20 faster the only drawback is that you have a pharaoh so you can't do everything, the incredible flexibility of this power means that a pharaoh can allow expert players to build and technology to obtain more resources faster and reach more precise times, the whole system is amazing and incredibly frustrating, but before we get into why we need to talk about the mission.

Also, the harbor near my starting location is full of fish. These are permanent food resources that can be collected with fishing boats. All I need to do is protect them. I figure I can kill two birds with one stone. Kamos naval raids are dumping troops into my base, if I can get a defensive Navy to protect my ships I can also minimize their attacks, all is well for mythic units. I love Thoth who gives me access to the Phoenix, one of the few flying creatures in the game, my plan is to use the Phoenix to help the siege at the base and if necessary they can move to the ocean to help my naval forces .

I defend against enemy attacks, get a decent army, and push back the enemy base and lighthouse while this is happening, let me address something. that's probably been driving seasoned ancient mythology players crazy for a while now. I have been using my pharaoh to empower My Town Center to make workers faster. That doesn't work and the game gives you no indication that that's the case. Sitting down with a stopwatch and timing your villagers' production time to make sure Age of Mythology is as good at providing a basic understanding of what things do, it's fantastic and intuitive in so many different ways, but it always skimps on the details. , which it is for some.

To some extent, you don't want to overwhelm learning players with tons of numbers. I agree with that, but those numbers have to exist somewhere. All those boosting percentages I listed above. I had to search the wiki. I literally learned what he was doing. this error while writing the script it's great that we have the wiki available now but man it sucks to get halfway through a campaign and it turns out that the tooltip that says build units faster specifically excludes what I assume is the most objective common for new players with no comments, it's obviously not a doomsday problem because I clear out Kmos' base and destroy his lighthouse pretty cleanly, we even have this little scene where the ships crash into the rocks because the lighthouse already It's not there, which is great now that the My Island base is gone and the top left base can't send a text message.

All that remains is the right fortress city. There is only one logical path I can take. I go to the top left and see if I can kill the pirate base. I can't kill the basepirate, crushes me, sinks my fleet and kills my Phoenix above the water, which is not healthy for firebirds. I decide that maybe it's the objective moment, remember when you were kids, when people added things to rock, paper, scissors, like lasers or something, and claimed that their New Thing would surpass all the normal options. Naval combat in this game is like rock, paper, scissors, nuke.

There are three types of poor ships. Seed ships fire strong, slow volleys that are good against Arrow ships. Arrow ships shoot faster and are good against Hammer ships. Hammer ships are melee siege and counter attack ships and then naval myth units literally blow them all out of the water. The great tortoise also known as the war tortoise is an Egyptian naval myth unit, as expected, it is very difficult to kill. I built five of them to lead my charge against the enemy port and it's a great landing, a sea raid is always a bit tricky to keep it properly reinforced requires a lot of micromanagement, constantly sending transport ships back and forth to ferry units, Instead, I prefer to bring in a Vanguard Force to secure a beachhead. and then workers to establish a structure of emphasis to keep the fight going, that's what I do here and it works very well.

I mount mass infantry catapults and blow a hole through the enemy defenses just before the Osiris pieces move once they are secure, all I have to do is move the piece to the front of the city, defeat the honestly pathetic ambush and ends the mission having escaped the city. Our heroes finally get a reprieve and the moment arcantos hears that he has a moment, he crashes like a rock and wakes up in a dream. Athena appears once again before arcanthus and gives him some exposition while Zeus is the king of the gods. Now there was a time before when it wasn't when the Titan Kronos ruled and was much worse for humans and then the son of Caster arcanta appears and Athena disappears forcing us to walk a bit to get more exposition, we follow him to a temple, we place a relic in the temple, three statues of Zeus charged their Tesla coils and we attack some dream cyclops, then all the heroes appear and fight a chimera, kill them heroically. and were rewarded with the next part of the story Zeus Poseidon and Hades fought the Titans, defeated them, and imprisoned them in sealed Tartarus behind large adamantine doors, one of which now has like 37 HP, but that's not a problem.

Poseidon is angry that Zeus had to be. the cool God after the war and wants to let Cronus out so he can dethrone Zeus, but the gates of Tartarus can only be opened with deadly ions or deadly battering rams, I guess, which is why Gargarences is working to get his father to take out the grandfather of him. You are still in a dream so now the game gives me an army to destroy a rock, which is clean after our epic fight against The Rock, we are transported to another map with some transports, we turn red, our soldiers become in Minotaur and we continue as If nothing has changed, then I float towards my base.

I'll be honest. I don't really enjoy dreams in the media. I'm not going to judge the game negatively for that, it's absolutely a personal preference, but the sleep settings are not mine. and the narrative doesn't change the gameplay of the mission and in that sense it's solid as we unload our forces on the other side we have our hero, a bunch of agargarensis mythic units and camouflages so we're looking at the perspective of what would happen if Gargar Grants were earned fairly fairly, except our patron deity is Hades. Why did they tell us literally 12 seconds ago that he was working with Poseidon?

The whole idea of ​​Hades equals evil is so wrongly ingrained in this game that he's making the story confusing. It just feels like they needed a mission where we played as Hades because there was absolutely no opportunity to do that in the past. An interesting part of the mission is that there are relics everywhere, there are like 40 of them on the map, it's actually excessive and I think it's funny that the moment I can play as the big bad I force him to do the job manual for transporting relics; There are too many to build a coherent strategy, but they provide a lot of economic benefits. benefits, which is great because as soon as I set it up, the enemy uses his 4th year earthquake power and destroys my base.

The objective is to destroy an enemy wonder at the top right of the map. It is defended by a huge Greek base. We have a ton of money relics and it starts in the fourth age, so the game speeds us towards the end of the game, which is a nice change of pace. A unique aspect of the Greek factions is that the main gods Poseidon Zeus and Hades each have a unique human unit available to them Elite cavalry for Poseidon, foot soldiers for Zeus and archers for Hades, this is the only time I will be able to play as Hades , so I go with gas graffiti, long-range crossbowmen that actually existed using my mythic units as a wall. a group of these archers at the back, but the enemy does not sit still for long.

AI is starting to get smarter. He is now using God's powers preemptively to strategize. They use the power of bronze to buff and attack the durability of the wave and send it towards me, but. I have Aphrodite's curse power available that can turn many human soldiers into pigs, completely negating the buff. This is the kind of thing I love about this game, these immensely powerful gods thwarting each other and coming up with clever tactics using wild powers. I love once The Army is big enough. I approach the front gates and begin my siege, unfortunately for the enemy.

I also have the power of the earthquake and level half the city with a single explosion, crippling its ability to reproduce. They send a pretty impressive wave of defenders, but the area damage. The flame breath of my chimera roasts them and pushes them through the depression. The wonder. One thing I wanted to mention as the mission ends is the spirit of narrative focus. I think a lot of people will notice. Oh, he's telling you what's going on. goddess in a dream as something negative, and honestly, I think if the goal was to win an Oscar or whatever, I'd probably agree, but this style of exposition actually fits the way Greek myth worked.

Deus ex machina is literally a made up term. Because many of their stories involve deities randomly showing up and saving the day, it's absolutely different from how we do things today and isn't my first choice in storytelling, but I respect the ensemble's decision to replicate the way than myths and plays. In reality, they were told during the day, as dust settles on the ruined building. Athena tells us that this is the fate of Atlantis if Gargorensis wins and Zeus cannot directly interfere or else a war between the gods will start, so good luck arcanthus, it's up to you.

Dude, the crew has one Osiris piece, but three more are left for the next three missions. We divided into groups to claim them simultaneously. The first is a manra that besieges the piece kept by Kemzet on his island fortress. Fortunately for us comes his propensity to use her without payment. The interns attack again, the mission layout is somewhat opposite to the last mission, there are two landmasses, the larger one is civilized by people who will join us when a mode approaches them, creating a large sprawling base , while Kemzet has a much smaller island, but is very well defended as I explore the map with a manra.

I end up scared because the coast is absolutely huge here the ships can launch trolls anywhere trolls why did I write that in my script the ships can launch their forces basically anywhere and that would be very difficult to achieve? Stand up to fight this. I use the Obelisk priest's special ability for 10 cheap gold. Create a novelist who they can't attack, but they have Sight over a really large area. I line the shores with them so they never catch me off guard later. rescue everyone on the continent and build a strong economy. I think about my assault on Kempson.

In fact, this is a complete lie. Coming into this career, there were a few missions where I knew exactly how I wanted to do things. This and the next mission are two where I've had a strategy for years and I finally got a chance to play again and make them for my strategy. I'll need the Leviathan, a naval mythical unit that is good at fighting and can transport up to 20 units at a time, but first I use it to transport a monra and a villager to an area I found with some hidden relics. Once again, this cool mechanic offers small rewards for exploration.

I get a bonus for farming fast infantry. Armor hero damage. to mythic units and siege weapon damage. It's really nice to get to Comsat Island. I need my transports to pass a massive fleet that patrols normally. It would take a serious naval war to make the trip properly, but I have a better idea. The Siege Tower is similar. In the Greek Heliopolis, his melee Spike deals massive damage to buildings and can garrison up to five infantry to protect them during the advance. I'm going to abuse that second part for fun and profit. I will make a large army of infantry and a lot of siege. towers and then garrisoned my entire army in those siege towers, putting around 50 infantry in the 10 of them, which I then load into my Leviathan, which can carry 20 units, as a result, the Leviathan only carries 10 siege towers, but it actually takes about 60 units, this is one of the things I love about Age of Mythology, the game is designed to have fun and do stupid things first and balance later, the game is totally fine with these Bonker strategies as part of it and it's surprising because my fleet is only one. unit.

I can easily sneak past the Navy and deploy my siege towers on the island, who then deploy infantry to cover them. I went through the base of the chemical team and the poor boy never had any idea why he hit him with the Osiris piece, assured a monarch and a front camera. set and as she moves to deliver the killing blow, chemical set Rock swoops in and grabs it to fly. The fact that he's backwards in this is so funny to me that I can't help but imagine that like 30 seconds after he makes his dramatic exit he's just sitting there not being able to see where he's going, saying that I have no idea where I'm going. take this I really hope it lands soon, my arms are numb and I have to pee.

This is almost as bad as flying United now. which in a way has done its job Ensemble remembered that Chiron is actually a character and gave him a mission: a large tamarisk tree grows on a piece of fertile land and on its trunk is the head of Osiris, sorry, stop here Wait a minute, look at that on the right. On the other hand, it is a relic in the intro scene. I love that they put this here once again. It gives a good incentive to get out and explore as soon as the mission starts. You know you have prizes waiting, so it's worth it.

What a great mechanic. Chiron talks to his men, the soldiers approach, but they are not hostile or Egyptian seers and his men have arrived from Midgard. They are searching for the one eye that has united the Giants to their cause. These Norse seek to stop the one eye and prevent Ragnarok. Join Chiron and we begin the mission by moving northeast and claiming a base. I have a lot to talk about here. This mission has a number of brilliant but subtle decisions in its construction and I love it. The tree in the middle of the map must be harvested.

The villagers need 5000 hits to take him down, so obviously that will be plenty if necessary and even then it will take a bit to reach that goal. We have a small contingent of Norse soldiers to complement our Egyptian faction on the map. It is bisected by a river, our side of the river is an open, desolate desert with resources few and far between. This is normally considered pretty bad for map design. Large open areas without training are generally considered amateur, not something that exists in its entirety. campaigns from established developers, but it's intentional here, the Egyptians don't have light cavalry to explore large swaths of area and aren't good at gathering resources from distant places, the Norse on the other hand are fantastic at both.

I send a raid. Cavalry to explore the area and find resources for the other Nordic unit I was given the auxiliary tank to so I could build resources away from a town hall. Egypt and Greece must build granaries, mining camps and the like. These are small centers where resources can be stored. returned take time to build only resourcesspecifics that can be returned to them and are immobile, the Norse on the other hand have the right idea, the auxiliary cart can walk and any resource can be returned to it, making it ideal for harvesting. In this Barren Wasteland this is a really cool mission design, it does a lot of things at once and it does them all well, firstly it introduces the next faction and we're heading towards the climax of the Egyptian campaign so it's important sowing the seeds of the next conflict, secondly, it shows the actual mechanics of the faction with the gameplay and not just empty words, which is why many titles, whether games, television or movies, will simply tell you about something and expect you to do so. remember when it appears later, showing it and doing it.

Playing with him is a very powerful way to introduce him, but because they start with a very simple mechanic, he's not overwhelming, you don't even have to use him if you don't want to, and ultimately helps establish Gargorensis as a villain. When our resident poet is mentioned and shown to be actively working to destabilize multiple regions, it feels less like we're thwarting his every move and more like we're rushing to put out fires, which helps show that, in fact, He's a competent villain. the fact that these three things can be done with a few lines of dialogue and a side cart is really cool, this wouldn't be possible if the game was split into different campaigns, one for each faction, with a contiguous story, it allows for this. level of quest variety that makes Age of Mythology stand out as I explore a voice line warns me that there are ancient tombs that spawn mummies around the map.

I must find and clear them, remember that mummy's human One-Shot units, and raise them as undead minions. This is a big threat, but because I had my cavalry scouting, I found the first tomb very quickly when I destroyed it. I receive two surprises. It turns out that beetles explode to cause damage when they die. I didn't mention this when I used them before. because I had no idea, in fact I checked the game's cool encyclopedia for information and they give me all the information I could want about the Scarab, but nothing about it exploding, sorry for letting you die, Paul the priest, I just did it.

I don't know, the second surprise is much better. I get 1500 gold for destroying the temple, which is a huge amount enough for 15 more legs, like I said before. I will not do this mission blindly. I have a plan to win it and to do that I need to worship my least favorite goddess Hathor, absorb resources on my side of the map and build a decent expeditionary force and then head towards the tree. A short distance past is an enemy urban center. I pick it up and build my own from the ruins I need. this to train my army when you worship a new minor god, not only do you gain a divine power and a mythical unit, but each comes with a variety of unique upgrades that cost Faith.

Mercenaries are an interesting mechanic that only Egypt can build in the city center. Infantry and Cavalry Marks are very strong, cost only gold and have a build time of one second, but only last 40 seconds. Hathor allows me to investigate the medj upgrade, which increases the duration to a much more respectable 70 seconds. My plan is to accumulate. a bunch of gold brings all my villagers to the tree and any enemy that comes to confront me, I quickly recruit an army and defend them and the enemy is not playing here, they hit me with an army of elephants, the unit does not myth stronger. in the game supported by the seemingly explosive beetles, scorpion men and siege towers to boot, the mercenaries actually do a fantastic job, they are incredibly fast, the training time means I can reinforce faster than anything dies and, although the fight is quite brutal and about half of my villagers fall.

I managed to hold on, ignore the fact that I'm ruined and my entire army went down after 70 seconds. I really just wanted to try out this mechanic that I haven't had much chance to experiment with and thought it was a really fun way to do the mission, the villagers finally do their 5000 hits, we grab the head and go, Monroe and Chiron have secured their pieces of Osiris and have made some friends along the way, now it's time for the Greek super brothers to do their part. The final piece is controlled by the Minotaur pirate Kamos and his defenses are strong.

The beginning of the mission is a non-construction segment. We start with a contingent of Greek soldiers and some siege weapons. While exploring this island covered in gold, we came across one of camouflages. outposts after defeating the Defenders and rescuing these civilians, they tell us that the seas ahead are absolutely rife with pirate activity, and to thank us, they occasionally gift us some mythic units, so that's pretty cool, given the Last time I fought the Camus Pirates, it wasn't like that. ends well for me, we need to take a more stealthy approach, we steal two of Kamosa's ships and transport our units through the pirate infested waters, upon reaching the coast where his fortress is located, we receive a small Egyptian city to build and start what I want.

I think it's one of the most intelligently designed missions I've ever seen. Our base is sandwiched directly between the Kamos naval blockade and the enemy base. There is no room to breathe. We have five minutes to build before Kamos finds us. become aggressive and our ships will no longer be able to pass through the channel. This would be nice, but there is a problem. A villager warns us that this base has very little gold and remembers that there is no gold, no human combat units or ships, so why is this design so cool? At first glance, this seems like a pretty normal resource shortage mission.

Most RTSs have one and that would be true, but this mission is designed in such a way that the limited resources, rather than limiting the player's expression, greatly increase it before explaining why it's awesome. I need to add two more pieces of information: first, the villager who warned us about the lack of gold also said that the Kamos base has some and second, if you take a moment to explore the entrance to the Kamos base, you will quickly see what there is. a ramp leading directly to the objective and a low path leading to Gold. There are so many options here.

I'm sure as you're listening you've already decided which one you'd probably use, but let's talk about the six different ways. which I see as perfectly viable solutions to beat this mission for the first two strategies we can look back at the island in the first five minutes we could use the pirate ship to smuggle a group of villagers before the pirates are alerted using them to start smuggling mine resources for the main base, but we will never be able to increase them in number, we could also use the gold we have here to build a Navy of our own and fight against the kamos who clear the channel and have complete economic dominance over the island a little later.

This would also give us the ability to grab the Colossus that our friends are making for us. We could also ignore the island by charging all the way forward, softening up the initial Kamos Defenders and stealing their gold mines. This would make everything closer together and easier to manage, but would increase the quantity. of pirate aggression or you could completely ignore the gold problem, build monuments to generate favor faster and then massive mythical units that don't cost gold like scarabs or scorpionmen and if you're not salty like me you could also worship Hathor , which has a second fifth unit called The Rock, a flying transport that allows you to bypass the Navy completely.

This is another way to get the Colossus and finally, you can get gold from other sources. The market has a function that I will talk about later. where you can sell resources for gold, you could theoretically fund your war effort with that alone. This smart choice of interleaving the player and limiting a resource when added to a game was such a fantastic variety of tools to choose from that it means everyone can play this mission differently and that's amazing, nothing in games feels better than when you beat someone, not because of what the game told you to do, but because you discovered a solution for yourself.

This mission is the purest essence of that and rules completely. Personally I went with a bit of strategy one and two. I fast travel to some villagers to get a gold mine operation going and then start building a fleet of siege ships. It's usually best to get a variety of ships, but I have a plan, so I'll stick to these Prestige ships which have fantastic range and deal good damage against buildings. This allows me to poke around the towers' initial defenses while I'm safe. Once I have enough seed ships, I put the second part of my plan into action.

God's powers have special side effects that aren't actually listed in the game as I approach the enemy fleet. I use the power of the ancestors. He normally summons a group of mummies on land in the Garden area, but at sea he summons a temporary fleet of ghosts. ships I make up for my previous lack of Front Line with them and easily gain control of the Seas. How can I send the Colossus to mine more gold and build an army of camel archers, usually those who control the Seas. ships, but because the range of the seed ships is so long, it gives me a nice benefit.

I start bombarding the coast with them. I managed to hurt most of the defenders and raise the enemy's fortress all the time, they are no match for me and to top it off my ground army I love Osiris for one of my favorite divine powers, most of the powers are one-shot use for a powerful effect, the son of Osiris is the exception when directed at my pharaoh, it permanently makes him the son of Osiris, one of the most powerful. powerful units in the game, it has a high powered, long range chain lightning attack that kills groups of human units and has a five times damage multiplier against mythical units, you only get one and if it dies it disappears, but omg, this is not one of my favorite abilities in the game every time he attacks it's a lot of power I love it as expected a besieged camouflage can't stop my army from being led by a demigod his fortresses fall the Osiris piece is rescued and in the next scene, the camouflage is skewered and falls to his death, what a great mission.

A Plus kamos is dead, gargorensis is angry and kempsit is afraid that kemzit has an army approaching and to help motivate them to move faster, gargorensis rides towards them while amanra and Chiron have returned with their Osiris pieces, we must break the defenses enemies and return the body of God. to the temple from the beginning this seems familiar another mission where we start with two separate bases last time this was averted with the power of the underworld passage and this time there are only a few trees separating the bases this is all a bit strange, but I have a hypothesis: I think both missions were initially designed without the ability to connect bases, but the playtesters found it too difficult to develop and defend attacks when split into two different locations, so both maps were changed during development to enable foundations.

When put together, the end result is a very messy design, but I think they made the right decision. I can easily see a world where even moderately skilled players will have two armies attacked and ordering the wrong army to come and defend as their attempt to get to the other base would pass through an enemy outpost and everyone would die. It's very easy to mess that up and it's not an interesting or fun way to lose once the trees have been felled and my forces unified. I decide to use the space. between the bases, by creating a market and training some caravans, they will trade with the center of my city and provide a constant flow of gold that does not require finding new minds.

This, plus the farms and the giant forest, means I'm doing great. with resources, but that does not mean that I am free at home, the enemy is very aggressive and sends me constant raids. In fact, they managed to push all my forces to the left and then attacked with a force of infantry and captured one of my Osiris cards, luckily. So I guess it's another note to the developers, the game actually shows you where they keep the held cart because otherwise we'd have to search for it all over the map. This is the final Egyptian mission and I'm not taking any chances. with enemy quality here as I advance to the Mythic era I adore Horus his Avengers are great bird men who spin to win and mix everything in their path why the Whirlwind bird children?

I don't know, but it's good to support them, it's my turn. make elephants, the unit is honestly absurd, they may not get anywhere quickly, but they also can't be stopped with huge HP reserves, great armor, and triple damage against buildings. Feelsure to move and take back the stolen car at this time arcanthus and Ajax arrive. with his chariot and it's time to push to the end because it's the final Egyptian mission. He wanted to come out strong. I try to get into the enemy base and advance their forces and then use the incredible power of the tornado to stop them.

If I killed that much in my head, this Giant Death Vortex would pick up all the enemies and deposit them in Kansas, but the fact that it's uncontrollable means that for the most part it will just sit around some buildings. I still think it looks amazing and I love how it brings enemies into the world. I wish I could have hit more of them. The remaining forces are cleared easily enough and I take each of the chariots to the temple as the Osiris pieces are returned. Gargarence's army arrives. Osiris is reborn and as he ascends to the heavens oh no he is literally here and he is angry, a literal God just drops down and starts bombarding everyone with lightning bolts and throwing meteorites, gargoyances, fleas because he is not stupid and everyone except Ajax, they follow him, manages to escape. to Sea and your next objective should be a Tartarus Gate in the north, this marks the end of the Egyptian campaign and the beginning of the Nordic campaign almost with the Egyptian campaign over and the story ending in one of its highest moments, the game does something. that I think many games are afraid to do it takes a break while Arcanthus and Ajax sail back to Greece they encounter some ruined ships that recognize their Odysseus Odysseus's Odyssey belong to Odysseus as they make landfall to investigate a mysterious woman raises his staff and turns it into pigs the nearby pigs then start talking they are also greek and the villagers of the island are looking for bacon the beginning of this mission is amazing the bored Ajax and arcanthus wander around the countryside chasing away the villagers attack the wolves and rescue their great friends after saving all the allies, they migrate through these defensive emplacements and head to a nearby temple to Zeus, who returns them to normal.

What you get is based on how many pigs you saved, now we get to build a base and fight the witch who cursed us. This mission is so unique and cool that it is by far one of the memorable missions in any RTS I have played, no one has ever accomplished anything like this and I love it. Inspired by the creativity of the developers I choose to be a little crazy, there are a lot of walls fortifying the base of The Witch and instead of demolishing them I choose to simply add my own touches to fill the spaces, this helps me to keep me safe at low cost while I increase my combat strength.

I end up building a group of Minotaurs from scratch. The islanders seem to have a pretty poor heavy diet, so I thought I'd spice things up with some meat. The enemy also becomes quite aggressive here using catapults to lay siege. long distances, but I can't help but feel like the mission could use a little more flavor here, wouldn't it be cool if the witch had multiple charges of Cursed God power that turned all my army units into pigs if the game Was it more modern? and technology allowed it, they could do some really cool things like fight with that god power and then send villagers as part of the attack wave to start hurting my pigs, then we have to clear the attack and intercept the villagers before Return to Slaughter guys, the game's activation system just isn't advanced enough to make that kind of complex stuff work, but man, if this game ever got a sequel, imagine how much potential there is for things weird and awesome like that, sorry, just I love this impromptu mission.

Things like this really get my creative juices flowing. Many RTS are so serious all the time. It's all part of a great crisis. The world must always be saved. The Multiverse is always in danger, but when you stop restricting yourself. and create original scenarios, that's how you stand out, that's how you make an impression and this mission made a big impression on me if you remember the dream mission I played as Hades. I built Hades' unique Archer unit, the gas. Graffiti this time I choose to do the same for Zeus by building his unique infantry unit, the Myrmidon, they are described as being strong against Norse and Atlantean Egyptian soldiers as well as buildings, although they do not deal additional damage against Greek soldiers. .

I'm fighting, they are still very good because I saw so many strengths from the beginning. I chose to support them with petrobolos to hit them from afar and clear the enemies. It's really not that challenging, its attacks were much better than its defenses. Once I destroy the final Fortress, the witch Cersei appears and I guess you can use the power of Zeus's lightning bolt against her. On the one hand, I feel like it would have been better to have a cool boss fight here, but on the other hand, this is objectively. It's really funny, so I let it go after giving Cersei the Panco treatment.

We rescued Odysseus. We give them a boat to sail home on a wave. Goodbye and we return to the main story. It's a great little mission, short, sweet, memorable and fun, everything I could have asked for. In fact, we continue our search for Gargan before returning to the main story. I wanted to take an intermission and talk about something that's not important at all, but now I'm assuming you're invested enough to pretend to care. Let's talk about cheat codes, remember them well in the past, all games had cheats, it was normal to expect them and some of them were hilarious.

Age of Mythology has them too, and while they have boring stuff like getting Matt's vision and money, they absolutely have some. amazing, if you type bark, bark, bark, bark, you will get this dog named Bella, who for some reason can form armies alone, if you type love, it spawns a flying hippo with a top hat and a rainbow trail that vomits blood on his enemies as you do, the power trines generate a fork boy, so we finally have someone worthy of wielding Poseidon's trident and of course Oh, Canada generates a bipedal bear and four monkeys, the bear has a cape and well, yes, you are losing track of the bear.

Mach One, I repeat a bear, oh no, so you know, that's in the game. I want to bring the monkeys right to the point, giving you a hundred monkeys. The red tide turns the river into blood, which should look really cool, but I took marine biology and college, so I got stuck thinking about how many dinoflagellates there must be in there and now it's going to be terrible for the ecosystem. Come on, now double the speed of the game for some fast-paced action and there's a cheat code. God Powers too. Bock Bock Bock gives legendary chicken.

Meteor and Gotheim give the power that turns each unit into a goat. Cheat codes aren't very important, but it makes me sad to see them disappear in more modern games nowadays. Everything is so sterile and things like this barely exist. I love it when a game is willing to let silly fun be the main goal, no matter what you're doing. Cheat codes should really make a comeback. Well, let's get back to the game. We continue our search for Gargarences from the north to Midgard, where we are ambushed by the Cyclopes. and hit with the strongest avalanche the 2002 graphics could handle, our forces are separated in a valley and we must consolidate, build a base and counterattack, taking down three Gargarence temples in the area we are now playing as the Nords and They really are It's strange, the Greeks were designed pretty much according to typical RTS faction ideas, they make a fantastic introductory run due to familiarity and the Egyptians take these core ideas and twist them a bit to achieve a personal identity, the Nordics simply do what they want and nothing stops.

They first are the auxiliary cars that were introduced earlier. I love these damn things, no more setting up resource collection points and then getting angry while you clear the area of ​​things to loot, the cart moves with the group of villagers and it's so damn. convenient, next is a change in construction. Only Norse villagers collect resources that they can't actually build, instead that job is left to the Norse infantry and to get mythic units to support those infantry you of course need favor, as opposed to more passive methods. used by Nordic villagers. The Greeks and Egyptians win if the Norse want the mythical units to come help them, they have to go beat up people and each human unit that fights gains favor, this means that gathering favor is not very constant, but rather it is a banquet or famine to win this mission.

I have to rape three. separate bases and destroy the temples with it the introductory segment separated by forces. I have to find one of the many settlements scattered around the map to build. I accidentally ended up picking one very close to one of the enemy camps, so I opted to get aggressive at first, maybe take down a base and get some favor while I'm at it. I opt to build the Hair Seer, a slow but strong infantry unit that deals additional damage to mythic units and generates double favor that the enemy base has failed to build.

By this time I had built up a lot of strength and they bent quite easily, this gives me some room. I use the pardon to check my first of the mythic units due to the fact that the troll in a game as experimental as mythology was in a faction as experimental as the Norse. There will surely be big winners and, of course, losers. The troll is a loser, in fact, he may be the biggest loser in the game. The Troll is a slow, bulky ranged attacker that throws rocks at its enemies. His special ability is to gain equal HP.

As for the damage dealt with its attack, not only is this unit chronically underpowered, but it is also a poor design. Why is the bottom line unit a tank regenerator? Why does hitting someone with a rock make you restore HP? It's all just weird and serial. of bugs, the only reason I built them was to explain why I will never build them again, but the Nords also have some mythic units that are real hits. The frost giant is one of my favorites. He has a breath attack that encases the target in a block of ice making them unable to do anything for a while, this can disable enemies while you fight the rest of their army or you can just hit guys on the ice.

They both work very well and are also quite bulky, making them a fantastic frontline fighter and defuser, another strange Nordic unit is the battering ram. This is the Nordic version of The Siege Tower. Both Heliopolis and The Siege Tower have a reduced 95 damage against ranged piercing attacks, but a pitiful five percent against melee hacking attacks. This makes sense. Historical versions of these were built specifically to transport weapons and soldiers to a wall without being shot by arrows, but why do these two workers with their pointed stick also have reduced 95 damage against piercing? What's happening here is absolutely a case of function over form and it's quite jarring to see these two macho men ignore 100 arrows like it's nothing and then get killed by a sword blow, but for now they do their job.

I knocked down the second base entrance with the Rams, stormed the gate with my Frost Giants, and raised my eyebrows. The third base is pretty much the same. My army has become unstoppable. Walk straight to the final Temple and take it out among the minimal defenses. All in all, the Nords are a strange faction and will continue to be, but I'm very glad Ensemble took the time and risk to innovate here. This faction has some incredibly cool tools coming and I'm really excited to show you there are no more trolls as we march towards Midgard. Amanra sees two figures looking at us and confronts them.

They are the dwarves Brock and Eatery and they want our help if we can. Help them recover their Mountain Forge from the Giants. They will show us the mining tunnels that can reach Midgard and, hopefully, intercept Gargorensis. To do so, we need to establish a base, get an army, and secure the forge on the mountain for 15 minutes. Design of this mission. is one that has fallen off as the RTS story has progressed, it's rare these days to do a Time section after a macro portion, but it's an interesting Mission layout and I'd like to see it come back while I was planning what conversation topics I wanted .

Go to where in this video I spent a lot of time trying to combine ideas of relevant mechanics and tidbits with quests that provided context and then this Quest came up and it was so totally Jank that I need to talk about it on its own, there are no other mechanics. First up are my two new heroes, Brock and E, which brings me to a total of six when combined with the Ajax arcanths Chiron and amanra. Honestly, there are too many. We don't need so many heroes and I guess that's goodthat we don't have them. I don't necessarily need them because Brock and Eatery are horribly designed.

Another one of those weird Norse experimental things is that they have two different types of villagers: standard and dwarves are special units that cost gold instead of food and collect gold faster than villagers, but wood and food are collected more slowly. Brock and E tree are dwarf heroes, their gatherers with reinforced attacks and HP totals, this makes them very difficult to use for some reason, when they are in your control group, you cannot issue attack movement commands which are the most Common commando in the game is commando in which you move to a location and attack any enemy you see along the way.

As a result, the problem of having too many heroes solves itself. I only send these two to look for gold. throughout the entire game because they make my army harder to use, not a good solution but it is a solution, the AI ​​in this mission started acting strange and the enemies attack early and often with big waves of giants and trolls and for some reason. in this attack they specifically focused on one of my villagers, she just had to die, they didn't take no for an answer after committing this very strange and specific crime, they came back and fought normally, why how strange to overcome the mission that did I opt? the hair series, my main combat unit and the valkyrie is my support.

These mounted mythological units are incredible, in addition to having high HP and armor, they deal decent damage, move quickly, and can heal their allies. I don't play Age of Mythology competitively, but I can. I can't imagine a world where these girls are anything other than a complete menace to society. A strong fast combat unit that can repair each other seems surprisingly oppressive on the note of Nordic experimental ideas. Dwarven Gold Mine is a really simple but really cool power. when used it creates a gold mine at the target location the problem is that for every age you have advanced more gold is added to the mine in the archaic era at the start of the game it only has 500 gold but if you can Wait until the Mythic era, at the end you have 6000.

I really like the flexible abilities that reward decision making. This is a utility spell with a huge opportunity cost, but with smart timing it can provide a ton of resources. I opted to rush into the Mythic era. It got old right around the time my first gold mine ran out so just a few moments later I was able to get my dwarves to mine a new one and it worked great when I hid the myth one meter I found something really strange. I could build a wonder. Wonders are a staple in the Ages series, they are hugely expensive structures that take many minutes to build when completed they start a 10 minute countdown timer and if you are still alive at the end of the timer you win, why Would this be a campaign mission?

There's no point in being able to build a wonder and for some reason that makes up for the fact that I didn't clear the minds of the giants. What's going on? I have to build it. I store 1,000 food, wood and gold. I then make a small raid with my forces to get the 50 favors I need and after spending more than five minutes building the Wonder, it ends and nothing happens. What's going on? Why can I build this tremendously expensive piece of useless garbage? It's obviously an oversight. But is this an original bug or a strange circumstance from a later patch?

It's very strange and a huge waste of resources. Now that I've wasted about 10 minutes doing nothing, I decide to go on the offensive and claim some forges. The path to the forges is I lightly defended some trolls and towers, but nothing special once the forges are secured, a 15 minute defense segment begins and I gain the ability to research three unique upgrades that buff my human soldiers. against the giants. I like that it's a little small. thing and it's cool, after defending for a few minutes I realize that the attacks against the forge are literally just the attacks that were previously hitting my base and the enemy camp that is causing them is like a screen away.

I've been sitting around long enough at this point after the whole Wonder thing so I go on the offensive, unfortunately I wasn't planning a siege so I don't have any way to take down buildings efficiently but the Nords have me covered because the infantry is the right one. As they build more structures, I quickly put up a fort and start training some battering rams. The ability to quickly build structures in the middle of the map to take out the units I want is a fantastic utility that I really enjoy, to my pleasant surprise, when clearing. This base ends the mission early, meaning I saved a full 2 ​​minutes and 40 seconds, which is about a quarter of what I spent on the whole Wonder thing after the mission.

Brock and Eatery wish us goodbye, but when our heroes leave, they confess to each other. that they intend to continue stalking us, but why after that scene is another gargorensis who is leading an army of giants to sack a village, it's funny to say, he encounters chem set and is disappointed by the time it took us to overcome the last mission that I found very funny and it mentions that they are working with Loki to destroy Thor's hammer, which is bad news for us because Thor is currently the guy who has given us God powers as we traverse the frozen wastelands, our armies are They run into an old man called Skolt who invites us to warm ourselves at his fire, this random Nordic who is with us asks Skull if he has seen Gargorensis, who answers that the Giants have come down from the hills to fight and that Ragnarok will soon be Here Ajax suggests that if we can convince the Nords to unite instead of fighting each other, then maybe they can fight the giants.

Scott says they won't listen to a stranger, but he offers the use of his village banner to get attention. from the other clan leaders to negotiate, all we have to do is escort him to them. The mission begins with a no-construction segment as we head north towards the objective. As we advance there, I wanted to draw attention to my army right now. For Nordic ax throwers. I started my army with a group of brick hoplites. This is a nice little touch that the game does quite often in both the Egyptian and Norse campaigns. I often start with a handful of Greek units.

I think this does a good job. to reinforce the idea that it's not just the hero heroes who are here in Journey, but also their cohorts. I really enjoy when a game can use non-verbal context to enhance an adventure, even if just a little. That sort of thing wouldn't have been noticed at all if it had disappeared, but it's always welcome to see that after fighting the Giants we reach a rock blockade and find a settlement. We'll need siege units to get through it, so I use my Nordic infantry. To start a base, the key here is that resources are very limited.

This is not a big macro mission, but a small segment to quickly draw out some strength and progress. I build some villagers and then fast forward to the heroic era I was initially planning. about building some battering rams to smash through rocks but then I had an idea that the walking forest power says it animates a forest to attack my enemies and that trees are good against buildings, that sounds cool so I love to Nord while I build my forces small giant raids that will be considered medium raids what small giant raids hit me constantly luckily a cool interaction of the Nordic mechanics means it's relatively easy to defend remember the Nordic faction gains favor by fighting most of the time this means that the Nordic faction starts with very little favorite generation at the beginning of the game and grows exponentially as time goes on, but in missions like these, where there is no construction segment at the beginning and we have to fight to reach a vase, I ended up almost no favors.

Before building a single thing, I opt to build the Iron Hair Flask, a bulky melee unit that occasionally honks its horn to rally its allies and increase its damage a bit, its fantastic Brawlers and support units, once that my level increases, I use the walking power of Woods and it turns out that I can't control them, the wording is very similar to the power of the ancestors that Egypt has, which I can control, but this time it's kind of a pity, but I can always resort to the Rams after getting some Rams. on the Rocks I defend myself against a few small giant attacks, a medium giant attack before a giant giant attack begins to descend on me from all sides.

I don't know if this is a hard time limit or a trigger based on The Rock's HP, but the game is Honestly, it's not very clear here if this time limit will exist or what causes it either way, we have to get out of here. I knocked down Rocks' charge in the valley. I'm trapped by a wall of trees that Thor oh so kindly burns and grandfather. The sculpture barely makes it across the river without the gum sticking to the sole of a giant's shoe. Honestly, the pacing of this mission is very strange. Just randomly decide that you have about two minutes to win or else it's tough on the Giants who are on our trail. we find the Norse clans locked in a battle to unify them, the banner bearer waves the flag and both stags dare to come here.

Paul's deer ate my cattle and kept my cabin in the river, kill them, kill them all. Well, that could have gone better now that we have it. There is no other option but to unify the clans by force. This mission is very interesting on paper. In reality, its execution is quite disappointing. There are three Nordic villages around the map, each of which is guarded by an increasingly stronger group of enemies. To win, I have to eliminate. all the clan leaders, but the problem is that I can't produce units and I only have enough money for a couple of towers to get the leaders out of their fortifications.

I can use the skull flag. I head to the right and move my standard bearer until the leader notices. and then I run once a leader is out. I click on him, he dies and his entire clan swears allegiance to us. My army goes from 50 supply to 180, then I do this two more times and the mission ends. There are no strategies here, no. tactics nothing to explore on the map no creative compositions just move the flag man and click on three enemies everything feels half-baked While most missions in this game take between 15 and 30 minutes, this took seven and , honestly, those seven minutes weren't that interesting arcanto is angry at Skull, who then goes into a geriatric laughing fit and explodes into birds, so you know normal Valkyrie stuff, then walks up to us and explains that the banner we were waving was not a deer, a giant war leader attacking the area, of course. people were angry with us, it's a trick Loki likes to use to wreak havoc among the clans.

This might have been a surprise, but for the last two missions, Loki was our main deity, having his name on screen ruins that fact. that something Tom Foolery was happening this is Ragan Leaf she was the one who ordered the Chiron Expeditionary Force to meet in Egypt she believes that despite Loki's betrayal we can still unify the remaining Clans this time without the banner before entering this Mission. Wouldn't it be absolutely hilarious if this was another one of Loki's tricks, wouldn't that be awesome? Imagine a story bold enough for Loki to trick us with the Shenanigans sign and then right after he does the exact same thing.

I really wish this was the case here, fortunately, it's not, there are three villages that give us a task every time we finish one, they join us. The first is two parts. The trolls are invading the city. This fight shows how absolutely powerless the troll is. They are a myth. units but they are being absolutely kicked over like dominoes, it's really sad what a terrible unit once the trolls are driven out of the city, we go to the mines, there is an underworld passage that reinforces them once it is destroyed and the trolls are eliminated, we take control of the remaining Village left one to two, the next Clan wants help to build some fortifications to build them.

I'm going to need some Nordic infantry, which brings us to our next exciting episode of strange Nordic designs that are sometimes cool and sometimes confusing, today we have the ax throwers, the trick about this unit is that it's ranged, but it considered infantry, this means that for any upgrades, relics or god powers that work on classic melee infantry also work here, theunit also deals damage like infantry instead of doing the commonly assisted piercing. Damage like most ranged units the throne axes are considered hacking damage which is almost entirely for melee units with these things combined none of that really matters its a close range unit that deals decent damage has Lots of strange exceptions to the rules but none of them really change how the game is played or what you want to do with the unit, they don't feel any different from archers when used in the field, although they do build towers and once I defend myself against some giant raids and full five, the second city is now my ally, the final clan.

The leader tells me that the Giants have kidnapped her daughter and I must rescue her. I lead the charge with my new mythical unit. The battle lasted. These guys are fast and tough, able to easily absorb damage from my throwing axes. They also have a special attack where they try to knock down enemies and stun them, it's a lot of fun but apparently it can't be used unless there are small units like humans nearby and you can't activate abilities manually in this game so I can't show it now. I'll try to remember it in the future, but no promises.

As soon as you reach the final giant base, the game goes from 0 to 100 very quickly. The defensive wave here is huge and causes great damage to me. My reinforcements are then intercepted by a wave. of giants that crushed the towers I built and a huge wave of trolls spawned in the upper left and attacked my main base. I had no choice but to YOLO dive into the tower and rescue the daughter. Fortunately, the battle bores dealt siege damage and managed to pull me back. We get out of a sticky situation and luckily the clan leader doesn't actually want his daughter back once she's out of the tower, okay, quest ends while I was looking into things later.

I found this really fun Easter egg with this lady if you click. As for the game's story for her, this is what appears and I think it's wonderful that little things like this do a good job of adding charm to a game, almost as much charm as Greta. In fact, let's take a minute to talk about that. game encyclopedia is quite nice if you right click on any in game icon it will open the corresponding encyclopedia entry not only does it have a more detailed breakdown of a unit's cost stat strengths and weaknesses but it also They mention all the other things. linked, so you can just click on it and jump to that page.

It's a really useful way to get a good overview of a unit. There are also nice little entries on everything that structures the units and upgrades. I don't think this is really necessary for things like a house, it's nice to have some context for some of the more exotic mythical units, what are they, what do they do, how many hands are they, etc. in general, the encyclopedia is a really good tool from back when fans expected people. just make wikis for them while the game doesn't cover everything I'd like, the encyclopedia fixes a lot of things otherwise it would be very confusing, and it also hides some really decent jokes if you look hard enough. and his army was seen nearby, building fortifications around the Well of ERD, another entrance to the underworld.

One thing I really like about age mythology is how the missions have a variety of objectives, most other rts at the time had the vast majority of their mission objectives. like something simple like destroying the enemy base, this is because their triggers were basic and they simply couldn't code for things that were more complicated, although this game avoids that for the most part. I think near the end of every campaign there should always be a big open macro mission with very little game direction where the player has access to all the tools they've been learning to use and can win any way they want.

This quest is exactly that and it's great that Gargorensis starts attacking quite a bit. At the beginning, with a large number of forces and from multiple different angles, fortifications are basically required here, otherwise my villagers and dwarves will be smoked and I need as many of them as I can for a special surprise later. I've been alluding to that for a while. whereas now, but the Norse campaign feels rushed compared to the Egyptian reconnaissance campaigns, all the missions are absolutely playable, but they're missing the little details that make you say wow, that was really well thought out.

Freya's Forest Firepower is a perfect example that because this quest starts in the second era, it is the default power we start with and is absolutely useless here, the power light tree is on fire, burning them to the ground and causing heavy damage to nearby units and buildings, the problem is that the enemy doesn't care at all about resources in the campaign, you can't tactically deny them wood or anything like that. This would be fine if there were some cleverly placed trees around the map. If there was a thicket next to a couple of production structures you could take. them down or a small grove situated between two sets of walls so you can burn it and sneak away, but no, the energy is just bad here and it's disappointing because it has so many cool potential uses.

I want to achieve a strong economy. quickly here and the only way to get villagers faster is with an extra town center, but to do that I need some worship in Siege. Nord gives me access to the giant mount that is almost as tall as me. These big boys enjoy hanging out with their brothers and Clubbing I'm also trying to use the awakened trees as a siege platform again, but honestly these guys just suck, plus you can't set them on fire with the forest fire ability, although it would be really cool one once you have a massive economy.

Another one of these strange Norse units, the basic formula for a faction's siege weapons is that in the Heroic Age you unlock a melee siege weapon, such as the Siege Tower or Portable RAM, and in the Mythic Age you unlock Unlocks a range unit such as the catapult, the ampoule. It follows that trend, but it's a strange siege weapon - instead of being very good against buildings, they fire a barrage of shots in an area, making them very effective against groups of enemy units. They still do decent damage against buildings, but it's not as much as other siege weapons.

I make a lot of them if I want to break Gargarence's defenses. I am the defenses of Cargurrence. I'm going to need a good siege army, but a rain army. Siege weapons need a little support. This is where one of my favorite divine powers comes from. In Ragnarok it is possibly the most extreme power in the game when activated, all my workers are permanently transformed into melee heroes. It is the epitome of a comprehensive strategy. There is no turning back from Ragnarok, you either win quickly or die mercifully. The power of the ballista combined with the heroes of Ragnarok are too much for Gargorensis.

He sends out multiple strong defensive waves, but they are all repelled by my 250th Supply Army. the last wave of fire from him. Giants Falls and I claim the good and leave. In the underworld, we have claimed good and found another door to Tartarus and another Ram. This has become so common at this point that even Arcantos is annoyed by how often he has to listen to the Rams banging on the doors once again. We have to stop them. So let's get down to it, the game takes its third go at a split mission and this time I think it does a much better job instead of building in two separate locations simultaneously.

The map is divided into halves. The above ground portion has a traditional base building macro. Although the underground part does not have any buildings and must be advanced to reach the ram, units can move freely between the parts by clicking on The Well of ERD. I like this design, by focusing production on one area, it is possible to try to divide people's attention, but also avoid catastrophic loss scenarios due to bad gathering points, such as the above ground area, which also has no gold, as well that instead I have to send my dwarves in an auxiliary cart underground to harvest.

I opt to leave my heroes down there as well to defend the only one I separated from Chiron, this is because while exploring I discovered that the upper side area was an open field the last time we encountered a map layout like this. I wanted to look for centaurs, but this time I couldn't. I have a hero. Centaur and I start off with the ability to make Valkyries, so I can finally play the horse game while exploring some more. I notice another novelty: this enemy base is a normal skirmish enemy. They do not have a large pre-built base.

We are building workers, harvesting and structures from scratch. I thought it was a really cool idea. We haven't seen much in the campaign and it makes sense that Gargorensis is rebuilding his base after we destroyed his main fortress in the last mission he talked about earlier. about how the valkyrie was probably a really good harassment unit and now I can prove it as soon as I saw the enemy building normally, I felt like the stars had aligned and I made my move. The Nordic cavalry is pretty decent, the raiding cavalry. It's fast but only strong against archers, although they skirmish well and I quickly find myself on the outskirts of the enemy base picking off infantry and harassing workers every time the bite ends.

Mahi Valkyries heals everyone and we are ready to start again, it feels a little. destroyed once i have enough troops the power of bragi's firearms doubles the attack of my human soldiers for 60 seconds, including my Cavalry with this burst of power. I managed to take down the city center and accidentally kill my enemy in 10 minutes if this design was common I think it would be pretty boring but as a unique thing I love the fact that there is a mission where this early aggression actually has value and shines with the clear bass. Now I can completely shift my focus to the underground.

I start building jarls. which are fast, durable cavalry that pack a punch, have no extreme weaknesses, and also get a bonus against mythic units. He's exactly the type of well-rounded fighter I want to help me attack this big defensive line. Enemy fire. The giants do something. Pretty big area damage with her attacks, but the yarls and Valkyrie are pretty fast so I can spread them out. The mission was short and simple, but I managed to secure the ram. It was fun. I enjoyed it quite a bit. What not. As much as it is the end, as soon as we defeat the Defenders, a giant wave of death is generated and chases us away and this happens.

Chiron, Adrian's mythology does a lot of things right, but his characterization of heroes who are neither Greek nor human is not the focus of him because of Chiron's sacrifice here. It falls a bit flat, the game just doesn't spend as much time on a Dragon Monroe or Chiron life and that's fine, but as a result it felt more like a decision to get him out of the way because there are too many heroes rather than him sacrificing himself bravely to save the world, it's strange that Monroe of all people gives a single line of mourning to Chiron before the heroes once again run into the dwarf Brock, they've been following us but they didn't.

They want to come to us directly because they thought we might have been one of Loki's tricks, which is honestly solid logic. Loki has broken Thor's hammer and the dwarves intend to rebuild it. I want to take a moment to say that I find it fascinating that in 2002, Thor's hammer was something so obscure that they didn't really name it, but 20 years later, basically everyone knows the name mjolnir. It's crazy how quickly pop culture can inform us anyway that dwarves are mining in Taproot to create half of it. to the hammer and then they will meet Etri, who has the head.

This is a cool little mission without construction. We start with a few units, some dwarves and an ox cart. Dwarves can do two things. They can extract gold, which will be. sent in segments of 400 to get reinforcements or they can harvest the taproot to advance the objective, meanwhile gargorenza sends waves of trolls, giants and the like to disrupt, it's up to the player to decide when they want to stop collecting hearts of gold and continue forward. I love the agency here, a confident player can try to make do with some reinforcements, but a more confident one can choose to build up some more forces a moment later, each respawns on the other side of the map, you don't receive any type of Reinforcement Mechanics, but he has the Hammerhead and some hairs here that are fantastic against these mythical units.

I hope to be quite bold with my gold collecting. Honestly, I probably get too much because I'm very greedy and I like money once it's made.he has finished. I go for the Taproot, which coincidentally requires 4,000 hits to finish off. After about three thousand of those hits, the Giants break through the rock wall that Chiron had created and begin to march. I have no idea if this trigger is based on the amount of time it's taken or percentage of the goal that's being met, all I know is that I have to get out of here. I quickly finish building my staff and start charging towards the Eatery, we meet up, gather our Hammer pieces and that's it.

Mission completed. Thor takes the The wheel moves the hammer from him, hits the last door of Tartarus and uh, the ground explodes with the last door of Tartarus sealed. Gargorensis is angry, he is going to send everything he has against us and we have to keep him away. There is a fortified mining town to the east. We headed there and started building. I have 10 minutes before the assault begins for this final Nordic mission. I decide to do something a little weird. Previously I talked a little about the dwarf, an alternative Norse harvester that costs gold instead of wood and harvests gold at 20 increased rate, well this is a mining town so what if I go all in on gold?

Of course, I'll need some food and wood too and I'll talk about how to get them in a moment, but first I need to build in these 10 minutes. I opt for a simple configuration of walls rather than masses of towers behind them. I make the Fenris wolf breeding. This mythic unit is fairly weak on its own, but each nearby wolf grants a bonus of 18 to damage and movement acceleration. At seven my plan is to use them as a high damage Rapid Response Force that covers all angles. I also get the ultimate winter power, which spawns packs of uncontrolled wolves to attack my enemies.

All the wolves die without doing anything and I'm pretty unimpressed after 10 minutes of building defenses. A cutscene plays skolt and gargarences demanding our surrender and Ajax gives our response. The foreigners get a little closer, so now the fight begins. Gargorensis will send waves of attackers at me for the rest of the mission hitting all three entrances to my base. He even goes a little crazy and uses an underworld passage to stab me in the back, which is a nice touch and does some serious damage. I talked about breeding Fenris wolves before, but this unit has a problem.

Actually, it's super bad. It is considered one of the worst units in the game. The wolves die without doing anything and I am not at all impressed. I'm going to need a real army, but how can I get one with just gold? I make use of one of my favorite structures from The Market series era. I've talked a little about the market before with the Caravan trade, but markets have another function like Well, you can buy and sell increments of 100 of food and wood for gold each time you do it, the deal gets a little worse for you.

This mechanic is simple, intuitive and the excellent balance of resources is one of the most difficult things in RTS to maintain an adequate income of each type. takes hundreds to thousands of games seems to become perfect the market offers a solution to players who have problems with that balance, but the solution is not perfectly efficient, which means that as players improve they will want to rely on it less and less. a very frustrating part of the game for casual players in a way that doesn't give competitive players a silly advantage. I honestly don't know why most other RTS haven't adopted this and implemented it in their own games in some form or That's why I bought Big Gold just to show how flexible the system is to make my strategy work.

I'm going to need to buy a lot of food and some wood, since this is the last Nordic quest I wanted to show off. The last Nordic unit I haven't been able to talk about yet, the olfsarc, is uh, it's the basic Nordic infantryman, normally this would be a big bag of who cares, but the unit is a perfect example of how flexible it is. the system of worship of deities. This game remembers that each deity is more than a mythical unit and a divine power, they also bring some unique upgrades, so let's talk about the humble ulfsarc, the base unit has 80 HP, 30 Slash Armor and 5 Pierce Armor and attacks with 10 Damage Infantry which provides 10 more damage.

There are also copper, bronze, and iron mail upgrades to provide armor and shields to pierce. armor, these are all standard standard, but then come the god upgrades, since Thor is your special deity, which means that weapon and armor upgrades have an additional level that gives 10 more each for Thor's mithril breastplate. seti, give another 10 for hacking attacks and bragi's call of Valhalla. gives them 15 more HP and their pig array upgrade gives them double damage against Cavalry and finally tears apart the Berserker gang. Gives him another 10 attacks and 15 hit points with everything combined, the old sart goes from 80 HP to 164. 30 armor hack goes to 58 5 five. armor piercing percentage to 37 and damage of 10 goes to 18 with double against Cavalry a strategy based on making all sarks as powerful as possible makes them more than twice as good as their base form this is the beauty of Age of Mythology you can mix and match upgrades to do whatever you want be strong you want to have giant bows do it powerful archers behind the cavalry tank is not a problem Pure glass cannon death force be my guest all play styles are supported if you look enough and you figure out how I want to approach it, it's not optimal to mine just gold, it's not optimal to create meme mythos units and then transition to Uber-enhanced Wolf arcs, but it doesn't have to be optimal, the fact that it's possible makes Age of Mythology so special. game and that's why I love it during these 30 missions.

I have done 30 different strategies, each with its advantages and disadvantages, but none of them are invalid. This trend will continue until we are done with a campaign and even then I won't do it. I've just scratched the surface with the number of potential combos, it's great and makes me want to come back to the game again and again after 20 minutes of holding off attacks. Odysseus shows up with an army that wasn't actually foreshadowed at all, just here now and I don't know why but it's okay with his added legions, we take the fight to the enemy, I break through their defenses, I capture gargorensis and in the next scene you're I'm sure you don't want to take him back to Atlantis. put him in a cage somewhere no, he will never set foot in my homeland this is for Chiron Ajax executes him with gargles defeated Our heroes set sail back to Atlantis to show their compatriots the victory they have obtained they hold the head of the Cyclops a Let's not get ahead of ourselves here with the help of Scolt, who you may have already discovered is Loki.

The villains used magic to disguise Kempsit as gargarensis while we defended ourselves against his attacks. Our antagonist is heading back to Atlantis and is on fire. This mission is really fun. We start with a huge Naval Invasion Fleet, seven transports filled to the brim with a collection of mythical units from each faction, after we are greeted by some meteorites and destroy the coastal defenses we get a base and begin the main objective. The entire map is a city controlled by gargarencis. Our objective is to rescue 15 Atlantean prisoners and transport them to a safe place. I quickly build two urban centers and start my macro engine.

The game starts with maximum favor and my supply can exceed 200. This is the biggest macro quest in the game so far. The initial mythic units I get are pretty strong, but instantly the enemy starts taking them down. The attacks here are of decent size and hit frequently to slow down enemy production. I choose to upload directly. their hearts and it's going quite well. I manage to rescue my first group of prisoners and take down my opponent's centralized production, which will slow him down, but I also lose basically everything, so it's a little tricky, okay, although I end up with around 80 workers and can quickly form a large army for this mission.

I don't know what I'm going to fight against, so I go for a full composition. I have some jump lights for anti-cavery. Hit passes are good anti-Infantry and some hypocon Cavalry for anti-archer duties. Some heliopolises are fantastic against buildings and you could also spend that favor on some tanky hydras to sew shots and deal with the pain. Can you understand what I mean by being able to do anything in In this game, I literally decided to arbitrarily create an army that only started with h and it ended up being a complete composition with no real weaknesses.

The crazy thing here is that I was actually considering doing it with Marmadon, Medusa, Manticores, and Minotaur at first. options is great, but even with high H energy it's not an easy mission, the enemy is now doing things like sending cavalry raids against my workers and I need my economy. I end up being forced to use my ultimate lightning storm to defend myself while I'm at it. out of position when this army comes to fight, although things are going well, units definitely die because I never play this game without death, but they are easily replaceable and my army is still pretty big.

One thing I like about the design of this mission is that not all of the buildings are hostile, there are a good number of neutral Atlantean buildings around the map that serve as stage decoration and are not damaged during the fight. It feels good that the target isn't burning down the entire city like you're supposed to. be protecting a lot of games, you would do that, after alternating a bit between defending and attacking, I freed 14 of the required 15 prisoners and found the location of a final prison. I send out my mega Army of Death and there's actually Here's a really impressive amount of stuff: gargorensis unleashes his own thunderstorm power on my army and sends out the bulky Cyclops and Colossus, completely destroys the non-mythical part of my army and even our chants go down, luckily my macro is decent so I'm able to keep my supply high but I got a little worried because the AI ​​really impresses me sometimes which is great because that's how it should be near the end of a campaign, but unfortunately for them my production is too much.

I manage to escort the prisoners off the island and claim my penultimate victory against Gargorensis while Ajax and the rest of the heroes help evacuate the civilians. Arcantos prepares to fight Gargorensis once and for all and finally discovers Kronos's plan, Poseidon and Gargarences. he had plotted to send arcanthus on a wild goose chase in the trojan war, hopefully getting him killed because the last tartar gate is in atlantis with the blessing of the gods and titans. gargorensis animates the statue of Poseidon armed with the Trident that we recovered so long ago and the final battle begins this mission is an absolute disaster it is crazy to obtain the maximum blessing from Zeus we must build a wonder, but this time really not like the version with errors that did not do anything in the Nordic campaign, but to do that, we have to reach the mythical age and obtain 1000 of each resource, as well as complete the extremely long construction time.

The enemy is crazy. Here are the most brutal attack waves of the campaign. Without exception, they are large and frequent, sometimes per second. The wave hits me while the first wave is still clearing, fortunately to help we have friends, a Nordic base to the north and an Egyptian base to the south of our position who help in various ways, first of all, they exist and have units that mean which help a little in defense, plus they will give you units from time to time and not weak ones, the Nordics repeatedly give you mountain and ice giants and the Egyptians look a little worse by giving only the anubite, but eventually they give you a damn son of Osiris who is just a monster when he explodes Behind these giants.

I can also heal my strength in this nearby healing spring. Believe me, there is a healing spring here. It just went bad and the stone part didn't load properly. What are you going to do? The quest also has an additional objective and it's something I absolutely adore. We've interacted with the Vault of Plenty a couple of times before as they are neutral structures that can be captured by having troops near them and provide a bit of income to the controller. There are four of these scattered around the map, each guarded by Gargarence's forces. The game doesn't have an audio line, it doesn't have an extra objective popup or anything like that, all it does is give you a glimpse of these and let you go on your way normally.

I wouldn't like this, but for the final mission of a campaign, to me this is a sign that you are no longer being pampered. They've spent 32 missions teaching us everything we need to know. I need a tutorial on how to grab Plenty Vault or something in the final mission, just trustyou. I capture one of the vaults fairly early, but the enemy makes sure to claim them every time they attack, which is pretty often, so I lose. It's a lot to contain the enemy. I decide it's time to unleash what is possibly the strongest unit in ancient mythology, the Colossus.

I've had a couple of them here and there. I fought some too, but this time I'm going for them. in Mass they have more HP than most buildings, fantastic armor, and a weapon that deals both slashing and smashing damage, making them great against almost everything. The only drawback is that they are very slow. I use them to support my giants and hydras, which makes them very tall. The army arcanthus must feel very short here, since I can't even see it half the time. Once I have a large enough army and stop a wave of attack, I send my forces to the left to claim another Bountiful Vault that the enemy doesn't have.

Lots of defenses here I took the Vault and then killed the nearby Temple which is when I learned something very interesting and the game quickly turns into chaos when you kill an enemy temple in this Mission Zeus blesses you with the use of the meteorite power and for cinematics . purposes, I have a vision of the Gate of Tartarus which is flanked by a total of four temples and a meteorite, a meteorite kills the temples, so I start exploding. I use this meteor between the two temples, one of them dies before the other, giving me a meteor that I use immediately. in more temples right after that, the second temple dies giving me another use of the meteor that I drop on a fortress, then the Third Temple dies giving me another meteor that I drop on another Fortress and then unfortunately the fourth temple just dodged all the meteors somehow and I couldn't finish the chain reaction and then my army finds another temple while all this was happening.

Gargar Chaff actually counterattacked by using the power of the earthquake to completely eliminate my Norse ally, so this wasn't exactly a one-sided affair, but I wasn't even looking at it, it didn't matter, my side is much better. I kill this Temple, I drop a meteor on the Ninja Temple, another meteor that I drop on all of Gargarence's production and suddenly, he can't build anything, so I start. To start, if you're familiar with my channel, you probably know that I started RTS challenges and I'm supposed to defeat this deadly giant of a statue with powered arcanthus by building a wonder.

This got me thinking about my escapades against Cenarius and Warcraft 3 Deathless maybe I can kill him without empowered arcanthus to answer this question. I use my Colossus to take out the remaining production and gargorensis garrison and then wonder what the hell Gargarence is doing here, he's supposed to be near the door behind a wall of rocks so he can't get hit, but I moved my hands away. eyes of this fight for a moment and somehow teleported to this corner next to the fire. At first I thought meteorites had brought it down. here but they didn't do it at all when I looked at the pictures.

I don't know what this guy is doing or how he got here. At this point I've lost interest in the statue and I'm trying to figure out what's going on with garcorensis, so why kill him and the model doesn't have a death animation because you're not supposed to attack him? So when he runs out of HP, he keeps raising his Trident in the same place, so it's fine anyway. Statue Man has 20,000 HP and 85 damage reduction against all damage types and massive HP regen. I spent a maxed out Army of Colossus and managed to get it down to about 75 percent, but honestly, at this point, I'm a little worried that I'll break the game if I go any further, so I just build the Wonder once it's gone. complete.

I gain the blessing of Zeus, a divine power that when used on arcanthus turns him into gigara cantos that hits the statue dealing 500 damage per hit and basically takes no damage in the final fight Arkanto's fights with the Statue, while a number absolutely huge of mythical units appear from the door, it's actually very scary, fortunately the Colossi are very tanky and although they couldn't win the fight on their own, buy enough time for arcanthus to defeat the statue, jump, impales the head with his spear and the statue collapses impaling gargorensis as it falls, finishing off the cyclops forever as the ships flee.

Odysseus amanra and Ajax look at Atlantis as it crumbles into the sea and finally Athena stands before the collapsed body of our camp, elevating it to a demigod and then the credits play and I can't show them because for some reason they don't play on the mythology of the era, but it launches a video file and OBS does not. I didn't understand it correctly, but it's basically a slideshow, so you won't miss anything. Age of Mythology's base campaign is a lot of fun. The missions have fantastic variety. The strategies and units are phenomenal gargorensis. It's interesting and the idea of ​​having all three.

The factions in the same campaign were bold and achieved it with just this Age of Mythology. It would be a great game and definitely worth playing, but there's probably a question at this point that you've been wondering for a while why the heck there's an hour left in this video, we're done well to answer that question, it requires a little context on the history of real-time strategy games. In the days before software as a service, there was a fairly common formula that every RTS game followed. Hopefully it comes out well reviewed and about a year after an expansion pack would come out, nowadays expansions are bundled with DLC, but that was far from what it was when most of the initial campaigns were made. the rts, the editor and the unit layouts. they are created alongside them, they don't have access to all the tools that will eventually appear in the game, they don't know exactly what each unit will do when designing missions, and they have no experience with the engine. and Editor to do what they want but with expansions that is not the case Warcraft 2 beyond the dark portal Starcraft brood War Red Alert 2 Yuri's Revenge Age of Empires 2 the expansion of the conquerors and Warcraft 3 The Frozen Throne each of them took an incredible base game and multiplied it with the experience the developers now had and came up with something so fundamentally great that they often define many of the biggest moments, best-crafted missions, and iconic characters for their respective series back then. , you played in the base game, yes, partially. because it was fun, but it was often getting to this content, so with that in mind, welcome to Age of Mythology, the mansion of the Titans Ten years after the events of the first game, Atlantis sank and the Atlantean people find themselves as Castor, the son of Nomads arcanthus.

An adult Theo has renamed himself Creos and everyone is miserable on this barren wasteland of an island. The gods have abandoned the Atlanteans, but there may be hope. Kryos has had a vision of an abandoned temple. If you can find it, it may be the key to a better life, so let's see, the Atlanteans are the fourth and final Age of Mythology faction added in the expansion, they follow the same basic concepts as the others, but have their own twists. First, it's the villagers, they cost about three times as much resources and supplies. They take forever to build but they harvest at an incredible rate.

They also have a donkey, which I guess is why they don't have to occasionally return resources to the city center like other workers do. I don't know why having a donkey makes me understand this mechanic, but it does an absolutely enjoyable job. Set that is great. Atlantean combat units follow the same formula as villagers. They cost more supplies and money than their counterparts. Pieces, but they are stronger. The beginning of the mission is quite simple. Train 5 Mermillo. Basic infantry that is good against cavalry. I can also train Arcus archers who can handle enemy infantry, although I don't have many options here.

The mission is pretty brutal at first and often some pretty big raids come and start attacking my workers. It's one of the things I love about expansions: they can rightly assume you've played the base game right now. You can naturally teach players through these raids that Atlantean workers are fantastic, but losing them is devastating. This wouldn't be possible in a non-artificial setting without this level of difficulty and most of the time you can't justify making a difficult tutorial. It's a really great natural teaching. I have a lot of respect for the limited food on the island and it's too cold to set up farms.

This mechanic helps to further reinforce the lesson about villagers, as the only option is to continually expand looking for animals to hunt and berries to eat, making you more vulnerable to raids after withstanding one of these attacks. I guess it's time to find out where, where. Honestly, either works. I leave and quickly come across one of the outposts to lay siege to. Krios has occasionally been giving me fire siphons. The Atlantean reach siege unit is not particularly special. I only do heavy crushing damage at range but I love the line of fire they throw out, it looks really cool after finding another outpost the enemy is basically out of steam.

I find a small valley and they show me the temple that Creos told us about. surrounded by bandits who resist a little but fall easily. One thing I find interesting is how small the Atlantean armies are. The elite soldier motif is completely valid, but due to the fact that they are the same size as others. infantry and I don't look particularly special. I have a hard time judging how the fights are going to be. I always feel outnumbered. The temple we rescued is an air passage, a building that can transport units. I load up some villagers and unload them on the other side.

Start the city center in my new house, much more beautiful, the gods have brought us to this new fertile island, but there were Zeus and his friends. This passage bears the mark of the Titan Orranos and his overgrown temples dedicated to him and Kronos, near Krios. that we should show thanks to them for leading us here by restoring their temples to their former glory. Castor agrees that it is better to follow Aranos than to be despised by all the gods. Some Greek explorers see this sacrilegious practice and move to alert their allies of the beginning. The mission is simple enough: build an economy and task some villagers with repairing the temples, but it's not long until two stick boys come and beat us up.

The Greeks are angry and the Atlanteans aren't sure why they are old allies. After all, just after another attack, the restoration of the first temple is complete and Aranos blesses us with a giant, our first Atlantean myth unit. Giants are large bulky siege machines that destroy buildings and regenerate. Wait a minute. I feel like I've given this description before. This is an unfair comparison, although of course when you have that many Miss units you will have a bit of overlap, it's the differences that make the units unique. Scarabs and Giants are nothing alike, for example the Scarab has 30 cutting armor while the Behemoth has 30 percent and for piercing armor, the Scarab has 75 while the Behemoth has a whopping 75 percent. .

The Scarab costs 300 food for five towns and 20 seconds of build time, while the much more affordable Behemoth only costs 300 food for five towns and 20 seconds to build. There are actually a lot of really interesting Atlantean mythological units, most of them are quite nice. I don't know why they decided that our first look at the faction has to be this lazy, uninspired copied assignment. It's pretty boring. I wonder if the giants do too. they have a hidden explosion when they die anyway, we can't really build mythic units here, we get the ones from repairing the temples and that's it after finding another one and clearing a greek village.

I worship Prometheus and gain divine power from the Atlantean God Valor. Powers are something unique. My only real criticism of God's power system so far is that everything is one-time use. The ensemble agreed that this wasn't great and the Atlanteans get multiple uses of their powers, as indicated by Pips above them, each one has a cooldown so they can't be spammed, but it's nice to have , although it is a bit inconvenient for the Egyptians, Norse and Greeks, who still have a single charge system. I feel like it should have been updated for everyone when the expansion came out.

I have two loads. of the power of Valor that interacts with the next Atlantean mechanic. Heroes, listen up. I know we're talking a lot about mechanics. I get it, but we do it now so we can all be on the same page later and just enjoy the awesome mission designs in the futureeach faction has some type of hero to combat mythical units the greeks have unique hero units that can be recruited at the town hall like Hercules or Jason the egyptians have the pharaohs and priests and the norse have their sighted infantry the atlanteans on the other hand can turn any human unit into heroes, even villagers.

The promotion itself is very expensive, costing about the same as one unit and giving you a small bonus to health, as well as 5 mythic weapon units with five times the damage. The Valor power can promote a small group of units in an area without paying anything, each promotion also costs one favor, so the Atlanteans will need to balance their production of hero and myth units, since they cost the same resource, not in right now, though I can't build myth units, so I'm making the most of it. In a giant army, I use the power of Valor to turn some of my guys into heroes and then promote the rest with cash until I have the biggest Doom army I can muster.

I'll talk about where I get all this favor from later because it's important, but I'm done talking about Mechanics for now, once I invaded the Greek settlement, an event started where I was granted, that's me, where I was granted the vision of a greek training camp that is constantly being built and sends out waves of attack once my army of heroes is complete i grab my dinosaurs and go destroying the camp it falls pretty cleanly and All That Remains is the main greek base and god mine is that an absolute ton of Greek guys to help in the fight use some of my new God Powers Shockwave.

It deals no damage, but knocks down enemy units by scattering their formations, while the chaos causes enemies to temporarily fire on our allies with a maxed out Army of Heroes, all releasing my divine powers. They throw me away. I'm going to have to change a little. I start adding destroyers. In the mix, the large shields with tridents are actually the Atlantean version of battering rams or siege towers, but they are so small that they actually fit quite well in a pitched battle to reinforce. I use the special structure of aranos, the sky step, any unit that enters. one passage can be downloaded into any other building them is a bit risky but the reinforcement potential is incredible the defense the greeks put up here is by far the most impressive thing i have seen in this game so far i end up throwing over a hundred expensive soldiers Atlanteans Into The Fray only to slowly reduce the enemy when he finally reaches their base.

I can see why they were so harsh. They have three barracks, three stables, and three archery ranges that constantly eliminate units. The AI ​​is a macro monster here, mission 2 of the expansion is significantly harder than anything else in the base game, it's wild, eventually my Pitchfork men push the buildings so hard they fall and I'm able to overwhelm the forces Greeks, the idiots finally leave the island once. and for everything except why the hell the Greeks attacked us, we're supposed to be friends, right? Castor agrees to lead an expedition to find out what the hell is going on, but he would like it to be peaceful if he can, the Greek forces.

Withdraw to the mainland and warn General Malaysia of Atlantean aggression. The general asks for Egyptian and Nordic help and prepares to defend his home. Meanwhile, Castor lands with about six guys and is ready to fight. This mission is a great example of the really interesting things that can happen when you have time to design a campaign that fits both a faction and pre-established narratives and to tell us what's going on, we may have the most unenthusiastic read of a voice line I've never heard before, we don't have a city center and there's no way to get it thanks for the information soldier you're definitely not reading that line for the first time what kind Atlantean villagers don't have to return resources anywhere so why would we need a city center?

The mission begins with a small Force next to one of the many Vaults of Plenty that already exist in Greek territory. We are expected to use a combination of gathering with our few villagers and capturing these Vaults to fund our war effort against General Malagius . I really like this design idea, it takes inspiration from the Vaults of Plenty in the base game's final mission and combines it with a new mechanic to show off, there are a few bugs in the design though mainly the fact that the Atlanteans get favors from through city centers, which we can't build, the game fixes this by giving you five favors every now and then, it doesn't draw attention to this and I really hope you don't realize how artificial it is.

I think this could have been fixed more cleanly by making the vaults themselves favor along with the resource drip, even if they had to indicate that their vaults are special in some way due to a large amount of the player's income. From the Vault, you have to maintain control of a large area to keep even a couple of them safe, so what Ensemble did was really clever: they just put a bunch of little events around the map to discover as you go towards the vaults, you can raid a fishing village and have them fish for you.

Polyphemus's cave is to the east and we can finish what Odysseus started. There are some statues to break, one that gives faith when destroyed and another that spawns statues of archers to defend this valley. just a bunch of these little things around the map and that makes wandering around and finding things really fun. However, General Millegius is not happy with me frolicking in his house and he is quite aggressive. He loves to send out small raids, which is very strong because we are spread out to combat him. I have the mythological unit of Hyperion, the Seder.

These guys are not flashy. They sit in the back and throw spears all day, but they deliver the punishment very quickly. The damage is surprising. I support them with a front line. I do Atlantean infantry. both the merrillo and the Cavalry Catapultis counter are fine, I've been trying to make a joke work here for a long time like oh it ends in belts and the Pelt saters easily, yeah no no it doesn't come together so I'm just not even going to try it, so we've established here that the Seder is pretty good, but for what other reasons did I love Hyperion?

I had no choice. This will appear repeatedly in the Titans expansion. The game absolutely has something. Incredible quest ideas, but as a result, the selected environment leads players to choose specific deities. Almost always the first three deities are preselected for you. This is not a complaint. I think this kind of design is good. This mission is a ton of fun and if I had to go up two separate levels to get here it would have been a lot slower and boring, but I wanted to mention this now so we could pay attention to how much time passes before we can choose ours. mythological unit, once I have maxed out my army I take the fight to the Greek general, luckily for me his entourage consists of five guys, wow that's a lot of mythical units, the final fight here once again impressed me, the general hit my flank with a Giant Minotaur Raid while he occupied the center, my entire front line is cut off and only the Seder survives as the general falls, if he had a little more health he absolutely would have been wiped out here at this point.

I feel like I'm Complementing the AI ​​in every mission and that's a good thing, the Titans expansion doesn't pull any punches, it absolutely gives players all the tools they need to win, but it also expects them to use those tools, that's exactly how I feel. I like the difficulty. in the games and it is very funny when the Atlanteans kill the general and march towards the Greek city. A relief force of Norse and Egyptians arrives. We can't win this fight, but Caster has another idea. We counterattack to the north while the Nordic armies are mobilized. In Greece, the Atlanteans attack their homeland and are here to send a message: we will raise the Temple of Odin to the ground.

This mission is another one that is built specifically to showcase the ability of a pair of Lantian mechanics, Kronos, to move structures and the vortex. Power of God, the objective is to eliminate three temples on the plateaus and replace them with Atlantean temples, this will make Odin's super temple vulnerable so we can destroy it. Our main base starts off completely sealed, so I can be super greedy financially because I'm so No, huh, the Norse Force uses the firepower of the forest to break into my base and starts attacking really fast. This is the kind of thing I was talking about earlier with forest firepower.

It's so cool that the game legitimately took me by surprise here with some really clever use of power, no other RTS has the huge potential for amazing map designs due to the divine power mechanic and I love seeing it used well as the raids keep coming and they don't stop doing it. I realize I will need a strong front line. to stop things so I started making Prometheans, they are pretty generic melee fighters with decent bulk and split in two when killed, basically doubling their durability behind them. I put in a Cherry-O ballista, an expensive anti-inventory unit that is seen a lot. like a siege weapon, but reality simply reduces the pain in one area to finish my composition.

I get some destroyers, the plan is to keep the enemy in close combat with the Prometheans and the destroyers while the cariableist attacks groups of them as I advance towards the first temple I try my strategy and it works very well. I traverse the Nords and reach the bottom of the first temple plateau and use Bliss to kill it once done. I can show the time shifting mechanic when I worship Kronos every Atlantean building can pay a fee to be transported to any location it has. Vision of the process. The process is slow. The building is vulnerable during it and only one building can be moved at a time, but despite the limitations, it is a very good ability to relocate and once completed.

The temple is erected, that is exactly what we are going to have to do. This map is divided into three separate valleys with no way to walk between them instead of marching an army. I have to use another tool, but first I need a vision of the next valley, which is. where the Atlantean Scout unit comes from, the Oracle oracles are a very strange design for a scout, their movement speed is slow, their vision range is abysmal, but once they stop moving for a few seconds their vision quickly gains in size and eventually shows a huge area for For us, this is perfect.

I can see the next valley where I use the power of the vortex to send my army into Vortex. It's a little crazy, you click on a location and every army unit you own teleports to that location. Normally it's a fourth level god power with three charges, but we start with four uses here, it's not as flashy as other fourth level powers like meteorite, but it's incredibly powerful, and my other ability that I have is deconstruction, uh , deconstruct the building once my army teleports away. and secure the area. I change my production structures to reinforce and advance towards the second temple once again.

The enemy defenses are pretty decent, but having an entire valley to myself or my workers cannot be harassed means I can outrun the enemy and break through claiming the second temple for myself, the end goal is significantly easier, my army marches nearby. , has vision and Vortex is right above it. I destroy it in seconds, making Odin vulnerable with the main temple exposed. Caster goes into bad manners mode and gives us an epic version of the power of deconstruction that dismantles the temple board by board sealing our victory against the Norse, meanwhile in Egypt the demigod arcanthus encounters a manra that warns him of a imminent Atlantean assault while their armies are away from our work as Atlanteans. to steal four Egyptian relics and return them to the Temple of Kronos, each one provides the use of a divine power when we return, we start in the middle and are surrounded to fight the Egyptians.

I want to use one of the most interesting Atlantean mythical units, the automaton which are melee units that are not fantastic to fight for their price and have no combat abilities, but once combat is over they can repair each other automatically and even rebuild killed automatons, this means they function fantastically as frontline tanks constantly rebuilding their numbers after each one. fight, but it's risky if you lose them all in a fight, you basically spent all your faith in a unit that does nothing from a technical perspective, this mission is nothing we haven't seen before every time one of the relics is claimed . gives a divine power that is the bronze, tornado and earthquake minions, and you canI'll tackle them in any order, which is good, so instead of going into detail here, I'll gloss over things a bit, instead talk about sound and music because I wanted to do this.

For hours and I just haven't had the chance. This might be a bit of a controversial opinion, but I personally believe that good sound design and good music are more important than the quality of graphics in games. Listen to it before you jump into the YouTube comments. Just relax. a bit Graphics obviously matter, but while the graphics age over time, the audio design is timeless, and Age of Mythology's audio design is fantastic, it's quite normal in RTS for a unit to give a response when commanded. do something in Age of Mythology, each faction's answers are all in their respective languages ​​in which the EU refers Ence hair Joe's ashlost here Joe's most intimate I don't know why, but this is much more memorable than all of them in English.

A fun piece of trivia from Ghost Crawler's time working on this game is that because it was made in the early 2000s, there wasn't a lot of reliable information on the internet about languages ​​other than English, particularly old ones, so they just improvised things. and they tried to make it sound good, no one speaks ancient Egyptian. or Ancient Greek in this game they simply speak a 2002 Tech Bros interpretation of Egyptian or Modern Greek and yet it sounds good and adds a lot of character to the game that it never occurred to them that they would like to go to a nearby library or college and asking for help is also really funny to me because if they did, maybe they could have made the mascot sober.

The game's music is also phenomenal. I'm going to turn it up a bit while we talk about the rest of the overseas mission. I ended up forming a large army of several archers behind my automaton trying to get the most value out of the repairs and rebuilds. I used that army to attack several enemy fortifications, secure the relic behind it, and bring it home. Another interesting mechanical thing about this quest is that only heroes can carry relics, Atlanteans have a special advantage here, being able to promote any human to hero at any time makes it much more convenient than when I had to have Gargarence do it.

Each relic returned gives me divine power. Every divine power gives me. It gives me the combat ability to fight for the next Relic once the dominoes start to fall, nothing can stop them and I easily collect all four relics and win as the Atlanteans surround Manra Arcantos, he shoots them and appears once again telling him to the queen to take her strength and her head. to Greece, the Atlanteans are being led by the son of arcanthus and he is being tricked into this aggression, but who is okay, I know it's Kronos, like we're literally worshiping him.

Not who I meant, I meant as some kind of intermediary, someone who is not trapped behind a 12 hp door, Caster returns from the Norse lands and Creos informs him that the raids on Egypt have been successful, the factions are withdrawing his forces, leaving the Greeks vulnerable, furthermore, Kryos has found another of Oranos's passages and can lead to a flanking position against the Greeks. Castor leads his men and the passage does not lead behind the enemy. This is Mount Olympus and there is no turning back. This mission is one of the most memorable RTS missions I have ever played.

It's fantastic and I love it. I'm generally not a big fan of no-build quests, they just don't help me, but invade Mount Olympus, sign up for the mountain is covered in temples, each with a statue in front, bring any unit to the temple and it will transform in the myth. unit represented by the statue reinforcements will occasionally be sent through the sky passage so we can improve our number of units and get the composition we want initially we only have access to the cyclops and the valkyrie but as we progress we get more options there. There are also these mini temples, each one gives the use of a divine power when destroyed and some of these divine powers are very smart.

The first one gives a curse of divine power at first sight. This is a simple way to kill enemies, but it is much more. Besides that, remember that the livestock in this game can be controlled, this is to take them towards the center of your city to harvest most of the time, but that means that after transforming my enemy into pigs I can take them to the temples and turn them into cyclopes. How many others? Have you ever been able to turn your opponents into bovines and then corner their bacon butts against a statue to transform them into cyclops to do your bidding?

It has to be less than four with this giant army, then we can trample to find an enemy base and a temple to transform into hydras, we also take another bower, this one with the power of the ancestors that generates a lot of very short-lived mummies that they then turn into manticores after devouring another enemy base. I found the Pagoda of Divine Power and uh hello. Chiron, I didn't know you were here, but I know you're supposed to be dead, so I'm going to fix it by clicking my entire army on Chiron. I accidentally turn everyone into manticores, so I decide that's just how it is.

Now we're spiky guys and we love it, the mission doesn't really have much strategy, it's just about running around and having fun with a huge army of mythical units of your choosing and that's exactly why it's fun that we have this absurd army. that's impossible in any other game format, triple the size of anything else you can get and made entirely of mythical units, it's so fun that the final enemy defense sends heroes like Hercules Achilles and Jason, but that's my problem with Argonaut and my millions of spikes look through them as we besiege the enemy. the walls fall and for the first time a mortal sets foot on the top of the mythical mountain the temple of Zeus is destroyed and they escape through the passage Caster besieged the gods and defeated them man, that mission is fun, Monroe arrives in Greece and finds Ajax as they start talking about Caster, bad things happen, it's a Titan on the other side of town, the Beaver Bears witness the result of their victories with the defeated Olympian gods, the Lesser Titans can no longer be contained and now are wreaking havoc on the world he was finally able to free his most powerful brothers, Grios has manipulated Caster from the beginning, the sun has undone everything his father had worked to achieve and the Atlanteans turn against Caster believing he has betrayed them with the Titans now it's up to Manra and Ajax to save him as he fights the Titans' forces.

This setup is great. It's not exactly subtle that the Titan-worshipping faction in the Titans expansion was going to free the Titans, but that's okay, the build-up here was awesome and the fact that we got to literally deal with Prometheus is awesome, plus it's not an Avatar, not even a cutscene, is a literal Titan just cruising around destroying everything in sight just as it should be. On a side note, the fact that Prometheus is the first Titan counter tier is really cool. It is often used figuratively in literature to represent the idea of ​​human ambition overreaching and causing great tragedy.

Using a literal Prometheus figuratively is really clever, well done, unfortunately, while the theme and symbolism of this Quest is incredible and the quest itself is actually quite disappointing. The difficulty in the games is difficult. RTS in particular are famous for their difficulty in balancing the ability to predict the infinite variations of strategies the player can make simply can't be done, but a sure way to make it a little easier to handle is to make sure the attack The waves send well-balanced compositions of forces so that they cannot be countered with force. This mission sends exactly one type of unit.

Prometheans, like I said before, Prometheans aren't bad, they have decent stats and split in two when they die, but they are a melee myth. units in the background don't do anything special, this would be pretty bad if we were playing as Atlantis where human units can become heroes, but we are playing as a manres Egypt and the priest has a nine times damage modifier against mythical units. and the range of a cruise missile, if that weren't enough, I start with the son of Osiris, whose five-fold damage modifier against mythic units means he hits 300 and attacks four targets at once, which is pretty good when the Promethean has 175 HP.

The goal is to survive for 15 minutes and it's really disappointing. Prometheus goes around smashing buildings in this city, occasionally summoning a large army of Prometheans to attack, and then returning to Smashing. I understand from a narrative perspective why Prometheus would only have Prometheans but after killing. about a hundred of the same mythical unit effortlessly. I can't help but feel like they could have done it a little better. He ended up maxing out the priests with plenty of time left and decided that while he was too scared to fight Poseidon. statue I can absolutely fly like a ghost around this Titan.

Then I learned that Prometheus has infinite HP regeneration and I won't kill him today, so I lose my entire army. My son of Osiris and my heroes are trapped unconscious in the city and apparently within three minutes. Left on the countdown clock, Prometheus is coming to assassinate you even though he is still a free win. All production structures in era mythology have a button when you are training a unit to automatically repeat the build once finished, meaning that if, for example, you have a priest building and you press it, it will try to build priests for you. always.

This is a simple little addition that makes the macro much easier to access, which I think is great for new players. I've actually been using this for about 12 missions trying to find a place. I could talk about it, but I keep getting distracted by other things, so we'll do it here, which is really cool because this is a wonderful place to show it. Prometheus is coming to crush me and he is immortal, but I have a lot of money. that the self-building temples that gather priests directly towards the foot of the Titan is more than enough to keep him at bay for the remaining minutes once the time is up.

I have a mission to send three rock transports to the launcher, which I build, ship, and rescue the lab once everyone. They are together and safe Arcanto appears warning the heroes that Prometheus is not the only Titan. The Northland and Egypt are also under siege. Amanra decides we should save Egypt first and we leave. This mission isn't bad, but Prometheus' attacks are too repetitive. and the lack of variety is incredibly uninteresting, there are some easy fixes that could have really improved this mission. Priests only cost gold, so not having early access to five gold mines would really force a bit of variety on the player's part by having a mix of Prometheans. with units that are good against priests would have also been an option, the linear gameplay is also reinforced by the lack of relics or anything else worth exploring on the map, the mission really disappoints in quite a few avenues, it's a shame that this big build up was let down by the gameplay which is very rare in Age of Mythology and the fact that it happened here just as the action starts to ramp up makes it hurt twice as much as the Atlantean and Egyptian forces arrived at the Temple of Osiris, is destroyed by Cerberus the next Titan that we must fall but the Egyptians have their secret weapon the guardian we must awaken him if we want to stop the Three-Headed Beast we must defend the son of Osiris while he channels his energies towards the guardian or we will not we have a chance to defeat the Titan to start the mission, once again we are playing as the Egyptians, but this time things are different, the objective of the mission is a little more nuanced than most, in the middle of the map is the dormant guardian, the son of Osiris.

You can be tasked with waking him up and slowly restoring his hit points in about 20 minutes, but the enemy is relentlessly aggressive sending a large number of mythical units and human units around the map constantly, which should be fine, we just build more priests, right, no, we don't have gold. Mines and priests are something we can't afford, but there is an answer. There are several camel caravans around the map. If we can find them, we can trade them with our ally at the bottom right for a constant source of gold. This doesn't help me. However, in the initial aggression I need to use a combination of walls to control enemy movement, any human units I can afford and occasionally take the son of Osiris out of his job to help, but the more he succeeds in doing this, the slower the mission becomes, there's abalance. attack depending on how well you are doing.

I also find myself building scorpion men as my mythic unit. I said they're pretty unimpressive before, but they only cost wood which makes them really affordable here, isn't it cool how the quests and maps are designed? I can take a unit that's pretty average at best and turn it into something really affordable and good. I love this kind of stuff as I struggle to fight off constant enemy attacks from all sides. Explore the map in search of camels. Rebuild walls that have been torn down and build an economy and an army, the enemy begins sending hero oracles to grab relics around the map and bring them home.

That's a really cool mechanic in the mythology of the time. Multiplayer relics are a free-for-all game, whoever grabs them gets the bonus and this is it. Just something not done anywhere else in the campaign, a really cool unique aspect as I struggled to fight off constant enemy attacks from all sides Explore the map for camels Rebuild walls that have been knocked down Build an economy and an army and I confront enemy heroes around the map who are trying to steal my relics, then they start sending rocks to my main base to launch assault groups of enemy units.

This is also a really cool mechanic. Attacks almost never come from non-standard addresses, almost always. just walk towards your base. I really appreciate this kind of thing being added, so as I struggle to fight off the constant enemy attacks from all sides, okay I'll be real here, this mission is hard, it's too hard, the game switches between one of the more difficult missions. easy and possibly the hardest in Quick Succession and it's too much, which is a shame because the theories behind this mission are fantastic, the gold limitation makes these mythic unit attacks significantly more interesting and makes me think about using the son of Osiris, which is an amazing cost-benefit analysis that encourages map exploration through camouflage and relics is fantastic, you could even do some clever things like follow enemy heroes to see where the relics are and then kill them when interesting that the camel trade route is open and requires fortification is also great.

These camels cannot be replaced so they are vital to staying alive and it is good to have missions where you need to make sure all your borders are fortified, the enemy is. Attacking from everywhere and nowhere is safe, but adding all this together is a lot. Each of these mechanics could have been the core of a really solid mission, and instead they decided to throw each idea into a Vitamix and this absurdly overwhelming work emerged. And did I mention that the mission is scheduled after about 24 minutes? Cerberus is coming to attack, no matter if you're ready or not, and despite all those things, here's the strangest thing of all.

I loved this mission deep in my heart. I'm a real-time strategy challenge runner. I beat Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 without losing a unit. I personally designed the nightmarish difficulty for all three of Starcraft 2's campaigns, so when I got to the point where I had everything secured, my borders saved the Caravans. The relics defended the falls gained a fantastic economy and built a giant army of chariot archers, camel riders and scorpion men. I was thrilled to have to throw my army into the clutches of the enemy Titan and try to keep it at bay while also fighting. with his huge escort of soldiers he barely managed to wake up the guardian, who could then take on the damned Cerberus while my other forces finished off everyone else.

It was epic, but that doesn't make it good design. I'm not your average player and these campaigns should never be. be built with someone like me in mind, so I'm in this weird limbo where I had a fantastic time. I loved every minute of this mission. I would go so far as to say that, being my favorite mission in the game, it is the real-time strategy equivalent of In a triathlon you need to be agile and powerful constantly for 20 minutes and if you fail in any aspect at any time you die, these last two missions are polar opposites, the first came with monotype Promethean armies attacking from one of two angles with masses of gold. giving way to difficult counterattacks, no reason to explore the map, being able to lose armies to the max without it mattering and a disappointing final fight with an unkillable enemy and right after that comes a hugely diverse selection of enemies that lack strict resources , multiple facets of exploration are required while constantly being attacked from all angles, the Camel Caravans and the Son of Osiris can't say you're done for, and an epic, climactic cinematic final fight.

One mission that goes too far and one that doesn't go far enough. I would say that there are 44 missions in the game, 40 of them are well adjusted and I find it really fascinating that the Alpha and Omega of difficulty ended up next to each other and have so many comparisons to draw that it is a fantastic look both for above and below. Designing Missions I think that in a perfect world none of these missions would be in their current state in the final game, but since they have a lot to teach and are so interesting, I'm kind of glad that they are like this as we move forward.

Back in the Nordic lands Ajax says what everyone is thinking I wish we could have brought that Guardian with us I don't think we need the Guardian this Titan seems much weaker this is not a Titan it's true the Titan is there we meet him Giant King Full Deer Who we join forces with to defeat the Titan Yamir progenitor of the Giants as we build Yamir and his forces begin to fight their way through an allied base, once destroyed they set up camp and the Titan continues its attack through the that we must survive. It takes Falstag 25 minutes to invoke the need to help us, but there's a problem: the six allied bases between us and Ymir can only survive for about 19 minutes on their own.

We have to slow down the enemy or we will die before the need ends. arrives, the only way we can delay a mirror is by using the giant's freeze breath ability on the Titan to stun it and only King Full Stag's breath is strong enough to do the job. As soon as I entered this mission, I started to think what waiting is. In full stag, the guy who sculpted us tricked into carrying the banner and made all the Nords mad at us, why is he on our side from time to time? I opened his encyclopedia entry to read his ability and found this fantastic paragraph of falstag history.

He was infamous among the human inhabitants of icy midgard as a troublemaker and home-wrecker after the great Atlantean hero arcanthus prevented gargorensis from bringing Ragnarok to the Land. the mid-guardians and united the giants and the nordic in peace, what a nice little thing to hide, if you didn't realize it was the same guy then the game doesn't slow down its pace with Exposition and if you care enough to look for it , you will find this fun little story. I love it, what I don't love is the Titan and his armies, every time they raid an allied village they will take it and use it to build.

They increase their strength and are not left behind. This base grabbing to get stronger is actually a really nice mechanic. They tell you to use Falstag as a delay tool. This incentivizes going out and using it early instead of waiting for the Titan to get close. Double this every few minutes. Each remaining village spawns a frost giant to join your forces. The more villages you survive, the more giants you will get. Both are fantastic mechanics. Neither of them take the time to say oh no, for every village we lose things. get worse, but instead intrinsically teaches the player that protecting as many villages as possible is good, it doesn't require clumsy exposition, as I use Falstag's breath to delay Amir's assault, enemy aggression against me begins to increase and I need an army, Frost Giants are fantastic frontline defusers and since the flavor text previously talked about Nords and the Unity giant, I thought I'd make a few of each.

I grabbed Sears hair for some extra favor production and got some beefy mountain giants and while exploring earlier I found a relic. Gaia's Book of Knowledge, which makes my infantry deal extra damage to the Titans, so I decide that infantry is the way to go, but I already have plenty of melee combat, so I decide to grab some throwing hacksmen that , if you remember, they are considered ranged infantry. I'm going to be honest when I said earlier in the Norse campaign that throwing axes as infantry basically did nothing. I did not expect this. The Relic system has once again cleanly and naturally given importance to even minor mechanics in the game, it's so good as the mission continues.

I fall into a very simple rotation. I freeze the fake Titan Retreat label. I am attacked by enemies. I defended my healing source and sent the whole deer to be frozen again. I am eventually attacked by a force that includes a battle drill. This is exciting for me because I promised it. I remembered that I would show you guys his ability to resist and I never got the chance and then I froze him with a frost giant and killed him before he could do anything. It was shattered after accumulating enough forces that I worshiped here and reaching the mythical era by unlocking the ultimate.

Thimble of winter power that generates packs of uncontrollable wolves to attack the enemy. The wolves die without doing anything and I'm not quite impressed. After a few more fights, the enemy gets a little upset that he harassed his friend Titan and sends his army. I have to take it back and everyone, including the Titan, follows me. I move my forces to fight the humans and although the Titan hurts, he can hit him like a truck, but he can be killed and my entire army deals additional damage to him. There are still six minutes until it is necessary. the pig appears, but I turn the fight around after the next minute.

I take a lot of damage, but I drop it to about half HP, but the fight lasts so long that another wave of enemies hits and I'm defeated. I have to retreat home and Sacrifice the remaining villages for time. He feels bad. I wanted to save more, but it works. I resist the few remaining attacks and finally the pig of need descends. The pig of need is a dragon and I love him. It doesn't do anything particularly sophisticated. damage in an area and he flies, but that's enough, he's a dragon. I lead my army of Nordic giant dragons into hand-to-hand combat with the Titan and the need.

Hog's powerful breath cleanses the escort and burns them as well. This mission is really cool unlike the previous two missions. where the titans were breaking things and it felt like the setting of the settlements here gave a sense of urgency, making everyone feel important and the losses felt shocking and they're dragons so obviously it's good with the norse egyptian titans defeated, the team returns to Greece and discovers that Prometheus has decimated the area but in the ruins of the battle lush vegetation grows arcanthus appears once again with a little more wisdom since the gods were defeated the titans grew in power but not all titans are engines of destruction Gaia the Earth Titan has We have also been growing in power and using it to restore the earth.

If we can spread Guy's lush green throughout the Desolation that Prometheus has caused, he will weaken the Titan and allow him to be defeated. Finally we play with the Atlanteans again and we have a lot of new things, we have a lot of God powers with a lot of burdens. The first thing is the Gaia forest. This ability creates a grove of trees that, when harvested, provides extra wood. This power is very well designed at first glance and works for a new player. as a good source of resources, but for more experienced players it can be used tactically to create natural barriers or choke points.

One of the hardest things to do in games is create something that's easy to learn and use, but also has a lot of skill. roof and this power is exactly that, although here I only use it for wood, the objective is to build four urban centers on the map, each of which distributes Gaia's Lush, the problem is that there are only six valid settlements on the map and four of them are on Prometheus's patrol path, but that's a problem I need to worry about in the future. Of the two remaining possible targets, one is my initial settlement and the other is an Atlantean base, so they are my first target to defend against attacks from the base.

I use another one. New spider layer of God's power to create traps that eat unsuspecting enemies who are going to attack me. The power is not that great, but it is really gratifying to seea guy getting ambushed by a giant spider and dragged down. I also have three loads of trees in possession. that allows me to steal an enemy unit, this really helps when they attack with a single seder, which is actually pretty good on the backline, once I'm safe I start advancing to the mythic era and do something for the first time in this campaign.

I choose a new mythological unit to use, don't think seriously about mission 1, we were abandoned by the gods, mission 2 only allowed temple giants, mission 3 didn't have a city center so we couldn't advance. The four ages were given to us. two God powers selected and didn't allow us to advance ages five had no advancement instead gaining powers through stealing relics six was an unbuilt mission Mission seven and eight were Egyptian and nine were Nordic there are only 12 missions in this campaign and The tenth is the first time we can choose new Atlantean mythical units to experience. Luckily, Atlas is the Titan I adore and is one of my favorites.

His mythical unit is the Argus, a strange floating mass with tentacles that spits acid that dissolves units. killing them instantly is really weird and I love it. I support The Argus with Fanatics, a mythic era infantry that wields two weapons and does tons of damage and then builds some fire siphons. The siege unit with Atlantean reach and with that margin to the Hostile. lantian base and use atlas divine power implosion, well it does, this is in one direction anyway. I really like the implosion when the enemy army is wiped out and their base cleared. It's probably time to address what is simultaneously my biggest criticism and my biggest praise.

Frankly, this campaign is too short as I was talking about, I can only select new myth units. Now the campaign is almost entirely made up of curated experience sections and they are all phenomenal. The quality of the levels is generally high and they are an absolute. It's great to play, but this mission design alone doesn't provide the full experience without a decent amount of open missions where the player can approach things however they want, they can't see everything Atlantis has to offer. about all the non-naval mythological units that the Greeks, Egyptians and Norse had, but what about the Atlantean stephelian caladria bird heka gigantis or lampades?

These are all great units and I haven't touched them one bit. The Campaign would really benefit from having a few more missions where we could actually play with these tools. I would never in my life give up any of the missions we currently have. I think they are amazing and I love them. I just want more and in the grand scheme of things, when that's the biggest problem you have with your campaign, you're actually doing pretty well, huh, anyway, we've got a big mud boy to clean up and we need two centers more urban. Prometheus patrols in a giant donut around the southern half of the map, four settlements.

They are there and the only reasonable way to get them up and running before they are demolished is with several villagers building at once. I opt to use eight and as I build I start promoting all my fans to heroes for the final showdown in the first city. The center is finished without a hitch, but since the last one is under construction, I realize that I probably should have attracted more villagers since Prometheus is quickly approaching my location. I have no choice but to attack the Titan early to buy some time. Argus acid melts the Prometheans stopping. splitting him into little kids allows me to fight the Titan alone, but that doesn't stop him from crushing 70 supply units in the shadow realm pretty quickly during the fight when things start to look bad.

Bleak the Lush finishes healing the land and Prometheus is weakened. I managed to take down the Titan with eight remaining soldiers. These fights between titans continue to get closer and closer. Hey? With the minor titans defeated, we must now turn our sights to the servant of Cronus. Theo is still somewhere with an Atlantean army at his fingertips and then Ajax says. What we all think is not much of a challenge after dealing with the titans, but we have to go kill him to return to the settlement we built so long ago, foreigner, where is everyone? The crew takes the passage to the Atlantean colony and finds it abandoned until they are ambushed by a legion of automatons disguised as statues and with that the mission begins.

This would be a really cool reveal of the automaton as a unit if it weren't the penultimate mission of the game and they hadn't been given them to use yet. I'm 90 sure someone had this idea in their head before, but to fit things into the story properly, this Mission was delayed to a point where it's just not as impactful. Cutting down all the automatons shows their main weakness if they can't win the fight to rebuild each other. They are not a fantastic unit. The Atlantean heroes destroy them with ease once we defeat the nearby automaton. We rescue the city center.

Some villagers. and all the buildings around here, but we can't create any more villagers, so it's a limited economy quest and in many ways it's really cool. The map is an island that is completely covered by Atlantean City and it is not just any island but the exact same island where we did mission 2 of the Atlantean campaign in the air area that we just secured. It's the Greek base that we had to invade, which was really difficult. It's a great detail and I really love it. They could have easily done it. a different map from scratch to get the perfect layouts they wanted, but the fact that they managed to fit two missions with completely different mechanics and starting points into the same map is a testament to the skill of the set.

The mission itself is quite simple. The city is covered. In the automaton, clear each section to control it, including more villagers and production structures, then use that increased army and build capacity to make a stronger army to invade the next section, the automatons put slight pressure around the map. It's more of an indicator of where to go than anything else, but they're not much of a threat on their own, which is my main criticism of the mission, they're all automatons. I'm honestly not sure what happened here, but it seems like someone took an immense amount of time and effort. to hand create this Titanic City and then decided to hire an unpaid intern to do the enemy compositions, the problem is reminiscent of the pro-me atheist mission, if there is only one type of enemy then you can counter it and that is exactly what What do I do, that's not I say the mission is a free victory, they actually send an absolutely enormous amount of automatons once you reach the northern part of the map, but when every Atlantean unit can become a hero, it means I end up with a legion of heroic archers mowing the grass.

Take down enemies before they can touch me. The most fun part of the mission comes from exploring the areas and that part is really interesting. They give you the power of the vortex to move around and it makes it a lot more fun in the south of this island. the small garden and in the northeast, a small secluded village that cannot be reached by a land path to the west, there is a group of animals and a small menagerie, at the end to the north, a small hiding place with some cavalry and lamps, a mythical Atlantean unit. that casts Chaos on the enemies making them all hostile honestly I feel like I should be more upset with the lack of enemy variety here but I find it fun to look at everything around me and look for the secrets and the fully designed city does a good job. a bit of world building, makes it look like the Atlantean world is still moving while Castor was on his crusades, they are building and making a new home for themselves, which is just amazing.

I also have a couple of new toys to play with the power of the Carnivorous God. summons an angry tentacle plant that acts as a static defense. I also have a couple of units of caladria myths, a bird lady who flies and heals. They do a great job filling out my heroes between fights as I make my way to the hub where the final Sky is located. The passage on the map is located, the defenses here are actually quite fantastic. Mirror Towers are unique Atlantean defensive structures that deal a lot of damage when I push, tons of automatons appear, and even flank me once I reach the inner walls.

Krios uses Tatar. and gate energy at each entrance, creating a building that spawns mythical units that are hostile to everyone and then proceeds to distract a group of automatons so that it can break through the defenses of the sky passage and jump out and chase after Creos and then these guys They get blown away by a meteor, which is really a skill issue on their part overall, this mission I think is pretty decent, this build entails It's tough, but it's really good. I just think this type of design would probably be better at the midpoint of a campaign, which really ties into my desire to have more of this if there were four levels after this Mission.

It would fit in nicely, but as the penultimate encounter of the game it feels a little strange. Plus, this is what Creo sounds like when he laughs and it's hilarious. Before we move on to the final mission of this campaign, there are a few things I need to talk about. First of all, I couldn't fit in anywhere else. I missed a few mythic units, mostly Atlanteans, and a bunch of naval units that simply didn't show up due to a lack of ship missions. The hippocampus is the special water horse of Poseidon, the Explorer. He doesn't attack but is free and respawns after being killed.

Carcinos are Hera's giant melee crab that explodes when she dies for any reason. The German Eel is a snake with low durability and a highly damaging ranged attack. The Titan Hyperion Nyriad is a specialized anti-muth unit that has a dolphin, which is cool. Helios' mana war fires chain lightning because why not? and the oceans have the servant a naval healer on the ground. Aphrodite's anemic lion is fast, bulky, hits hard and has a roar that damages enemies in a where the award for best name in the game goes to heka gigantis of hilus who liked to crush and Thea's divine power generates a Hesperides tree that can spend 150 gold to summon a dryad.

Dryads are really bad, they are just a stat ball and have no Special Skills, also has the boost Dem Philion Bird, yeah sure, we'll accept that it's a slow flyer that deals big damage on close range volleys and boom. Now we have gone over each mythical unit in the game, the most commonly played ones. The game mode in epoch mythology these days is Skirmish mode and it's pretty good, the kirmuza is the traditional lobby where you can select a map, add other players or the AI, set up the teams however you want and then start playing.

The maps are procedurally generated with various archetypes which is standard for the era of gaming and the best part is that this game pulls no punches, every unit and broken death power with superpowers that I have shown here is perfectly legal and, While this could be completely destroyed in one-on-one and some deities are considered meme-level, as a result the game is often played in teams or free-for-alls, which does a great job of allowing people to have their superpowers. , but prevent a single good earthquake from ending the game overall. Skirmish mode is a lot of fun and one of the main reasons this game has so much longevity and finally comes the bug in the room, the sad reality that I can't keep talking about the Chinese faction, yes I know, I'm I'm sure a good number of people here are confused, including several people who have played this game before, there is a Chinese faction and a Chinese campaign and they are both horrible, so let's do a little history in 2014, 12 years after release initial version of the game, a company called Skybox Labs was hired to release it.

Age of Mythology Extended Edition, this was a new release on Steam, it was a bundle that came with the base game, the Titans expansion and some updates that are quite useful, such as widescreen monitor support, Twitch and the integration of Steam in 2016. Skybox Labs released its own expansion for Age. Dragon mythology story 14 years after the game's initial release, plain and simple, this was a low-effort cash grab, the Chinese faction is poorly organized, reuses a ton of assets, has a poorly written campaign and zero balance, and, by some accounts, it installs the DLC. It makes the AI ​​in the game worse and increases crashes and instability.

These have not been resolved in six years. I'm here to review Age of Mythology sets. I'm not here to see bad fanfic about a parasitic company looking to make a quick buck. Tale of the Dragon is an attempt to rip off the community and I will not dignify it with even a single moment of gameplay in this video, leaving that aside, Kronos has beenfacing us for 44 missions and I think it's time to put an end to it, we arrive at the sunken ruins of Atlantis and learn the most horrible news, yes, those five HP doors that I kept joking about how no one was repairing them, oh , that's legit and Kronos is about to get out of one, but in these swamps.

The ruins are the presence of Gaia. Our only hope for salvation in almost every RTS I've played. The final mission is an epic resistance or massive fight across an entire map full of enemies and a last gasp era of mythology that bucks the trend. once again in the middle of the map is the kronos base and around the map are the pools we must plant the gaia seeds in each one creating four summoning trees that will summon the Titan outside the kronos base there are no settlements and There is very little space for construction so we must once again use the nomadic skills of Atlantis to harvest resources, build an army and protect the trees.

It's a little strange that the final mission is another one that has no settlements for the Atlanteans, so they have to resort to generating fake favors, but at this point it's just become a normal thing, I don't know if it should be like that, though once the gaia seed power is used on a pool it creates both the tree and some dryads and carnivores for defense, it's not much but it's nice to have quickly. first and moving to the northeast for the second and then I feel very happy to be doing this project. I already wrote the script about the mission where we can kill Prometheus and talked about how the power of Gaia's forest is great for tactical use and This pool is surrounded by a forest with only one entrance in the front, so I have an idea and I don't know if it will work, but why didn't I just drop the trees and the wall all over the place and hope I wouldn't have to?

Defend it at all spoiler alert, it totally works. I've never done this before and it makes me so happy that even now I can find cool new uses for God's powers. This game is simply amazing. From time to time, ships from Norse, Egyptian and Greek forces. Arriving by providing units to help is a small thing, but I love how the game makes sure to reinforce the idea that the Atlanteans aren't alone here, they're all working together to stop Kronos. I end up pretty quickly going around the map clearing areas. and plant seeds once all four are planted, your standard 10 minutes and 49 The second timer begins to summon Gaia.

I guess rounding things to the nearest minute is more of a deadly thing. I divided my forces, the enemy pressure is light at first but they finish. I received some pretty nasty big attacks from powerful units hitting multiple places at once. Seriously, it's a lot of things. I also found a lot of relics and I'm still trying to make a temple in the north to hide them, but it's not going well. I'm going to pretend it never happened and not talk about it while we wait for the final countdown of the final mission. I wanted to talk about why I spent so much time and effort making a three-hour long video about a game. which came out 21 years ago, well there are a few reasons and the first is that it's fun to re-experience the story, it was fun to think about the game, it was fun to develop all the strategies, it was fun and most importantly, playing the game was fun, and that's it.

It is not something that should be taken for granted. I'm known as a real-time strategy guy, but I sometimes have a hard time playing these older games. Bad pathfinding units that don't respond. Horrible hotkeys and small control groups make games feel bad to play and Age of Mythology feels. Great, this game was way ahead of its time in many ways, the top bar skill that was blatantly ripped off in Starcraft 2 Co-op, the unit path that was way better than anything else at the time, the groups controls they could just fit a lot of units in them, building units is easy and the things you do are really cool, even today the game holds up and ticks all the boxes which is just amazing, the fact that this game only sold a fraction as well as other real-time strategy titles. at that point it's absolutely criminal Age of Mythology had the unfortunate circumstance of coming out just a couple of months after Warcraft 3 and the Titans expansion just a few after Frozen Throne.

It's a shame this is one of my favorite games, but it shares the setting. With Warcraft 3, arguably the most important real-time strategy game ever released, it's asking the impossible. When I was a kid I ended up getting my original Age of Mythology CD from a bargain bin, just thinking about it, now it's crazy, no one talks about this game that much, but every person I've found out who knows about it, absolutely loves it, It was a brilliant step forward in the genre, a passion project for the developers, and it deserved a lot more than it got.

I'm going to ruffle a lot of feathers here, but I personally like this game. better than any of Age of Empires, better than Command and Conquer, better than Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 2. People may disagree here, each of the games have their own merits, but this is the best replay experience I've ever seen. I've had, without exception, and that's why, oh, hey, Chronos is here, yeah, six minutes left. Chronos finally finds his keys and opens the door and decides that he will take destiny into his own hands. I try to use Guile's force power to surround him, but it doesn't work because the developers are smarter. than me, but it would have been so much fun if I could have just surrounded it with trees.

Chrono begins to move towards the objectives. I have to engage him to buy time and just like Prometheus this Greater Titan is impossible to kill, all I can do is throw forces into the meat grinder and hope the AI ​​takes advantage of that by sending a big attack to my flank . I end up having to abandon my makeshift base and miss the first tree, but his Kronos makes his way to the second Gaia Blooms and the entire game drops to a three FPS lag. What's going on here? Why did it suddenly become so slow? I've been locked at 60 FPS constantly throughout this entire game and right at the last second the game just explodes, I was actually doing a little digging in the Chinese stuff section and it turns out that Skybox Labs claims to have improved the water physics when the game came out. remaster and I'm pretty sure this delay is completely his improvement in action thanks Skybox I love you with Gaia active I chase after Kronos and repeatedly hit him where it hurts, he finally knocks down the Gaia Titan, then attacks him by growing trees on his grave and then uses its flower power to disappear.

Creos tries to run away and Caster completely stomps on him, it's like he's not even around. this fight and finally arcanthus appears Atlantis is leaderless so the demigod appoints Castor to guide the Atlanteans while they rebuild and this is where we learn the most important lesson of all: there are no punishments for war crimes as long as your father is famous. of Mythology will always hold a special place in my heart despite its flaws, it is truly a unique experience that also manages to master all the fundamentals. I mentioned that there were multiple reasons why I made this video and here are the other two that the game is based on.

There will be a remaster soon Age of Mythology will be retold I think the remaster will be good, it's made by the same people who remastered Age of Empires 2 and 3 and nailed it, but I wanted to give this version of the game a proper send-off even if it happens In a better way, I think it also deserves to be remembered in its original incarnation. It was a big part of my childhood and I wanted it to end with positive memories. The final reason is that real-time strategy is at a moment's notice. From a difficult situation at the moment, Blizzard's rts will have no consequences.

Command and Conquer has transformed into a winning mobile game that pays like garbage. Age of Empires 4 is moving forward, but the game just isn't doing it for me, but there has been some hope: recently people are seeing a gap in the market and real-time strategy games are starting to appear as the game Starship Troopers and soon Great War Western Front Company of Heroes is also moving forward, although the most recent release needs a lot of work, but I think there is another niche that could be filled here, another Age of Mythology, not necessarily a direct sequel like Age of Mythology 2 , but a game with the same general ideas.

It's not like Ensemble has a trademark on mythological creatures or anything like that. The thing to do when working in a fantasy setting is for the team to create a series of exciting and dynamic units, but Age of Mythology is so perfect that instead of a small team brainstorming for months Imagine legions of Japanese samurai fighting alongside Kitsune against Aztec high priests who sacrifice their own units to channel power. from Quetzalcoatl imagine flanking your enemies with a cavalry raid of doulahan, the headless horseman, who fears his enemies with his own decapitated head while slashing them with a whip cut across the spine, it doesn't even have to be old Mythos imagine a faction that is an ancient cult dedicated to Lovecraftian horrors like Cthulhu to most developers, right?

Now I don't think the answer is to aim to make the next esports RTS. It will be difficult if you create a game that is perfectly balanced with the idea that you need to play at 400 actions per minute or you will die instantly. Much more space to see is to see the realization of the absolutely incredible and crazy ideas that Humanity has come up with to see them in their most extreme, impressive and stupid form. I want powers that permanently destroy parts of the map with earthquakes I want huge floods that wipe out advancing armies I want the world to be the plaything of the gods In 2002 the technology for something so epic simply didn't exist but now it does and there is plenty of room to build something truly Unique here, if someone is bold enough to create an RTS that doesn't care about 1v1 competitive balance, doesn't care about historical accuracy and just wants to make something absolutely sweet, then study this game, learn from it , takes everything Ensemble had in its heyday. and implement it, repeat it and improve it if you do this I will be your biggest fan.

Age of Mythology is a phenomenal game, it's by no means perfect, but it's consistently okay in many ways. While most RTS of the era have aged. like milk Age of Mythology ages like mythology I wanted to thank you for watching this video. I know only a small fraction of people will make it to the end, but I hope you enjoyed it. I took a big risk in making this if it's a bomb, so I spent almost four months working on a flop, but I hope it was a fun ride. I specifically want to thank my editor Finlay for putting up with my selfish desire to do this and I also wanted to thank my sponsors who can be seen on screen once again.

Thanks for watching. I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and I'll talk to you soon. Peace team.