As promised with the announcement of my Titans beta version, I've added 28 new screenshots of me playing the beta (mostly the campaign).

Wooh! I just acquired another original beta version! This time it's the Titans Expansion, the add-on for Age of Mythology. There are 2 original/official marketing beta versions of this particular expansion out there, and if I'm not mistaken this is the earlier one of those two. I'm not sure since I haven't had the chance to try it out yet (only just received it!), but the CD cover seems to somewhat confirm this. Maybe it includes the beta Norse titan? Perhaps, anything could be possible, I just don't know yet. 

Here's a photo taken with my mobile:

 

My non-mobile camera is currently being borrowed, sorry for the low quality. We have a scan of the CD cover here. 

I am going try the beta out the coming days to see how it differs from the retail/final build of The Titans, and will post the results/some screenshots very soon on AoE Beta.

After the weekly AoEO server maintenance, you can now try the new Skirmish Hall feature today, for FREE. According to the devs it will be free for a limited period, so login and download it free while you can. I'm curious about the AI and how it will respond to different tactics used and the different modes available.

Originally the Skirmish Hall was supposed to be released in December, along with the Celts. The latter has been postponed to early March.

On behalf of all the staff I would like to wish you a Merry Christmas and a wonderful two-thousand-twelve. Best wishes to everyone!

We have surpassed a major milestone the last couple of days, and now have had more than 300.000 pageviews since the start of AoE Beta back in 2007, July 16th to be exact!

This shows there is still a lot of interest in both the Age series and of course all the significant differences between the alpha stages up to the retail/final versions. We have quite a lot of visitors each day which shows that a lot of fans appreciate the work we do here - I'm glad you all enjoy the stuff we put up!

Just found this new rare screenshot featuring a "skeleton" render of an AoK wonder/cathedral, in the hidden dungeons of Age of Empires Heaven. It is under development in 3D Studio Max, which is the program used to create all units, buildings and animations in both AoE and AoK. No bigger version sadly - very nice to see a building next to the other 3DSM screenshots we have.

Hi everyone !
I just added a page with the changelogs from the alpha builds of AoE Online that I found, check it by clicking on the link on the menu, or by clicking here.

On another topic :
We are aware of browser display issues in Chrome, and trying to resolve this.

If you were into the Beta or Alpha stages of AoE Online before Build #2144, feel free to contact me by email (see the contact page), I have some questions !

RTS-Sanctuary's Capital City Creations Season 1 has wrapped up and the results are in! Many magnificent looking cities have been created over the past two months, and out of approx. 25 people who entered, I am the winner of this first season's contest :)

View the results here!

A big thank you to the judges MasterGberry, Redhrts and Dejavunl88 for spending their time judging and hosting the contest, and Brandon from Voobly for sponsoring the very nice prize!

For those who wish to view my city, there's a nice HQ video on Youtube (courtesy of Maffia):

My city of Olympia

Hope to see you guys next season ;)

Ladies and gentlemen, what we have here is no doubt the most important development since the advent of sliced bread; an unofficial patch for Age of Empires II: The Conquerors simply titled UserPatch.

So how does this compare to our dearly beloved piece of sliced bread one might ask? Well the answer is simple, it beats that hands down! Starting off as an attempt on fixing up AI scripting problems and general problems with the AI, recent changes have also fixed issues that have been caused by modern computers.

Still recall when the AI made quite an effort at walling itself and eagerly rebuilding walls once they got destroyed only for it to later chop down a forest and totally disregard the fact that its doors now became wide open? Well, recall no more since as of this patch this oversight has been fixed.

And how about that lone enemy villager that you happen to find constructing a castle that is almost finished? In almost every case, once you hit the villager just once the AI would demolish the building and loose all the resources and progress. Quite the waste really... But even this longstanding issue has been fixed.

How about those times when someone dropped from the multiplayer game and the voting screen that appeared would get out of sync making it impossible either save the game or continue on without the dropped player. Even this cruel bug has been beridden.

Oh and hey did I also mention the fixes that apply to modern computers? Maybe you were one of those unlucky persons who were just flat out unable to play the game since once you started it, the view would just scroll uncontrollably. Or perhaps you bought that shiny new 22" widescreen monitor only to jump to some gaming in the form of AoC only to notice that no matter how hard you tried to convince it, the game just wouldn't budge and happily kept it's 4:3 ratio.

And on top of that, this patch does widescreen better than the previous patch out there as it actually adds in-game selection of all resolutions supported by your computer and the new empty space is also ingeniously filled by mirroring the edges of the old interface graphics onto the new empty space. Looks natural at best, and not all that bad at worst.

You can read all about it here!


Screenshot showing off the game at 1680x1050 (click for full size)

Check it out, a new video featuring an overview of the Persians:

Persian overview

Seems there are quite some regions in the making, for those who paid attention. Tarsos being a Persian region and finished - but then there is Massalia, Tylis, The Village of Sens and Vindelicia. I assume that the last four are Celtic regions!