Age of Empires II: Rise of the Rajas - new Southeast Asia Expansion

Yep, Age of Empires II has another expansion, following The Conquerors, The Forgotten, and The African Kingdoms, its now Rise of the Rajas.

New civilizations: Burma, Khmer, Malay, and Vietnam

http://store.steampowered.com/app/488060/

The greatest overall RTS ever made keeps getting expanded decades later, and now has more of a global reach than the original release.

I miss owning a PC. I loved AoE2.

How long has this game been going on? I must been like 15 or 16 when I first played it and I'm 31 now.

The HD version of AOE2 was released in 2013, which included the Conquerors, but since then there are three new expansions exclusive to the HD version.

And to see that AOE2 HD got a 68 on Metacritic....wow. Did the critics miss the mark or what?

Picked up them others including Age Of The Dragon but not taken the time to play them, good to see Microsoft supporting the pc opposed to a Xbox port, even if they are older titles.

It's crazy how long this game has been getting expansions xD

The forgotten, The African and now this asian expansion are done by different devs from AoE II and The Conquerers, but they can still approach the same quality.

They should give us a new game or at least use the engine of aoe 3. Making a dlc for a game as outdated as aoe 2 seems stupid in my opinion.

But AOE2 is far better than AOE3

@texasgoldrush: HD got poor reviews on release because it had a number of issues - some fairly inexcusable given they made non-visual aspects of the game inferior to the original in several ways. It works great for me now, though, and is a treasured part of my Steam library

Exactly! AoE 2 >>>>>> AoE 3. It's a shame MS shutdown Ensemble.

He's purely taking about the engine.

Doesn't bother me one way or another, looking at people from 50 feet in the sky.

3.8 million Steam owners....

No wonder new xpacs are getting released.

The HD version was pretty bad on launch. Bugs, terrible A.I, and a high price for what was arguably a worse way to play the game.

Now it's pretty damn great.

Isn't Halo Wars 2 being co-developed with Creative Assembly? I'm asking because it obvious there is still an audience for AoE games, and even though Ensemble is dead, they could still outsource development of AoE IV or whatever to CA. They're already historical RTS specialists anyway, so this would be right up CA's alley.

Well, one can dream, right?

man I loved this game! Sadly I no longer have it but I got 3 and...that kinda doesnt feel the same.

Rise of nations is RTSOAT

They stopped making them when they sold out to console crap.

With the way Microsoft are now I wouldn't even want a new game from them. It would just be overpriced, dumbed down, have mandatory UWP and content intentionally cut out to sell for more later.

Nothing to worry about, Phil Spencer flatly stated he wasn't interested in traditional PC IP's when interviewed about Age Of Empires Online.

This game is going to completely change with 5.0

Walls are now weaker, and now can be bypassed by infantry with the new siege tower units that everyone gets at the castle age. But castle's themselves will stay strong and even be jacked.

This means that petards can get through walls if the siege tower I snot taken out.

Also, you can now build on wet tiles where both navy and army units can pass through and some maps will have a ton of this terrain type. So you can now have large Vietnamese style ship to army battles.

Here are the list of changes being made.

http://www.forgottenempires.net/aoe2/changelog

The shallow mangrove terrain completely changes the game. While not in most maps, some maps have this terrain. Although I think they are fun maps, they don;t realistically capture the combat of the region as I hoped and thats due to the rock, paper, scissors relationships between army and navy units.

Both army and navy units can coexist on these tiles as well, you can build on them. Its weird. So you will have many land to sea unit battles. Melee units will tear ships up, but demolition rafts will kill land units enmasse. And trebs and bombard cannons are rendered useless because of cannon galleons are much faster on these maps.

The new civilizations are fun. Battle Elephants are no where near as powerful as the vanilla games Persian elephants but they are effective nonetheless. However, none of the new civilizations have good horse calvary. Malay is probably the best naval civilzation in the game, and have docks that shoot arrows.

Overall, its not as vital as The Forgotten, but a great expansion nonetheless. Of all the expansions, its Conquerors that is the worst.