Much has happened since the era of the first game. In the first game and its expansion we followed our civilizations out of the stone age and into the copper, iron, and bronze ages with the Roman empire. In Age of Kings, we pick up our history lesson in a more grand way than before. We are after the fall of the Roman empire, and the campaign follows a new path. You may pick the campaign of William Wallace of the Scotts for a training campaign to fend off the Britons, you may play as Joan of Arc and help the Franks fend off the Britons, or follow the likes of Salizar of Egypt, or the Mongolian champion Ghengis Khan. In The Conquerors expansion, the Aztecs, Mayans, Attila's Huns, and the Spanish and Koreans are added.

Age of Kings adds several key features from the original game. First, there is a button to select the next idle villager. This avoids the problem of creating more villagers because you weren't sure where your existing ones were hiding. There is also a "town bell" button which, when rung, summons all villagers to seek shelter in the town hall and defend it with arrows to prevent them from standing in front of that incoming cavalry rush. Finally, some advanced tabs were added to the interface to further control your units, including the new formations for attack, attack modes for siege weapons, and other fine-tuning features.

The Conquerors expansion, nicely bundled in the Gold edition of the game, takes the features even further. In addition to tons of new maps, new campaigns and civilizations, there are new weapons, and new additions to the technology tree. Though, perhaps one of the coolest features in the expansion is the auto-seeding farms. I'm sure any AOE1 players out there recall the annoyance of rebuilding farms when they are exhausted. AOEII didn't solve this problem, but the expansion came to the rescue, and now you can queue (for a price) so many farm seeding cycles at your mill so you don't have to babysit your farms anymore.

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