It’s interesting that this is where I landed with my computer playing time. It’s also a good cautionary note for where AI falls short. It dissuaded me from trying to play AOE4 citing the shorter pace, and tried to convince me to play more Halo, but turns out that code was buggy for LAN. Such a shame. The AOE2 campaign was probably a bit too easy and I ended up going through the motions. I even delayed the start of the LAN party to finish one campaign that I was working on with castle age tech, which is similar to the loop I found myself in playing AOE4 after the fact.
It’s old but it’s good. What do I think of age 4 in comparison? The thing I miss is the speed at which units move from Starcraft 2. The lesson seems to be I need to establish a FOB in each campaign I fight to put out enough units in the theater of battle to really matter. I think that I should add the quarterly day for epcn, for which playing a videogame is probably an encouraged activity.
But what about AOE2? The campaign missions are… reasonable. A single campaign takes 5-10 hours, is broken up over different things, and then I need to learn unit types to become more effective. I wish I could just jump into a campaign with the Chinese, but if I really wanted to go down that route I would download some of the DLC.