drdevience's Full Review: Age Of Empires II: Conqueror 2.0 for Windows, Mac
The first thing you should know is that The Conquerors is an expansion pack. This means you must have Age of Kings on your system to load and play this. Conquerors adds quite a few elements to Kings. Well worth the purchase.
With Conquerors you get 4 new campaigns. El Cid, Attila the Hun, Montezuma, and Battles of the Conquerors. In the latter is another 7 mini campaigns. That's a lot of new game play. Of all these, my favorite is 1066 in the Battles campaign. This is the battle of Hastings replayed under your control. Very cool! Other than that one, I've just never really been a campaign person. I like the single player scenarios so much better....
Luckily, Conquerors also brings us new scenarios. heh. You still have Regicide, Death Match, and all the originals.. but on top of those now you can also Defend the Wonder, Race to Wonder, play The Last Man Standing, or be the King of the Hill. Now, I'm going to tell you right off.. they changed the Scenario menu. You will not find them listed on the main single player menu any more. I was in a quandry at first because it seemed that not only did I not get the new scenarios, but I lost my old ones. I even called the Microsoft help desk.. free support. Let me tell you. That free support is about worthless. I was transferred to a supposed Empires expert.. she had NO idea what I was talking about or where the scenarios could have gone too. I finally found them in a drop down menu which didn't exist in Kings. She should have known that. Yeesh. Oh well.. I did find them finally, and they rock..
Race to Wonder has no battling at all. This one is all about how fast you can get your village through the ages to the point where they can build a Wonder. I liked this at first, but found I craved battle.. so, Defend the Wonder is a good answer for that. Here you you start in the Dark Ages and have to gain control of a Wonder in the middle of the map... and hold it for 500 years. I like this scenario a great deal.
Along with all the new campaigns and scenarios are of course new maps and races. Good lord they even have a map of Texas now! Hey, the Spaniards have to have folks to invade... In addition to the 13 civilizations you already have, they have added Hun, Aztec, Mayan, Korean and Spanish. Each has it's own unique technology, attributes, and buildings too so do play around with different ones to see what you like best. I still prefer Celts and Brits myself, but even those old ones have been enhanced in this expansion. Too cool. All I'm sayin' about the new ones is watch out for those Korean Turtle Boats.. they will hurt you!
BUT.. the very best part of this expansion is what it fixed. In the original AoE: Age of Kings, once a farm was used up the folks just stood around with their thumbs up their butts. Trying to keep track of all your workers in the middle of battle was a major pain. Well, now you can que up replants so this is no longer a problem. YES!
Also, if you tell a villager to go build a logging camp or whatever, they will start gathering that resource automatically after the building is done. That's another major plus. Additionally, you can now garrison your troops inside battering rams and the like to protect them, and increase the speed at which the things move. Love it.
Nothing changed as far as graphics or music. Still the same awesome level on both counts. Well, they did add more background music to suit the new civilizations. One problem with some expansions, like all the Sims expansions, is they tend to bog the game down. Not so with Conquerors. I've noticed no difference at all with load times or game play.
This is one of the best expansions I've seen for any game, and has enhanced my enjoyment doubly. I do highly recommend you buy this and add it. A very solid 5 stars and kudos to Microsoft. There is one update you should get after you install this: http://www.microsoft.com/games/conquerors/downloads.asp Normaly I would take a star away for that, but hell you can't get away from them these days. Annoying, but common practice now, unfortunately. Go get this. You will not regret the purchase.
System Requirements (aka Guy Stuff)
Multimedia PC with Pentium 166MHz or higher processor.
Microsoft® Windows® 95, Windows 98, Windows ME, Windows NT® worstation version 4.0 with Service Pack 5, or Windows 2000 Professional operating systems.
32 MB of RAM for Windows 95, Windows 98, Windows ME; 64 MB for Windows NT or Windows 2000
100 MB of hard disk space for a typical install (in addition to the original Age of Empires II required disk space); additional 100 MB of hard disk space for swap file.
Super VGA monitor supporting 800x600 resolution.
Local bus video card that supports 800x600, 256 color resolution and 2 MB of VRAM.
Quad-speed CD-ROM drive.
28.8Kbps modem (or higher recommended) for internet or head-to-head play.
Audio board with speakers or headphones or headphones recommended.
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