Age of empires windows vista free download

You start with negligible assets and a couple of units to educate. With 10 single-player missions to browse, you get the opportunity to pick your 1 stories from the Greco-Roman ages. Overcome Persia as Alexander the Grea t or fabricate the domain of Babylon. Search for assets in deceptive wildernesses and huge open fields to cause your progress to endure.

Discover gold to pay your warriors and stone to develop your protections. Group up and structure partnerships, or take everybody on and vanquish the world. On the off chance that Bill Gates and co needed to be paid attention to with respect to their diversion programming as I they accomplished for their applications, they expected to deliver an amazing game.

You were unable to develop a structure, research an innovation, or direct battle. In any case, a resident could cleave a tree. We had no idea what game to make, remembers Rick. I bought a copy of the original Warcraft and we then embarked on a quest to figure out what to do. We considered a cowboys and indians game, a railroad game and a game in which you were trapped on a deserted island and had to solve puzzles to escape.

Then at the start of we hired Bruce Shelley and formed a three-person committee, consisting of Bruce, myself and my brother. We met each week to discuss proposed game ideas before finally deciding on a real-time Civilization'. The concept behind Age Of Empires then grew out of those meetings. It's hard to imagine that someone who would later be considered a gaming legend, with hits such as Civilization , F Stealth Fighter and Railroad Tycoon already under his belt, would become involved with an unknown games studio without much experience of what was becoming a risky business to be in.

But as the old adage proved, it's as much about who you know as what you know and Tony Goodman, the business brains behind Ensemble, had an old acquaintance keen to help out.

Tony was an old friend from many years earlier, recalls Bruce Shelley. When he and colleagues at his business applications company were thinking about getting into game development, he started calling me up and asking pretty detailed questions about the process of creating games.

Eventually he asked me to get involved. At first Rick Goodman, Tony, and I met regularly on the phone to discuss the design. Then Tony got more involved in building the company, leaving Rick doing most of the work with me helping him. Those games were definitely the biggest influences," says Rick. There were elements of those games that I liked and some that I felt could even be improved.

I liked the epic scope of Civ and the random maps, but I really wanted our game to be multiplayer. I liked the graphics and action orientation of Warcraft, but I felt that a historical realistic' game would have a broader world-wide appeal. I think the single greatest influence and resource available to any designer is all the games that already exist," says Bruce. Our games originally derived from several classic games and then began to derive from our own creations.

We did a lot of research and conceptualising because it took a while to get an engine together to build a prototype. Angelo Laudon did a fantastic job as our lead programmer making that happen. From the first prototype the game just continued to evolve through playing, adjusting, recoding, and so on, over and over. Overtime, the vision changed, says Rick, as development progressed from the conceptual stage to the implementation stage.

It's safe to say that few of us had any real experience creating a computer game, so we had no idea what we were getting ourselves in to.

As a result, the game charted its own direction, much more so than any one team member charted the direction for it. Our philosophy was: as long as the game was becoming more fun to play each day, then we felt were on the right path.

Considering Ensemble's speciality was business software, it remains something of a minor miracle that development on their first ever game continued with few real problems. With much of the team receiving on the job training, and veteran Bruce Shelley's skills centred on design rather than coding, neither he nor Rick Goodman can remember any significant problems.

If I had to choose one major challenge during development it would be the performance of our 2D graphics," says Rick. The engine was relatively slow and we recognised this early on. So Matt Pritchard went to work rewriting it. His idea was. I had no idea if such a thing was even possible As the game neared completion, with Microsoft now on board, the problems of having 12 races and numerous units and buildings and technological advances in the game became apparent.

Balancing the gameplay would be a huge undertaking that Ensemble recognised they would have to get right early on. To our credit we started the play balance process eight months before we shipped," says Rick.

We used every minute of that time to attempt to balance all of the civilisations and all of the units in each civilisation. We had never done such a thing before, so we didn't know how to go about doing it. Therefore, we just had everyone play multiplayer games every day from February to September of We did a pre-game briefing and a postgame debriefing. Then, I made play balance changes to the game and we played again the next day.

I think we played a total of about internal play-test games during this period, not counting the Microsoft test team's parallel effort in Redmond. That Age Of Empires wasn't quite the Life Sim game they'd signed up to publish didn't seem to worry Microsoft as it soon became apparent during months of testing both at Ensemble and Microsoft HQs that it would be a huge success, with forecasts putting worldwide sales at the half a million mark.

In fact, the game was so successful that the first shipment totally sold out, leaving Christmas shelves across the US empty of stock. We had no idea at the time, but, in hindsight, AoE turned out to be a real blessing for Microsoft as well as for Ensemble Studios, says Rick.

Microsoft was suffering badly in the minds of gamers and in the press. Even we felt the splash damage before the game was completed.

At one point, before the game shipped, we wondered whether the Microsoft name might actually have a negative connotation in the minds of gamers. We only realised how successful the game was after we ran out of copies during the holiday period in and it went past one million copies sold.

Recalls Bruce. It was continuing to sell really well at that point, there was a huge fan community around the game, and it was clear it was appealing to a broad audience. The response greatly surpassed our expectations, although we knew the game was good.

It was at this point that Rick Goodman, the game's leading architect, decided to leave the studio he helped create.

In , he formed Stainless Steel Studios and soon began development on Empire Earth , in many respects an even more ambitious game than AoE. This took the real-time concepts of its predecessor and added in the entire past, present and potential future of Earth history.

Ensemble also had a clear vision, so we amicably parted company so we could each pursue our own goals. Today with combined sales of Age Of Empires, its two sequels and two expansion packs in excess of 8.

What imperfections remained have largely been ironed out as the series has evolved. Though relatively basic, the real-time clashes inspired by Warcraft are today regimented battles, with players able to organise their armies into intricate formations - just one of Ensemble's innovations that come as standard in realtime strategy games since.

The latest in the series, Age Of Mythology, takes the series in a new direction, both in terms of setting and the new technology powering it, though the core concept -to have fun - has remained central. I would hate to pick a favourite out of the games I have worked on, says Bruce. I think in general I believe the most recent is the best because each builds on those that came before.

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Microsoft Corporation in no way endorses or is affiliated with Best Vista Downloads. Advanced Search. Age of Empires II spans a thousand years, from the fall of Rome through the Middle Ages in which players lead one of 13 civilizations into greatness. Players can improve the economy of their civilization through trade and diplomacy options.