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Spot the guy who doesn't actually keep up with developments but has Dunning-Kruger'd himself into thinking he knows what he's talking about.

Spot the empty tautologies.

Besides much better support for newer devices and software

Case in point.

Win8x has a lot of performance improvements in such things as over-the-network copying

Except when it's slower because of malware scanning. The only thing "better" from the user's point of view is the accuracy of the time remaining guestimate. Molehill, not a mountain.

boot and reboot time

Reboots were quaint 10 years ago, outside of OS updates. And those are scheduled to run in the middle of the night.

You also get better multi-monitor support

Win7's multi-monitor support is just fine.

and the ability to use >2TB partitions and devices

Dynamic Disks have been supported since 2000 and GPT since 2003. You're only stuck with 2TB if you limit yourself to 512b cluster size.

You'd have to be an idiot to prefer W2K to a modern version of Windows.

Hardly. Vastly smaller hardware requirements and no activation crap. The only real improvement for the end user since then has been instant user switching, and that came with XP. Most everything else has been forced obsolescence. Well, there's also Bitlocker, but that came out with Vista.

Win8 is a flaming bag of crap. It is actively hostile to the end user. Win 7 is a no-holds-barred upgrade from 8, in the same way that XP was an upgrade over Vista.

http://ron.heavengames.com/press/events/bhgvisitmarch2004/interviews/DougKaufmanMar2004-1.shtml

I haven't read many strategy guides lately, maybe 10 or so in total, and I definitely haven't read any in the last couple years in either a seperate book version or print Computer Game magazine feature.

I've been disillusioned to them since I read the Diablo II strategy guide and like many I had read before it seemed to be a series of common sense suggestions, and a rehashing of in-game help & manual information. More importantly, it often suggested strategies, character builds, and skill combinations that were bad. The most annoying is information which is out of date or incorrect!

At least now I can go to gamefaqs or gaming websites if I want mediocre strategies and single-player walkthroughs (I generally don't).

I find a lot more useful information and effective strategies reading the most popular fan forums for the game in question. Yes, there is bullshit in the forums and information which is wrong, but the absolutely vital thing is that people usually get called out if the provide bad information, strategies that only work on 'easy', or are easily countered. People will sometimes (best cases) give hard evidence/examples/replays/game data to back up their claims, and will comment on whether patches have changed the effectiveness of any plan.

• Detailed information or strategy discussion -> Forums
• Walkthrough for an unenjoyable/unsolvable puzzle -> Gamefaqs
• Otherwise -> Enjoy the game unassisted

It's very possible I'm out of touch with most others and get more 'into' any game I play

Games I've played recently & best website I could find discussing them:
Civ 4 at Apolyton and Fanatics
Rise of Legends also Game Replays is a pretty popular site for Rise of Legends and other popular RTSes I don't play (C&C, AoE III, Act of War, Battle for Middle Earth).
Rise of Nations
Guild Wars
NWN Official Forums and NWVault
Ground Control II Official Forums
Age of Mythology
Diablo II

I've tried looking for a good place to find out about Star Wars: Battlefront II and Homeworld 2 but I haven't really found out what the most useful site for these games is.

I haven't read many strategy guides lately, maybe 10 or so in total, and I definitely haven't read any in the last couple years in either a seperate book version or print Computer Game magazine feature.

I've been disillusioned to them since I read the Diablo II strategy guide and like many I had read before it seemed to be a series of common sense suggestions, and a rehashing of in-game help & manual information. More importantly, it often suggested strategies, character builds, and skill combinations that were bad. The most annoying is information which is out of date or incorrect!

At least now I can go to gamefaqs or gaming websites if I want mediocre strategies and single-player walkthroughs (I generally don't).

I find a lot more useful information and effective strategies reading the most popular fan forums for the game in question. Yes, there is bullshit in the forums and information which is wrong, but the absolutely vital thing is that people usually get called out if the provide bad information, strategies that only work on 'easy', or are easily countered. People will sometimes (best cases) give hard evidence/examples/replays/game data to back up their claims, and will comment on whether patches have changed the effectiveness of any plan.

• Detailed information or strategy discussion -> Forums
• Walkthrough for an unenjoyable/unsolvable puzzle -> Gamefaqs
• Otherwise -> Enjoy the game unassisted

It's very possible I'm out of touch with most others and get more 'into' any game I play

Games I've played recently & best website I could find discussing them:
Civ 4 at Apolyton and Fanatics
Rise of Legends also Game Replays is a pretty popular site for Rise of Legends and other popular RTSes I don't play (C&C, AoE III, Act of War, Battle for Middle Earth).
Rise of Nations
Guild Wars
NWN Official Forums and NWVault
Ground Control II Official Forums
Age of Mythology
Diablo II

I've tried looking for a good place to find out about Star Wars: Battlefront II and Homeworld 2 but I haven't really found out what the most useful site for these games is.

I haven't read many strategy guides lately, maybe 10 or so in total, and I definitely haven't read any in the last couple years in either a seperate book version or print Computer Game magazine feature.

I've been disillusioned to them since I read the Diablo II strategy guide and like many I had read before it seemed to be a series of common sense suggestions, and a rehashing of in-game help & manual information. More importantly, it often suggested strategies, character builds, and skill combinations that were bad. The most annoying is information which is out of date or incorrect!

At least now I can go to gamefaqs or gaming websites if I want mediocre strategies and single-player walkthroughs (I generally don't).

I find a lot more useful information and effective strategies reading the most popular fan forums for the game in question. Yes, there is bullshit in the forums and information which is wrong, but the absolutely vital thing is that people usually get called out if the provide bad information, strategies that only work on 'easy', or are easily countered. People will sometimes (best cases) give hard evidence/examples/replays/game data to back up their claims, and will comment on whether patches have changed the effectiveness of any plan.

• Detailed information or strategy discussion -> Forums
• Walkthrough for an unenjoyable/unsolvable puzzle -> Gamefaqs
• Otherwise -> Enjoy the game unassisted

It's very possible I'm out of touch with most others and get more 'into' any game I play

Games I've played recently & best website I could find discussing them:
Civ 4 at Apolyton and Fanatics
Rise of Legends also Game Replays is a pretty popular site for Rise of Legends and other popular RTSes I don't play (C&C, AoE III, Act of War, Battle for Middle Earth).
Rise of Nations
Guild Wars
NWN Official Forums and NWVault
Ground Control II Official Forums
Age of Mythology
Diablo II

I've tried looking for a good place to find out about Star Wars: Battlefront II and Homeworld 2 but I haven't really found out what the most useful site for these games is.

Want to turn it into a game of who-can-click-faster or what?

I actually think this is absolutely true. It's pretty scary to me but I have read a lot of articles and comments from RTS players who cherish the micromanagement and want to keep RTS games about the controlling of individual units.

In reading a bit about Age of Mythology when I was playing it I noticed a lot of players saying that they hated the changes in the "Titans" expansion pack which were geared at reducing micromanagement. For example, in searching for comments like that I saw http://www.ggl.com/view_forum_topic.php?TopicId=30 4&Start=50 where one of the players says:

I haven't and won't play the Titans because of the autoqueue function... [amongst other reasons]

Autoqueue is just an infinite queue option that tells the building to keep producing units! I've seen people say that infinite queue takes the skill out of the game. So to them repeatedly returning to a building and queueing up more units is a skill. I'm not debating that it is in fact a skill, but I don't think it's fun and I think spending less time on this and more time on other parts of the game would be preferrable.

From http://aoe3.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display .cgi?action=ct&f=1,26176,0,10

Holy crap u want the auto queue from AoT!!!!!. This was probably the WORST feature in AoT and you want it in AoE3. When I heard AoE3 was not going to have autoqueue, it was one of the happiest days of my life. I pray to God ES don't mess up and put autoque in a patch or expansion.

NO AUTOQUE!

These sort of opinions are why there is no 'infinite-queue' option in recent releases Age of Empires III and Rise of Legends. It's not that the developers don't know how to put it in because it's in Age of Mythology: Titans and Rise of Nations. If you feel that there is not enough interface improvement it may partly be that people because actually fighting against these changes!

Hey, sounds like he's taking a page from an old Impressions Games franchise... hmm.

yeah, the link i submitted for the accepted article was NOT the gamespot article, it was a link to the rise and fall forums where several ex sssi'ers have been posting (and more info is provided). Not sure why it was changed. Anyway - Midway came right out in their quarterly report and said something to the effect that they felt the market was too crowded (with AOE3 + Civ 4), so they wanted to delay the release of R&F. I was looking forward to the hero mode of R&F. Oh well.

Here is a link to the R&F forums
http://raf.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display. cgi?action=ct&f=9,132,,10

It's a shame for sure, but I'm not surprised newer stuff won't work with ME. It's been many years since MS discounted the Win9x core (and thank god they did), and the newer versions of DirectX (which I'm guessing EA is basing their games on) aren't available for Win9X and ME. Really, everyone who's still using any Win9x product should either ditch it for Linux or update to Windows XP. It's such a horrible platform. :)

Wish I'd read this beforehand...

On the AOE3 boards, ES_DeathShrimp posted this:

I feel pretty safe saying that AOE3 has a lot more depth than AOM. In fact, it is probably something of a risk. There are so many different combos of civs, strategies, techs (even not including the HC), and maps, that there is the potential for some insane strategies that we weren't able to come up with during testing.

If anything, the design of AOE3 is just going to mandate more patches than we've been able to do before. That doesn't mean it will be buggier -- just that the depth can lead to a lot of unforseen strategies and balance issues.
http://aoe3.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display .cgi?action=st&fn=1&tn=22408&st=recent#23

And this is a game that according to them is tested every day. The problem, IMO, is that even though creators play the game every day, they don't play as everyone else does, so while you may have 50 people playing, they're all playing the same style.

Compare this to 50,000 people who are going to play different ways. These people are going to come up with different strategies then the creators, strategies that they might easily not have thought of.

One idea is that there should be more mass testing of games before their full release. They do the same thing with movies, Serenity has been pre-shown 2 times now, with a third time coming up the 23rd (anyone with tickets to Boston, please, reply), and the reviews for it are great. Of course, these reviews are from diehard fans....

The only problem with massive testing is that people can easily copy the game and spread it that way.

But the technology does have drawbacks. For one, it only benefits users who run several programs at once or have software specially designed to take advantage of the two engines.

Gordon Farrel is probably my favourite designer. Find some of his work here - http://aoe.heavengames.com/dl-php/lister.php?categ ory=spscen&rating=top.

His campaigns about the Pelopennesean war and the Persian War were some of the coolest ever, and I think he got hired later by Ensemble.?

Well if you want donkeys, try playing Dungeon Siege. One of the characters you can purchase is a pack mule. They can carry loads of goods. This comes in handy for large areas like Wesrin Cross. The only downside is they barely fight back, so you'll have to keep them at a distance whilst in battle. The expansion pack Legends of Aranna has a better pack animal, a rhino/reptile looking character, that can fight back.

Oh great, like I need anything else to get me
Hooked on the Net ... now a bandwidth busting game that's sure to suck away all my blogging time!-)

What's the attraction, well its like the song title ... especially those of us coming from the Age of Empire school of MMOG ... "Everybody Wants To Rule The World"!

Yeah, I know, now you're going to have to spend the rest of the day getting that stupid tune out of your head.

I know that praising any of Micro$oft's products on /. is flamebait but...

The creators ofAge of Mythology have been very good at implementing tools and utilites for fans to create their own scenarios and campaigns. This is somewhat of a surprise from Micro$oft, who isn't exactly a big supporter of anything that gives their users much room for freedom or input in their software, (I assume that it saves them money for fans to devolop certain parts of the game in this instance without giving them enough freedom to truly modify it), but I'm surprised that it's easier to customize than Blizzard's WCIII. With Ensamble promoting fan websites by handing out "fan site web kits" I've found it very easy to find about 4 or 5 websites that offer quality custom single player scenarios for download. Some of the best campaigns I played for Age of Empires II were written by fans, many of them even rivaled Ensamble in quality. What's ironic is that I'm actually enjoying a Micro$oft because it's so easy to implement user modifications into.

Look here

If Microsoft weren't distributing this game, I'm sure it would have a much larger /. fan base but I think it is worth mentioning Ensemble Studios Age of Mythology, the next game in the series after Age of Kings.

I think the game looks absolutely beautiful and am eagerly waiting for a beta or demo version so I may judge its worth for myself. I already burned far too many hours playing the last two games in the series :)

Check out the ensemble webpage for AoM here and if you have a decent amount of bandwidth available to you, also have a look at the downloadable movies from the game here or, read more buzz at AoM Heaven.

-AP

Most of you probably know that Daily Radar is made up of a lot of people from PC Gamer magazine. In an ad run by babbages (and its associated companies) in the January issue of PC Gamer, a graphic was used from Age of Empires. I run an Age of Empires fan site, and it is pretty common for the game's promotional images put out by Ensemble Studios and Microsoft to be available for use in promoting the game.

Anyway, the picture used in the ad was of a rider on a horse, waving a sword in the air. The problem was that the picture was obviously lifted directly from my web site, because I noticed a few obvious changes I had made to the graphic in order to fit the site. Age of Empires Heaven has a "heaven" theme to it, so I stuck wings on the rider's back, and some artist idiot at babbages/gamestop.com/software etc. lifted this graphic and stuck it into the ad, despite the fact that there are no winged riders in the game.

Here's what I'm talking about. It will show both pictures. I'm not exactly sure what the legal issues are with that, because I didn't create the rider, I just made the wings. Obviously, they shouldn't have used it, though.

I got a good laugh out of it, and an apology from babbages, btw.