Age of Empires 2: The Conquerors Preview

As for combat, the ships will now be able to form formations, much like your ground forces, and infantry will have the ability to take cover under Battering, Capped and Siege Rams. This will protect them, but the archers won't be able to shoot out.

The pretty good AI will be further enhanced: Computer will now need 16:30 to 18:30 minutes in order to reach Castle Age with 29 villagers. Here it starts pumping units for mass attacks and further development. It will only attack with substantial forces and rarely ever in Dark and Feudal Ages.

The multiplayer mode will have new mods of play. Defend the Wonder will resemble the FPS assault mod, and the goal will be to defend/destroy a wonder. Wonder race is a classical race in building wonders. All the players will be allied here, with no possibility to alter that. The most promising, however, is the King of the Hill mod. When any of the players approaches a Wonder, the clock starts ticking, and the one that occupies it when the time runs out wins the game.

Player communication has been improved, now you can send messages to enemy players only. There will also be some commands you can issue to your computer guided ally.

And for the coupe de grace, the game will include detailed realistic maps of existing terrains (British Isles, Japan, Europe) and a possibility of setting all possible details when creating user maps. RANDOM MAP SCRIPTING seems to be a great and efficient way to create new battlegrounds. You just have to set some basic parameters in a text file and the computer will generate a random map using that data (for instance: you say if you want a continent or islands, what type of terrain you desire, and the degree of elevation, and the computer then randomly creates a map befitting the description.) A script like this will provide you with an infinite number of different maps with your favorite configuration.

Programmers are already having a great time testing and tweaking the new units. They don't want to favor any of them as only a well-balanced game can provide long playability and multitude of successful tactics. AoE II: The Conquerors will require the original game, and if nothing goes wrong, we'll be enjoying new conquests by September or October.