The Best Strategy Game You Never Played: Age of Mythology

the early 2000s was the golden age for strategy games and real-time strategy was its king Command and Conquer Age of Empires Warcraft and Starcraft were all household names selling millions of copies each RTS was so popular that its mini games ended up spawning their own genres like Tower Defense and mobas after their immense success with Age of Empires 2 Ensemble Studios wanted to Branch out they were already one of the most experienced and skilled developers out there and they wanted to take everything that they had learned to make something new fresh and awesome thus Age of Mythology was born and the game didn't sell very well it wasn't a flop by any means but it just could not steal away the titans of the time see this graph the red bar is Age of Mythology it was rough the thing is in my opinion age mythology is secretly one of the best RTS games ever released and 21 years later I am here to talk for an entirely reasonable amount of time why we're going to talk about every campaign and game mechanic design decision game mode and anything else that I can think of because age mythology is amazing and deserves it we're also going to talk about the stuff that it doesn't do well because it may be one of my favorite games but that doesn't mean it's perfect or immune to criticism for a bit of context I have played this game through many times as I was growing up and to prepare for this video I did both a full playthrough on the Titan difficulty as well as a playthrough on hard difficulty this run is going to be the hard difficulty playthrough because I want to show off everything and while Titan is absolutely possible sometimes the overwhelming difficulty can limit player freedom and strategy expression which means I wouldn't be able to show off some of the really cool stuff that also kind of sucks and yeah this game is getting remastered soon so I probably should have waited for that to make this video but I was very excited so I hope you don't mind with that said let's begin the journey through one of my favorite games ever right off the bat were introduced to our protagonist arcantos in a dream he relives an old battle against theerys who as far as I can tell isn't actually a mythological figure and is only a therapeutic horse riding group he's approached by the goddess Athena who gives some backstory arcantos is a powerful Admiral from Atlantis who has run out of real opponents and a stuck fighting weak Pirates but his service to his homeland is not complete dark times are coming when arcantos wakes up we are debriefed the chief deity of Atlantis Poseidon is pissed and it might be because the atlanteans are not helping the Greeks in the battle of Troy and then a freaking Kraken attacks in the first mission Begins the world of Age of Mythology is best understood by not thinking about it too hard four thousand-year-old Egyptian civilizations sit alongside 2500 year old Greeks and 1 000 year old Vikings nobody questions it it just is how it is more importantly each of these civilizations mythologies exist from the Sun God raw to the frost Giants to Hercules they're all real there's no question questioning it this is a brilliant setting for a game real-time strategy games often struggle with faction identity either factions all blend together and are hard to distinguish or they're so incredibly separate that everything is weird and hard to process for new players the world of age mythology is a fantastic shortcut when I talk about a centaur the large majority of people go yeah horse on the bottom person on the top I know that it manages to quickly and cleanly create a unit that is both unique but not confusing it is a fantastic way to create a game that is both approachable and evocative while I've been talking the tutorial has been going waves of pirates and Kraken attack from the sea and I push them back this tutorial is a pretty straightforward clinic on unit movement and army control at least it is on Lower difficulties I didn't notice this when I played as a kid but coming back to the game I was really impressed by something that Ensemble managed to do here tutorial missions are a really tough part of gaming developers have to figure out a way to make a game accessible to new players feeding them information in a digestible away but also not make the early bits an awful experience for experienced players or repeat playthroughs this mission is one of the best examples of how to do this that I have ever seen the mission is specifically designed in a clever way on the lower difficulties it is crafted so the player can win with their starting forces alone all they have to do is focus on moving their army and fighting occasionally the game gives the player a prompt that they can produce more forces out of the barracks and archery ranges but they don't push it if they don't have the attention to do it right now that's for the next mission this is true if you're playing on easy or moderate difficulty but if you're playing on hard or Titan to hold off the enemies you have to use all these tools that the game gives you you have to build more workers to harvest more resources to train more troops to fight off the Pirates you can't rely on only your starting forces new players get to take things bit by bit and experienced players are thrown into the fire instantly and none of it required any contrived gameplay changes this is the first little peek into Ensemble really understanding how to make a good RTS at this point in their history and it will not be the last after amassing a pretty solid Army the final push comes it's a big Force but hurray the Atlantean reinforcements have arrived to save the day and somehow I didn't notice that there were two groups of atlanteans until the last moment whoops after the Pirates Retreat the unnamed theocrat at least I assume his name isn't actually theocrat mentions that Krakens are Poseidon's creatures atlantis's Patron deity is obviously pissed at them for some reason oh and the attack was a faint to steal Poseidon's trident so he's gonna be double pissed now the mission ends with the biggest dad energy quote ever arcantos tells his men to prepare to board the ships to hunt the Pirates and that his Sun Caster comes up and says this can I come no I need you here in case they come back I don't know why I love this so much but it perfectly encapsulates the feeling of a kid or a little sibling who wants to participate but arcantos is just trying to come up with excuses to keep him at home I don't know if it was intentional but it is wonderful once arcantos embarks his ships quickly spot more Pirates and he lands his forces on this island to set up camp this is the first mission structured around building stuff and I like how it doesn't really hold your hand here if you're truly lost on how to play the game does offer a pair of missions labeled how to play that provides Basics on unit movement resource Gathering and production anything besides those bare bone Basics the game gives you free reign to discover in a fairly relaxed early game environment here my objective is to advance to the classical age because the age of Ceres is centered around ages shocking I know once you reach a certain requirement you can spend a good chunk of resources to advance to the next age and unlock a whole bunch of new stuff their four ages in total but we can only get to the second age here to do that I need a lot of resource courses there are four primary resources in the game wood and gold are the most simple villagers can chop trees and dig at gold mines for these food is a bit more complex with a few options such as wild animals that can be hunted bushes that can be gathered domestic animals that can be herded and Farms that can be farmed all of these activities are done by villagers so I want a bunch of them these three resources make up the human parts of the tech tree every human unit costs gold and either food or wood each upgrade to units costs one or more of these as well this is true for each faction in order to advance to the classical age I need both a temple and 400 food I harvest food to pay for workers use them to harvest more food wood and gold construct some fortifications get a temple up and start advancing to the classical age and this is where age mythology really sets itself apart when you click to advance a screen pops up where you can pick from a pair of deities to worship each deity bringing a host of benefits a useful God power unique upgrades to the faction and access to a powerful myth unit because is our major deity is Poseidon my first choice is between Aries and Hermes I'm gonna pick everybody over the course of this playthrough but for today I'm going for Aries with the temple finished and Aries worshiped I can talk about the final and most spicy resource favor favor is used to pay for God's specific upgrades as well as part of the cost of myth units and each faction generates favor in a different way the Greeks are by far the most simple and straightforward villagers can be tasked onto a temple and that Temple will generate favor based on how many villagers are worshiping at it with diminishing returns now at the classical age and having a decent economy my objective shifts to mustering an army and destroying the Pirates Town Center to do this I'm going to recruit the help of ares's myth unit the Cyclops Cyclops are big bulky Brawlers who deal some awesome damage and can literally pick up enemy humans and toss them like a doll they're amazing also expensive in order to balance things out I make an army of help light infantry and talk so it's archers and head over to the anime they're decently defended with a few Egyptian and new bite myth units as well as some towers and infantry but this is mission two so it's not anything too scary one reason that I picked the Cyclops is that he does crushing damage which is super effective against buildings allowing me to raise the enemy base more quickly I'll talk about God Powers a bit later but worshaming Ares also gives me the pestilence power which allows me to temporarily disable the Pirates unit production during the fight with this combo I'm able to barely win the fight link up with my reinforcements take the enemy Town Center down and force camos to retreat as arcantos Corners the pirate captain on a small Cliff face he jumps and surfs away on a giant whatever this is but it's fine the atlanteans have their Trident back so they ship it off home and head on over to join the siege of Troy all right before we get to the next mission we gotta talk about something they don't actually say in between here and the next mission that they're going over to the siege of Troy they like brought it up as a potential thing to do in mission one and then there's just no connective tissue between these two we're just gonna be at Troy in the next mission and we just gotta go with it the storytelling in the early stages of Age of Mythology is weird once things get going it makes a lot more sense and it's internally consistent because it's following events but the beginning is just they skip a lot of stuff and just expect you to know what's going on but honestly that was pretty true for a lot of early 2000s games so it was par for the course now that we're at Troy we get to meet and greet some actual mythological figures oh I forgot to mention this but arcantos isn't actually a mythological figure he's ensemble's original character that they're tossing into these events but I guess that's how all myths begin so maybe he is one now arcantos joins forces with King Agamemnon and then meets up with his old pal Ajax as well Ajax is by far and away the best character in this game and I'll take every opportunity later to show you why Agamemnon gives us a place to start our base but the Trojan Fleet comes and attacks our landing craft we have to take out both of Troy's Harbors to stop them similar to the last mission we're starting mostly from scratch but unsurprisingly the Trojan threat is significantly more real than the Pirates they send some early raiding parties they can get pretty nasty if you're caught unaware fortunately as the Greeks we have an answer to that the temple can build the Pegasus myth unit for real cheap they fly and they can see that's it I grabbed four of them look for likely attack pads and put them there to spot incoming assaults the two docks are fortified behind walls so I want some heavy hitter to deal with them because each faction's campaign is only 10 missions long and there's a bunch of gods to try the game gives you access to technology really quickly on Mission 3 I'm already able to reach Age 3 of 4 and I opt to rush for it I can pick between Dionysus and Aphrodite here but I want my boy daiyo because he has one of my favorite myth units as I advance to the heroic age under his guidance let's talk about God Powers at the top of the screen there are four slots for icons each represents a god power from each age the first is from the major God that you start with the second is for the minor God you worship to advance to the second age third for the third age Etc these powers are generally weak at the lower ages and later on they're stronger for example Poseidon's power lure makes a rock that has wild animals walk towards it so I can hunt them for food Dionysus is on the other hand is a bit more combat oriented as I advance to the heroic age I'm hit by two attacks in quick succession the first does a number to my infantry and the second is a Cavalry raid that makes things look pretty sketchy but as the fight began ends I finished my upgrade to the third age and gain access to the bronze power giving my human units in an area a large increase in durability for a minute and a half this allows me to fend off the attackers just barely I have a lot to say about God power design and we'll get to it later but all the Greek Egyptian and Norse god powers can only be used once per game meaning the bronze is off the table for me for the rest of the mission that's not why I went Dionysus though I wanted his myth unit the Hydra or as my twitch chat keeps asking why is there dinosaurs in this game as the hydro eliminates enemies it gains more heads each head attacks allowing the Hydra to kill more enemies gaining more heads up to a total of five after getting a couple hydras and archers to cover them I move on to the first dock the Hydra design is just so cool not only is the basic idea awesome but it's a fantastic self-limiting design five-headed hydras are absolutely overpowered they're monsters but you can't just Spam them out because they need killing blows to get their heads so too many of them will end up splitting the kills getting you a bunch of subpar hydras it's a brilliant way to reward players for taking care of their units without letting things snowball out of control the first stock goes down easily and Agamemnon delivers me reinforcements which I need because the objective of scratching the surface is super unique there's two docks that need to be destroyed and each is defended by a progressively stronger group of enemies no seriously that 2015 design thing that blizzard was so proud of that they made an entire campaign out of yeah Age of Mythology was doing this 13 years before them like this is actually some really impressive triggering for 2002 the second dock is reinforced with a slew of infantry as well as two Colossus arguably the strongest myth unit in the game I don't really want to fight that but I don't have to while I was assaulting the first Trojan dock I was building two of my own and trained dionysus's second myth unit the Skyla I looked up the pronunciation to this one please don't get mad at me it's the same as the Hydra but it's in water I use a Skyla to clear the Waters of Trojan ships and build a pair of transports Agamemnon gave me some Cavalry who I ride to the bases Gates draw the enemies outside and the Skyla engage the naval defenses while my transports unload and snipe the dock the mission ends without me having to fight the final Defenders this won't be the last time that the Trojans are beaten with some horse-based trickery with the Trojan docks down Agamemnon introduces arcantos to Odysseus and gives his plan to end the war these two bust down the front gate of Troy which is sure to be an easy task Ajax charges in and takes down all the Defenders and then Agamemnon you know rescues Helen equal glory for everybody Agamemnon aside this Mission does an incredible job at showing something very very difficult to do how do you restrict a player but not railroad them down one specific solution the mission starts with a warning that our base has no gold this is a big problem because every human unit in the game costs gold to train no gold no Army what's so awesome here is that the mission is super open-ended about how you actually get to solve this problem it gives a player a few suggestions about various ways to get gold but never requires any of them to be done the first and easiest solution is to raid enemy gold mines and claim them but the caveat is that these mines are almost empty it's easy to mine out the entire map here the second solution is to avoid gold outright while all human units cost gold myth units always cost one resource and favor for example these Minotaur only cost food in favor making them an excellent early game option here the game doesn't directly tell you this but it does start you with a bunch of free favor just in case and the third option is my favorite there is a brilliant design going on here that subtly teaches the player game mechanics in a non-obtrusive way while also being thematic and strategic and then somebody messed it up as I explore I eventually find some donkey trade Caravans a soldier tells us that these Supply Troy with gold and if we destroy them they'll train fewer troops this is really cool it serves as both a mechanical device to allow the player to harass the Trojans and teaches the player that trade Caravans exist and can generate gold which is useful here somebody was really smart here When developing the mission and I'm 99 sure that somebody else developing the mission did not get it and screwed it up because on the left hand side of the map is a town center where the trade Caravans are shuttling money to Troy from the way that trade Caravans work is that they automatically Patrol between Market where they're built in a town center each successful Loop delivers free gold I believe that originally the Town Center was the market and acted as a teaching tool showing the players the building that they needed to get this free source of gold at some point in development somebody took the Town Center out of Troy and swapped it with the Market's position not realizing its importance this denied players the visual aid to understand how trade Works my evidence for this is that deep in the depths of the Trojan base there is a market and if you attack it a Trojan Soldier exclaims the Greeks seek to destroy our Market if we lose our trade it will hurt us badly like my dude this Market is in the middle of your base where your armies have to be dead for me to reach it this voice line would make a lot more sense if the market was outside trading with Troy the path I take in this mission is a bit of everything I start with Minotaur production and use that Force to raid some gold mines the Trojans counter-attack a bit but it generally goes well I build a series of walls to constrict the Trojan movement and harass their Caravans with Odysseus us while making a market in Caravans of my own once I have a strong economy I produce a large army of hopalites archers and heliopolis Siege Towers to assault Troy's front Gates as I move into the enemy base they show off a very frustrating mechanic in the game not all God powers are made equal and ceasefire is made dumb the Trojans use the ceasefire God power this creates a mandatory 60-second period where no units on the map can attack in real time strategy 60 seconds is an eternity I don't know if this power is considered strong or weak and frankly I don't care it is awkward and frankly boring sitting here unable to fight the enemy an unnecessary pause right at the climax of the mission but I won't let it diminish from the fight which is actually quite fun the Trojans do a fantastic job of Defending here I have a big army and they did a great attempt at holding it off I had to snipe High Ground catapults while using my Siege Towers to break through their fortifications and Temple they kept sending defensive waves from the city and were organized and competent eventually I managed to get my Towers to the Trojan gate protect them and it falls the thing I like about this mission is just how many different ways there are to approach it I used a couple different ones to get gold here or circumvent the gold issue and there's probably others that I haven't even thought of while the end result is always the same the process that various players take to deal with this restriction allows for a lot of cool self-expression and gameplay I just wish they would fix the market thing the atlanteans rush into Troy but ajax's backup is flanked by a Trojan relief Force arcantos makes the decision to back up and rescue his bro and then of course destroy the Outpost where these attacks are coming from so they can continue the Troy campaign the map here is big wide and open there are multiple paths for the Trojans to take when attacking by forces so I thought that Cavalry would be an awesome thing to use here and the Greek have a couple great myth units to support that style so it seemed like a win-win it's probably not a surprise that the Centaur is considered a Cavalry unit they're fast powerful archers that can also support where my Centaur here's an interesting probably unforeseen problem with the design of the Gods in the age system the game wants to give the player a nice little boost here this Mission starts off in ajax's Camp and it's logical that he's progressed as Tech already we start off in age number three but that means my first two minor gods have already been picked for me I wanted to grab Hermes for the Centaur and Aphrodite for the neemium lion both are fantastic additions to my Cavalry play but the game gives me Athena's Minotaur and dionysus's high Hydra both units are slow and things that I've used already they're not what I want to showcase and they're also just not good in these big Open Fields instead of going for the tactically inferior units i instead opt to just not make myth units this Mission which kinda sucks in the bottom right of the map is a small base of Agamemnon that's Allied to us it doesn't make units but we start off with a donkey trading Caravan that is going to his Command Center this is another nice wordless tutorial that tells you about the trade mechanic you can trade with your allies and it makes you even more gold than normal using my Cavalry I start exploring and I find a relic relics are items that can be picked up by Heroes once delivered to a temple it provides some pretty powerful bonuses permanently almost every Mission has relics hidden in them sometimes multiple and everyone has bonuses that are curated specifically for the mission well most of the time this Relic is the cathara of Apollo when I install it on my temple it increases the movement speed of all of my villagers not only does this let them escape from danger faster but it also speeds up delivering resources when they've harvested it's great great The Relic mechanic is actually genius there's a big problem in RTS development where players are incentivized to buckle down and sit at home turtleing until they have a maxed out Supply Army and then attack after 30 minutes of doing basically nothing relics reward players for going out and exploring checking every nook and cranny of the map to figure out what's going on it also naturally teaches people about the value of scouting and it gets a creative juices flowing actively surveying the terrain makes it easier to come up with Mission specific strategies and then the reward of The Relic is generally well thought out they help you on the mission and they can help you come up with new and unique strategies once again they give that dopamine Rush of a loot box where you never know what you're gonna find but it's a specifically handcrafted loot box for you you never know what it is but it's gonna be worth it five-star genius mechanic solves a ton of problems and is fun it's so good that I'm not going to rate anything else with stars in this video now let's talk about something incredibly stupid as I Scout with my Cavalry I find a group of Trojan Farms Farms provide food but cost resources to make and harvest more slowly than hunting animals the upside is that you don't have to take the risk of bringing your villagers into the middle of the map and getting gored by a boar once we find this area arcanto says we can steal these Farms build a granary here and get some of our villagers farming them this is obviously intended as a teaching moment Farms are neutral and anybody can work them so let's save some money and take theirs but these Farms are like half a screen away from the enemy base look at this it's insane nobody in their right mind would take all of their workers and bring them right over to these Farms to be murdered by the enemy so I do it but I build a fortress the most expensive defensive building the Greeks have to maybe keep it safe the Greek have two Cavalry units that I hope to defend with the hippocan is an anti-archer Cavalry and the prodomos is a specialty anti-cavelry unit despite that I am often able to engage large swaths of enemy infantry this is one of the things that I love about RTS my Cavalry may get bonus damage against other unit types but damage isn't everything having the mobility advantage means that I can always fight in the position that I want to I can hit flanks surround the enemy and always have the concave despite being countered on paper there's so much strategic flexibility that I can get out of my units it's not just rock paper scissors also none of this mattered in my stupid farming Village died to the first attack I was trying to get some petrovolos catapults so I could attack the enemy but their area damage ended up hurting my Fortress more than it helped I can't get over how they wanted you to just Farm here moving to one of the worst bases I've ever seen in my life and just pretending it would be fine the whole thing is bizarre after building a new Fortress I Siege the enemy base but managed to find a large enemy attack as I advance I surround it execute them and then Dash to take the Trojans down before they can rebuild the petrobolos don't do incredible Siege damage but they outrange everything making it easy to knock down the gates and get the Cavalry in once I'm in the mission is over the bronze power makes me resilient to The Defenders that are left and the base false as we celebrate we get the news this was a diversion and Agamemnon has been attacked everybody is fed up Troy is winning anytime we get an advantage we're counter-attacked and beaten back we can't win the straight up fight the walls are too good and they burned agamemnon's house it's time to give up that frontal fighting and get a little bit sneaky so the boys hatch a plan Poseidon is the Lord of horses in Atlantis a defeated General surrenders his horse when beaten a horse yes a great wooden horse a I don't understand will it fight I love Ajax the plan is to build the Trojan Horse I I don't need to explain what the Trojan Horse is right like everybody knows we're on the same page here this video is long enough as it is this is the mission where the most well-known moment from the Trojan War happens and the mission is incredible and horrible part one is probably the single most lazy piece of design in the game the Northwest half of the map is Troy and the Greeks are on the left and the rest of the map is just a lot of nothing there's no hidden relics no weird events prompting me to take bad bases not a single piece of interest to be found the only thing to do is sit around build a defense and then build the horse so I start doing that pretty quickly the first raid appears and the mission shows off its one mechanic I fight these horses for a bit and then they start to run if they get back to Troy a big attack wave is sent this mechanic sucks if it were infantry or something retreating sure but these are mounted Cavalry they're fast even when I chase them with a slightly faster perdomos I can't catch them before they get to Troy in theory I think that one is supposed to run away and then you're supposed to use Zeus's bolt power to kill it but I it's two of them what am I supposed to do he doesn't have two bolts I guess this gives me extra attacks or something to deal with which will give me something to do but it still feels bad eventually I hit the 1000 Lumber and construction of the horse can begin any number of workers can construct buildings at a time in this game so I use a bunch I'm pretty sure that it would take about an hour to construct with just sorry does Agamemnon not have a weapon if we get him in this Mission and are boys just going around punching people in the face no wonder his forces are getting wrecked their Commander thinks that he's a freaking jowlin monk what is going on here to defend I opt to worship Apollo and get the Manticore I start with a good deal of faith and the Manticore costs Lumber and which I also need to build the horse so it felt natural as the horse nears completion the Trojans send a pretty big attack and it's the manty's time to shine their quills don't do a whole lot of damage but they do hit an area shredding smaller targets pretty quick it's a decent unit whose downside is that it usually costs too much Supply and is hard to fit into big armies but in this mission where I'm trying to finish real quick and I never hit the supply cap it works out great the restoration God power keeps me alive and the manticore's Melt the enemies the wooden horse finishes and it's time to move to part two unlike part one part two freaking rocks at the beginning is a stealth segment arcantos Ajax and Odysseus are broken into Troy and have to carefully Traverse to find a way to break open the gate and let the Allies in they find some heliopoli guarded by a cyclops so I do the stealthiest thing I can and ask Zeus to drop a freaking lightning bolt on his head after grabbing The Siege Towers I walk over to the front gate and smash it once down agamemnon's armies appear We join up and start slapping we have to kill three fortresses the first Target is on the right I use my catapult not not petrobolos mind you these are called catapults for some reason in order to shoot them from a range for the final two fortresses the game just says hey you didn't enough here here's two charges of the fourth tier God power meteor have fun and it is fun I like meteor I was gonna question why we're given an Egyptian god power not a Greek one like earthquake but I don't care because it's really nice to look at and everything is going boom the first part of the mission didn't really need to exist it was boring but the second part is awesome and one of the key forming memories I have of playing this game as a kid is so cool now the Troy has fallen it's time for the boys to part ways arcantos wants to head back to Atlantis but his ships have seen better days our boy Ajax kindly offers to show us the way to the port city of viol close and we take him up on it as they get sailing we're introduced to a very interesting character and he strides among the Treetops and is taller than the trees and his voice through all the garden is thunder sent to breathe what is it Kim said this is gargorensis the goat-legged trident-wielding Cyclops and he will be serving as our main antagonist for the game I just love his design he's so interesting they could have gone with anything as the main villain and a cyclopian poet is not something I ever would have thought of the Cyclops in The Odyssey are depicted as big and stupid brutes that nobody would mess with sorry I can't get through that without laughing it's such a bad joke I love it so much gargarences on the other hand is well spoken and cultured we're also introduced to one of his lackeys kemzen and told that the pirate Minotaur camos is also his follower also they're digging a tunnel but nothing else is clarified meanwhile Ajax and arcantos land at ayal close and find it burning Bandits have attacked and taken everybody hostage including the Centaur Chiron so we go to save them and finally this lets me talk about heroes seriously this has been an integral mechanic to the game but there's been so much to talk about so far that were seven missions in before I get to address it but before that we find some captured Centaur rescue them get told the town is under attack and we gotta clear the enemies out back to heroes in the late 90s and early 2000s was the beginning of the golden age of RTS the war in starcraft's Age of Empires and Command and Conquer were all incredibly successful and developers were paying attention to the problems one of them was hero units often missions contained plot relevant units who were significantly stronger the normal but if they died the mission would end in theory this is awesome the super-powered King Arthur cleaving through enemies leading the charge but in reality the fear of losing them was too great people would hide their heroes in the back of their base because if they died it was Game Over Age of Mythology and Warcraft 3 were both born from the devs trying to study this problem and solve it age mythology system is simple but really effective protagonist characters like Ajax and arcantos can run out of health and if they do they collapse after a while if you have forces in the area they can get up and try to fight again but they have very low HP so if you don't pull them back and heal for a bit they're probably gonna fall right over again it's a good system I never feel bad about having these legendary badasses leading the charge and if you get too crazy with them then they're gonna die in the middle of nowhere and you're gonna have to go on a rescue mission which is a whole nother bonus objective of its own that was called foreshadowing by the way it's gonna be a lot of fun as I secure the Town Center Ajax and arcantos both fall and it's not good my Centaur take big damage but I don't lose the game it can still be salvaged after securing the town I get to use the buildings round to make more forces I also found a couple of relics that give me a steady trickle of money to work with this is what I would normally call a no build mission where there's no villagers Gathering resources or production but this Mission does have a little bit of production it's just very limited in scope and as a result it ends up being a pretty cool design no build missions are generally puzzles using specific sets of tools that you're given in order to complete the mission but here half of our army is set in stone it's the Centaur in the heroes and then the other half gets produced out of these buildings in whatever combination you want being allowed to produce in the midpoint allows you to solve the puzzle in your own way instead of just being told what to do and that's awesome we still don't get to pick Our God Powers though it feels like every time the game pre-assigns them for me it's the same three and honestly a little bit of variety would be nice after producing an army I secure the Eastern portion of the city and explore a bit more I find a vault of Plenty this structure can be captured by standing next to it and once secured it gives a trickle of every resource I really appreciate how going down random roads in this game often feels so worth it exploring is fun Chiron is imprisoned behind a medical stronghold I build up my final attack and start pushing they use the Serpent's God power to slow me down which summons some really lackluster snakes and then after those are cleared out they bring a giant army out to attack it's a bit mistimed the Army is intimidating though and I'm not sure if uh buddy you're gonna fight attack moving in this game is occasionally buggy and will move command you instead but this is the first time I've ever seen it happen to the anime it's unfortunate that the game bugged at the climax and the enemy Army just walked into the meat grinder and fed my hydras but oh well what you gonna do Chiron thanks The A-Team for the rescue and tells them that chem set the man we saw with gargorensis was the one that organized The Raid he took the prisoners away and put them to work on something so of course we gotta rescue him as the team moves North they reach the most befuddling of all obstacles a wall as a result the Scooby-Doo team does the only thing that they can think of they split up and search for resources not gonna lie this is a very contrived setup the game wanted to split us into two bases and it darn well made sure it was going to the mission on the other hand is pretty interesting I start with two Town centers meaning that I get double villager production but one side only has Lumber and the other only has food and gold I need to form a strategy around this forced resource distribution sort of firstly Farms can be built with Lumber providing the Eastern base with a source of food but more importantly Apollo exists the design of the mission is that both sides are split up and sealed in by walls outposts and even more walls once they fight through around the middle of the map there is a place to link up and join forces but uh if you researched to the third age and you worship Apollo his God power is underworld passage a Deployable tunnel that quickly moves units from one side to the other I can't tell if you're supposed to invalidate the mission mechanic this way because it's very very obvious or if it's just the weirdest oversight and somehow everybody in testing just picked Dionysus instead there's no way right despite the connection the mission does find me low on food and needing to break through a large number of fortifications to reach the two fortresses that I need to destroy at the top of the map so let's kill two birds with one stone here I go for a mostly ranged composition the peltilist is an Archer that specializes in fighting archers they mix well with my more rounded toxicities I use them both to cover my petrobolos catapults and to cap things off I worship Hera to get her unique unit the Medusa as I start to clear them up I figure it's a good time to talk about unit abilities pretty obviously the Medusa has the ability to turn enemies into stone and predictably it's amazing basically every myth unit and hero that I've talked about has some sort of special ability you've probably noticed arcantos raising a spear into the air in mind entire Army getting blue fairly often that's a buff that he applies every single ability in Age of Mythology is automatically cast by the unit and they all have cooldown timers no Mana bars or anything like that this is an interesting and very deliberate decision that allows players to make unique exotic and flavorful units without requiring the player to break their wrists in order to use every ability in combat this is an enormous upside and I think it was implemented very well initially here I was going to talk about how I think that there should be micro potential for the you know Elite Esports Gamers like you know like me guys but then I started watching the Medusa and I actually think this system is interesting in a way it helps to self-balance the overpowered stuff the Medusa's ability to turn units into stone and instantly kill them is insanely overpowered if you can hold on to it for as long as you want to until the juicy targets arrive but you can't if the Medusa is fighting it's gonna turn things into stone it will go on to cooldown down and the insanely powerful ability has counter play now that's really neat does the benefit outweigh the lack of micro potential for 99 of players absolutely maybe it sucks for the pros but I think allowing such cool abilities and making them accessible is really important and I'm glad that it exists I've been Captain 140 supply for a while now this is because Town centers give 15 Supply 20 with an upgrade and houses give 10. and you can only have a maximum of 10 houses unlike other RTS Town centers can only be built on specific areas called settlements they have a white icon on the minimap and look like a group of shacks this is a very fascinating mechanic that encourages fighting for map control and rewards progressing the supply cap of the game is actually 300 but that would take 10 Town centers with upgrades which is basically impossible this means that there's always a trade-off one player is going to get more Supply but has to use a larger Army to control more territory while the other has less Supply but it doesn't spread as thin I really like systems that encourage interaction with the map it's really well thought through and subtly encourages healthy gameplay as I secure the middle of the map gargoruncher shows that we're not the only ones who have high tier God Powers he gets pissed and drops the meteor power on my left base completely destroying it then he uses the Egyptian Rock myth unit to ferry over minotaurs on a Colossus to secure the area by destroying my underworld passage I I just don't want to deal with that so I push forward unfortunately for gargorensis I also have a fourth tier power I drop Hera's lightning storm and absolutely melt the remaining Greek army from there my petrobullos have free reign to Siege the fortresses unscathed not wanting to be upstaged gargarences does some poetry at me and then deploys another set of meteors and then runs like a coward into this cave that he was forcing the prisoners to excavate also this is a small thing but watches the game Fades to Black here he never actually like gets into the cave or even close I think this is because they had the entrance as a solid building and they couldn't figure out how to actually get him to go inside of it it doesn't really matter but it's kind of funny pursuing the Cyclops into the tunnel the heroes get their first inkling of what's actually going on here an enormous Ram Siege in an equally large door guarded by soldiers and Chimera they don't know what it's for but these guys aren't really the stop and think kind of sort so they decide to smash first and ask questions later instantly we're given a large reinforcement wave of Centaur to support our heroes with this Force we start clearing towards the ram there are a ton of myth units in this Mission and not weak ones the Chimera are particularly dangerous with their spouts of fire they can roast most units in an area quickly while I'm clearing this is the perfect time to talk about heroes uh no not like we did before the main protagonists Ajax arcantos Chiron those kind of guys can do the whole I fell down and can get back up sort of thing but Hiro is also an archetype of units who all have some pretty nice perks first and least important each time that you go up in an age the heroes gain increased damage and defenses it's a nice thing to make them scale well more importantly Heroes Have a great matchup against myth units which makes sense at least half of Mythology is made up of Heroes fighting the beasts of Legend heck while all of this is going on Odysseus is literally fighting off polyphemus Heroes do bonus damage to myth take reduced damage from them and are immune to their special abilities like being turned to stone by the Medusa or being tossed by the Cyclops this mechanic is great in the campaign it allows the opponent to feel the diverse variety of powerful units without having so many overpowered abilities flying out that you just fall over and die but these Heroes aren't powerful enough on their own they really do need a Supporting Cast to help him out it's a really good balance and this Mission showcases it well after exploring a bit finding a few mythical friends and Gathering some reinforcements that appeared at the starting area I moved to take the ram the Ram's initial defenses are nothing to write home about but the mission isn't done here the ram has 30 000 HP and takes between 1 and 5 damage from attacks now I have to defend myself from Attack waves while also keeping the pressure on the ram if I take too long the ram will destroy the gate and I will lose this is a really nice design for a defense Mission it gives a lot of player choice on how they want to approach all of the problems that are coming to them additional reinforcements are constantly arriving as well giving me more tools to work with as the waves of myth units descend upon me I opt to keep my melee on the ram so they don't have to spend time moving back and forth while my toxicities and Centaur can whip around at a range and defend I try to keep my heroes engaging the myth unit so my hop lights can be safe but things get seriously dicey turns out in a world where the average human is sitting at 50 through 100 HP a 30 000 HP Ram is kind of bulky as the ram gets low I go all in on it I saved Hera's lightning storm power to keep the coast clear and I managed to take the ram down and I'm feeling great the door on the other hand has seen better days sitting at 3 000 of 45 000 HP but that ain't my problem carverances then appears a bit annoyed that we have the audacity to follow him but he tells us that there are many entrances to Tartarus so it's not a problem that this one didn't work out and then to show us that he didn't care he blasts us with an earthquake and caves us in with a way out collapsed we venture into Erebus the Greek underworld actually it was established that we were in arava's last mission but we still are we're approached by Shades Who start to guide us the mission mechanic is very unique and I like it quite a bit every human unit we have including Heroes has a dramatically reduced Vision radius but the shades can see just fine we have to use the shades to escort our forces and Scout ahead but the shades also have a second purpose they can be sacrificed to destroy an enemy in a single hit this is another example of awesome levels of player choice the mission once again is filled with myth units and while the first unit we learned to kill with the shade is obvious the rest is fairly well left up to the player you get to pick and choose your least favorite myth units to take out shades are also plentiful they're not a limited resource where if you use them too early and lose the game later it might have been because you didn't save them this is one of those Mission designs that was obviously inspired by descriptions of the Greek underworld it's often written as a deep murky Prime mortal darkness that creeps through everything it's not the fire and brimstone that a more Western audience thinks of the underworld as so I'm just gonna ignore all the fire and brimstone that the last mission was completely made of and the beginning of this mission was one sec let me let me Google a justification okay it's uh oh Zeus it's uh the it's the river FL flag-a-thon it's the river flag-a-thon everybody's favorite ancient Greek underworld river yeah that's it they just they just had to put it in as a fan favorite that's why it's on fire once we pass the fire the mission is dark which makes the next objective all that more brilliant there are three relics throughout the mission that must be collected each is guarded by progressively stronger group of myth units we don't turn in the relics to Temples for bonuses here instead carrying them with us to the end I love the contrast between the dark caverns and the bright Relic it's striking and I swear to Thor it is bronze and restoration again every single time that we do a no build segment we're given bronze and restoration as our second and third level abilities come on it would not have been that hard to give a bit of variety here this game is chock full of amazing and awesome powers to pick from and then they go for the same ones every time in this campaign like I get it having more durable units is nice healing in an area is nice but come on Aphrodite's curse turns people into pigs let me do that once in a while or tease some new abilities that are unlocked later that worked with Troy in the meteors those are Egyptian on the topic of God Powers this is the final time we're gonna be with Zeus for a while so I should probably bring this up I don't think the god power system is as good as it could be and Ensemble agrees every Greek Egyptian and Norse power can only be used once permission and that causes problems do you know that feeling of playing an RPG and keeping all of your rare consumable items until the end of the game because you never know when you're gonna need them God Powers feel that way constantly one of the best examples is Zeus's bolt power because Zeus is a patron deity we've started every Mission since number four with his power what it does is kill exactly one target enemy in the early game you never want to use it because the targets just aren't important enough an individual axemen are populate no way even a Minotaur or something like that for your one a game Power absolutely not but later in the game there are four Siege Towers three Chimera six Cyclops and a full Army of humans supporting them that's too much so let's wait until next time to see if there's more impact to be gone that's what happens every time and even when I do use the Ability I always feel like I should have saved it a little bit longer I never end up using it on this Mission and this isn't the first time that happened on Mission 5 I already had basically won so I used it on a random goat because I'm a sociopath on mission 7 I bolted a catapult despite it being useless at the fight at the end of the mission because it was the odd one out and then on Mission 8 I didn't use it at all the one and done design makes it very difficult to feel like you did something gratifying because you always feel like you could have used it better later the Titans expansion approached this problem by giving the Atlantean faction multiple uses of some God Powers with a cooldown in between that was a Cool Fix to the problem if you're playing atlanteans for three out of the four factions it's still an issue and yes I did say four we will get to that I don't mean to sound too negative here I freaking love God Powers they're amazing they're cool and they still feel incredibly used to this day which is why I want to be a little bit more Reckless with them we're the playthings of the Gods after all what's another Bowl to second set of flaming weapons that's nothing to them so this is a little promise to myself for the rest of the run I'm going to make sure that I very aggressively use all of my God powers for the rest of the game and I'm never going to regret it the design might be problematic but I'm not going to let that get in the way of my fun as I reach the end of the mission having cleared through Infinity myth units and gathered three relics we come to the three temples one to Hades one to Poseidon and one to Zeus the three Patron deities that you can worship as the Greeks arcantos being the good boy he is brings a relic to Poseidon's Temple but Poseidon left this poor boy on red and he ain't getting a message back so this is a question for you and the audience between Zeus and Hades who do you think would be more interested in giving our heroes passage out of this land the famously erratic and unpredictable God of gods who is probably turning himself into an ostrich right now to woo his next wife or the deity whose realm you are in who lent you his Shades to lead you to these temples and was described as Socrates as a great benefactor to those in his realm he who bestows such great blessings upon us who are on Earth yeah of course they go to Zeus's Temple okay last minute rant for a bit Hades isn't a bad guy he isn't the devil he isn't some knockoff Loki voiced by James Woods different cultures have vastly different depictions of what the ruler of the Land of the Dead would look and act like I feel like this could have been a cool time to correct some of those misconceptions if even in a subtle way but thanks for the stairs Zeus go have fun as an emu or whatever Our Heroes escape the underworld but they have no idea where Zeus has taken them fortunately they're quickly met by a mantra who gives them two choices the Oasis is surrounded by the followers of the Gods set we can go get murdered by them or help fight them off they're after a treasure of honors forces have discovered and she wants to dig it up so we decide to be friends with a nice lady and go to Battle Stations this Mission serves as an introduction to playing as the Egyptians one of the unique points of Age of Mythology that I think really makes it stand out is that the main campaign spans all three factions in one contiguous series of stories and missions I don't think I've ever seen an RTS do that before and it's really cool it makes the whole thing greater than the sum of its parts Greece is the faction that works most like a traditional RTS faction designed to be easy to pick up and to teach the mechanics of the game the Egyptians are more of the intermediate faction and have some interesting things going on for them but first I should talk about Mission design it's pretty tactical we start with no Town Center or Temple and cannot build either this means that we have the 12 workers we start with and cannot build any more so don't lose any because it'll be a bad time there are three valleys leading into the oasis Seth's followers will attack through all three and attempts to destroy our position the win condition is to use villagers to remove rocks covering the artifact more villagers is faster but you need to harvest resources and build units in order to survive this creates an interesting balance between harvesting resources and completing the objective if this sounds familiar yes this is exactly how the first part of the Trojan Horse Mission worked but this time you can't just make 30 workers to Blitz through in an instant it is significantly more strategically dense also this Mission gets a pass because the factions introductory Mission and if too much was going on it would be overwhelming to help with the economic woes the Egyptians have a few tricks up their sleeves first is that their buildings are free well like half of them but that's still insane houses upgrade buildings and resource collection points are all on the house this lets me store up money to build a big army to help even more I have a god power okay I need to talk about something real quick I don't want to get demonetized on this video I spent an insane amount of time on it and if I slip up on something and the algorithm decides to hide the video I'm in a horrible place but that's gonna make some of the Egyptian Parts awkward if you look to the bottom center of the screen there's a little flag icon if you look to the right of that icon you can see who my Patron deity is I'm not gonna say that word it has gained additional meanings over the last 20 years and talking about worshiping or the glory of them might trigger YouTube's automatic moderation systems this is because back in the day they tried to use YouTube as a platform to put recruitment videos up and YouTube went ballistic on that as they should but I don't know if that automatic moderation is still in effect or if I will get caught in the crossfire so I'm not gonna take my chances if I say anything about my Patron goddess in this campaign this is who I am referring to to help my economy even further my Patron goddess has the prosperity power which gives me 50 seconds of almost double mining rate this combos with the fact that the few Egyptian buildings that aren't free cost gold instead of wood because of this wood is a significantly less important resource than the other factions which is actually really cool while ancient Egypt had significantly more trees than it does today it has always lacked really big ones for flow's large construction projects this is an awesome way to represent the relative differences that the actual societies had for this first Egyptian Mission we only have access to the barracks units but they work very differently here than their Greek counterparts for infantry Cavalry and archers Greek had a paired system two units where one acted as a generalist and the other as a counter for example with archers the toxicities had a fairly strong matchup against everything with a 50 bonus against infantry while the peltast did far less damage to every Target however it did four times damage to other archers all Egyptian Barracks units are counter units which bring things to an extreme the axman is an infantry that does four times to other infantry the Spearman four times to Cavalry and the Slinger four times to archers they're all either brutally effective or useless there's no in between but they're also cheap for this Mission I end up massing Spearman and axemen assuming that archers would be rare after I get a good army I take all of my workers and put them onto the excavation site split my Force into two pieces and intercept The Siege weapons the enemy is sending at me while the attacks do ramp up in difficulty near the end it is nothing to be worried about and everything finishes fairly unceremoniously a manra has Unearthed the sword of Horus who defeated set in the past so obviously gargarence's minion kempsit wants it as part of his plan he's captured the temple to Osiris the temple contains a guardian who will awaken if given the sword so we get moving I feel bad for the guy who has to carry the pointy end quickly we come upon enslaved laborers who are being forced to mine gold for kempsat we unemploy the guards and free the miners now to escort them back home the road contains mummies a top-tier Egyptian myth unit who can not only instantly kill human forces but raises them as Undead minions they're tough to stop and I lose a villager as well as some soldiers fortunately I have four Heroes right now with Amano joining our forces so we can fight back then they use the snake's power on me it summons snakes and they're seriously unimpressive they keep doing this in no build missions and it's never actually any impact at all and I kinda wish they would just stop upon reaching the town the citizens thank me for liberating them from a life of mine and gold and they pledge fight for our cause so I send them back to the gold mines listen Kemps it might not be a good dude but he knows how to build an army how do I know because a giant army of death doom and demise is in the bottom left of the map I have to reach the guardian before this Force Cleaves through all the towns despite being mission 2 of the Egyptian campaign we actually have a ton of tools available tier 3 can be reached and now I can make myth units as well we're also following raw who gives us the rain power which temporarily triples our farming speed the ability is super bugged in the base game it doesn't say this anywhere but if a farm is not near a town center it gives zero bonus food production which is awesome when its introductory Mission has the Farms all off onto the side but that's not it for the bugs for whatever reason rain also increases the wood harvesting rate of the user by 50 without saying so the whole thing is a mess the Titans expansion did fix the proximity thing but the lumber bug remains to this day one of the coolest things in Age of Mythology is how favor production is completely different for every faction while the Greek have to devote villagers at temples to worship the Egyptians built monuments there are five monuments in total each costing progressively more food and gold to produce as well as taking a while to build once they're done its passive favor forever which is really nice and it would be even more favor if I remember to deposit this Relic that arcantos is holding it gives me more faith regeneration and I just sat here like a doofus holding it for half of the mission while being two feet away from the temple to defeat chemzit I decide to spend my favor on the Scarab a living Siege weapon who honestly I think are kinda cute just me okay scarabs are big bulky and obliterate buildings and they're not half bad against soldiers either to supplement I get a pack of Slingers to flesh out my already existing forces with chem set taking the second of three villages I feel the need to get the move on can I take a moment to talk about how my Army looks here I love having this wall of scarabs in front of the rest of my forces it's one of my favorite things about this game where the addition of the myth units and the humans to give them a sense of scale makes these awesome armies that you just can't see anywhere else as I crash into Seth's defenses he rushes to intercept and my goodness this guy has a ton of units Seth's whole shtick is that he has evil animals hippos giraffes Crocs and even rhinos he supports them with an armada of Chariot archers I managed to breach the front Gates take down a tower and Dent his army but I lose the maxed out force all of my heroes drop in enemy territory to be honest I was kind of skimping a bit the Armory contains upgrades for human units attack and armor but they're pretty expensive so I tend to get the attack upgrades and hope things will work out after my scarabs died the rest of my Army went down very quick but this time things didn't work out so I'm gonna not skimp I get my armor upgrades try to quickly form up a force of axemen spearmen and Slingers to hit set before he can remake everything that he lost and the second wave goes significantly better despite my scarabs getting stuck in the back his Chariot 4 is not nearly replenished enough and he doesn't have his corrupted animal Frontline we rescue the heroes destroy the stronghold bust the gate and bring the sword to the guardian but the mission isn't over now I get the guardian and it's time to smash kempsich's giant army this it's supposed to be cool I remember thinking as a kid it was supposed to be cool and then being wholly underwhelmed the guardian is effectively Immortal kills everything in one hit and does damage in an area but it's slow and has no abilities which makes the final fight him attacking stuff and it falling over it's really clunky by no means is it horrible but the guardian probably needs something like triggers slinging off God powers that the enemy or anything really it's just a bit flat so what is chem set doing why is he conquering temples of Osiris if that killed him well mythology is weird so Osiris was killed but not killed instead split into Parts reunify the parts and we get the old man back but if any are destroyed then Osiris is gone the game never directly explains why we want Osiris back I don't really know much about him but Amana wants him back and that's enough for me the mission is a tug of war we're ambushed all of our heroes are knocked out and the cart starts moving down the Ravine towards the enemy base whoever is next to the cart controls it whoever brings the cart to their base wins this is cool tug of war missions are fun and we get right into the action we start with a ton of money which is just neat but this mission is super incomplete I send Chiron to the top right because I spotted A Relic this Relic doesn't do anything at all it just has no text when I put it into the temple it does nothing they just forgot let's talk a moment about major Gods I've called them Patron deities as well because as I play too much Dungeons and Dragons in high school but they're the same thing you start with a god worshiped I really wish the game did a better job at explaining when and why a God is your major God at the beginning it was Poseidon which was obvious right as the war for Troy started it shifts to Zeus which makes sense the Greek forces would be for Zeus and then it sort of obscures the fact that Zeus is the one helping out arcanto specifically later for the first mission of Egypt we get our Patron goddess and then in mission 2 we get raw which is actually mentioned when they talk about the rain spell which I appreciate and then here I'm set you know the villain the guy who killed Osiris the one who wants to get his body parts to destroy him alright this is never mentioned again has zero plot significance and never comes up again the only explanation I can think of is that this mission was basically never tested so nobody caught that the wrong major God was set sorry I won't stop you've already missed like 20 of these the mission is also laughably easy you you start with a full base a billion of each resource in the bank and just have to match whatever units you want and it will easily overwhelm anything that the enemy sends no matter the difficulty I went for a force of a new bites the cool jumping myth unit I wanted to support a Monroe who also has a jumping attack but the enemies keep walking past my Skirmish force and not attacking them a couple scripted ambushes happen but they're all a joke and I finished the mission in seven minutes this is by far the least polished mission in the entire game I would really be interested to know what went on here most games generally have problems like this hidden towards the end and we're smack dab in the middle here how did this happen if anybody has any info please put it in the comments because I would love to know after rescuing the piece of Osiris things snap back to normalcy and the game starts to get good again we move to the center of Osiris's Kingdom that I wish had a name and we need to get our piece of Osiris to satna I had no idea who satna was so I had to look it up apparently he is the son of Ramses II his actual name is I don't know if they just expect you to know that because I had no idea who came was that or satna was anyway amandra then just kinda walks off mid-sentence and a bunch of chem sets men surround Ajax and arcantos kemset then monologues at them for three seconds and sends them to jail they don't pass go nor do they collect 200 a manra now alone praise to our Patron goddess for Aid and our Patron goddess responds with overnight shipping on a pile of myth units this is one of the missions I remember the most as a kid as we're in the holy city of Osiris there aren't a ton of resources there's a bit of lumber a few farms and some gold mines what there are is an absolute ton of monuments normally the Egyptians can only build one of each Monument to generate favor but a Monera can move to about 15 here giving absurd favor income in theory this Mission actually lets you build normal units and fight like a standard Mission but no let's be honest here this is the mission where you build mass myth units and everybody knows it and we get a few new ones the Scorpion man is uh The Mummy Returns came out while this game was in production and you can tell that they were inspired by the film and by that I mean it kinda sucks the Sphinx on the other hand are incredible units they have solid bulk can smash things hard have an area of effects and Vortex attack and are fast to boot and then there's the oh no uh petsu chose yeah petsutros these gold ornamented crocodiles fire laser beams from their head at an insanely long range I was actually doing a bit of research on this part in order to make sure that I could pronounce petsu chose correctly and it turns out that petsuchos aren't strictly mythological units instead they were crocodiles that lived in the very real City named get this crocodilopolis which is just lovely the ancient Egyptians would ordain these Crocs with gold and worship them as offsprings of Sobek the crocodile God in fact petuchos means offspring of Sobek and then I got thinking why the heck does offspring of Sobek not have the sound so back in it so I did a little bit more digging and it turns out that petsu chose is actually the ancient Greek translation where sutros is the poorly translated spelling of Sobek so it shouldn't be petsutos it should be pet Sobek The Offspring of Sobek so first of all get it together Ensemble and second of all it's 4am and I thought that I made decaf while writing the script but it was accidentally fully caffeinated coffee and this has caused me to take an entirely pointless Journey down this rabbit hole and I do not apologize for it you saw how long this video was going to be when you clicked on it and there is no reasonable world where I'm going to properly respect your time here which is why I ask you the question if petsutros or pet Sobek are The Offspring of Sobek the God and Sobek is a crocodile and these are also crocodiles which God do you think should be worshiped in order to unlock them because if you answer hathor the cow goddess of dance love and joy you are correct but you are also cheating these gods are so unrelated that they don't even appear on each other's Wikipedia Pages while Ensemble why did you take a real-life crocodile that wears fancy jewelry and literally named after a deity and not include that deity into the game give it to someone else use a weird translation on the name and put a laser beam on its head the only reason I went down this rabbit hole is because I saw the name sobeck and recognized it from an H bomber Guy video it's now been two hours and I haven't gotten anything productive done what were we doing all right the mission the mission is pretty cool we have to get a Monroe to a dock to sail to ancient Egyptian Alcatraz and rescue the boys we can either head directly there where we can fight through kenzet's Elite guard or we can strike the Citadel and draw the guards away I go for the Citadel and get absolutely smoked I end up dropping production of every myth unit besides pet Sobek because they have long enough range to kill my enemies before before they reach me these white cloud units are priests they're an Egyptian anti-mith unit that really would convince a smart person to stop building only myth units but I've been Googling crocodiles for hours and how and have lost all executive functions so I make a lot of laser heads until I can overpower their production and take down the Citadel forcing the elite guards back I could then walk over to the dock and continue the mission but I'm still angry so I keep pushing into the depths of the red base kill all the stuff there and then go after the elite guards I didn't need to kill them but I did need to get Justice for my pet Sobek and the mistreatment by the hands of Ensemble they needed this I needed this finally with every enemy dead I bring a mantra to the dock get a transport and Ensemble why can't the crocodile swim how did you mess this unit up so much what did it ever do to you why are you like this all they want to do is live with their buddies in crocodilopolis stop doing them dirty anyway a modern says that she has to convince a nearby port to give her ships we go over there she literally says nothing to them and the entire Port Town becomes our friends including this giant turtle which can swim sea Ensemble see the reptile that can swim I take my fleet grab the enemy's attention with big turt and drop a manra on the island GG I'm not making Crocs again because they deserve a happy retirement after all of this abuse before a Mana arrives and imprisoned arcantos gets the opportunity to speak to gargorensis the Cyclops wants to know which God is giving arcanto so much support that he's been able to accomplish the things that he has Lord Poseidon watches over all the people of Atlantis Lord Poseidon you are more a fool than I expected you may feel less like fighting after I pull off your head I will deal with you all in due time we have more pressing matters to attend to at Osiris's pyramid when I first watched this I thought that I was gonna have to be critical about oh gargorensis is telling everybody where he's going why do the villains always do that and then I remember that they're literally in the holy city of Osiris and the biggest most important thing here is the pyramid so it's not like they're giving away any vital information I can give this one a pass as the mission starts we break out of prison and a small Fleet of transports Arrow ships and Big Turk come to rescue us there's an Allied base to the South that will Aid us so we make our way there this mission is fantastic and one that I always enjoy unlike most missions we get to see the layout of the entire map once we get a base we have to retrieve our piece of Osiris and escape the city and kamos will repeatedly move the piece around the city over time this city is enormous taking up the entire Eastern landmass of the map but before we can do that we have some other issues we start on a smaller land mass and are sharing it with a base of camos and to make matters worse kamos also has a pirate base that constantly sends Naval raids against me but if I can take down a lighthouse on the peninsula low we can stop the raids to deal with all these problems I have to build up fast in order to do that I use one of the defining mechanics of Egypt the Pharaoh shortly after any game as Egypt starts you spawn a pharaoh for free they're Heroes so they deal well with myth units they have a nice healing ability but their real strength comes from the Empower ability the Pharaoh can Empower one structure at a time and the benefits are nutty a building under construction finishes 74 faster units and Technologies build 30 faster defensive structures attack faster resource drop sites create money out of thin air and monuments create favor 20 faster the only downside is that you have one Pharaoh so you can't do everything the insane flexibility of this power means that a pharaoh can allow skilled players to build and Tech faster get more resources and hit crisper timings the entire system is amazing and Incredibly frustrating but before I get into why we need to talk about the mission more the harbor near my starting location is full of fish these are permanent food resources that it can be harvested with fishing boats all I need to do is protect them I figure I can kill two birds with one stone here kamos's Naval raids are dropping troops at my base if I can get a defensive Navy to protect my ships I can also minimize his attacks the entire thing goes well for myth units I worship Thoth who gives me access to the Phoenix one of the few flying creatures in the game my plan is to use the Phoenix to assist The Siege on the base and if needed they can move over to the ocean to assist my Naval forces I defend against enemy attacks get a decent Army and push back the enemy base and Lighthouse while this is happening let me address something that has probably been driving seasoned age mythology players Wild for the last bit I've been using my pharaoh to empower My Town Center to make workers faster that doesn't work and the game gives you no indication that that is the case you would have to sit down with a stopwatch and time your villager production time to be sure Age of Mythology is so so good at giving a basic understanding of what things do it's fantastic and intuitive in many different ways but it always skimps on the details which is to some extent fine you don't want to overwhelm learning players with tons of numbers I agree with that but those numbers have to exist somewhere all of those Empower percentages that I listed earlier I had to look up on the wiki I literally learned that I was making this mistake while I was writing the script it's great that we have the wiki available now but man does it suck to get halfway through a campaign and it turns out the tooltip that says builds units faster specifically excludes what I assume is the most common Target for new players with no feedback it obviously isn't a world-ending problem because I clear through kmos's base and Destroy his lighthouse fairly cleanly we even get this little cutscene where ships crash on the Rocks because the lighthouse is gone which is cool now that the base on my island is gone and the top left base is unable to send a text All That Remains is the right City Fortress there's only one logical path for me to take I go to the top left and see if I can kill the pirate base I cannot kill the pirate base it crushes me sinks my fleet and kills my Phoenix over the water which is not healthy for Firebirds I decide maybe it's objective time remember as kids where people would add stuff to rock paper scissors like lasers or something and claim that their new thing would beat all the normal options naval combat in this game is like rock paper scissors nuclear bomb there are three types of poor ships seed ships fire strong slow volleys that are good against Arrow ships Arrow ships fire faster and are good against Hammer ships and hammerships are melee and counter Siege ships and then Naval myth units literally blow them all out of the water big turt also known as the war turtle is an Egyptian Naval myth unit unsurprisingly he is very difficult to kill I build five of them lead my charge against the enemy Harbor and it goes great landing a sea raid is always a bit of a mess to keep it properly reinforced takes a lot of micromanagement constantly sending transport ships forward and backwards to Ferry units instead I prefer to bring a Vanguard Force to secure a beachhead and then workers to establish an emphasis structure to keep the fight going that's what I do here and it works great I Mass infantrying catapults and punch a hole through the enemy defenses right before the Osiris pieces moved once secure the only thing I have to do is move the piece to the front of the city defeat the honestly pathetic Ambush and finish the mission having escaped from the city Our Heroes finally get a reprieve and the moment arcantos hears that he has a moment he crashes like a rock and wakes up in a dream Athena once again appears before arcantos and gives him a bit of exposition while Zeus is the king of Gods now there was a time before when he was not when the Titan Kronos ruled and it was much worse for humans and then Caster arcanta's son pops up and Athena disappears forcing us to walk a bit to get more Exposition we follow him to a temple put a relic into the temple three statues of Zeus charged their Tesla coils and zap Some Dream Cyclops then all of the heroes appear and fight some Chimera heroically slay them and were rewarded with the next part of the story Zeus Poseidon and Hades fought the Titans defeated them and imprisoned them in Tartarus sealed behind great adamantine doors one of which has like 37 HP now but that's not a problem Poseidon is angry that Zeus got to be the cool God after the war and wants to let Chronos out so they can Dethrone Zeus but the doors to Tartarus can only be opened by mortal ions or Mortal battering rams I guess which is why gargarences is working for his pop to get his grandpa out we're still in a dream so now the game gives me an army to uh destroy a boulder which is neat after our epic struggle against The Rock we get transported to another map with some transports we become red our soldiers become Minotaur and we carry on as if nothing has changed so I float over to my base I'm gonna be honest I don't really enjoy dream stuff in media I'm not gonna judge the game negatively for that it's absolutely a personal preference but it's not mine the dream setting and storytelling does not change the mission's gameplay though and in that respect it's solid as we unload our forces on the other side we have our hero a bunch of myth units agargarensis and a camos so we're looking through the perspective of what would happen if gargar grants is won fair enough except our Patron deity is Hades what why we were literally told 12 seconds ago that he was working with Poseidon the entire idea of Hades equals evil is so so misguidedly entrenched in this game that it's actively making the story confusing it sort of just feels like they needed a mission where we played as Hades because there was absolutely no opportunity to do that in the past one cool part of the mission is that there's just relics everywhere there's like 40 of them on the map it's actually excessive and I think it's hilarious that the moment that I get to play as the big bad guy I force him to do the manual labor of shuttling relics around there are far too many of them to build an actual coherent strategy around but they give a ton of economic benefits which is great because as soon as I get set up the enemy uses their fourth year Earthquake power and destroys my base the objective is to destroy an enemy Wonder in the top right side of the map it's defended by a huge Greek base we have a ton of money relics and start in the fourth age so the game turbos us into the late game which is a nice change of pace a unique aspect of the Greek factions is that the major Gods Poseidon Zeus and Hades each have a unique human unit available to them Elite Cavalry for Poseidon infantrymen for Zeus and archers for Hades this is the only time I will get to play as Hades so I opt to go for the gas graffitis a long-range crossbowmen that actually existed using my myth units as a wall I get a bunch of these archers in the back but the enemy doesn't sit around for long the AI is starting to get smarter it's now using God powers preemptively to strategize they use the bronze power to buff and attack wave's durability and send it at me but I have Aphrodite's curse power available that can turn many human soldiers into pigs completely invalidating the buff this is the kind of stuff I love about this game these immensely powerful Gods thwarting each other and coming up with clever tactics using wild Powers I love it once my Army is big enough I approach the front Gates and start my Siege unfortunately for the enemy I also have the earthquake power and level half the city in a single blast crippling their ability to reproduce they send a pretty impressive wave of Defenders but the area damage from my chimera's flame breath roasts them and I push through depression the Wonder one thing I wanted to mention as the mission ends is the spirit of the storytelling care I think a lot of people will look at oh you're being told what's going on by a goddess in a dream as a negative thing and honestly I think if the goal were to win an Oscar or whatever then I would probably agree but this style of exposition actually fits the way that Greek myth worked deus ex machina is literally a term came up with because so many of their stories involve deities randomly showing up and saving the day it is absolutely different from how we do things these days and it isn't my first choice in storytelling but I do respect ensemble's decision to replicate the way that myths and plays were actually told in the day as the dust settles on the ruined building Athena tells us that this is the fate of Atlantis should gargorensis win and Zeus cannot directly interfere or else it will start a war between the gods so uh good luck arcantos it's on you bud the crew has one piece of Osiris but three more remain for the next three missions we split up into groups to claim them simultaneously first up is a manra sieging the piece kept by kemzet at his Island Fortress fortunately for us comes its propensity to use unpaid interns strikes again the mission design is somewhat the opposite of the last mission there are two land masses the biggest one is civilized by people who will join us when a manner approaches them creating a great sprawling base meanwhile kemzet has a much smaller Island but it's very well defended as I Scout the map with a manra I end up scared because the coastline is absolutely massive here ships could drop trolls anywhere trolls why did I write that in my script ships can drop comes its forces basically anywhere and that would be really tough to defend to battle this I use the priest's special ability Obelisk for a cheap 10 gold it creates a novelist they can't attack but they have Vision in a really large area I line the shores with them so I'll never be caught off guard after rescuing everybody on the mainland and building a strong economy I think about my assault on kempson actually this is a complete lie going into this run there were a few missions where I knew exactly how I wanted to do things this and the next mission are two of them where I've had a strategy for years and finally have gotten the chance to play again and do them for my strategy I'll need the Leviathan a naval myth unit that is both good at fighting and can transport up to 20 units at a time but first I use it to transport a monra and a villager over to an area I spotted with a few hidden relics once again this genius mechanic gives little rewards for exploration they give me a bonus to farming speed infantry Armor Hero damage to myth units and Siege weapon damage really nice to get to comsat's island I need my transports to get past a massive Fleet patrolling around normally it would take some serious Naval Warfare to make the trip properly but I have a better idea The Siege Tower is similar to the Greek heliopolis its melee Spike does huge damage to buildings and it can Garrison up to five infantry to protect them during the advance I'm going to abuse that second part for Fun and Profit I make a large infantry Army and a bunch of Siege towers and then I garrisoned my entire Army into those Siege Towers putting about 50 infantry into the 10 of them which then I load into my Leviathan who can carry 20 units as a result the Leviathan is only carrying 10 Siege Towers but in reality he's carrying about 60 units this is one of the things that I love about Age of Mythology the game is designed for fun and stupid stuff first and balance later the game is totally fine with these Bonker strategies being part of it and it's amazing because my fleet is a single unit I can easily sneak past the Armada and deploy my Siege Towers onto the island who then deploy infantry to cover them I storm through chem set's base and the poor lad never had any idea what hit him with the Osiris piece secured a monarch and fronts cam set and as she moves to strike the killing blow chem sets Rock swoops by and he grabs on it to fly away the fact that he's backwards in this is so funny to me I can't help but imagine that like 30 seconds after he makes his dramatic exit he's just sitting there not able to see where he's going being like I have no idea where this is taking me I really hope that there's land soon my arms are numb and I have to pee this is almost as bad as flying on United now that a manner has done her job Ensemble remembered that Chiron is actually a character and gave him a mission a great tamarisk tree grows from a patch of fertile land and in its trunk is the head of Osiris sorry stop here a moment see that on the right hand side it's a relic in the intro cut scene I love that they put this here once again it gives this nice incentive to get out and explore as soon as the mission starts you know you have prizes awaiting so it's worth it what a great mechanic as Chiron speaks to his men soldiers approach but they aren't hostile or Egyptian nordseer and his men have arrived from midgard they're seeking the one eye who has rallied the Giants to his cause these Norsemen seek to stop the one eye and prevent Ragnarok they join Chiron and we begin the mission by moving Northeast and claim a base I have a lot to talk about here this Mission has a series of brilliant yet subtle decisions in its construction and I love it the tree in the middle of the map must be harvested it takes Villagers 5 000 chops to take it down so obviously they'll be quite a if you're required and even then it will take a bit to reach that goal we have a small contingent of Norse soldiers to supplement our Egyptian faction the map is split into two by a river our side of the river is open desolate desert with resources few and far between normally this is considered quite bad for map design large open areas with no training is generally seen as amateur not something that exists much in full-fledged campaigns from established developers but here it's intentional the Egyptians don't have light Cavalry to scout large swaths of area and they're not great at Gathering resources from distant places the Norse on the other hand are fantastic at both I send a raid in Cavalry to scout the area and find resources for the other Norse unit that I'm given the aux cart in order to construct resources away from a town hall Egypt and Greece must construct granaries mining camps and the like these are small hubs where resources can be returned to they take time to build only of specific resources that can be returned to them and are immobile the Norse on the other hand have the right idea the aux cart can walk around and any resource can be returned to it this makes it ideal for harvesting in this Barren Wasteland this is a really cool Mission design it does so many things at once and it does them all well first of all it introduces the next faction and we're heading towards the climax of the Egyptian campaign so it's important to sow the seeds of the next conflict second it teases the actual mechanics of the faction with gameplay and not just lip service so many titles be it games TV or films will simply tell you about something and expect you to remember it when it comes up later showing and making you play with it is such a strong way to introduce it but because they're starting with very simple mechanic it's not overwhelming you don't even have to use it if you don't want to and finally it helps establish gargorensis as a villain when it's mentioned and shown that our resident poet is actively working to destabilize multiple regions it feels less like we're thwarting his every move and more like we're rushing around to put out fires which helps show that he is in fact a competent villain the fact that all three of these things can be done with a few lines of dialogue and an AUX cart is really cool this wouldn't be possible if the game was broken up into different campaigns one for each faction having a contiguous story allows for this level of mission variety that makes Age of Mythology stand out as I explore a voice line warns that there are ancient tombs spawning mummies around the map I should find them and clear them out remember that mummy's One-Shot human units and raise them as Undead minions this is a big threat but because I had my raiding Cavalry Scouting Around I find the first Tomb very quickly as I destroy it I get two surprises it turns out scarabs explode for damage when they die I didn't mention this when I used them earlier because I had no idea in fact I checked out the really cool in-game encyclopedia for information and they give me all the lore I could ever want on the Scarab but nothing about them exploding sorry for letting you die Paul the priest I just didn't know the second surprise is much better I get 1500 gold for destroying the temple which is a huge amount enough for 15 more paws as I said earlier I'm not doing this Mission Blind I have a plan to win it and for that I need to worship my least favorite goddess hathor I suck up resources on my side of the map and build a decent expeditionary force and then head towards the tree a short distance passed is an enemy Town Center I raise it and build my own from the ruins I need this to train my Army when you worship a new minor God you're not only getting a god power and a myth unit but each comes with a variety of unique upgrades that cost Faith mercenaries are an interesting Egypt only mechanic the Town Center can construct both infantry and Cavalry marks they're very strong only cost gold and have a one second build time but they only last for 40 seconds hathor allows me to research the medj upgrade which increases the duration to a much more respectable 70 seconds my plan is to stockpile a bunch of gold bring all of my villagers to the tree and whatever enemy comes to contest me I quickly recruit an army and fend them off and the enemy is not messing around here they slam me with an army of elephants the strongest non-mith unit in the game supported by the Apparently exploding scarabs scorpion men and Siege Towers to boot The Mercenaries actually do a fantastic job they're insanely fast training time means that I can reinforce faster than anything dies and while the fight is pretty brutal and about half of my villagers fall I managed to hold on ignore the fact that I'm broke and my entire Army fell over after 70 seconds I really just wanted to test out this mechanic that I've not had much opportunity to experiment with and I thought it was a really fun way to do the mission the villagers eventually do their 5 000 chops we grab the head and vamanos a Monroe and Chiron have secured their Osiris pieces and made some friends along the way now it's time for the super Greek Bros to do their part the final piece is controlled by the Minotaur pirate kamos and his defenses are strong the beginning of the mission is a no build segment we begin with a contingent of Greek soldiers and some Siege weapons while exploring this gold-covered island we stumble upon one of camos outposts after defeating the Defenders and rescuing these civilians we're told that the Seas ahead are absolutely littered with pirate activity also to thank us they'll occasionally gift us some myth units so that's cool given last time I fought camus's Pirates it didn't end well for me we need to take a stealthier approach we steal two of kamosa's ships and transport our units through the pirate-infested waters upon reaching the shore where his Fortress is located we receive a small Egyptian town to build up from and start what I think is one of the most cleverly designed missions that I've ever seen our base is sandwiched directly between kamos's Naval blockade and the enemy base there is no space to breathe we we have five minutes to build up before kamos finds us then he'll get aggressive and our ships will no longer be able to Traverse the channel this would be okay but there's a problem a villager warns us that this base has very little gold and remember no gold no human combat units or ships so why is this such great design at first glance this seems like a fairly normal resource crunch Mission most every RTS has one and that would be true but this mission is designed in such a way that the limited resources instead of limiting player expression massively increase it before I explain why this is amazing I need to add two more pieces of information first is that the Villager who warned us about the lack of gold also said that kamos's base has some and second if you take a moment to scout the entrance to kamos's base you will quickly see that there is a ramp that leads directly into the objective and a low ground path that leads to Gold there are so many options here I'm sure that while listening you've already decided on the one that you probably use but let's talk about the six different ways that I see as perfectly viable solutions to beat this mission for the first two strategies we can look back at the island in the first five minutes we could use the pirate ship to smuggle a group of villagers before the Pirates are alerted using them to start mining resources for the main base but never be able to increase them in number we could also use what gold we have here in order to build up a Navy of our own and fight kamos clearing the channel and having complete economic dominance over the island a bit later this would also give us the ability to grab the Colossus that our friends are making us we could also ignore the island completely charging forward softening kamos's initial Defenders and stealing his gold mines this would give everything closer together and easier to manage but would increase the amount of pirate aggression or you could completely ignore the gold problem altogether build up monuments to generate favor faster and then Mass myth units that don't cost gold like scarabs or scorpion men and if you're not salty like me you could also worship hathor who has a second 5th unit called The Rock a flying transport that allows you to circumvent the Navy entirely this is another way to get the Colossus and finally you could just get gold from other sources the market has a function that I'll talk more about later where you can sell resources for gold you could theoretically fund your war effort off of that alone this clever choice of both sandwiching the player as well as limiting a resource when added to a game was such a fantastic variety of tools to pick from means that everybody can play this Mission differently and that is amazing nothing in gaming feels better than when you beat someone not because of what the game told you to do but because you figured out a solution by yourself this mission is the purest essence of that and it completely rules I personally opted to go for a bit of strategy one and two I quickly shuttle over a few villagers to get a gold mine operation going and then start building up a fleet of Siege ships normally it's better to get a variety of boats but I have a plan so I'm gonna stick to these Prestige ships have fantastic range and do good damage against buildings this allows me to poke at the initial tower defenses while being safe once I have enough seed ships I take the second part of my plan into action some God Powers have special secondary effects that are not actually listed in the game as I move towards the enemy Fleet I make use of the ancestors power normally it summons a group of mummies on land the Garden area but on sea it summons a temporary Fleet of ghost ships I make up for my previous lack of Frontline with them and easily gain control of the Seas how I can ship the Colossus over mine more gold and build up an army of camel archers normally ones who control the Seas you're kind of done with boats but because the seed ships range is so long it gives me a nice benefit I start bombarding the coast with them I managed to wound a majority of the Defenders and raise the enemy's stronghold the entire time they can't contest me and to top off my ground Army I worship Osiris for one of my favorite God Powers most powers are a one-time use for a powerful effect the son of Osiris is the exception when targeted on my Pharaoh it permanently turns him into the son of Osiris one of the most powerful units in the game he has a long range high power chain lightning attack that Slaughters groups of human units and has a five times damage multiplier against myth units you only get one and if he dies it's gone but my goodness is this not one of my favorite abilities in the game every time he attacks it's just so much power I love it unsurprisingly a besieged camos can't stop my Army being led by a demi-god his fortresses fall the Osiris piece is rescued and in the following cut scene camos is skewered and falls to his demise what a great mission A Plus kamos is dead gargorensis is pissed and kempsit is afraid kemzit has an army approaching and to help motivate them to move faster gargorensis rides out to meet them meanwhile amanra and Chiron have returned with their pieces of Osiris we must break the enemy defenses and return the God's body to the temple right off the bat this looks familiar another mission where we start off with two separated bases last time this was circumvented with the underworld passage power and this time there's just a few trees separating the bases this whole thing is kinda weird but I have a hypothesis I think that both missions were designed initially without the ability to connect the bases but play testers found it too difficult to build up and defend attacks when split into two different locations so both of these Maps were then changed in development to allow the bases to be conjoined the end result is very messy design but I do think that they made the right choice I can easily see a world where even moderately skilled players will have two armies get attacked and command the incorrect Army to come and defend in its attempt to get to the other base it would run right through an enemy Outpost and everybody would die it's really easy to mess that up and it's not an interesting or fun way to lose once the trees have been chopped and my forces unified I decide to utilize the space between the bases by making a market and training some Caravans they'll trade with my town center and provide a steady trickle of gold that doesn't require finding new minds this in addition to farms and the giant forest means that I'm doing great on resources but that doesn't mean I'm home free the enemy is really aggressive sending constant raids against me they actually managed to pull all my forces to the left and then sweep in with an infantry force and capture one of my Osiris cards fortunately from what I assume is another piece of feedback to the developers the game actually shows you where they keep the held cart because otherwise we'd have to search the entire map for it this is the final Egyptian Mission and I'm not taking any chance with enemy quality here as I advance to the Mythic age I worship Horus his Avengers are large bird men who spin to win and blend everything in their path why do bird boys Whirlwind I don't know but it's good to support them it's my turn to make elephants the unit is honestly absurd they may not get anywhere quickly but they also can't really be stopped with enormous HP pools great armor and triple damage against buildings I feel confident moving out and retaking the stolen cart around this time arcantos and Ajax arrive with their cart and it's time to push to the end because it's the final Egyptian Mission I kinda wanted to go out on a bang I try to poke into the enemy base and bring their forces forward and then I use the awesome tornado power to not actually kill that much in my head this giant Vortex of death would scoop up all the enemies and deposit them into Kansas but the fact that it's uncontrollable meant that it just sat around some buildings for the most part I still think it looks awesome and I love how it Scoops enemies up into the world I wish I just could have hit more of them the remaining forces are cleaned up pretty easily and I bring each of the carts to the temple as the pieces of Osiris are returned gargarence's Army arrives Osiris is reborn and as he ascends to the heavens oh no he is just literally right here and he is pissed a literal God just plops down and starts blasting everybody with lightning and dropping meteors gargoyances fleas because he ain't dumb and everybody but Ajax follows him he manages to escape to Sea and his next Target must be a Tartarus gate in the north this marks the end of the Egyptian campaign and the beginning of the Norse campaign almost with the Egyptian campaign finished and the story winding down from one of its high beats the game does something that I think a lot of games are afraid to do it takes a break as arcantos and Ajax are sailing back to Greece they come across some ruined ships that they recognize their Odysseus's Odysseus's Odyssey they belong to Odysseus as they make landfall to investigate a mysterious woman raises her staff and turns him into pigs the nearby swine then start talking they're Greek too and the villagers on the island they're looking for some bacon the beginning of this mission is amazing the Ajax and arcantos bores roam around the countryside scaring away villagers Goring wolves and rescuing their biggie friends after saving all the Allies they migrate through these defensive emplacements and make their way to a nearby Temple to Zeus who turns them back to normal what you get is based on how many pigs you saved now we get to build a base and take the fight to the witch who cursed us this mission is so freaking unique and cool it is by far one of the memorable missions in any RTS I have ever played nobody has ever pulled off something quite like this and I love it taking inspiration from the developers creativity I opt to be a bit wacky myself there's a large number of Walls fortifying The Witch's base and instead of demolishing them I opt to just add my own touches filling in the gaps this helps me keep safe on the cheap while I build up my combat Force I end up building a bunch of Minotaur early on the Islanders seem to have a fairly poor heavy diet so I thought I'd spice things up with some beef the enemy gets pretty aggressive here too using catapults to Siege from long distances but I can't help but feel like the mission could use some more flavor here wouldn't it be cool if the witch had multiple charges of the curse God power which turned all my Army units into pigs if the game was more modern and the technology allowed for it they could do some really cool stuff like fighting with that God power and then sending in villagers as part of the attack wave to start hurting my pigs away then we have to clean up the attack and intercept the villagers before they get back in Slaughter the the guys the game's trigger system just isn't Advanced enough to make that sort of complex thing work but man if this game ever got a sequel imagine how much potential there is for weird and awesome stuff like that sorry I just love this Mission off the cuff things like this really get my creative juices flowing so many RTS are just so serious all the time everything is part of a big crisis the world must always be saved the Multiverse is always in danger but when you stop constricting yourself and come up with out of the box scenarios that's how you stand out that's how you make an impression and this Mission made a big impression on me if you remember back to the dream mission where I played as Hades I built hades's unique Archer unit the gas graffitis this time I opt to do the same thing for Zeus building his unique infantry unit the myrmidon they're described as being strong against Egyptian Norse and Atlantean soldiers as well as buildings even though they don't do bonus damage against the Greek soldiers that I'm fighting they're still just very good because I saw so many fortresses early on on I opted to support them with petrobolos to hit them from afar clearing through the enemies really isn't that challenging their attacks were much better than their defenses once I destroy the final Fortress the witch Cersei appears and I guess you can just use Zeus's lightning bolt power against her alright on one hand I feel like it would have been better to have a cool boss fight here but on the other hand this is objectively hilarious so I give it a pass after giving Cersei the panco treatment we rescue Odysseus give them a ship to sail home in wave goodbye and head back to the main story it's a great little Mission short sweet memorable and fun everything I ever could have asked for we continue our pursuit of gargan actually before we get back to the main story I wanted to take an intermission of my own and talk about something that isn't important at all but by now I assume you're invested enough to pretend that you care let's talk about cheat codes remember them well back in the day every game had cheats it was normal expected and some of them were hilarious Age of Mythology has them as well and while they have the boring stuff like getting Matt vision and money they have some absolutely awesome ones if you type in bark bark bark bark bark you'll get this dog named Bella who for some reason can solo armies if you type in love woo it spawns a flying hippo with a top hat and a rainbow trail that vomits blood on his enemies as you do trines of power spawns a fork boy so finally we have someone worthy to wield Poseidon's trident and of course Oh Canada spawns a bipedal bear and four monkeys the bear has a cape and well there is yes losing track of bear bear has reached Mach One I repeat one bear oh no so you know that's in the game I want to monkeys straight into the point giving you a hundred monkeys red tide makes the river turn into blood which should look really cool but I took marine biology and University so I got stuck thinking about how many dinoflagellates there must be in there and now it's gonna be terrible for the ecosystem let's go now doubles the game speed for a bit of fast-paced action and there's cheat code God Powers too bock bock bock gives the legendary chicken meteor and gottenheim gives the power that turns every unit into a goat the cheat codes aren't super important but I'm sad to see them go in more modern games nowadays everything is so sterile and things like this barely exist I love it when a game is willing to let dumb fun be the main objective no matter what you're doing cheat codes should really make a comeback okay let's get back to the game we continue our pursuit of gargarences up north to midgard where we're ambushed by the Cyclops and struck with the strongest Avalanche the 2002 Graphics could handle our forces are separated in a valley and we must consolidate build a base and strike back taking down three of gargarence's temples in the area we're playing as the Nords now and they're really weird the Greeks were designed fairly in line with typical RTS faction ideas they make a fantastic introductory race due to the familiarity and the Egyptians take these core ideas and twist them a bit for some personal identity the Norse just do whatever they want and Nothing is Stopping them first up are the aux carts which were introduced earlier I love these darn things no more setting up resource collection points and then being annoyed as you clean the area out of things to loot the cart moves with the pack of villagers and is just so darn convenient the next thing is a change in construction Norse villagers only Harvest resources they can't actually make build instead that job is left to Norse infantry and to get myth units to support those infantry of course you need favor unlike the more passive methods that the Greek and Egyptians gain if the Norse want myth units to come help them they have to go beat people up each human unit fighting gains favor this means that Gathering favor is not very steady instead very feast or famine to win this Mission I have to breach three separate bases and destroy the temples with him the introductory segment separated by forces I have to find one of the many settlements scattered around the map to build up on I accidentally ended up picking one very close to one of the enemy camps so I opted to get aggressive early maybe take down a base and get some favor while I'm at it I opt to build the hair Seer a slow but strong infantry unit who deals bonus damage to myth units and generates double favor the enemy base hasn't managed to build up many forces by this time and they buckled fairly easily this gives me some space I use the reprieve to check out my first of the myth units for the fact the troll in a game as experimental as age mythology in a faction as experimental as the Norse there are bound to be great winners and of course losers the troll is a loser in fact it may be the single Biggest Loser in the game The Troll is a slow bulky ranged attacker who pelts their foes with rocks their special ability is to gain HP equal to the damage done with their attack not only is this unit chronically underpowered but it's also just a bad design why is the backline unit a tanky regenerator why does hitting somebody with a rock cause you to restore HP the entire thing is just bizarre and a series of misses the only reason I built them was to explain why I'm never building them again but the Norse also has some myth units that are real hits the frost giant is one of my favorites it has a breath attack that encases the Target in a block of ice making them unable to do anything for a while this can either disable enemies while you fight fight the rest of their army or you could just beat the guys up in the ice both work really well they're also pretty bulky making them a fantastic Frontline brawler and disabler another weird Norse unit is the battering ram this is the Norse version of The Siege Tower both the heliopolis and The Siege Tower have 95 reduced damage against ranged piercing attacks but a pitiful five percent against melee hacking attacks this makes sense the historical versions of these were built specifically to transport weapons and soldiers to a wall without taking Arrow fire but why do these two jobbers with their pointy stick also have 95 reduced damage against piercing what's happening here it is absolutely a case of function over form and it's pretty jarring watching these two Macho men shrug off 100 arrows like it's nothing and then dying to a sword hit but for now they do their job I bust down the second base's entrance with the Rams storm the gate with my Frost Giants and raise the temple the third base is more the same my Army has snowballed into some something Unstoppable I walk straight to the final Temple and take it out amongst the minimal defenses all in all the Norse are a weird faction and will continue to be weird but I'm really glad that Ensemble took the time and risk to innovate here this faction has some of the most amazingly Cool Tools coming up and I'm really excited to show them off no more trolls though as we March towards midgard amanra spots two figures watching us and confronts them they're the dwarves Brock and Eatery and they want our help if we can help them reclaim their Mountain Forge from the Giants they'll show us the mining tunnels that can reach midgard and hopefully intercept gargorensis to do so we need to establish a base get an army and secure the forge in the mountain for 15 minutes this Mission design is one that has fallen off as RTS history has advanced it's rare these days to do a Time section after a macro portion but it's an interesting Mission design and I kinda wish it would make a comeback as I was planning out what talking points I wanted to go where in this video I spent a lot of time trying to pair relevant mechanics ideas and tidbits with missions that provided context and then this Mission came by and it was just so totally Jank that I need to talk about it on its own no other mechanics first up are my two new Heroes Brock and E tree this brings me up to a total of six when combined with arcantos Ajax Chiron and amanra this is honestly too many any Heroes we don't need this many and I guess it's good that we don't necessarily need them because Brock and Eatery are horribly designed another one of those weird experimental Norse things is that they have two different types of villagers the standard one and the dwarf dwarves are special units that cost gold instead of food and gather gold faster than villagers but wood and food are gathered slower Brock and E tree are hero dwarves their gatherers with beefed up attack and HP totals this makes them very clunky to use for some reason when they're in your control group you cannot issue attack move commands which are the most common form of command in the game it's the command where you move to a location and attack any enemies you see on the way as a result the problem of having too many Heroes sort of solves itself these two I just send to go mine gold for the entire game because they actively make my Army harder to use it's not a good solution but it is a solution the AI on this Mission started acting weird as well the enemies attack early and often with big waves of Giants and trolls and for some reason in this attack they hyper focused specifically on one of my villagers she just had to die they would not take no for an answer after they commit this very weird and specific crime they go back and fight normally why how weird to beat the mission I opt for the hair series my core combat unit and the valkyrie is my support these mounted myth units are awesome in addition to having high HP and armor they do decent damage move quickly and can heal their allies I don't play Age of Mythology competitively but I can't imagine a world where these girls are anything besides a complete Menace to Society a strong fast combat unit who can patch each other up seems amazingly oppressive back on the note of experimental Norse ideas the Dwarven gold mine is a really simple but really neat power when used it creates a gold mine at the targeted location the catch is that for each age you've Advanced more gold is added to the mine in the archaic age at the beginning of the game it only has 500 gold on it but if you can hold off until the Mythic age at the end it has 6 000. I really like flexible abilities that reward decision making this is a utility spell with a huge opportunity cost but with clever timing can provide a ton of resources I opted to rush to the Mythic age right around the time my first gold mine depleted so only a few moments later I could get my dwarves mining from a fresh new one and it worked great when I hid the myth a gauge I found something really weird I could build a Wonder wonders are a staple in the age series they're massively expensive structures that take many minutes to build when completed they start a 10 minute countdown timer and if it's still alive at the end of the timer you win why would this be in a campaign mission it doesn't make any sense to be able to build a wonder and for some reason that makes up for the fact that I didn't clear the minds of giants what is going on I gotta build it I store up 1 000 food wood and gold and then go on a small raid with my forces to get the 50 favor that I need and after spending over five minutes constructing the Wonder it finishes and nothing happens what is going on why can I build this tremendously expensive lump of useless garbage it's obviously an oversight but is it some original bug or a weird circumstance of later patching it's very odd and a big waste of resources now that I've wasted about 10 minutes doing nothing I decide to go on the offensive and claim some forges the path to the forges is lightly defended a few trolls and Towers but nothing to write home about once the forges are secured a 15-minute defense segment starts and I gain the ability to research three unique upgrades that improve my human soldiers against the Giants I like that it's a small little thing and it's neat after defending for a few minutes I come to a realization the attacks against the forge are literally just the attacks that were previously hitting my base and the enemy encampment that is making them is like a screen away I've been sitting around for long enough at this point after the whole Wonder thing so I get on the offensive unfortunately I wasn't planning on a Siege so I don't have any way to knock down buildings efficiently but the Norse have me covered because infantry are the ones that build more structures I quickly pop up a fort and start training some battering rams the ability to rapidly build structures in the middle of the map to pop out whatever units I want is a fantastic piece of utility that I really enjoy to my pleasant surprise clearing this base early ends the mission which means I saved a whole 2 minutes and 40 seconds which is about a quarter of what I spent on the entire Wonder thing after the mission Brock and Eatery wish us farewell but as our heroes leave they confess to each other that they're intending to continue to stalk us but why following that cutscene is another gargorensis is leading an army of giants to pillage a village that's fun to say he meets with chem set is disappointed in how long it took us to get through the last mission which I found very funny and mentions that they're working with Loki in order to destroy Thor's hammer which is bad news for us because Thor is currently the guy that's given us God powers as we Traverse through the Frozen wastes our armies stumble upon an old man named skolt who invites us to warm ourselves at his fire this random Norsemen who is with us asks skull if he has seen gargorensis who responds that the Giants have come down from the hills to do battle and that Ragnarok is soon to be here Ajax suggests that if we can convince the Norsemen to join together instead of fighting each other then maybe they can fight back against the Giants Scott says that they won't listen to an outsider but he does offer the use of his village Banner to get the attention of the other Clan leaders to negotiate all we have to do is escort him to them the mission starts off with a no build segment as we head north towards the objective as we progress over there I wanted to bring attention to my Army right now in addition to Norse ax throwers I started my army with a bunch of brick hoplites this is a nice little touch that the game does quite often both in the Egyptian and Norse campaigns I often start with a handful of Greek units I think this does a cool little job of reinforcing the idea that it isn't just the hero Heroes that are here on Journey but their cohorts as well I really enjoy it when a game is able to use non-verbal context to enhance an adventure even if it's just a little bit this sort of thing would not have been noticed at all if it was gone but it's always welcome to see after battling through Giants we reach a blockade of rocks and find a settlement we're gonna need Siege units to break through so I use my Norse infantry to start up a base the key here is that resources are very limited this is not a big macro Mission but a small segment to quickly get some forces out and progress I build a few villagers and then quickly advance to the heroic age I was initially planning on building some battering rams to break through the Rocks but then I had an idea the walking Woods power says that it animates a forest to attack my enemies and that the trees are good against buildings that sounds cool so I worship Nord as I build up my forces small giant raids will that just be considered medium raids what small giant raids are constantly hitting me luckily a cool interaction of Norse mechanics means it's relatively easy defend remember that the Norse faction gains favor by fighting most of the time this means that the Norse faction starts out with very little favorite generation in the early game and it grows exponentially as time goes on but on missions like these where there's a no build segment at the beginning and we have to fight our way to a vase I ended up almost capped on favor before I built a single thing I opt to build the iron hair jar a bulky melee unit who occasionally toots his horn rallying his allies and increasing their damage for a bit their fantastic Brawlers and support units once my tier increases I use the walking Woods power and it turns out I can't control these the wording is very similar to the ancestors power the Egypt has which I can control but this time it's a no-go kind of a shame but I can always fall back on the Rams after getting some Rams on the Rocks I fend off a few small giant attacks a medium giant attack before a giant giant attack starts descending on me from all sides I don't know if this is a hard time limit or trigger based on The Rock's HP but the game is honestly very unclear here that this time limit will exist or what causes it either way we gotta get out of here I knocked down the Rocks charge down the valley I'm trapped by a wall of trees that Thor oh so kindly burns down and old grandpa sculpt barely makes it across the river without becoming gum stuck to the bottom of a Giant's shoe the pacing of this mission is honestly really weird it just randomly decides that you have about two minutes to win or else it's harsh with the Giants Hot on our Trail we find the Norse Clans engaged in battle to unify them the banner carrier wave sculpts flag and both Stags men dare come here Paul stag ate my cattle and hold my cabin into the river kill them kill them all well that could have gone better now we have no option but to unify the Clans by force this mission is one that is very interesting on paper in reality it's pretty underwhelming in execution there are three Norse Villages around the map each is guarded by a progressively stronger group of enemies to win I have to eliminate all the clan leaders but the catch is that I cannot produce units and only have enough money for a couple Towers to draw the leaders out of their fortifications I can use the flag of skull I head to the right move my banner carrier until the leader notices and then run once a leader is outside I click on him he dies and his entire Clan pledges allegiance to us my army goes from 50 Supply to 180 then I just do this two more times and the mission ends there aren't any strategies here no tactics nothing to explore on the map no creative compositions just wiggle flag man and click three enemies the whole thing feels half-baked While most missions in this game take between 15 and 30 minutes this took seven and honestly those seven minutes were not that interesting arcantos is pissed at skull who then proceeds to have a geriatric laughing fit and explode into birds so you know normal stuff of Valkyrie then approaches us and explains that the banner we were flying was out of full stag a giant War leader who raids the area of course people were pissed off at us it's a trick that Loki likes to use to spread chaos between the Clans this uh might have been a surprise but for the last two missions Loki was our major deity having his name right on the screen sort of spoils the fact that some Tom Foolery was going on this is Ragan Leaf she was the one who ordered the expeditionary Force Chiron met in Egypt she thinks that despite Loki's treachery we can still unify the remaining Clans this time without the banner before we get into this Mission wouldn't it be absolutely hilarious if this was another of Loki's tricks wouldn't that be amazing imagine a story bold enough to have us get duped by Loki with the banner Shenanigans and then right after he does the same exact thing I really wish this were the case here on fortunately it's not instead there are three villages who give us a task each time we finish one they join us the first one is a two-parter trolls are invading the town this fight shows how absolutely underpowered the troll is they're myth units but are getting absolutely kicked over like dominoes it's sad really what a terrible unit once the trolls are pushed out of the town we go into the mines there's an underworld passage that's reinforcing them once that's destroyed and the trolls are cleared out we gain control of the remaining Village one down two to go the next Clan wants assistance with building some fortifications to make them I'm gonna need some Norse infantry which brings us to our next exciting episode of weird Norse designs that are sometimes cool and sometimes confusing today we have the throwing axemen the gimmick on this unit is that it's ranged but it's considered infantry this means that for any upgrades relics or God powers that work on classical melee infantry they also work here the unit also deals damage like infantry instead of doing the commonly assisted piercing damage like most ranged units the throne axes are considered hacking damage which is almost entirely for melee units with these things combined none of it really matters it's a short range unit that deals decent damage it's got a lot of weird exceptions to rules but none of them actually really change how the game is played or what you want to do with the unit they don't feel different from archers when they're used on the field they do build towers though and once I fend off a few giant raids and complete five the second town is now my Ally the final clan leader tells me that the Giants have kidnapped his daughter and I must rescue her I lead the charge with my new myth unit the battle bore these guys are fast and tough able to easily soak damage from my throwing axemen they also have a special attack where they Buck around knocking enemies back and stunning them it's really fun but apparently it can't be used unless small units like humans are nearby and you can't manually trigger abilities in this game so I just can't show it off right now I'll try to remember in the future but no promises as soon as I get into the final giant base the game goes from 0 to 100 really quick the defense wave here is huge and does some big damage to me my reinforcements are then intercepted by a wave of giants that smash the towers I built and a huge troll wave spawned in the top left and attacked my main base I had no option other than to YOLO dive the tower and rescue the daughter fortunately battle bores deal Siege damage so they managed to pull me out of a sticky situation and double fortunately the clan leader doesn't actually want his daughter back once she's out of the tower it's fine the mission ends as I was looking things up later I found this really funny Easter egg with this lady if you click on the in-game lore thing for her this is what pops up and I think that it's wonderful little things like this do such a good job of adding charm to a game almost as much charm as Greta actually let's take a minute to talk about that in-game encyclopedia it's pretty darn nice if you right click on any icon in the game it will open the relevant encyclopedia entry to it not only does this have a more detailed breakdown of a unit's cost statistics strengths and weaknesses but every other mentioned thing is linked so you can just click on it and jump to that page it's a really handy way to get a good overview about a unit there are also nice little flavor entries about everything structures units and upgrades well I don't think this is really necessary for things like a house it is nice to have some context for some of the more exotic myth units what are they what do they do how many hands tall are they Etc all in all the encyclopedia is a really nice tool from back before when fans expected people just create wikis for them while the game doesn't cover everything that I would like the encyclopedia does patch up a lot of things would otherwise be very confusing and on top of it it hides some really decent jokes if you're looking hard enough gargarences and his army were spotted nearby he's building fortifications around The Well of ERD another entrance to the underworld one thing I really like about age mythology is how the missions have a variety of objectives most other rts's at the time had the large majority of their mission objectives as something simple like destroy the enemy base this is because their triggers were Bare Bones and they simply couldn't code things that were more complicated even though this game avoids that for the most part I think that near the end of every campaign there should always be a big open macro Mission with very little direction from the game where the player has access to all the tools that they've been learning to use and can win in whichever way they want this mission is exactly that and it's wonderful gargorensis starts attacking pretty early with large numbers of forces and from multiple different angles fortifications are basically required here otherwise my villagers and dwarves are gonna get smoked and I need as many of them as I can get for a special surprise later I've been alluding to it for a while now but the Norse campaign does feel rushed in comparison to the Recon Egyptian campaigns the missions are all playable absolutely but they lack in the small pieces of polish that make you go wow that was really well thought out freya's Forest Firepower is a perfect example of that because this Mission starts in the second age it is the default power we begin with and it's absolutely useless here the power lights tree is on fire burning them to the ground and dealing big damage to nearby units and buildings the problem is that the enemy doesn't care about resources in the campaign at all you can't tactically deny them Lumber or anything like that this would be fine if there were some cleverly placed trees around the map if there was a Thicket next to a couple production structures you could take them down or a small Grove sitting between two sets of walls so you could burn it down and sneak through but no the power is just bad here and it's disappointing because it has a lot of potential super cool uses I want to get a strong economy out quickly here and the only way to get villagers faster is with an additional Town Center but to gain that I need some Siege worshiping Nord gives me access to the mount giant who's almost as tall as I am these big boys enjoy hanging out with their Bros and clubbing I also try to use the awakened trees as a Siege platform again but honestly these guys just suck also you can't light them on fire with the forest fire ability even though it would be really cool once I have a massive economy I go for another of these weird Norse units the basic formula on a faction Siege weapons is that in the heroic age a melee Siege weapon is unlocked such as the siege Tower or the portable RAM and in the Mythic age a range unit is unlocked like the Catapult the blister follows that Trend but it's an odd Siege weapon instead of being extra good against buildings they fire a volley of shots in an area making them very effective against clusters of enemy units they still do decent damage against buildings it's just not as much as other Siege weapons I make a ton of them if I want to break gargarence's defenses I'm cargurrence's defenses I'm gonna need a good siege Army but an army of rain Siege weapons needs a little bit of support this is where one of my favorite God Powers comes in Ragnarok it is arguably the most extreme power in the game when activated all of my workers are permanently transformed into melee Heroes it is the epitome of an all-in strategy there is no coming back from Ragnarok you either win quickly or you die fortunately the power of the ballista combined with the heroes of Ragnarok are too much for gargorensis he sends multiple strong defensive waves but they're all pushed back by my 250 Supply Army his final wave of fire Giants Falls and I claim the well-overd and away to the underworld we've claimed the wellvered and found another door to Tartarus and another Ram this has gotten so common at this point that even arcantos is annoyed at how often he has to hear the Rams thumping on the doors once again we have to stop them so let's get to it the game takes its third shot at a split Mission and this time I think it does a much better job instead of building up in two separate locations simultaneously the map is split into halves the above ground portion has traditional Base building macro while the underground portion has no building and must be progressed through to get to the ram units can move freely between portions by clicking on The Well of ERD I like this design by focusing production in one area it's possible to try to split people's attention but also avoid catastrophic loss scenarios from Bad rally points on the like the above ground area also has no gold so instead I have to send my dwarves on an AUX cart undergrounds to harvest I opt to leave my heroes down there as well to defend the only one that I split off is Chiron this is because as I was scouting I found that the top side area was a wide open field last time we encountered a map design like this I wanted to go for centaurs but I couldn't this time I have a hero Centaur and start with the ability to make Valkyries so finally I can play the horse game as I Scout a little bit more I notice another novelty this enemy base is a normal Skirmish enemy they don't have a large pre-built base instead they're building workers harvesting and structures from scratch I thought this was a really cool idea we haven't seen this much in the campaign and it makes sense that gargorensis is rebuilding his base after we thrashed his main Fortress in the last mission earlier I had talked about how the valkyrie was probably a really good harassment unit and now I can test that out as soon as I saw that the enemy was building like normal I felt like the stars had aligned and I made my move Norse Cavalry are pretty decent the raiding Cavalry is fast but only strong against archers they Skirmish well though and quickly I find myself on the outskirts of the enemy base picking off infantry and harassing workers each time the bite ends Mahi Valkyries heal everybody up and we're good to go again it feels kinda busted once I get enough troops bragi's flaming weapons power doubles the attack of my human soldiers for 60 seconds including my Cavalry with this burst of power I managed to take down the town center and sort of accidentally kill my enemy within 10 minutes if this design was common I think it would be pretty lame but as a one-off I love the fact that there is a mission where this early aggression actually has value and shines with the bass clear I can now shift my focus entirely to the underground I start building jarls who are fast durable Cavalry that pack a punch they have no extreme weaknesses and get a bonus against myth units to boot it's exactly the sort of well-rounded combatant that I want to help me attack into this large defensive line the enemy fire Giants do some pretty major area damage with their attacks but the yarls and Valkyrie are quite fast so I can spread them out the mission was short and sweet but I managed to secure the ram this was a fun one I enjoyed it quite a bit what I don't like as much is the ending as soon as we defeat the Defenders a giant death wave spawns chases us away and this happens Chiron go Adrian mythology does so so many things well but its characterization of the heroes that are not both Greek and human is not its focus because of that chiron's sacrifice here Falls a bit flat the game simply doesn't spend that much time on a Monroe Dragon life or Chiron and that's okay but as a result it felt more like a decision to get him out of the way because there's too many Heroes instead of him valiantly sacrificing himself to save the world it's weird a Monroe of all people gives a single line of mourning to Chiron before the heroes once again stumble upon the dwarf Brock they've been following us around but they didn't want to come with us directly because they thought we might have been one of Loki's tricks which is honestly solid logic Loki has smashed Thor's hammer and the dwarves intend to rebuild it I want to take a moment to say that I find it sort of fascinating that in 2002 Thor's hammer was such an obscure thing that they didn't actually name it but 20 years later basically everybody knows the name mjolnir it's kind of crazy how quickly pop culture can inform us anyway the dwarves are mining in the Taproot to create the half to the hammer and then they'll meet up with etri who has the head this is a cool little no build Mission we start with a few units a few dwarves and an ox cart the dwarves can do two things they can mine gold which will be sent in segments of 400 to get reinforcements or they can harvest the Taproot to progress the objective meanwhile gargorenza sends waves of trolls Giants and the like to disrupt it's up to the player to decide when they want to stop with goldheart harvesting and get a move on I love the agency here a confident player can try to get by with a few reinforcements but a safer one can choose to build up a few more forces a moment later each respawns on the other side of the map he doesn't get any sort of reinforcement mechanic but does have the Hammerhead and some hairs here who are fantastic against these myth units I hope to be pretty bold with my gold harvesting I honestly probably get too much of it because I'm very greedy and I like money once it's all gone I go for the Taproot which casually takes 4 000 chops to finish off after about three thousand of those chops the Giants break through the rock wall that Chiron had created and start marching I have no idea if this trigger is based on the amount of time that I've taken or percentage of the objective being done all I know is that I gotta get out of here I quickly finish building up my stick and start charging towards Eatery we meet up get our Hammer pieces together and that's it Mission done Thor takes the wheel swings his hammer around boops the final Tartarus gate and uh the ground explodes with the final Tartarus gate sealed gargorensis is pissed he is going to send everything that he has against us and we need to hold him off there's a fortified mining town to the east we head there and start building up I have 10 minutes before the assault Begins for this final Norse Mission I decide to do something a bit weird I previously talked a bit about the dwarf an alternate Norse Harvester who costs gold instead of wood and Harvest Gold at 20 increased rate well this is a mining town so what if I went all in on gold of course I'll need a bit of food and wood as well and I'll talk about how I get those in a bit but first I need to build up in these 10 minutes I opt for a simple setup of walls instead of masses of towers behind them I make the Fenris wolf brood this myth unit is fairly weak on its own but each nearby wolf gives an 18 bonus in damage and movement speed up to seven my plan is to use them as a high damage rapid response Force covering all the angles I also get the ultimate power fimble winter which spawns packs of uncontrolled wolves to attack my enemies the Wolves all die without doing anything and I'm fairly unimpressed after 10 minutes of building defenses a cutscene plays skolt and gargarences demand our surrender and Ajax gives our response foreign move a little closer so be it now the fight begins gargorensis will send waves of attackers to me through the remainder of the mission hitting all three entrances to my base he even gets a bit crazy and uses an underworld passage to backstab me which is a nice touch and does some serious damage I talked about the Fenris wolf brood earlier but this unit has a problem it's actually just super bad it's considered one of the worst units in the game the wolves die without doing anything and I'm fairly unimpressed I'm gonna need a real army but how can I get one with only gold I make use of one of my favorite structures in the age of series The Market I've talked a bit about the market before with trading Caravans but markets have another function as well you can buy and sell increments of 100 food and wood for gold each time you do it the deal becomes slightly worse for you this mechanic is simple intuitive and Brilliant resource balancing is one of the hardest things in RTS keeping a proper income of each type takes hundreds to thousands of games seems to get perfect the market provides a solution to players who are having issues with that balance but the solution isn't perfectly efficient meaning that as players improve they'll want to rely less and less on it it fixes a very frustrating part of the game for casual players in a way that doesn't give a silly advantage to competitive ones I honestly don't know why most other RTS haven't grabbed this and implemented in their own games in some way shape or form this is why I went big gold just to show off how flexible the system is in order to make my strategy work I'm gonna need to buy lots of food and a bit of wood given this is the final Norse Mission I wanted to showcase the final Norse unit that I haven't gotten to talk about yet the olfsarc it's uh it's the basic Norse infantryman normally this would be a big bag of who cares but the unit is a perfect example of how flexible the worshiping system for deities is in this game remember that each deity is more than a myth unit and a god power they also bring some unique upgrades so let's talk about the humble ulfsarc the base unit has 80 HP 30 hack armor and 5 Pierce armor and it attacks for 10 damage infantry can get the medium heavy and Champion infantry upgrades each giving 10 bonus damage and 10 15 and 20 Health respectively the copper bronze and iron weapons upgrades each give 10 more damage there's also copper bronze and iron upgrades for mail to give hack armor and shields to give piercing armor these are all stock standard normal but then come the god upgrades having Thor is your special deity means that the weapons and armor upgrades have an additional tier giving 10 more each for seti's mithril breastplate gives another 10 to hack attacks and bragi's call of the Valhalla gives 15 more HP and his swine array upgrade gives them double damage against Cavalry and finally tears Berserker gang gives him another 10 attack and 15 hit points with everything combined the old sart goes from 80 HP to 164. 30 hack armor goes to 58 5 five percent piercing armor to 37 and 10 damage goes to 18 with double against Cavalry a strategy built around making all sarks as powerful as possible makes them over twice as good as their base form this is the beauty of Age of Mythology you can mix and match upgrades to make whatever you want be strong do you want to have gigaults arcs go for it powerful archers behind tanky Cavalry not a problem Pure Glass Cannon force of death be my guest every single play style is supported if you look hard enough and figure out how you want to approach it it's not optimal to mine only gold it's not optimal to make meme myth units and then transition into Uber upgraded Wolf's arcs but it doesn't have to be optimal the fact that it's possible at all makes Age of Mythology such a special game and that is why I love it over these 30 missions I have done 30 different strategies each with their pluses and minuses but none of them being invalid this trend will continue you until we're done with a campaign and even then I won't have scratched the surface with the number of potential combinations it's so great and it makes me want to come back to the game time and time again after 20 minutes of holding off attacks Odysseus shows up with an army this was not really foreshadowed at all he's just here now and I don't know why but that's fine with his added Legions we take the fight to the enemy I breach their defenses capture gargorensis and in the following cut scene you're sure you don't want to take him back to Atlantis put him in a cage somewhere no he'll never set foot in my homeland this is for Chiron Ajax executes him with gargarences defeated Our Heroes set sail back to Atlantis to show their countrymen the victory they have won they fasten the head of the Cyclops to let's not get ahead of ourselves here with the aid of scolt who you may have figured out by now is Loki the villains used magic to disguise kempsit as gargarensis as we were warding off his attacks our antagonist was heading back to Atlantis and it's on fire yo this mission is really fun we start with a massive Naval Invasion Fleet seven transports packed to the brim with a menagerie of myth units from each faction after we're greeted with some meteors and smashed the coastal defenses we get a base and start the main objective the entire map is a city controlled by gargarencis our goal is to rescue 15 Atlantean prisoners and Ferry them to safety I quickly build two Town centers and get my macro engine going the game starts me with maxed out favor and my Supply can get over 200 making this the biggest macro mission in the game so far the starting myth units I get are pretty strong but instantly the enemy starts to will them down the attacks here are decently sized and they hit often to slow down the enemy production I opt to charge directly into their heart and it goes well enough I managed to rescue my first batch of prisoners and knock down my opponent's centralized production which will slow him down but I also lose basically everything so it's a bit of a wash it's okay though I end up with about 80 workers and can pretty quickly pump out a big army for this Mission I don't know what I'm gonna fight so I go for a well-rounded composition I get some hop lights for anti-cavery hit pass pists are a nice anti-infantry and some hypocon Cavalry for anti-archer Duty a few heliopoli are fantastic against buildings and I might as well spend that favor on some tanky hydras to sew shots and deal out the pain can you see what I mean about being able to do anything in this game I literally decided to arbitrarily make an army that only started with h and it ended up being a well-rounded composition with no real weaknesses the crazy thing here is I was actually considering do doing with marmadon Medusa manticores and Minotaur at first I had options it's so cool but even with big H energy it's not an easy Mission the enemy is now doing stuff like sending Cavalry raids against my workers and I need my economy I end up being forced to use my lightning storm ultimate to defend while I'm out of position when this Army gets to fight though things do go well units do definitely die because I'm never playing this game deathless but they're easily replaceable and my Army stays pretty large one thing I like about this Mission design is that not all the buildings are hostile there's a good number of neutral Atlantean buildings around the map that kind of serve as set dressing and are not damaged during the fighting it feels nice for the goal to not be burning the entire city down that you're supposed to be protecting a lot of games kind of would have you do that after a bit of alternating between defending and attacking I have freed 14 out of 15 required prisoners and I find the location of a final prison I send my mega Death Army and whoa there's actually a seriously impressive amount of stuff here gargorensis drops his own lightning storm power on my Army and sends in the bulky Cyclops and Colossus he completely shreds the non-mythical portion of my Army and even our cantos goes down fortunately my macro is decent so I'm able to keep my Supply up but I was worried for a bit the AI is really impressing me at times which is great because this is how it should be near the end of a campaign but unfortunately for them my production is a bit too much I managed to escort the prisoners off of the island and claim my penultimate Victory against gargorensis as Ajax and the rest of the heroes help evacuate civilians arcantos prepares to take the fight to gargorensis once and for all and he finally figures out their plan Kronos Poseidon and gargarences had conspired to send arcantos on a wild goose chase to the Trojan War hopefully getting him killed because the final tartaring gate is in Atlantis with the blessing of the Gods and Titans gargorensis animates the statue of Poseidon armed with the Trident we recovered so long ago and the final battle commences this mission is an absolute hot mess it's just wild to gain the ultimate blessing of Zeus we must construct a Wonder but for real this time not like the bugged version that didn't do anything in the Norse campaign but in order to do that we have to reach the Mythic age and get 1 000 of each Resource as well as complete the extremely long build time the enemy is insane here they are the most brutal attack waves in the campaign Bar None they are big and frequent sometimes a second wave hits me while the first wave is still being cleaned up fortunately to help out we have friends a Norse bases to the north and an Egyptian bases to the south of our position helping out in a few ways first of all they exist and have units meaning that they help out in defense a bit additionally they'll gift you units occasionally and not wimpy ones the Norse repeatedly give mountain and frost Giants and the Egyptians are looking a little bit worse giving only the anubite but eventually give a freaking son of Osiris who is just a monster when he gets to blast Behind These Giants I can also heal my forces at this nearby healing spring uh trust me there there's a healing spring here it just bugged out and the stone part didn't load properly what you gonna do the mission also has a bonus objective and it is something I absolutely positively adore we've interacted with the Vault of Plenty a couple times before they're neutral structures that can be captured by having troops near them and provide a trickle of income to the controller there are four of these spread around the map each guarded by gargarence's forces the game doesn't have an audio line it doesn't have a bonus objective pop-up or anything like that all it does is give you vision of these and let you go on your way normally I wouldn't like this but for the final mission of a campaign to me this is a sign that they're not babying you anymore they've spent 32 missions teaching us everything we need to know there doesn't need to be a tutorial about grabbing the Plenty Vault or something like that in the final mission they just trust you I do capture one of the vaults pretty early but the enemy makes sure to reclaim them every time they attack which is pretty often so I lose it a bunch to hold off the enemy I decide it is time to unleash what is arguably the strongest unit in ancient mythology the Colossus I've had a couple of them here and there I fought a few as well but this time I go for them in Mass they have more HP than most buildings fantastic armor and a weapon that deals both hacking and crushing damage making them great against almost everything the only downside is that they're really slow I use them to support my Giants and hydras making a really tall Army arcantos must feel really short here like I can't even see him half of the time once I get a big enough Army and hold off an attack wave I send my forces to the left to claim another plenty Vault the enemy doesn't have many defenses here I grabbed the Vault and then kill the nearby Temple which is when I learned something very interesting and the game quickly devolves into chaos when you kill an enemy temple on this Mission Zeus blesses you with the use of the meteor power and for cinematic purposes I have vision of the Tartarus gate which is flanked with a total of four temples and uh meteor meteor kills temples so I start blasting I use this meteor between the two temples one of them dies before the other giving me a meteor that I immediately use on more temples right after that the second temple dies giving me another use of meteor that I drop on a fortress then the Third Temple dies giving me another meteor that I drop on another Fortress and then unfortunately the fourth temple just dodged all the meteors somehow and I didn't get to finish the chain reaction and then my Army finds another Temple while all this was happening gargar granzas actually struck back using the earthquake power to completely wipe out my Norse Ally so this wasn't exactly a one-sided Affair but I wasn't even watching it it didn't matter my side is way better I kill this Temple drop a meteor on the Ninja Temple yet another meteor that I drop on all of gargarence's production and suddenly he can't build anything so I start to get thinking if you're familiar with my channel you probably know that I got my start with RTS challenge runs and I'm supposed to beat this giant death Behemoth of a statue with empowered arcantos by building a Wonder this made me think of my escapades against cenarius and Warcraft 3 deathless maybe I can kill him without empowered arcantos to answer this question I use my Colossus to remove the remaining production and Garrison of gargorensis and then engage that what the heck is gargarence is doing over here he he's supposed to be down near the gate behind a wall of rocks so he can't be hit but I took my eyes off of this fight for just a moment and somehow he teleported into this corner next to the fire at first I thought the meteors had ragdolled him over here but they absolutely didn't when I look at the footage I don't know what this guy is doing or how he got here at this point I sort of lost interest in the Statue and I'm trying to figure out what's happening with garcorensis so why kill him and the model doesn't have a death animation because you're not supposed to be able to attack him so when he runs out of HP he just keeps raising his Trident in the same spot so that's cool anyway this big statue man has 20 000 HP and 85 damage reduction against all damage types and massive HP regeneration I expend a maxed out Army of Colossus and managed to take him down to about 75 percent but honestly at this point I'm actually kind of concerned that I'm gonna break the game if I go any farther so I just build the Wonder once it completes I gain the blessing of Zeus a god power that when used on arcantos turns him into gigara cantos who hits the statue for 500 damage per hit and basically doesn't take damage himself in the final fight arkanto's brawls with the Statue while an absolutely huge number of myth units Spawn from the gate it's actually really scary fortunately the Colossus are very tanky and while they couldn't win the fight on their own they buy enough time that arcantos defeats the statue he leaps up impales the head with his Spear and the statue collapses impaling gargorensis as he falls ending the Cyclops for good as the boats flee Odysseus amanra and Ajax look at Atlantis as it crumbles sinking into the sea and finally Athena stands before the collapsed body of our camp raising him into a demigod and then the credits play and I can't show them because for some reason they're not actually played in age mythology but it launches some video file and OBS doesn't pick it up properly but it's basically a slideshow so you're not missing anything the base campaign of Age of Mythology is a lot of fun the missions have fantastic variety the strategies and units are phenomenal gargorensis is interesting and the idea of having all three factions in the same campaign was bold and they pulled it off with just this Age of Mythology would be a great game and absolutely worth playing but there's probably a question at this point that you've been wondering for a while why the heck is there an hour left in this video we're done right to answer that question requires a bit of context about the history of real-time strategy games back in the day before software as a service there was a pretty common formula that every RTS followed the game would come out hopefully be reviewed well and about a year after an expansion pack would come out nowadays expansions kind of get lumped together with DLC but that was far from what it was like when the initial campaigns of most rts's are made the editor and unit designs are being made alongside them they don't have access to all the tools that will eventually make it into the game they don't exactly know what every unit is going to do when they design missions and they don't have the experience with the engine and Editor to make it do what they want but with expansions that is not the case Warcraft 2 beyond the dark portal Starcraft brood War Red Alert 2 Yuri's Revenge Age of Empires 2 the conquerors expansion and Warcraft 3 The Frozen Throne each one of them took an incredible base game multiplied it with the experience the developers now had and came up with something so fundamentally great that they often Define many of the most important moments best designed missions and iconic characters for their respective series back then you played through the base game yeah partially because it was fun but often it was to get to this content so with that in mind welcome to Age of Mythology the Titans mansion Ten Years After the events of the first game Atlantis has sunk and the Atlantean people find themselves as Nomads arcantos's son Castor has grown up Theo has renamed himself Creos and everybody is miserable on this Barren Wasteland of an island the gods have abandoned the atlanteans but there may be hope kryos has had a vision of an abandoned Temple if they can find it it may be the key to a better life so let's get looking the atlanteans are the fourth and final faction of Age of Mythology added in the expansion they follow the same basic concepts of the others but have their own twists first are the villagers they cost about three times as many resources and Supply to build they take forever to make but they harvest at an insane rate they also have a donkey which I assume is the reason they don't have to occasionally return resources to the town center like other workers do I don't know why having a donkey makes me understand this mechanic but it absolutely does so nice work Ensemble that's neat Atlantean combat units follow the same formula as villagers they cost more Supply and money than their counter Parts but are stronger the beginning of the mission is pretty simple train 5 mermillo the basic infantry that are good against Cavalry I can also train Arcus archers who can handle the enemy infantry while I don't have a lot of options here the mission is actually pretty brutal early and often some pretty big raids come and start attacking my workers this is one of the things I love about expansions they can rightfully assume that you've played the base game right now you're able to naturally teach players through these raids that Atlantean workers are fantastic but losing them is devastating this would not be possible in a non-contrived scenario without this level of difficulty and most of the time you can't justify making a tutorial hard it's really cool natural teaching that I have a ton of respect for there's limited food on the island and it's too cold to place Farms this mechanic helps reinforce the lesson about villagers even more as the only option is to continually expand out searching for animals to hunt and berries to forage making you more vulnerable to raids after holding off one of these attacks I figure it's time to figure out where where the dream Temple is or where the raids are coming from honestly either works I head out and quickly come upon one of the outposts to Siege it up krios has occasionally been giving me fire siphons The atlantean-ranged Siege unit they aren't particularly special they just do strong crushing damage at range but I love the line of fire they spew out it looks really cool after finding another Outpost the enemy is basically out of steam I find a small Valley and I'm shown the temple that Creos told us about it's surrounded by Bandits that put up a bit of a fight but go down easily one thing I find interesting is how small the Atlantean armies are the elite soldier Motif is a completely valid one but due to the fact that they're the same size as other infantry and don't look particularly special I have a hard time judging how fights are gonna go I always feel outnumbered the temple that we rescue is a sky passage a building that can transport units I load in some villagers unload them on the other side and start the Town Center at my new significantly nicer looking home the gods have brought us to this new fertile Island but it wasn't Zeus and friends this passage Bears the mark of the Titan orranos and their overgrown temples dedicated to him and Kronos nearby krios argues that we should show thanks to them for leading us here by restoring their temples to the former glory Castor agrees it's better to follow aranos than to be scorned by all of the Gods some Greek Scouts see this sacrilegious practice and move to alert their allies the beginning of the mission is pretty simple build up an economy and task some villagers to repair the temples but it isn't long until two stick boys come and poke at us the Greeks are angry and the atlanteans aren't sure why they're old allies after all right after another attack the restoration of the first temple is complete and aranos blesses us with a behemoth our first Atlantean myth unit behemoths are big bulky Siege engines who obliterate buildings and regenerate wait a minute I feel like I've given this description before this is an unfair comparison though of course when you have so many Miss units you're gonna have a little bit of overlap it's the differences that make units unique scarabs and behemoths are nothing alike for example the Scarab has 30 hack armor while the Behemoth has 30 percent and for piercing armor the Scarab has 75 while the Behemoth has a whopping 75 percent the Scarab costs an entire 300 food five populations and 20 seconds of build time while the much more accessible Behemoth only costs 300 food five population and 20 seconds to build there are actually a whole lot of really cool Atlantean myth units most of them are pretty neat I don't know why they decided that our first look into the faction has to be this lazy uninspired copied homework it's pretty lame I wonder if the behemoths also have a hidden explosion when they die anyway we can't actually build myth units here we get the ones from repairing the temples and that's it after finding another one and cleaning out a Greek Village I worship Prometheus and get the god power of Valor Atlantean God powers are something unique my only real criticism of the god power system so far is that everything is single use Ensemble agreed that this wasn't great and the atlanteans get multiple uses of their powers as indicated by Pips above them each has a cool down so they can't be spammed but it's nice to have though it is a little bit awkward for the Egyptians Norse and Greeks who still have a one charge system I feel like that should have been updated for everybody when the expansion came out I have two charges of the Valor power which interacts with the next Atlantean mechanic Heroes listen I know we're talking a lot about mechanics here I get it but we do it now so we can all be on the same page later and just enjoy the awesome Mission designs in the future every faction has some sort of hero to combat myth units the Greeks have the unique hero units that can be recruited from the town hall like Hercules or Jason the Egyptians have the Pharaohs and Priests and the Norse have their hair Seer infantry the atlanteans on the other hand can promote any human unit into a hero even villagers the promotion itself is very expensive costs about as much as a unit does and gives them a small bonus to health as well as 5 five times extra damage guns myth units The Valor power can promote a small group of units in an area without paying anything each promotion also costs favor so atlanteans will need to balance their hero and myth unit production as they cost the same resource not right now though I can't build myth units so I max out on a giant army use the Valor power to turn some of my guys into Heroes and then promote the remainder of them with cash until I have the biggest Doom Army I can muster I will talk about where I'm getting all this favor from later because it is important but I'm done talking about Mechanics for now once I invaded the Greek settlement an event started where I was granted that's me where I was granted vision of a Greek training ground that's constantly building up and sending attack waves once my hero Army is complete I grab my dinosaurs and go smashing the camp goes down fairly cleanly and All That Remains is the main Greek base and my goodness is that an absolute ton of greeky boys to help the fight I use some of my new God Powers Shockwave doesn't deal damage but knocks enemy units around dispersing their formations while chaos temporarily causes enemies to fire on their our allies with a maxed Army of Heroes all slinging my God Powers I get dumpstered I'm gonna have to change up a bit I start adding destroyers into the mix big Shield boys with tridents they're actually the Atlantean version of battering rams or Siege Towers but they're so small they actually fit pretty well into a pitched battle to reinforce I use aranos's special structure the sky passage any unit that enters a passage can be unloaded at any other one building them is a bit risky but the reinforcement potential is incredible the defense that the Greeks put up here is by far and away the most impressive thing I have seen in this game so far I end up throwing over a hundred of expensive Atlantean soldiers Into The Fray just to slowly Whittle the enemy down when I finally make it into their base I can see why they were so tough they have three Barracks three stables and three archery ranges constantly bumping out units the AI is a macro monster here mission 2 of the expansion is significantly harder than anything in the base game it's wild eventually my Pitchfork men poke the buildings hard enough that they fall over and I'm able to overwhelm the Greek forces the jerks finally leave the island once and for all but why the heck did the Greeks attack us we're supposed to be friends right Castor agrees to lead an expedition to figure out what the heck is going on but he'd like it to be peaceful if he can the Greek forces Retreat to the mainland and warn general malaysius of the Atlantean aggression the general calls for Egyptian and Norse Aid and prepares to defend his home meanwhile Castor lands with like six dudes and is ready to rumble this mission is a prime example of the really cool things that can happen when you have time to design a campaign to both fit a faction and the pre-established narratives and to tell us what's going on we might have the least enthusiastic reading of a voice line that I have ever heard we have no town center and no way to get one thanks for the information soldier who is definitely not reading that line for the first time what a guy Atlantean villagers don't have to return resources anywhere so why would we need a town center the mission starts us off with a small Force next to one of the many plenty vaults already established to exist in Greek territory we're expected to use a mix of harvesting with our few villagers and capturing these vaults to fund our war effort against General malagius I really like this design idea it takes inspiration from the Plenty vaults in the final base Game mission and combines it with a new mechanic to show off there are a few pitfalls in the design though mostly the fact that atlanteans get favor through town centers which we can't build the game remedies this by giving you five favor occasionally it doesn't bring attention to this and it really hopes you don't notice how contrived it is I think this could have been dealt with more cleanly by having the vaults themselves give favor along with the trickle of resources even if they had to signify that their special vaults somehow because so much of a player's income is From the Vault you have to maintain control of a large area in order to keep even a couple of them secure so what Ensemble did was really smart they just put a bunch of little events around the map to discover as you march towards the vaults you get to raid a fishing Village and make them fish for you polyphemus's cave is to the East and we can finish what Odysseus started there are some statues to break one that gives faith when destroyed and another that spawns Archer statues to defend this Valley there's just a bunch of these little things around the map and it makes wandering around and finding things really fun General millegius is not happy with me frolicking around his home though and is quite aggressive he loves sending little raids around which is very strong because we're spread out to combat him I have hyperion's myth unit the Seder these guys are not flashy they sit in the back and toss Spears all day but they put out the punishment really quick the damage is amazing to support them with a front line I make Atlantean infantry both the mermillo and the counter Cavalry catapultis okay I've been trying to make a joke work right here for a really long time like oh it ends in belties and the saters Pelt with ease yeah no it's not it's not coming together so I'm just not even gonna try so we've established here that the Seder is pretty darn good but what other reasons did I worship Hyperion for uh I didn't have a choice this is gonna come up repeatedly in the Titans expansion the game has some absolutely awesome ideas for mission but as a result the curated environment railroads players into specific deity choices almost always the first three deities are pre-picked for you this isn't a complaint I think that this sort of design is good this mission is a ton of fun and if I had to Tech up two separate tiers to get here it would have been much slower and more boring but I wanted to bring this up now just so we could pay attention to how long it actually is before we get to pick our own myth unit once I've maxed out my Army I take the fight to the Greek General fortunately for me his Entourage consists of like Five Guys whoa that's a lot of myth units the final fight here once again impressed me the general hit my flank with a Giant Raid of Minotaur while he held the center my entire front line is cut away and only the Seder survive when the general goes down if he had a bit more health I absolutely would have gotten wiped out here at this point I feel like I'm complimenting the AI every Mission and that's a good thing the Titans expansion does not pull its punches it absolutely gives players all of the tools that they need in order to win but it also expects them to actually use those tools that is exactly how I like difficulty in games and it is really fun as the atlanteans kill the general and March towards the Greek city a relief force of Norse and Egyptians arrive we cannot win this fight but Caster has another idea we counter-attacked to the north while the Norse armies are mobilized in Greece the atlanteans strike their Homeland and they're here to send a message we will raise the Temple of Odin to the ground this mission is another one that's built specifically to show off a couple of lantian mechanics kronos's ability to move structures and the vortex God power the goal is to eliminate three temples on plateaus and replace them with Atlantean temples this will make Odin's super Temple vulnerable so that we can destroy it our main base starts off completely sealed in so I can be super greedy economically because I'm so nope uh the Norse Force uses the forest Firepower to bust away into my base and starts attacking really quickly this is the type of stuff that I was talking about before with the forest Firepower it's so cool the game legitimately caught me off guard here with some really clever power use no other RTS has the sheer potential for awesome map designs because of the god power mechanic and I love to see it used well as the raids keep coming and they don't stop coming I realize I'm gonna need a strong Frontline to hold things off so I start making Prometheans they're fairly generic melee Fighters with decent bulk and split into two when they're killed basically doubling their durability behind them I put Cherry-O ballista an expensive anti-inventory unit that looks a lot like a Siege weapon but reality just puts down the pain in an area to finish off my composition I get some destroyers the plan is to hold the enemy in melee with the Prometheans and destroyers while the chariableista hit groups of them as I move out towards the first temple I test my strategy and it works really well I cleave through the Norse and reach the bottom of the plateau of the first temple and use Bliss to kill it once that's done I get to show off the time shift mechanic when worshiping Kronos each Atlantean building can pay a fee to be transported to any location that you have vision of the process is slow the building is vulnerable during it and only one building can be shifted at a time but despite the limitations it's a very nice ability to relocate and once the temple is erected that's exactly what we're gonna have to do this map is split into three separate valleys with no way to walk between them instead of marching an army I have to use another tool but first I need vision of the next Valley which is where the Atlantean Scout unit comes in the Oracle oracles are a very weird design for a scout their movement speed is slow their Vision range is abysmal but once they stop moving for a few seconds their Vision rapidly gains in size and eventually shows a huge area for us this is perfect I can see into the next Valley where I use the vortex power to send my Army in Vortex is a bit insane you click a location and every army unit you own gets teleported to that location it's normally a fourth year God power with three charges but we start with four uses of it here it isn't as flashy as other 4th tier powers like meteor but it's incredibly powerful oh and my other ability that I have is deconstruction it uh it deconstructs the building once my Army is teleported in and secures the area I time shift my production structures over to reinforce and push towards the second temple once again the enemy defenses are pretty decent but having an entire Valley to myself or my workers cannot be harassed means I can outproduce the enemy and break through claiming the second temple for myself the final objective is significantly easier my Army marches near it gets vision and Vortex is right on top of it I blow it away in seconds making Odin vulnerable with the prime Temple exposed Caster goes full bad manner mode and provides us with an epic version of the deconstruction power that takes the temple apart board by board sealing our Victory against the Norse meanwhile in Egypt a manra is met by the demigod arcantos who warns her of an impending Atlantean assault while her armies are away our job as atlanteans are to steal four Egyptian relics and return them to the Temple of Kronos each provides the use of a god power when returned we start in the middle and are surrounded to fight the Egyptians I want to use one of the more interesting Atlantean myth units the automaton they're melee units that aren't fantastic at fighting for their price and have no combat abilities but once combat ends they can automatically repair each other and even rebuild slain automatons this means that they work fantastically as a Frontline tank constantly rebuilding their numbers after each fight but are risky if you lose them all in a fight you basically spent all of your faith on a do-nothing unit from a technical perspective this Mission isn't anything we haven't seen before each time one of the relics is claimed it gives a god power which is bronze minions tornado and earthquake and they can be approached in any order which is nice so instead of going into detail here I'm gonna gloss over things little bit instead talk about Sound and Music because I wanted to do this for hours now and I just haven't had the chance this might be a bit of a contentious opinion but I personally feel that good sound design and good music are more important than quality Graphics in games listen before you go into the YouTube comments just chillax a bit Graphics do matter obviously but while Graphics age over time audio design is timeless and age of mythology's audio design is fantastic it's fairly normal in RTS that a unit gives a response when it's ordered to do something [Music] in Age of Mythology each faction's responses are all in their respective languages in which EU refer Ence hair Joe's ashlost here Joe's most intimate I don't know why but this is a lot more memorable than them all being in English a funny piece of trivia from Ghost crawler's time working on this game is that because it was made back in the early 2000s there wasn't a whole lot of reliable information on the internet about non-english languages particularly ancient ones so they kind of just cobbled stuff together and tried to make it sound nice nobody actually speaks ancient Egyptian or ancient Greek in this game they just speak a 2002 Tech Bros interpretation of modern Egyptian or Greek and yet it sounds good and it adds a lot of character to the game the fact that it never dawned on them to like go to a nearby library or university and ask for help is also just hilarious to me because if they did then maybe they could have pronounced pet sober the game's music is phenomenal as well I'm gonna crank it up a bit as we talk about the rest of the mission foreign I ended up making a big army of various archers behind my automaton trying to get maximum value from the repairs and rebuilds I used that Army to attack into various enemy fortifications secure The Relic behind it and bring it home another nice mechanical thing about this mission is because only Heroes can carry relics the atlanteans are specially advantaged here being able to promote any human into a hero at any time makes it significantly more convenient than when I had to go make gargarence's do it each returned Relic gives me a god power each God power gives me the combat ability to fight for the next Relic once The Dominoes start falling nothing can stop them and I easily scoop up all four relics and win as the atlanteans surround manra arcantos bolts them and appears once more telling the queen to take her forces and head to Greece the atlanteans are being led by arcantos's son and he is being tricked into this aggression but by who okay I know it's Kronos right like we're literally worshiping him that's not who I meant I meant like some sort of middleman somebody that's not stuck behind a 12 hp door Caster returns from the Norse lands and Creos informs him that the raids in Egypt have been successful the factions are recalling their forces leaving the Greeks vulnerable additionally kryos has found another of oranos's passages and it may lead to a flanking position against the Greeks Castor leads his men through and the passage does not lead behind the enemy this is Mount Olympus and there is no turning back this mission is one of the single most memorable RTS missions I have ever played it is fantastic and I love it I'm generally not a big fan of no build missions they just don't get me going but invading Mount Olympus sign me up the mountain is covered in temples each with a statue in front bring any unit to the temple and it will metamorph into the myth unit represented by the statue occasionally reinforcements will be sent through the sky passage so we can buff up our unit count and get the composition that we want initially we only have access to the Cyclops and the valkyrie but as we progress further we get more options there are also these mini temples each one gives the use of a god power when destroyed and some of these God powers are very clever the first one gives a god power curse at first glance this is a simple way to kill enemies but it is much much more than that remember that Livestock in this game can be controlled this is to herd them towards your Town's Center for harvesting most of the time but that means after transforming my enemy into pigs I can bring them to the temples and make them into Cyclops how many other games have you ever been able to turn your opponents into bovine and then Corral their bacon butts over to a statue to morph them into Cyclops to do your bidding it has to be less than four with this giant army we then get to stomp around finding an enemy base and a temple to transform into hydras we also grab another gazebo this one with the ancestors power which spawns a bunch of very short duration mummies which then get turned into manticores after gobbling up another enemy base I found the god power Pagoda and uh hi Chiron I didn't know you were here but I do know that you're supposed to be dead so I'll fix that for you by clicking my entire Army on Chiron I accidentally transform everybody into manticores so I just decide that's how it is now we're spiky boys and we're loving it the mission really doesn't have a ton of strategy it's just running around and having fun with an enormous myth unit Army of your choosing and that's exactly why it's fun we get this absurd Army that's impossible in any other game format triple the size of anything else you would ever get and made completely out of myth units it's so fun the final enemy defense sends out Heroes like Hercules Achilles and Jason but that is Argonaut my problem and my million quills stare through them As We Lay Siege to the enemy the walls fall and for the first time ever a mortal sets foot on the summit of the mythical Mountain the temple to Zeus is destroyed and they escape through the passage Caster laid Siege to gods and he beat them man that mission is fun a Monroe reaches Greece and finds Ajax as they start to discuss Caster bad things happen that is a Titan on the other side of town Castor Bears witness to the result of his victories with the Olympian gods defeated the Lesser Titans can no longer be contained and are now wrecking havoc in the world eventually being able to free their more powerful Brethren grios has manipulated Caster from the start the sun has undone everything that his father had worked to accomplish and the atlanteans turn on Caster believing that he has betrayed them to the Titans now it's up to a manra and Ajax to save him while fighting off the Titans forces this setup is great it's not exactly subtle that the Titan worshiping faction in the Titans expansion was going to release the Titans but that's fine the build up here was awesome and the fact that we have to deal with literally Prometheus is amazing as well it's not some Avatar not a cutscene it's a literal Titan just cruising around smashing everything in sight just as it should be on a side note the fact that it's Prometheus is the first Titan counter tier is really cool he's often used figuratively in literature to represent the idea of human ambition overreaching and causing great tragedy using a literal Prometheus figuratively like that is really smart well done unfortunately while the theming and symbolism of this Mission are awesome and on point the mission itself is rather underwhelming difficulty in games is tough RTS in particular is famously difficult to balance being able to predict the infinite variations of strategies the player can do just can't be done but one Surefire method to make it a bit easier to manage is to make sure that attack waves send well-balanced compositions of forces so they can't be hard countered this Mission sends exactly one type of unit Prometheans as I said before Prometheans are not bad they have decent stats and split into two when they die but they're melee myth units at heart they don't do anything special this would be bad enough if we were playing as Atlantis where human units can be converted into Heroes but we're playing as a manres Egypt and the priest has a nine times damage modifier against myth units and the range of a cruise missile if that wasn't enough I start with the son of Osiris who's five times damage modifier against myth units means he hits for 300 and Strikes four targets at a time that's pretty good when the Promethean has a 175 HP the objective is to survive for 15 minutes and it's really underwhelming Prometheus goes around smashing buildings in this town occasionally summoning a large army of Prometheans to attack and then goes back to Smashing I understand from a narrative perspective why Prometheus would only have Prometheans but after killing about a hundred of the same myth unit effortlessly I can't help but feel that they could have done a little bit better I end up maxing out on priests with a ton of time remaining and decide that while I was too scared to fight the Poseidon statue I can absolutely ghost flap around this Titan I then learned that Prometheus has infinite HP regeneration and I will not be killing him today so I lose my entire Army my son of Osiris and my heroes are stuck unconscious in the town and at apparently three minutes left on the countdown clock Prometheus comes to murder you despite that it's still a free win all production structures in age mythology have a button when you're training a unit to Auto repeat the construction once done meaning that if for example you have a priest building and you press it it will try to build priests Forever This is a simple little addition that makes macro a lot easier to get into which I think is great for newer players I've actually been using this for like 12 missions trying to find a place that I could talk about it but I keep getting distracted by other things so we're doing it here which is actually great because this is a wonderful place to show it off Prometheus comes to smash me and is Immortal but I have so much freaking money that the auto build temples rallying priests straight into the Titan's foot is more than enough to hold him off for the remaining minutes once time is up I get a quest to send three Rock transports to caster which I build send over and rescue the lab once everybody is safely together arcantos appears warning the heroes that Prometheus is not the only Titan the Northland and Egypt are under siege as well amanra decides that we are to save Egypt first and off we go this mission is not bad but the Promethean attacks are far too repetitive and the lack of variety is incredibly uninteresting there are a few easy fixes that could have really improved this Mission priests only cost gold so not having access to five gold mines early would really force a bit of variety on the player's part having a mix of Prometheans with units that are good against priests also would have been an option the linear gameplay is also reinforced with a lack of relics or anything else worth exploring for on the map the mission really just disappoints in quite a few Avenues it's a darn shame this great build up was let down by the gameplay which is very rare in Age of Mythology and the fact that it happened here right as the action starts to rise makes it sting twice as much as the Atlantean and Egyptian forces reached the Temple of Osiris it is destroyed by Cerberus the next Titan that we must fell but the Egyptians have their secret weapon the guardian it must be reawakened if we want to put stop to the Three-Headed Beast we must defend the son of Osiris as he channels his energies into the guardian or we have no chance to defeat the Titan to start the mission off we once again are playing as the Egyptians but this time things are different the mission objective is a bit more nuanced than most in the middle of the map stands the dormant Guardian the son of Osiris can be tasked with Reawakening him slowly restoring his hit points over about 20 minutes but the enemy is relentlessly aggressive sending a huge number of myth units and human units around the map constantly which should be fine we just build more priests right nope we have no gold mines and Priests are something we cannot afford but there is an answer there are a number of camel Caravans around the map if we can find them we can trade with our Ally in the bottom right for a steady source of gold this does not help me with the early aggression though I need to use a combination of walls to control enemy movement whatever human units I can afford and occasionally pulling the son of Osiris off of his job to help out but the more he's pulled off the slower the mission is there's a balance to strike depending on how well you're doing I also find myself building scorpion men as my myth unit I said that they're fairly unimpressive before but they only cost wood making them really accessible here isn't it cool how Mission and map design can take a unit that's like pretty average at best and turn it into actually something really accessible and good I love this kind of stuff as I struggle to fight off the constant enemy attacks from all sides scout out the map for camels rebuild walls that have been knocked down and build an economy and army the enemy starts sending hero oracles to grab relics around the map and take them home that's a really neat mechanic in age mythology multiplayer relics are a free-for-all whoever grabs them gets the bonus and this is just something that isn't done in any other part of the campaign a really cool unique aspect as I struggled to fight off the constant enemy attacks from all sides Scout around the map for camels rebuild walls that have been knocked down build an economy and Army and contest the enemy Heroes around the map that are trying to steal my relics they then start sending rocks into my main base to drop raiding parties of enemy units this is also a really cool mechanic attacks barely ever come from non-standard directions they almost always just walk towards your base I really appreciate this sort of thing being added in so as I struggle to fight off the constant enemy attacks from all sides okay imma be real here this mission is hard it's too damn hard the game flip-flops between one of the easiest missions and arguably its hardest in Rapid succession and it's too much which is a darn shame because the theories behind this Mission are fantastic the gold limiting making these myth unit attacks significantly more interesting and causing me to think about using the son of Osiris which is a cost benefit analysis awesome encouraging exploration of the map via camo and Relics is fantastic you could even do some clever stuff like following enemy Heroes around to see where the relics are and then killing them when they grab them there's a whole lot of space for interest there the camel trade route being open and requiring fortification is cool too these camels can't be replaced so they're vital to keep alive and it's good to have missions where you have to make sure all of your borders are fortified the enemy is attacking from everywhere nowhere is safe but adding all of this together it's so much stuff each of these mechanics could have been a core of a really solid Mission and instead they decided to toss every single idea into a Vitamix and this absurdly overwhelming slog came out oh and did I mention the mission is timed after about 24 minutes Cerberus comes to attack doesn't matter if you're ready or not and despite all of that stuff here is the weirdest thing of them all I freaking loved this Mission at my heart I'm an RTS challenge Runner I beat Starcraft 2 and Warcraft 3 without losing a unit I personally designed the nightmare difficulty for all three Starcraft 2 campaigns so when I got to the point that I'd held everything off secured my borders saved the Caravans gotten the relics defended the drops got a fantastic economy and built in a giant army of Chariot archers camel Riders and Scorpion men I was thrilled that I then had to throw my Army into the clutches of the enemy Titan and try to hold it off while also dealing with its massive escort of soldiers barely managing to reawaken the guardian who could then engage freaking Cerberus as my other forces finished everyone else off it was epic but that doesn't make it a good design I am not the average player and these campaigns should never be built with someone like me in mind so I'm in this weird limbo where I had a fantastic time I loved every minute of this Mission I would go as far to say as this being my favorite mission in the game it's the RTS equivalent of a triathlon you need to be past agile and Powerful constantly for 20 minutes and if you fail in any aspect at any moment you die these last two missions are Polar Opposites the first came with monotype Promethean armies attacking from one of two angles with masses of gold giving way to hard counters no reason to explore the map being able to lose maxed out armies without it mattering and an underwhelming final fight with an unkillable enemy and right after it comes a hugely diverse selection of enemies strict resource starving multiple facets of exploration required while constantly being raided from every angle the camel Caravans and Son of Osiris can't dire you're done for and an epic cinematic climactic final fight One mission that goes too far and another that doesn't go far enough I would say that of the 44 missions in the game a good 40 of them are well tuned and I find it really fascinating that the Alpha and Omega of difficulty ended up being right next to each other and have so many comparisons to draw it's a fantastic look into both over and under designing missions I think that in a perfect world neither of these missions would be in their current state in the final game but because they have so much to teach and are so interesting I'm actually kind of glad that they are as we make our way back to the Norse lands Ajax says what everybody is thinking I wish we could have brought that Guardian with us I don't think we need the guardian this Titan looks much weaker this is not a Titan that's right the Titan is over there [Music] we meet the giant King full stag Who We join forces with to defeat the Titan yamir progenitor of the Giants as we build up yamir and his forces start crushing their way through an Allied base once destroyed they set up camp and the Titan continues his Onslaught we must survive for 25 minutes for falstag to call upon the need hog to Aid us but there's a catch the six Allied bases between Ymir and us can only survive for about 19 minutes on their own we have to slow down the enemy or we will die before the need hog arrives the only way we can delay a mirror is by using the Giant's Frozen breath ability on the Titan to stun it and only King full Stag's breath is strong enough to do the job as soon as I got into this Mission I started thinking wait isn't full stag the guy who sculpt tricked us into carrying the banner of and made all the Norsemen mad at us why is he on our side now and then I opened his encyclopedia entry to read his ability and found this fantastic lore paragraph falstag Was Infamous among the human inhabitants of the icy midgard as a troublemaker and destroyer of homes after the great Atlantean hero arcanto stopped gargorensis from bringing Ragnarok upon the Earth volstag rethought his hatred of humankind through a series of events including The Taming of the needhog he won the favor of the mid-guardians and United the Giants and Norsemen in peace what a nice little thing to hide away if you didn't notice that this was the same guy then the game doesn't slow down its Tempo with Exposition and if you do care enough to look around for it you'll find this fun little story I love it what I don't love are the Titan and his armies each time they pillage an Allied Village they will take it using it to build up their forces and they are no slouches this taking of bases to become stronger is actually a really nice mechanic you're told to use falstag as a delay tool this incentivizes going out and using him early instead of waiting for the Titan to get closer to double down on this every few minutes each remaining Village spawns a frost giant to join your forces the more Villages that survive the more Giants you get both of these are fantastic mechanics neither of them take the time to say oh no for each Village we lose things get worse but instead intrinsically teach the player that protecting as many villages as possible is good it doesn't require clunky Exposition as I use falstag's breath to delay amir's assault the enemy aggression against me starts ramping up and I need an army the frost Giants are fantastic Frontline disablers and because the flavor text earlier on talked about Norsemen and giant Unity I thought I'd make some of each I grabbed hair Sears for additional favor production and get some beefy Mountain Giants and while I was exploring earlier on I found a relic gaia's Book of Knowledge which makes my infantry deal extra damage to Titans so I decide that infantry are the way to go but I already have a bunch of melee so I decide to grab some throwing hacksmen who if you remember are considered ranged infantry I'm gonna be honest when I said earlier in the Norse campaign that throwing axemen being infantry did basically nothing I was not expecting this The Relic system once again has cleanly and naturally given importance to even minor mechanics in the game it's so good as the mission continues on I fall into a very simple rotation I freeze the Titan Retreat false tag get attacked by the enemies defended my healing Fountain and send full stag to freeze again eventually I get attacked by a force including a battle bore this is exciting for me because I promised way back that I would show you guys its bucking ability and never got the opportunity and then I froze it with a frost Giant and killed it before it could do anything get wrecked after building up enough forces I worshiped here and reach the Mythic age unlocking the ultimate power thimble winter which spawns packs of uncontrollable wolves to attack the enemy the wolves die without doing anything and I'm fairly unimpressed after a few more fights the enemy gets a bit upset with me harassing their Titan buddy and sends their army After Fall stag I have to retreat him and everybody including the Titan follows I move my forces to engage fight off the humans and ow Titan hurts he may hit like a truck but he is killable and my entire Army does bonus damage to him it's still six minutes until the need hog spawns but I give the fight a spin after the next minute I take a lot of damage but I drop him to about half HP but the fight takes so long that another wave of enemies hits and I'm routed I have to retreat home and sacrifice the remaining Villages for time it feels bad I wanted to save more but it does work I hold against the few remaining assaults and finally the need hog descends the need hog is a dragon and I love him he doesn't do anything particularly fancy just damage in an area and he flies but that's enough it's a dragon I bring my Norseman dragon giant army into melee with the Titan and the need Hog's powerful breath clears out the escort and scorches him as well this mission is really cool unlike the previous two missions where the Titans were breaking things and it felt like set dressing the settlements here give a sense of urgency making each one feel important and the losses feel impactful and it is dragons so it's obviously good with the Egyptian Norse Titans defeated the team returns to Greece and finds that Prometheus has decimated the area but in the ruins of the battle a lush vegetation grows arcantos appears once again with some more wisdom as the gods were defeated the Titans grew in power but not all Titans are engines of Destruction Gaia the Titan of Earth has also been growing in power and using it to restore the land if we can spread guy's verdant Lush across the Desolation that Prometheus has caused it will weaken the Titan and allow him to be defeated finally we're back to playing the atlanteans and we have a whole host of new stuff we have lots of God Powers with a bunch of charges first off is gaia's Forest this ability creates a Grove of trees that when harvested gives extra wood this power is really well designed at face value and to a new player it acts as a nice resource pump but to more experienced players it can be used tactically to create natural barriers or choke points one of the hardest things to do in games is to make something that is easy to pick up and use but all also has a high skill ceiling and this power is exactly that though I do just use it for wood here the objective is to build four Town centers on the map which each spread gaia's Lush the problem is that there are only six valid settlements on the map and four of them are in the patrol path of Prometheus but that's a problem for future me to worry about of the two remaining possible objectives one is my starting settlement and the other is an Atlantean base so they're my first Target to defend against the base's attacks I use another new God power spider layer to create traps that eat unsuspecting enemies that are going to attack me the power is not that great but it's really gratifying watching a guy be ambushed by a giant spider and pulled below I also have three charges of the trees in power that allows me to steal one enemy unit this really helps out when they attack with a single seder who's actually pretty good in the back line once I'm safe I begin to advance to the Mythic age and do something for the first time in this campaign I pick a new myth unit to use no seriously think about it in in mission 1 we were abandoned by the gods mission 2 only allowed behemoths from the temples Mission 3 didn't have a town center so we couldn't Advance ages four gave us two curated God powers and didn't allow us to advance ages five didn't have advancement instead getting Powers through stealing relics six was a no build Mission seven and eight were Egyptian and nine was Norse there are only 12 missions in this campaign and the tenth one is the first time we get to pick new Atlantean myth units to experiment with fortunately Atlas is the Titan that I worship and he is one of my favorites his myth unit is the Argus a weird floating blob with tentacles that spits acid that dissolves units instantly killing them it's really weird and I kind of love it I support The Argus with Fanatics a Mythic age infantry that dual wields and does tons of damage and then builds some fire siphons The atlantean-ranged Siege unit and with that I margin to the Hostile lantian base and use atlas's God power implosion it well it does this is in a Direction anyway I really like implosion as the enemy Army is annihilated and I clean up their base it is probably time to address what is simultaneously my biggest criticism and biggest praise about this campaign frankly it's too short as I was talking about with only being able to select new myth units now the campaign is almost entirely sections of curated experiences and they're all phenomenal the quality of the levels is overall high and they're an absolute blast to play but this Mission design alone does not give the full breath of experience without a decent number of open-ended missions where the player can approach things the way they want they don't get to see everything that Atlantis has to offer I talked about every non-naval myth unit that the Greeks Egyptians and Norse had but what about the Atlantean caladria stemphelian bird heka gigantis or lampades all of these are cool units and I haven't touched on them a bit The Campaign would really benefit from having a few more missions where we actually got to play with these tools I would never in my life give up any of the missions that we currently have I think they're awesome and I love them I just want more and in the grand scheme of things when that is the biggest problem you have with your campaign you're actually doing pretty well huh anyway we have a big mud boy to clean up and we need two more Town centers Prometheus Patrols in a giant donut around the southern half of the map four settlements are there and the only way to reasonably get these up and running before they're demolished is with multiple villagers constructing at once I opt to use eight and while I construct I start promoting all of my Fanatics into Heroes for the final showdown the first town center is finished without a hitch but as the final one is under construction I realize I probably should have pulled more villagers as Prometheus is rapidly approaching my location I have no choice but to engage the Titan early to buy some time The Argus acid melts prometheanes stopping their split into tiny boys allowing me to fight the Titan alone but that does not stop him from smashing 70 supply of units into the shadow realm fairly quickly during the fight as thing start to look Bleak the Lush finishes healing the land and Prometheus is weakened I managed to fell the Titan with eight remaining soldiers these Titan fights keep getting closer and closer huh with the minor Titans defeated we now need to turn our eyes towards kronos's servant Theo is still out there somewhere with an Atlantean Army at his fingertips and then Ajax says what we're all thinking not much of a challenge after dealing with Titans but we have to go kill him so we return to the settlement that we built up oh so long ago foreign where is everyone the crew take the passage to the Atlantean colony and find it abandoned until they're ambushed by a legion of automaton masquerading as statues and with that the mission begins this would be a really cool reveal of the automaton as a unit if it wasn't the second to last mission in the game and we hadn't already been given them to use I'm like 90 sure that somebody had this idea in their head for earlier on but to fit things in the story correctly this Mission got pushed back to a point where it just isn't as impactful cutting through all of the automaton shows off their main weakness if they can't win the fight to rebuild each other they're not a fantastic unit the Atlantean Heroes shatter them with ease once we defeat the nearby automaton we rescue the Town Center some villagers and all the buildings around here but we can't make any more villagers so it's a limited economy Mission and in many ways it's really cool the map is an island that is completely covered in Atlantean City and it isn't any old Island but the exact same island that we did mission 2 of the Atlantean campaign on the air area that we secured just now it's the Greek base that we had to invade that was really hard that is such a cool detail and I really love it they could have easily made a different map from scratch to get the perfect designs they wanted but the fact that they managed to fit two missions with completely different mechanics and starting points onto the same map that is a testament of ensemble's skill the mission itself is pretty simple the city is covered in automaton clear each section out to gain control of it including more villagers and production structures then using that increased Army and build capacity to make a stronger Army to invade the next section the automatons put light pressure on around the map more is an indicator of where to go than anything else but they're not much of a threat on their own which is my main criticism of the mission it's all automatons I'm honestly not sure what happened here but it feels like somebody took an immense amount of time and effort to hand craft this Titanic City and then decided to get the unpaid intern to make the enemy compositions the problem is reminiscent to the pro me atheist Mission if there's only one enemy type then you can hard counter it and that's exactly what I do that's not to say that the mission is a free win they actually do send an absolutely massive number of automaton once you reach the northern portion of the map but when every Atlantean unit can become a hero it means that I end up with a legion of heroic archers that mow the enemies down before they can touch me the most fun part of the mission comes from exploring the areas and that part is really neat they give you the vortex power to move around and it makes it so much more enjoyable in the south of this island there's the little garden thing and in the Northeast a little secluded Village that you can't get to by ground path to the West are a bunch of animals and a little Menagerie end to the north a little hideout with some Cavalry and lampades an Atlantean myth unit that casts Chaos on enemies making them hostile to everybody honestly I feel like I should be more annoyed with the lack of enemy variety here but I do find it fun to look around at everything and search for the secrets and the fully crafted city does a good bit of World building it makes it feel like the Atlantean world keeps moving while Castor was on his Crusades they're building up and making a new home for themselves which is just awesome I also have a couple new toys to play with the Carnivora God power summons an angry tentacle plant that acts as static defense I also have a couple caladria myth units a bird lady that flies and heals they do a great job of topping off my heroes between the fights as I make my way to the center where the final Sky passage on the map lies the defenses here are actually pretty fantastic mirror towers are unique Atlantean defensive structures that deal a lot of damage as I push in tons of automaton appear and I even get flanked once I've reached the inner walls krios uses the Tartar and gate power on each entrance creating a building that spawns myth units that are hostile to everybody which then proceeds to distract a bunch of automaton for me to blast through the sky passage's defenses and jump in and Chase Creos and then these guys get blown away by a meteor which is really a skill issue on their part overall this Mission I think is pretty decent this setting carries it hard but it really is a good one I just think this sort of design would probably be better off at maybe the midpoint of a campaign which really does tie into my desire to just have more of this if there were four levels after it this Mission would fit in great but as the game's penultimate encounter it just feels a bit weirdly placed also this is what Creo sounds like when he's laughing and it's hilarious before we move on to the final mission of this campaign there are a few things I need to talk about that I couldn't fit anywhere else first off I missed a few myth units mostly Atlantean and a bunch of Naval ones that just didn't come up due to a lack of boat missions the hippocampus is Poseidon's special aquatic horse Scout it can't attack but it's free and it respawns after being killed the carcinos is a giant melee crab from Hera who explodes when it dies for whatever reason the Norse German Elver is a serpent with low durability and a massively damaging ranged attack the Titan hyperion's nyriad is a specialist anti-muth unit who has a dolphin which is cool helios's Mana War shoots freaking chain lightning because why not and oceans has the servant a naval healer on the ground Aphrodite's anemian lion is fast bulky hits hard and has a roar that damages enemies in an area the award for best name in the game goes to hilus's heka gigantis who liked to smash and Thea's God power spawns a Hesperides tree which can spend 150 gold to summon a dryad dryads are just really bad they are just a ball of stats and have no special abilities they also has the stim Dem philion Bird yeah sure we'll go with that it's a slow flyer that deals high damage in short-range volleys and boom now we've gone over every single myth unit in the game the most commonly played game mode in age mythology these days is Skirmish mode and it's pretty great kirmish is the traditional Lobby that you can select a map add other players or AI set teams how you'd like and then get playing the maps are procedurally generated with various archetypes which is standard for the age of games and the best part is that this game does not pull any punches every single super powered broken death power and unit that I've showcased here is perfectly legal and while this might be completely busted in one versus one and some deities are considered meme tier as a result the game is often played in teams or free-for-alls which does a great job of letting people have their superpowers but avoiding having a single good earthquake end the game all in all Skirmish mode is a ton of fun and one of the main reasons this game has so much longevity and finally comes the bug bear in the room the sad reality that I cannot delay talking about any longer the Chinese faction yeah I know I'm sure a good number of people here are confused including multiple people who have played this game before there is a Chinese faction and a Chinese campaign and they're both horrible so let's do some history in 2014 12 years after the game's initial release a company called Skybox Labs was contracted to release Age of Mythology extended edition this was a new release on Steam it was a package that came with the base game the Titans expansion and some updates that are pretty handy like widescreen monitor support twitch and steam integration in 2016 Skybox Labs released their own expansion for age mythology tale of the Dragon 14 years after the game's initial release plain and simple this was a low effort cash grab the Chinese faction is poorly put together reuses a bunch of assets has a sloppily written campaign and zero balance whatsoever and by some accounts installing the DLC makes the AI in the game worse and increases crashing and instability these have not been fixed in six years I am here to review ensembles Age of Mythology I'm not here to look at the bad fanfic of a parasitic company looking to make a quick Buck tale of the Dragon is an attempt to scam the community and I won't dignify it with even a single moment of gameplay in this video with that out of the way Kronos has been antagonizing us for 44 missions now and I think it's time that we put an end to him we arrive at the sunken ruins of Atlantis and learn the most dire of news yeah those five HP doors that I kept joking about nobody repairing oh that's legit and Kronos is about to bust his way out of one but in these swampy ruins is the presence of Gaia Our Only Hope at Salvation in almost every RTS I've ever played the final mission is either an epic holdout or a massive grind through an entire map full of enemies and an age of mythology's final breath it bucks the trend once again in the middle of the map lies kronos's base and around the map lies for pools we must plant gaia's seeds in each creating four summoning trees that will invoke the Titan outside of kronos's Base there are no settlements and very little room for construction we must once again use atlantis's nomadic abilities to harvest resources build an army and protect the trees it's a bit weird that the final mission is another one that has zero settlements for the atlanteans so they have to resort to the fake favor generation but at this point it's just gotten kind of normal I don't know if it should be this way though once gaia's seed power is used on a pool it creates both the tree some dryads and Carnivora for defense it isn't much but it's nice to have quickly I plant the first and move to the Northeast for the second and then I become very happy that I'm doing this project I've already written the script about the mission where we get to kill Prometheus and talked about gaia's Forest power being cool for tactical use and this pool is surrounded by a forest with just an entrance at the front so I have an idea and I don't know if it's gonna work but why not I dropped the trees and wall off the entire Place hoping that I don't have to defend it at all spoiler alert it totally works I've never done this before and it makes me really happy that even now I'm able to find new cool uses for God Powers this game is just amazing occasionally boats of Norse Egyptian and Greek forces arrive providing units that help out it's a small little thing but I do love how the game makes sure to reinforce the idea that the atlanteans are not alone here it's everybody working together to stop Kronos I end up pretty quickly Waltzing around the map clearing the areas and planting seeds once all four are planted your standard 10 minute and 49 Second timer starts to summon Gaia I guess that rounding things to the nearest Minute is more of a mortal thing I split up my forces the enemy pressure is light at first but they end up getting pretty nasty big attacks of powerful units hitting a bunch of places at once it's seriously a lot of stuff I also found a bunch of relics and keep trying to make a temple in the north to stash them but it doesn't go well so I'm gonna pretend that it never happened and not talk about it while we wait for the final countdown on the final mission I wanted to talk about why why did I just spend so much time and effort making a three hour long video about a game that came out 21 years ago well there's a few reasons and the first is that it's fun re-experiencing the story was fun thinking about the game was fun building up all the strategies was fun and most importantly actually playing the game was fun and that's it's not something that should be taken for granted I'm sort of known as an RTS guy but I really struggle at times playing these older games bad pathfinding unresponsive units horrible hotkeys and small control groups make the games feel bad to play and Age of Mythology feels great this game was so far ahead of its time in so many ways the top bar ability which blatantly got ripped off for Starcraft 2 Co-op the unit pathing that was so much better than anything else at the time the control groups can just fit a bunch of units in them building units is easy and the things that you make are really freaking cool even today the game holds up and checks all the boxes which is just incredible the fact that this game only sold a fraction as well as the other RTS titles at the time is absolutely criminal Age of Mythology had the unfortunate circumstance of coming out just a couple months after Warcraft 3 and the Titans expansion only a few after Frozen Throne it is such a shame this is one of my favorite games ever but sharing the stage with Warcraft 3 arguably the most important RTS ever released is asking the impossible as a kid I ended up getting my original Age of Mythology CD from a Bargain Bin just thinking about that now is insane nobody really talks about this game that much but every person that I have found that knows about it absolutely adores it it was a brilliant step forward in the genre a passion project for the developers and deserved so much more than it got I'm gonna rile up a lot of feathers here but I personally like this game better than any of the Age of Empires better than Command and Conquer better than Starcraft 1 and Warcraft 2. people are free to disagree here each of the games has their own merits but this is the best replay experience I have had Bar None and for that reason oh hey Chronos is here yeah with uh six minutes left Chronos finally finds his keys and unlocks the door deciding he's gonna take fate into his own hands I try using Guile's Force Power to surround him but it doesn't work because the devs are smarter than I am but it would have been really funny if I could have just walled him in with trees Chrono starts b-lining towards the objectives I have to engage him to buy time and just like Prometheus this greater Titan is unkillable all I can do is throw forces into the meat grinder and hope the AI takes advantage of that by sending a big attack to my flank I end up having to abandon my makeshift base and I lose the first tree but his Kronos makes his way to the second Gaia blooms and the entire game drops to a laggy three FPS what is going on here why did it become so laggy all of the sudden I've been hard locked to 60 FPS constantly throughout this playthrough and right at the last second the game just explodes actually I was doing a bit of digging for the section about the Chinese stuff and it turns out Skybox Labs claims to have improved the water physics when the remaster came out and I'm pretty sure that this lag is entirely their Improvement in action thanks Skybox love you with Gaia active I chase down Kronos and repeatedly punch him where it hurts eventually felling the Titan Gaia then BMS him by growing trees on his grave and then uses her flower power to disappear Creos attempts to flee and has absolutely stomped by Caster it's like not even close in this fight and finally arcantos appears Atlantis is without a leader so the demigod appoints Castor to guide the atlanteans as they rebuild and this is where we learn the most important lesson of all there are no punishments for war crimes as long as your father is famous Age of Mythology will always hold a special place in my heart despite its flaws it is truly a unique experience that also manages to master all of the fundamentals I mentioned that there were multiple reasons that I made this video and here are the other two the game is getting a remaster soon Age of Mythology retold I think the remaster is gonna be good it's made by the same people who remastered Age of Empires 2 and 3 and they nailed those but I wanted to give this version of the game a proper send-off even if it moves into a better form I think it deserves to be remembered in its original Incarnation as well it was a large chunk of my childhood and I wanted it to end with positive memories the final reason is that real-time strategy is in a bit of a tough spot right now the blizzard rts's will not be getting sequels Command and Conquer has been transformed into a garbage paid win mobile game Age of Empires 4 is chugging along but the game just doesn't quite do it for me but there has been some hope recently people are seeing a gap in the market and RTS games are starting to come out like the Starship Troopers game and soon the Great War Western Front Company of Heroes is also chugging along although the most recent release does need a lot of work but I think that there is another Niche that could be filled here another Age of Mythology not necessarily direct sequel like Age of Mythology 2 but a game with the same overarching ideas it's not like Ensemble has a trademark on mythological creatures or something one of the hardest things to do when working in a fantasy setting is having the team come up with a host of exciting and dynamic units but the Age of Mythology is so perfect for that instead of a small team brainstorming ideas for months you get to utilize the cumulative creativity of the entire human race ideas built up for thousands of years by billions of people the possibilities are endless imagine Legions of Japanese Samurai fighting alongside Kitsune against Aztec High priests who sacrifice their own units in order to channel the power of Quetzalcoatl imagine flanking your enemies with a Cavalry raid of doulahan the Headless Horseman fearing his enemies with his own decapitated head while slashing them with a severed spine whip it doesn't even have to be old Mythos imagine a faction that's an ancient cult devoted to the lovecraftian horrors like Cthulhu for most developers right now I don't think the answer is to aim to make the next esport RTS it's gonna be tough if you make a game that's perfectly balanced on the idea that you need to play at 400 actions per minute or you instantly die what I think there's a lot more room for is to see realize the absolutely incredible and insane ideas that Humanity has come up with to see them in their most extreme and awe-inspiring and stupid I want powers that permanently tear up parts of the map with earthquakes I want great floods wiping out advancing armies I want the world to be the play thing of the Gods in 2002 the technology for thing that epic simply did not exist but now it does and there's a ton of room to build something truly unique here if someone is bold enough to make an RTS that doesn't care about 1v1 competitive balance doesn't care about historical accuracy and only wants to make something absolutely freaking sweet then study this game learn from it take everything Ensemble had at its peak and implement it iterate it and improve on it if you do this I will be your biggest fan Age of Mythology is a phenomenal game it is by no means perfect but it is so consistently correct in so many ways While most RTS of the time have aged like milk Age of Mythology ages like mythology I wanted to say thank you for watching this video I know that only a small fraction of people will make it through to the end here but I do hope you enjoyed it I took a big risk making this if it bombs then I spent almost four months working on a dud but I do hope that it's been a fun ride I want to specifically thank my editor Finlay for putting up with my selfish desire to make this and also wanted to thank my patrons who can be seen on screen once again thank you for watching I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and I will talk to you soon peace team s [Music]

Channel: GiantGrantGames

Views: 2,344,655

Keywords:

Id: 27-tJxIepmo

Length: 213min 33sec (12813 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023

Reddit Comments

[u/Das_Bait]

I watched it yesterday. It was very fun, Grant had some pretty good insight to a lot of it.

[u/Xignum]

It fits well with what he said in his other video. RTS games should focus on campaign first because it's fun. The spectacles like god powers might not be balanced but it's one heck of a good time

[u/MisterManatee]

It’s a really good video!

[u/Sexy_Chocolate]

What a great way to welcome in retold

[u/Armonasch]

Great video.

[u/psychcaptain]

Wasn't this posted a few days ago? I watched it already.