The sounds tell you when things are finished being produced, created, built, or when you are being attacked. Each event has a corresponding sound alerting you of its completion. These small additions only enhance the eye candy that Age of Empires already had. At first glance you will not see much change until you play a new civilization. This looks better than the sharp corners of the original. There is also smoothing of the corners in the shadowed and undiscovered areas on the map. The artwork in the Roman wonder is great and worth the work just to view the splendor. You have not really won in Age of Empires until you have built a Roman Coliseum (the new wonder for the Romans) and held it for a thousand years. There is new artwork for the buildings and new units. Just when I thought it wasn't possible to improve the graphics, they went and proved me wrong. Real players play without cheats! Graphics There are new cheats, but I will let you find them for yourself. This is great for lots of players or for people who like to battle it out for hours on end. There are also new land types and sizes, including a new large map size (gigantic). They include the ability to set population limits in the game setup. There are a few new items I did not mention in the preview. Tower Shield: researching this gives infantry and Academy units +1 armor against all Ballista, Helepolis, and missile weapons. Medicine: this increases the healing rate of a Priest. Martyrdom: this lets you instantly convert a unit by sacrificing one of your priests however, this does not work on enemy priests. Logistics: barrack units count only half towards your population limit this does not include the new units, slingers. There are four new technologies in the game. This is also the first unit that requires stone to build). The new units include Armored Elephant (upgrade to a War Elephant, expensive but worth it if you can swing the cost), Camel Rider (attack bonus against any horse unit, including chariots), Fire Galley (Catapult Trireme Killer you only get this if you cannot build Catapult Triremes), Scythe Chariot (upgrade to Chariots, REALLY COOL), and a Slinger (against archers and watch towers you get an attack bonus. If a building is destroyed or converted with queued units, the resources are returned except for the one unit under construction. By the time you lose an advanced force doing all kinds of damage and mayhem, you can come back to find the replacement troops ready to group and walk back into battle. A nice benefit is that when you reach your population limit, you can stack up units and as soon as you drop below your limit they start being created. You need to have enough resources to commit at that time, but this allows you to stack up your army without babysitting. You can now click multiple times on building a villager, archer, fishing boat, or any other unit you build and it will crank them out one by one without your having to go back and start another unit. For those of you who missed my preview, hereвЂ™s the info again: The best new addition to the game is the 'queuing' of units.

If you can play_ Age_, there are only a few new things to learn. The rather erratic route finding will still occasionally have you screaming with frustration but, as with just about every other RTS game, you just have to live with it and babysit units to make sure they go where they're told. The soundtrack is even better than before, and the little gameplay tweaks, which allow you to queue the production of units and double-click on a unit to command all of that type, make things a little easier on the mouse hand. Martyrdom, Medicine and Tower Shield) give you something to aim for and even bigger maps and four new map types (mountainous highland, large island, the Mediterranean and a peninsula) make for even more diversity. Four new researchable technologies (Logistics, There are four new civilisations to get to grips with (you can now take control of Carthage, Palmyra, Macedonia or Rome), new units, including an armoured elephant, camel rider, Tire galley, slinger and scyther chariot, and there's heaps of new Roman architecture to gawp at.ДЄs well as the usual single and multiplayer options, there are four totally new campaigns made up of dozens of scenarios, including the Rise of Rome campaign from which the mission pack derives its name. So, by way of a stopgap, we have what is essentially a mission disc, promising new missions, units and a few graphical and gameplay tweaks.

We were originally promised a sequel round about now, but that's been put back until much later next year.

Age of empires heaven