Demeter:

• Harpy: lifting enemy units into the air and sending them crashing to the ground
• Wither: unleashes a devastating wither upon a targeted area, drying out berries, plants, and trees, and transforming the terrain into barren wasteland where nothing can grow for a short period of time.

Pan:

• Lykaon: moves through the world disguised as a Villager until the moment it strikes with its true strength.
• Arcadian Meadow: creates a peaceful field that stops all attacks from units and buildings caught inside its glow

Hestia:

• Hamadryad: hides as a tree when idle, allowing for infiltration, scouting, and resource theft.
• Communal Hearth: offers defensive strength and resource bonuses, and it can convert enemy units to your side.

Persephone:

• Sirens: lure enemy troops with their haunting song, pulling them away from safety.
• Underworld Invasion: revives the last one hundred fallen units as spectral Eidolons under your control, at the cost of every Town Center you own.

Two separate disguise units is very interesting. I don't think we've had any of those before. Not even Shinobi, though in aoe4 Shinobi have a disguise ability.

A variant of locusts, and a localised variant of ceasefire. Interesting twists. I guess there are only so many ways to keep making unique god powers after a point.

I'm very curious about Communal Hearth. Defensive boost (like Sentinels?), extra resources (like Plenty Vault?) and concerts units (like Traitor?). It's pulling a lot of tasks for a Heroic Age power.

Underworld Invasion seems awesome. Kind of a variant of Ragnarok, I guess. Very interested to see how it plays out. That's a huge boost in population, at the cost of losing a heap of max pop, once your units die off.

If it is ranked on fun, then yeah Stronghold Crusader deserves to be there. If it is for being effective? Maybe not. I did a naughty thing when a friend played with me the first time. He was a hardcore turtler, and I knew that. I must have hired a bazillion ninjas by the time he told me he felt his base was impenetrable. Sad to say I never got to use the tunnelers or anything else I had.

Wonderful game.

It is a very solid game. I wish someone made a BAR mod that changed all the units and buildings names back to their original ones.

Good thing Beyond All Reason is such a fantastic spiritual successor and is free and open source!!

https://www.beyondallreason.info/

There are co-op modes in BAR too where you can turtle co-op.

The original Total Annihilation has very powerful static defenses as well. Different types with different ranges that you can overlap for maximum destruction of incoming enemies. There is something hugely satisfying with seeing a huge approaching mass of robots and vehicles being thinned out by long range heavy plasma batteries that are hitting in a scattered pattern throughout their ranks with powerful area effect, then whatever is left of them makes it close enough being engaged by laser turrets.

Oddly, they didn't just give everyone control of a single house, a thing the OpenRA engine supports. Instead, they split and sometimes duplicate starting units with no other significant changes to the missions.

There are a ton of options to tweak it, though. You can share or duplicate income, share tech, and increase enemy count/veterency/etc.

The tech sharing is super janky. If your ally has a class of building that you do not, your build options behave as if you have that class of building. As an example, if you are playing a Soviet mission and your ally captures a GDI war factory, they get GDI tanks, as expected. You get Soviet tanks, including a Soviet MCV. If you then capture a GDI conyard, you can build GDI buildings and your ally can build Soviet. The moment you build a war factory, you lose the Soviet tank options and have GDI. Sometimes, sharing just doesn't work, however.

Video is about aoe2 specifically, but honestly its point could work for any game, RTS or otherwise, with online ranked matchmaking and a robust singleplayer mode.

Demeter gets Wither: which "dries out berries, plants, and trees".

Aztecs get a myth unit called Stoneskin Quinametzin, and feature gods including Tezcatlipoca and Quetzalcoatl.

And they've released one screenshot:

I'm happy to see it will be primarily single player. I would absolutely hate to see a production line I spent hours building and fine tuning being constantly under attack.

I like to play my RTS games like a mix of Tower Defence and Sim City, ending with a complete easy mode power fantasy steamroll of the enemy base. That doesn't work well with PvP multilayer.

Yeah, if you weren't already aware, all 4 of the main Age games got remasters, starting with Age of Empires: Definitive Edition in 2018, and most recently ending with Age of Mythology: Retold last year. And they have all (with the partial exception of the first one) been extremely well-done. In many ways they feel like completely new, modern RTSes, while retaining the spirit that made them great back in the late '90s/early '00s.

Wild, aoe3 was my first experience with a non-blizzard rts like 15 years ago. Got peer pressured out of checking it out again over the years because 'game old'

Yup! The last balance & patch update was in October 2024. Early 2024 they announced there would be a new DLC in late 2024. Prior to the patch, also in October 2024, they announced the DLC was delayed, before in January 2025 it was cancelled entirely.

Prior to that, in August 2023 it went free-to-play with a limited rotating roster of civs, with the option to pay to unlock fully. And it received its last DLC in May 2022.

AoE2 and 4 are both still receiving regular updates, as is Age of Mythology. Though only 2 and 4 are getting representation at the Wololo tournament at the Royal Albert Hall early next year.

Wait, they were working on aoe 3 until last year?! Wild. Never really vibed with 4

Context: in early 2024, at a franchise-wide presentation, World's Edge announced an upcoming AoE3 DLC which would include Denmark and Poland. A year later, they announced that the DLC had been cancelled, and they implied all future development on AoE3 had also been ceased.

In a post last week, World's Edge announced AoE4 would be getting two new DLC next year. The second one will include 2 new civs, one of which will be "Vikings". This rather busy thread on the official forums is titled 'please don't call them "vikings"', on the basis that aoe4 civs are usually named after specific polities, not general cultures like aoe2 civs. And that "vikings" doesn't even refer to a general culture, but to a specific activity/occupation. Instead, they should be called "Norsemen", "Northmen", or "Danes". Names that were actually used historically to refer to the societies responsible for viking.

I remember playing this as a kid in 1999. For some I thought it was very hard. I was still pretty young, but while I found Warcraft 2 and StarCraft challenging, I remember them being easier to eventually figure out.

The story/lore also felt more immersive and realistic. Very grim dark and even scary. This might be a controversial opinion, but I always thought that Blizzard's story beats were generally subpar. They excelled in game design, balance and visual art, their writing was never impressive.

Yeah, I'm majorly hyped. Back when they announced the 2nd expansion was Japan, a lot of people were disappointed that it wasn't Aztecs. My comment was that I thought Japan was an excellent pick, because of the geographic closeness to the already-released Chinese, but only if they were going to be doing Aztecs later. If the Japanese were going to be the last expansion, I would be disappointed that it was Japan rather than Aztecs.

And here we are!

i cant wait for the aztec pantheon expansion

After the first two Age of Mythology expansions were Chinese and Japanese, with no more updates guaranteed beyond that, a lot of us were worried that that would be it. Its player count numbers on Steam don't look great, so we thought it might get put out to pasture like AoE3 did. But we're now being promised the Aztecs, as well as a new major god expansion for Demeter, and a major visual update which "introduces dynamic blood systems, prismatic essence for myth units, and evolving transitions that make each skirmish feel visceral and alive – exclusive to Expansion Pass owners".

That "Expansion Pass" is good news, too. AoE3 had one more expansion announced, but it was cancelled along with the cessation of future development. But this one is going to be taking people's money as early pre-orders. That gives them an obligation to follow-through to a much greater degree than something that was only announced.

AoE2 gets a new South American expansion with 3 new ranked civs: Mapuche, Muisca, and Tupi.

AoE4 gets two new expansions, one "will feature a sweeping story inspired by Chinese history" in a campaign, and the second will bring 2 new civs, one of which is Vikings. I kinda hope they don't call them that though, considering the trend so far has been that civs are largely named based on actual historical political entities. "Vikings" was historically a term for a thing some people did. The actual people were the Danes or Norsemen.

The upcoming changes to water/navy appear not to be in this yet. I guess they wanted some more time to consider feedback after the recent Thalassocracy Cup tournament showcasing the preview branch of the naval changes. And probably didn't want to make such a massive change so soon before one of their biggest events.

No, I am not the author, just sharing. :)

This is an engine for running older C&C games (including multiplayer support):

Dawn of the Tiberium Age (DTA) is a stand-alone mod that combines and enhances Tiberian Dawn and Red Alert using a heavily customized Tiberian Sun engine. Featuring all 4 factions (GDI, Nod, Allies and Soviets) with extremely polished gameplay, DTA allows you to mix and match the factions as you'd like in tons of new multiplayer maps and challenge yourself in dozens of original missions.

Since DTA is a stand-alone mod, you don't require anything but the mod itself to be able to play: the original game is not required.

This looks nice! Having played C&C as a kid (even Dune 2) and all sequels since, I wonder what this is exactly? Descriptions says standalone mod. I'm curious about where this comes from. Did you help with the mod?

Rejoice, children of Nod!

Wow Zade is swiftly becoming one of my favourite niche creators on YouTube. The quality of this documentary is superb.

I had no idea what a tiny, scrappy team Firefly was. But they seem to be doing a great job with their remasters. And I love their open approach to development.

This kinda makes me wanna play some Stronghold! I hope they do a Stronghold Legends DE, because that's the one game from their franchise that I have nostalgia for from my childhood.

Someone pointed out in the replies that the Goths were not in aoe1. Petersen replied:

my bad. The Goths were NOT in Age 1. Oops.

oh and Loki spawn MUs more often