I'm curious what any of you who've tried Age of Empires Online think of it? I haven't tried it myself but am considering it just for fun.

Haven't played it personally, mainly because everyone I HAVE talked to who have, say it's terrible.

If I can dig up the thread on a different forum, I'll expand on why a bit later, but they DID say to avoid it.

Alright, here's the quote, if it helps:

Kentel said: I'm mad.

It's terribad. I've played all of the Age of Empires games (in fact, AoEII was the first game I ever really played) and I'm fairly good at them. So I decided to try Online, knowing I was probably going to hate it.

I do, in fact hate it.

I've played for about 5 hours, doing tutorials. This is beyond retarded. They haven't changed anything apart from mixing AoM and AoEII. I'm still not even at the stage in the game where I can lolrape other players yet. I just got to the point in the game where I can actually do what I want in the missions, rather than being given like 10 hoplites and being told to kill shit.

Oh, and a quest reward I just got was something that makes my basic infantry have 15% more attack and 10% more health. Except I can't use it. You have to be a person who pays. There's no way I'm going to play a game where the other player's troops can be 30% more powerful than me at the beginning of the game. I knew there was going to be advantages for people who paid, but I figured it'd be skins and even whole other civs, which I could live with. But I can't live with this.

So yeah, I'm sad.

My understanding (gleaned from the developers, spoke to them at PAX) is that you can easily play for free against the AI but you'll have a hard time genuinely competing with people if you haven't bought at least a few upgrades for an army. Now, it's up to you how you feel about that, is 20 bucks for an army too much (I'm guessing, you need to price it out)? Dunno, cheaper than SC2, but it's not free beer like you can get away with in some games (DDO and the upcoming Firefall).

At the very least you have nothing to lose by playing against the AI for a bit, that's free and you can see if it's worth an investment to play against people. That doesn't mean it blows, per se, might not be worth it to you, though. Again, it's really no problem vs. AI, but if you play against other players you'll have to pay something to compete.

I haven't been online with AOEII in awhile but I bet the only ones playing it at this point are ringers, if you're already really, really good, you'll do okay, otherwise you'll get bowled over. I think the draw of modern online play is that they have semi-viable ladder systems so you end up against your own skill level. Sure you'll fight smurfs and crap sometimes, but all in all, hopefully you'll benefit from a similarly ranked opponent.

And I can't really defend it, I haven't played it, it might totally blow and be played only by assholes. But the fact that you must "pay to play" doesn't always equate to "pay to win" to me. Paying a reasonable amount to participate in a system is sort of like investing in a Players Handbook if you want to play AD&D occasionally, it might make sense to make a minor investment at times, but not to buy everything in print.

Still systems I'd call "pay to win" exist and aren't pretty, but I'm not aware that AOE Online is one of these.

I've only played a bit of it but for what it is it's fairly good. I don't know that I would specifically choose it over a previous game (or vice versa) if you already have some of them but either way it adds some interesting new ideas such as an out-of-match hub mode where you build up a city and store loot (collected during missions) and so forth.

As with any free to play game there's always premium content and features close by but I felt it was less in-your-face than some other games I've tried. Most of the premium content is aimed towards player versus player combat, so if you're more into the single player you can certainly get some fun out of it. They recently released a free "Skirmish" DLC for playing custom matches against the AI like in the previous games.

I thought it was pretty fun. If you don't mind the constant nagging that you can get much more out of the game if you just pay lots and lots of money I see no reason to not give it a shot.

Well I just installed it so I'll give it a shot and see for myself. It does look like fun to me.

Well so far I am not impressed. The game installs but the patcher fails over and over to successfully download a file called scenario.bar and doing some searching including on the AOE forums tells me this is not an uncommon problem. A recent post by a Microsoft employee indicated they may have a server side issue which they are currently investigating. The post was from about a week or more ago, I forget now, with no further word.

I would be one mighty unhappy camper if I'd purchased content and a broken patcher kept me offline.

Anyway, I posted on their tech support forum with an error log showing what is going wrong so we'll see how they respond to that and if I wind up actually being able to access the game at all.

The game's been out for around six months now. You'd think they would have their act together but no!

I guess I am inpatient but one working day later and no response from anyone at MS tech support to at least acknowledge this issue:

http://forums.ageofempiresonline.com/forums/166608/ShowThread.aspx#166608

I think I've reached that point of craziness now where I want to play this badly simply because I am not able to do so. I think I am in denial of the reality here that this isn't worth pursuing. GRRRR! No wonder people hate Games for Windows Live games...

Well for anyone interested, the less than user friendly install experience on Windows 7 to make this game install and run features the following steps:

Download the installer.
Run the installer.
Watch the installer fail and begin investigating why.
Review the installer logfile and find the error.
Google it
Come up empty
Go to MS Support forum for the game and try numerous suggestions in a FAQ that addresses this install failure which is a known issue six months after the game's launch.

Optional:
Ignore advice to open 7 ports in firewall because surely a Microsoft game knows how to modify settings in Windows 7 firewall so the game can actually install itself.
Realize you are stupid and wrong for assuming Microsoft would the do the obvious thing to provide a friendly, simple user install experience.
Find Windows 7 Firewall advanced settings and manually add 7 ports
Try the launcher again to find it can now download one particular file and successfully complete the game's installation.

Also Optional:
Take a break after all this because you are too irritated to want to play the game anymore at this point at least.
Whine on GOG forums just to vent and maybe feel better.
Thank GOGers who read this!

Thank you!