Hey I'm not sure exactly how GOG works as regards licence and stuff but does anyone know if they intend bringing along AOE any time soon. And if it doesn't need a patch what do I need to do to play my original. AND can someone recommend an alternative available on GOG. Bear in mind I'm looking for the conrol individual characters to do things like AOE as oppossed to a civilisations type control. Oh finally. I'm trying to download Commados 2+3 and the bin file keeps crashing during download. I don't know what the heck a bin file is but it's an apt name since that's exactly where I feel like throwing the laptop.

All in all fantastic work GOG

i dont know what you mean with "individual charakters", and i didnt play any age of empires or empire earth game, but i read lots of times that empire earth is like age of empires (and i read more often that empire earth 3 isnt good)

Again, it's a Microsoft game. So it's about as likely to turn up here as Half-Life.

However, there are a number of similar games on GOG. You might like Empire Earth 2 (NOT 3) & Celtic Kings. There's also Total Annihilation, which is a very different kind of RTS. But in the best possible way. Easily still one of the best RTS ever made.

Age of Empires = Micro$oft = you will see it here when hell freezes over.
And for playing, my AoE pack (AoE1 + 2 + their expansions) work just fine.

The .bin files are used when a game exceeds 2 Gigs. Instead of a single file, you get a ~2mb installer, and the rest of the data in chunks of up to ~2 gigs. This is because some filesystems don't like files over 2 gigs.

When you say it crashes during download, do you mean the download craps out, or is the installer verification failing? All I can recommend is downloading the relevant file again.

As it happens I've downloaded my collection again recently for backup purposes, and those two files MD5 as follows.
setup_commandos_2_3-1.bin (1.95GB) cfd007eb9a27eea5aad3dbb72909aea9
setup_commandos_2_3-2.bin (761MB) 360d4b8dcc7b08874d7e92dc6596a496

Not gonna happen.

It's FAT32 file systems that can't take >2gigs file sizes. NTFS likes them just fine. Pain in the arse transfering rendered video files between a Mac and a PC with the cross compatable format being FAT32. Anyway it's done because a lot of drives come preformatted as FAT32 so GoG has too make allowances.

In AoE you manouvre each soldier, villager etc individually or in groups of eight. Some sims I've played only give you control over the construction and commercial side.Thanks for all the recommendations guys.

Who needs Age of Empires?

The indie scene has you covered!

Take a look over at Wildfire Games' 0 A.D. - http://wildfiregames.com/0ad/

God, I forgot I was following that game on MODdb. Sexy, but I will wait a bit.
AoE is a great game though guys.

They only seem similar on the surface. AoE2 had the best multiplayer ever and I do not say that lightly.

It was Emsemble Studios' IP, owned by MS. Despite MS generally being considered evil, they have done some pretty progressive things in gaming at times. They released the Allegiance source code to the community when they shut down the servers. Also, I think MW4 has finally been released for free under some kind of license.

Not open source, but freeware. Also it's MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, not the original game (MechWarrior 4: Vengeance). You can download it with MTX (available here) or the BitTorrent client of your choice.

I know Mercenaries was standalone and probably doesn't include the campaign from Vengeance but doesn't it include all the mechs from Vengeance?

I checked out the alpha, but to be honest, there's still a lot of work that needs done, as I found the engine pretty laggy and I'm running it on a dual processor AMD 64 4800+. I do see some potential there, however. It'd be worth checking out after a few more tweaks, I suspect.

I would like to play some AoE multi. If anyone is interested, I'm on #gog (quakenet).