On Saturday, we had our second monthly LAN party. This time around, the focus was on Age of Empires, a favorite among Annie’s family. We had a good turnout, with Nick and Noah bringing their laptops, Dave playing on Annie’s computer, and Rose playing on Dave’s computer, which was hooked up to the TV via an S-Video cable (by the way, I wouldn’t recommend this for gaming, unless you’re playing a first-person shooter. All the text was unreadable, because the TV makes the signal blurry, even when we dropped the game resolution to 800×600).
We played several games, and much to everyone’s suprise (including my own), I didn’t completely suck! You have to understand that this game was a lifestyle for Dave and Rose when they were in college, so they are extremely good at it. While I play lots of RTS games and enjoy the single-player modes, I’ve never been particularly good in multiplayer.
This time around I tried a new strategy, though, which was to play the Britons, whose special unit is the longbowman. In the first few games we played, it was the five of us against several computer opponents, and with everyone else backing me up, I was able to focus on economy, and built up an incredibly large army consisting of two full divisions of longbowmen and a small detachment of trebuchets. This combination allowed me to just march across the enemy territory. It was awesome.
As Dave put it: “You see this big block of blue on the map, and you think, oh, it’s a city. But then you scroll over there and the WHOLE SCREEN is full of archers.”
However, the last game we played was Dave and Noah vs Rose and Nick and I vs a couple of computers, and I got annihilated. Dave had noticed that my strategy left me completely vulnerable in the early game, and managed to completely remove me from the equation by just sending 10-12 troops at a time over to my base to kill everyone. I never managed to build up enough to fight him off.
Of course, while he was busy wiping me from the face of the earth, Nick and Rose very quietly won the game, so it all worked out in the end.
It was good to have Nick there, and we agreed to let him know when the next lan party is, even though he’ll be in Boston, so he can join our games via the internet.