Troops tend to go off on their own rampage.
This was satisfying for a while, but it’s not long before missions start to feel like a chore. A constrained choice of units doesn’t help. Levelling up your town grants you points to spend on an enormous, three pronged tech tree where you can unlock and upgrade new units and buildings. As you advance further down the tree, your civilisation advances through the ages, but after six or so hours spent grinding homesteads into the dirt, I still only had access to spearmen, bowmen, swordsmen and a useless variety of javelin-throwing cavalry.
Each unit is designed to counter a type of enemy unit. Spearmen are adept at taking down mounted enemies, for example, (Age of Empires Online Gold)while swordsmen mince up foot soldiers, but in practice every problem can be solved by box-selecting everyone and right clicking on it.
Occasionally, missions will gift you a devastating advanced unit to play around with. The Hetairoi are a Greek example. Mounted on barded steeds, flaming torches in hand, they’re adept at smashing buildings to pieces. They’re tough, and their rarity makes them worth protecting.
You can loot hidden chests during missions.
At level eight, I finally had a reason to change my strategy. I created a vanguard of swordsmen and spearmen to sweep away enemy combat units, then scurried them out of the range of the lethal guard-towers to make room for the Hetairoi, who formed a column and stampeded through the town. They crushed every building and razed the town centre in a matter of seconds. Most satisfying.
It was a rare moment of excitement in a campaign that was quickly becoming dull, but unique units like the Hetairoi can’t be unlocked through the skill tree. To train them on the battlefield you must install that unit’s commander at your advisor’s hall in your capital city, but you can only do this if you’ve paid for the Greek or Egyptian Civilisation Pack, which costs around £12.
As well as adding unique units, advisors confer general bonuses to your empire, (Age of Empires Online Gold)and you can appoint one for each age your civilisation has progressed through. My copper age advisor lets my villagers take more wood from trees, my bronze age advisor makes my guard towers more powerful and my silver age advisor lets me train Phalanx warriors.
