Classic real time strategy, highly playable and enjoyable
Age of Empires brought a lot of innovations in the realm of real time strategies. One of its biggest breakthrough was the development of longer skirmishes and scenarios that saw the introduction of generations of types of units and constructions. This meant that, within a single game, you could be playing with chivalry and archers while later on you could have access to modern day fighting units, tanks, planes, modern infantry. This sometimes led to clashes that seemed less than believable: there could be encounters between archers and modern infantrymen for instance, but, the way the game was balanced it worked just fine. The Gold Edition had a few more aces up its sleeve: it was cleaned of many more bugs, it had a few tweaks applied to the randomly generated maps and, overall, it was just a lot more fun to play. The gameplay however is as classic as it gets for RTS games. You built encampments, produced units, harvested resources and when the time was right, went to war. But, as mentioned, the scope of the game, history wise was really interesting, as wasn't as common for so many different historical periods to be encapsulated into one single strategy game.
