<p>Yeah, I know, this comparison seems absurd. That’s because the two games are over 10 years apart. But it so happens that they’re the only two RTS’s that I’ve really played in depth, since crappy video cards (and parental issues) in between prevented me from playing any games after Age of Empires 2 (which I will refer as AoK). Plus, more appropriate comparisons would be between Starcraft 1 and 2, or between Starcraft and some other modern game. </p>
<p>In a sense, it’s also an exposure to modern gaming from someone who hasn’t really played many games since ones released in 2000.</p>
<p>Anyways, features Starcraft 2 has that AoK doesn’t have:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>When your ally resigns, you get all their resources and can control all their units. I’ve long dreamed of such a feature in AoK, and I know it wasn’t implemented in AoE 3 either. This makes games <em>a lot</em> less unfair whenever someone resigns early (in fact, AoK games were often long, so a 4v4 frequently guaranteed that someone would have to go, completely changing the gameplay dynamics).</p></li>
<li><p>Replays show APM (actions per minute). Not the best measures of skill, but they are good proxies. And they also show whether or not you can most improve through being faster or being smarter. Obviously this was a feature that was even in Starcraft 1</p></li>
<li><p>Pressing a ctrl-number twice centers the screen on the unit.</p></li>
<li><p>“Spells”/special abilities that you can give units. Admittedly, I’m not the best at micro so I tend to think that they disadvantage me. But they still make the game more interesting. I think AoE3 had some of those.</p></li>
<li><p>When players are eliminated, they can continue to stay in the game and chat to their allies (and even command their ally’s units if their allies allow it)</p></li>
<li><p>Games are faster (there’s no 10 minute build-up period that is the same ALL the time, thus wasting at least 10 minutes of each and every game - unless you play on Deathmath or “high resources”)</p></li>
<li><p>Some units count more towards population/housing limit than others. Although in AoK, the population limit was <em>frequently</em> reached, while it isn’t very frequently reached in starcraft 2. But after Empire Earth, most RTS games had large units contibute more to the limit than others.</p></li>
<li><p>There aren’t resources that run out more quickly than others. So there’s no end-game trash-unit spammage like there was in AoK (unless people created lots of trade carts)</p></li>
<li><p>Fewer civilizations, but they’re significantly different from each other. This is pretty interesting and I’ll admit that overall it isn’t a plus or a minus. But <em>right now</em>, everyone is knowing that the three civs are unbalanced, since Terran always outclasses Zerg. In AoK, all the civilizations were pretty well balanced, except for Mayans vs. Goths and Aztecs in water maps.</p></li>
<li><p>Allows you to select and copy conversations to the clipboard where it can be archived with a clipboard monitoring utility (important for me since I love reading conversations I’ve had years ago)</p></li>
<li><p>Autosaves all games by default (I don’t like having to ask people to record game all the time)</p></li>
</ul>
<p>Things AOK has that Starcraft 2 doesn’t have:</p>
<ul>
<li><p>Doesn’t allow you to customize your own hotkeys. My middle mouse buton becomes effectively useless.</p></li>
<li><p>Doesn’t allow game modes other than 4v4, 3v3, 2v2, 1v1, or 4-player FFA. The fondest gaming memories I have are of diplomacy/“shimo”-style games I played with AoKHers which were FFAs where you could ally/unally anyone at will. 2v2v2v2’s are also quite interesting. I’m a cognitive psychology junkie, so those game modes (with all the additional decisions you have to make considering who to ally/unally) make the game more intensely interesting.</p></li>
<li><p>No random maps. All the maps are the same over and over again. And the map is always revealed. I’m not the best player around, so I admit that it’s “easier” on me when the maps are the same and when they’re all revealed. It sure makes rushing a lot easier, too (especially tower rushing where placement is vital). But it also makes people more prone to “fixed action patterns” since they know the map configuration by heart. At AoK, you always had to adapt since you never knew how the map would look like.</p></li>
<li><p>No Ctrl-B for barracks, Ctrl-U for university, etc, or automatic ctrl-X for any random building X… You can use your own Ctrl 0-9 hotkeys for them but they take away from hotkeys you could use for units (although I’ll admit that even with this system, I"m not using up all the control groups).</p></li>
<li><p>No ability to customize starting resources,population limit, wolf aggressiveness, or all those other special settings that could make for interesting permutations of game rules.</p></li>
<li><p>Pure elimination/conquest. No regicide, no wonder/relic victories. Doesn’t make for a variety of game modes like what I’ve tried out in the AoKH forum parties (which were SO fun).</p></li>
<li><p>Spies. Granted, Starcraft 2 will make you automatically lose if everyone on your team loses all their buildings even if you have units still lying around. Which prevents straggler hunts. But still, stragglers can sometimes make the final moments of the game more interesting, especially if they’re dark templars. Besides, the conversations at the end of the game (when people are hunting out stragglers, or “roachers”) are often at their most exciting and Starcraft 2 doesn’t even allow conversations at the end of the game.</p></li>
<li><p>No extensive system of custom scenarios. Seriously, custom scenarios are where AoK excelled (this may be a function of the community as well). I have never seen a game with as many successful custom scenarios. Even AoM and AoE3 hardly had any compared to AoK. And for AOK, this is especialy impressive since it came before Web 2.0.</p></li>
<li><p>The sheer variety of maps that Age of Empires 2 really has.</p></li>
<li><p>No LAN (not a problem for me since I never had AoK LAN parties)</p></li>
<li><p>No joining games by IP address</p>
<ul>
<li>Custom games. You can’t make games private only to AoKHers or members of a certain community. And there are none of those interesting pre-game convos you had on the MSN Gaming Zone client (no MSN Gaming Zone chatrooms either, which were often funny in their own ways back in AoK’s prime, anyways). And you can’t choose what sort of game to join either.</li>
</ul></li>
</ul>
<p>Things I don’t really care about:</p>
<ul>
<li>Graphics (I really don’t care).</li>
</ul>
<p>In summary, Starcraft 2 is far less customizable than AOK ever was. It gives you <em>far</em> less choice. You pretty much always have to play by standard settings in Starcraft 2. While oversocialization often restricted the options effectively available to those who played AoK (since everyone considered “high resources” to be unique only to n00b-only games),some of the AoKH forum parties at my forum really played around with those settings, which made the game really fun and interesting even once I got bored of playing with the “zoners” (which was the somewhat-disparaging term us AoKHers applied to the random people in the MSN Gaming Zone).</p>
<p>In some ways, this is a reflection of how games may have evolved in the last 10 years. Newer games seem to be more “constructed” than “open”. Even Spore didn’t seem to be very open (even though you could create all sorts of creatures, the type of creature you constructed ultimately had almost no impact on the mid-later stages of the game).</p>
<p>Plus, since maps are far more consistent in Starcraft II, it allows for less uncertainty and more fixed action patterns (and less randomness).</p>
<p>Still, Starcraft 2 doesn’t have some of the things that ultimately drove me out of AoK (namely, the consistent 10-15 minute period of starting up, the possibility that one side’s allies would resign and completely tip the balance, making for an unbalanced game, and the end-game spamming of trash units). And the community (since AoK’s community ultimately started confining itself to Green Arabia and Land Nomad by 2006, but this was largely a function of AoK’s age by that point). Of course, I think that these things have also been addressed in other RTS games.</p>
<p>Starcraft 2 games also play much faster. There aren’t that many mineral patches as there are resources (or trade carts) in AoK. While this is often welcome for many of the most common games, it also reduces the number of intensely interesting/memorable games there are. In short, you lose less time from the games that end up sucking, but you also get fewer of the really nice moments.</p>
<p>If you really like playing with a certain community (which makes the diplomacy a lot more interesting since everyone knows everyone else and everyone else’s rough skill level, and where people are more open to trying different settings), AoK really is the preferable game. But I guess if you’re not in a certain special community, Starcraft 2 has its advantages. Another thing is that AoK is a lot more time-consuming than Starcraft 2 - in what you have to do to set up the game, in how long it takes to start up, and in how games can get drawn out. So I have less time than I used to have (as does practically everyone else who isn’t a tween), which is a plus for Starcraft 2. Still, if I had infinite time and AoK was still in its prime, AoK is still a lot funner.</p>