Age of Empires II/YMMV

• Anticlimax Boss: In the Barbarossa campaign's last scenario The Emperor Sleeping, after fighting your way through Damascus and the Saracen's camp, all spawning powerful units at will, you end up in a fortified but soldierless Jerusalem.
• Awesome Music:
  • Several examples on the Conquerors soundtrack. Especially This, around the 1:15 mark
  • Don't forget This from the original game.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Expect to see Deathmatch Hun only matches, and be criticized if you don't play Deathmatches as the Huns.
• Critical Research Failure:
  • In Age of Kings:
    • The final scenario for the tutorial campaign (the Battle of Falkirk) portrays it as a siege, and implies that William Wallace surives to continue his war with the English. While they were probably trying to avoid the historical Downer Ending, they could've just as easily given Wallace an Heroic Sacrifice. Alternatively:
    • The Battle of Falkirk should have had you playing as the English where you have to defeat William Wallace. It also should have been the second-to-last mission of the Tutorial campaign. The real final tutorial mission should have been the Battle of Bannockburn, where it reveals that the narrator of the tutorial campaign was Robert the Bruce.
  • In The Conquerors:
    • The religious building for the Aztecs and Mayans are still called Monasteries, and the religious unit is still called Monk. However, the Aztec/Mayan monk actually uses a different skin than other monks, making it look like an actual Mayincatec priest. At least they got the blood on the stairs.
    • The Montezuma campaign repeats the popular myth that the Aztecs mistook the Spanish for gods.
    • In the El Cid campaign, El Cid was said to have been killed by an arrow and propped up on a horse in order to stop the truth from spreading. In reality, he died peacefully. This was probably done for the same or similar reasons as the Battle of Falkirk bit.
• Ensemble Darkhorse: For a very minor role in the first Genghis Khan level, Ornlu has gotten quite poular among the fanbase, enough for the developers to reference him in Age of Mythology and Age of Empires III.
• Game Breaker: In spite of being a game with an actual priority of history over gameplay, a few can be exploited. For example:
  • The Huns in The Conquerors don't require houses like everyone else. This means that, in Deathmatch (when you start with a huge stockpile of resources), the tactic of "Build a few Barracks, spam-click build Militia Button, and swarm everyone" ends up being this.
  • The Goths' ability to Zerg Rush.
  • The eventually patched-out Teuton Town Center range boost.
  • The Persians' War Elephants.
  • The various Korean onager bonuses allow them to outrange near enough anything, and the onager's obscene firepower and area of effect damage means they will cause insane damage before anything can retaliate.
  • British Longbowmen, once fully upgraded, can outrange any Castle except for a Teutonic Castle (a Castles maximum range is 10-11 depending on the civilisation, the fully upgraded British Longbowman has 12 range, Teutons have 13). They can outrange any siege unit except for Bombard Cannons and Trebuchets (Trebuchets are damn slow and can't hit moving targets very well, Bombard Cannons barely manage to outrange British Longbowmen and are slower, and not everyone can make them); they can even match, if not outrange, the afore mentioned Korean Siege Onager. Suppose they are near the sea, and the enemy decides to use their navy to destroy the Longbowmen? Well, the Longbowmen can outrange any ship (except for the Cannon Galleon, which is also pretty damn inaccurate (unless you're Spanish). They don't even need to worry about cavalry, because large numbers of them can shoot down entire hordes before they can do any serious damage.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • In the fourth Attila the Hun mission, you are tasked with destroying three major cities. Destroying the third spawns the massive Roman Army, a force of over a hundred top-tier units... unless you found and killed the placeholder unit on the map, which causes the army to be instantly defeated (later versions of the game have the army spawn anyway, forcing you to defeat them to win).
  • In the fifth Saladin mission "Jihad!", one of the three cities, Ascalon, is intended to attempt a Wonder victory. However, sometimes the AI for Ascalon bugs out and doesn't do anything. Given as how "Jihad!" is That One Level even without Ascalon going for the Wonder, this is immensely helpful.
  • The in game scenario editor can do some interesting things with structures and terrain elements that shouldn't be possible. This has been abused thoroughly by the modding community creating custom campaigns.
  • In the first scenario of the Attila the Hun campaign, it's possible to fire both the "Bleda getting killed in the boar hunt" and the "Attila fleeing the Hun camp" events if your timing is good. Because of the first event, the Huns will argue over whether Attila is a worthy leader or an honorless cur, but the second event will make all Hun units instantly join your side upon Bleda's death. This has the practical benefit of giving you Bleda's entire faction with minimal bloodshed. Another bug in the same scenario can occur if the player allies with the Scythians. While the Scythians will break their alliance with the Persians, the Persians don't always do the same and won't even bother to fight back as the Scythians slaughter their way through their base.
  • In the fourth Sundjata scenario "Blood on The River Bank", a bug can cause Gbetos to be produced every second on one of your allies' Barracks, resulting in the player having a massive amount of infinitely-generated troops.
  • In an early version of the game, in "The Crucible", the first Genghis Khan level, Genghis Khan — an extremely strong and powerful hero with a Mangudai model — could be converted to player control at the start, making it ridiculously easy.
  • The AI never builds transport ships despite making docks, at least on lower difficulty levels, making an Island game of deathmatch much easier and regicide impossible to lose because you only need to worry about navy fights.
  • It's possible to bypass the inability to attack your allies by having non-archer projectile units target the ground that just so happens to be where something of your ally's is at. Since you technically aren't attacking them, the AI will never change their stance to you.
  • In Agincourt (one of the Battles of the Conquerors), you start with a small army, several Monks, no base, no villagers and 80 Wood and 85 Gold. It is possible to convert enemy villagers but, as the level instructions points out, this will only allow you to repair your siege weapons... unless you convert four villagers, have them collect 20 Wood each, then build a farm, which will cause them to deposit the wood in your inventory, giving you enough to build a lumber camp, collect more wood and build a base.
• Hell Is That Noise: Enemy Monks converting your units. The chanting sounds like allied monks, only dropped a couple of octaves with added reverb.
• It's the Same, Now It Sucks!: While the Middle Eastern architecture set suits the Berbers, there's still the issue that 6 civs share the same set (Saracens, Turks, Persians, Byzantines, Indians (until Rise of the Rajas, where they officially get a unique set) and the aforementioned Berbers).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Ten elephants fit in the transport boat but eleven archers can't.
  • "how do you turn this on".
• Most Annoying Sound:
  • The monk conversion noise, especially if it is successful.
  • In the Saladin campaign, from Medina and Aqaba:

"Crusaders are attacking our trade routes!"

• Scrappy Weapon:
  • Camels are usually avoided because they cost a lot of gold, yet are very frail. They die easily to building fire as they're classified as ships (which have a similar weakness) to differentiate themselves from Knights. This is one of the reasons why the Indians cannot utilize their camels prior to The African Kingdoms because their Knight line (one of the most powerful standard units in the Castle Age) is completely replaced by Camels, which due to the reasons above above cannot be used similarly to Knights.
  • The Champion line and most of the infantry Unique Units (with the exception of Huskarls, every single Malian infantry, Shotel Warriors and Woad Raiders) rarely see use in competitive play due to being slow, requiring obscenely expensive upgrades that barely do anything and having many common weaknesses, namely the commonly-used archers, gunpowder units, knights and Onagers.
    • The Samurai, Teutonic Knights, and Jaguar Warriors can be an exception as well depending on the situation. Since the Samurai have bonus points against other unique units, The Teutonic Knights are Mighty Glaciers that can obliterate almost any melee units that gets in their path thanks to their armor bonus, and the Jaguar Warriors slaughters other infantry and have a unique tech that gives them +4 attack points.
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: While the original game was OK, this game and the expansions are universally acclaimed and seen as great improvements.
• That One Level:
  • The second mission in the Saracen campaign. The level seems designed to screw you over in every way possible. You can't advance to the Imperial Age, start out with next to no resources and almost no units, and your opponents (especially Reynald's Pirates) can do everything you can't. Also features a Most Annoying Sound listed above.
  • The second to last mission in the Saracen campaign has you up against three major foes who attack you relentlessly from both land and sea. Your position is extremely exposed, while they are safe in their strongholds (two of which you have to destroy). To make matters worse, one of your enemies starts building a wonder soon after the mission starts, effectively forcing your hand in attacking him as soon as possible.
  • The last mission (again) in the Saracen campaign. Feeling good at building a huge wonder in Acre while repelling the continous assaults of Genuese (warships), Templars (rams and teutonic Knights), French (bombard cannons and hand cannoneer), Jerusalem (champions, camels and trebuchets) and Richard the Lionhearted, who can spam you with longbowmen and trebuchets AND has two Trebuchet heroes in his ranks. Oh, and you'll have to defend the city from both north and west. Have fun.
  • From the Genghis Khan campaign, the China mission. It would have been a simple matter of building a base and waging a war of attrition against the various enemy factions, if not for the fact that the Jin (in a powerful stronghold on the other end of the map) start building a wonder after not too long. The fact that the population limit is 75 puts you at a distinct disadvantage when launching an amphibious assault on them. In addition, this scenario chews up a lot of processor power and memory because of the huge wall and having several mature civilizations. The lag isn't going to help the player at all. Playing with the expansion gives access to Petards, which make it slightly easier to breach Jin's stronghold, but it's still an extremely difficult level.
  • From the Barbarossa campaign: Scenario five is a fixed-force mission in which you must transport your army across the Aegean Sea, which is patrolled by many Saracen warships. Even if you do capture the Byzantine navy, all you can do is weaken the Saracens slightly. You'll be lucky if even one transport makes it.
  • Genghis Khan 4 and Barbarossa 6 are also quite hard if played with the expansion due to not being rebalanced to account for the Persian unique technology, which makes their elephants faster. Let's hope you can micromanage your monks.
  • Barbarossa 4 can be quite the nightmare as well, what with getting chased out of your base right off the bat and having to relocate to one of two places, neither of which has enough resources for you to beat all of your enemies. Oh, and there's also the mission objective, which stipulates that you must build an obscenely expensive Wonder inside an enemy base. You know, those bases that are busy turning out soldiers faster than you can kill them and all that. Those bases.
  • The Siege of Paris on any difficulty level other than "Standard": the English now have fully developed and highly aggressive Longbowmen that can snipe you dead from far away or lead you to their towers and castle's range. Once inside the city the simpliest mistake will have you swarmed with all the possible enemy troops in the city, including the above mentioned Longbowmen, Champions, Halberdiers and Siege Onagers. Even if you manage to evade all these foes, there's still the matter of leading Joan and at least 6 out of 10 villagers through a huge Burgundy attack safe and sound.
  • Barbarossa's third mission "Pope and Antipope" is like hell after the first two warm-up missions. The player must convert the Cathedral at Milan. While getting started isn't that hard, accomplishing the actual objective is. The player will be the target of frequent naval invasions, and even if one's defences are sufficient to ward them off, one still has to cross that river and fight Milan... and Milan not only has the resources to spam out troops at a horrendous rate, they also seem to have a fairly strong AI that makes them quite efficient at keeping their side of the river clean.
  • The fourth mission in the Attila the Hun campaign. You have three enemies: one that is weakly defended, but offers an alliance with you; one that is moderately defended; and one that is very heavily defended and periodically does attacks on you that are very difficult to fend off. And when you decide to attack their city, they create units faster than you can kill them, and you are likely to replenish your forces at least twice even if you have a very strong army. To make matters worse, when you do almost defeat them, you have to fight another enemy, whose army consists of over a hundred Champions and Elite Cataphracts (though there is a way around that: by killing a random Samurai trapped in a forest).
  • The sixth mission in the Attila the Hun campaign. You have four enemies, all of whom try to defeat you with a Wonder victory, all of whom attack you with forces that are difficult to fend off, and all of whom are in fortified cities.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The African Kingdoms would have been a perfectly reasonable opportunity to incorporate the Vandals (one of the most notable Germanic enemies of the Romans, other than the Goths) into the game, seeing as they had ruled the North African kingdom of Carthage for a time, and they sacked Rome during that period. Surely, that would've been worth at least one scenario that was about them, right?
• The Unexpected: Ornlu, in a hilarious defiance of common logic, turns up in the fourth mission of the Montezuma campaign, as an Easter Egg. In the second level, a renamed version of him called Son of Ornlu can also be found.
• Unfortunate Implications: By researching Atheism, the spy/treason tech cost (which allows you to see all your enemies on the map) is halvened. It seems that not being religious makes you a filthy traitor who would sell his country for gold.