The Tournament of the Underdog (Part 1)

It was a Friday evening in St. Petersburg, FL. Most people my age were probably at bars and clubs a mile way in downtown St. Pete, kicking off their weekend with a bang. I was in my room yelling at the top of my lungs at my computer screen. Twitch was pulled up on my monitor and from its speakers emanated the excited and exasperated voice of the legendary gaming commentator Memb. Memb has commentated on professional Age of Empires II gameplay for over a decade. Even he wasn't believing what he was seeing. Sitaux, the aggressive and opportunistic Frenchman, had Hera, the machine-like Canadian on the ropes. Sitaux had been up 3-1 in this best of 7 series, but Hera had clawed back two games in a row to even the score 3-3. We were now going to that most hallowed ground of competition: Game 7. From a competitive perspective it was the perfect way to end a hard-fought and entertaining day of Age of Empires II, yet I was anxious. Sitaux was a massive underdog and now Hera had all the momentum. All I wanted was for Sitaux to overcome his demons and end Hera's era of total supremacy over the tournament scene. The final civilization picks were locked in. Hera had selected Lithuanians. Sitaux would play as the Vietnamese. This was Sitaux's last chance. Would he let it slip as he had the last two, or would he find another level of gameplay to overcome the world's best Age of Empires II player?

Age of Empires II is a game that seems as old as the trees. Originally released in 1999, the game and its community has gone through its ups and downs over time, yet remarkably its player base has grown. Twenty-five years later, the community is as vibrant as ever and the competitive scene is thriving.

Age of Empires II is an RTS or Real Time Strategy game. Let's break down what that means. "Real Time" specifies that unlike a board game, an RTS is not turn based. Action happens in real time. RTS games are also defined by strategic choices a player must make. Throughout a standard game of Age of Empires players will have to make hundreds of small and large choices that affect the outcome. For example, there are four resources that can be gathered by your villagers: food, wood, gold, and stone. What resources you choose to gather and at what times can completely change the nature of a game by determining what structures you can build, what units you can create, and what upgrades you can research. This constitutes the economic aspect of Age of Empires II.

Despite the economic aspect of the game being extremely important, at its very core Age of Empires II is a game of tactics and fighting. Age of Empires II features a wide roster of many different unit types from slow, but cheap infantry units, to fast and expensive cavalry. What units you train and how you use these units are crucial elements to achieving victory. For example, let's say you are playing as the Franks and your opponent is playing the Berbers. Your civilization, the Franks, has many bonuses that allow you to produce top notch knight units, however your Berber opponent has a very strong counter to your knights: camels, a cavalry unit that gets a bonus when fighting other cavalry units. So as the Frankish player you have a difficult choice to make: do you still go for knights anyway since that is what your civilization is best at, or do you decide to produce another type of unit like monks or archers that aren't as strong as your powerful knights, but your Berber opponent will find harder to counter?

These are the kinds of tough decisions that make Age of Empires II such a deep and fascinating game and why hundreds of thousands of players across the globe still play it twenty-five years later.

AoE II has a vibrant competitive scene that has grown significantly since the release of the Definitive Edition which came out in 2019. Since then, the majority of the largest AoE II tournaments have been won by a handful of world class players. For a long period of time the world's undisputed best player, "TheViper", won nearly every tournament he competed in. In more recent months, a young Canadian player who goes by the in-game tag "Hera" first challenged TheViper's dominance and then eclipsed him, beginning his own era of dominance in the competitive circuit.