The Best Strategy Game You Never Played: Age of Mythology

Prostagma?

Excuse you "Never Played". This game was my childhood

Came for a retrospective of my favorite childhood RTS, stayed for the Crocodile rants. Justice for Sobek

Fun fact about Osiris in myth: his wife, your “patron goddess who shall not be named” was able to find every part of his body except one. The one missing part was the one most important for cough husbandly duties. So she made a replacement out of gold, brought him back to life and he lived exactly long enough to cough perform once, before dying again.

What’s insane is that Arkantos is basically retired by the time Fall of the Trident begins. There’s so much back story behind his character that I would love to see in the form of campaigns in the new aom Retold

This was the game that introduced me to both strategy games and ancient mythologies. Thank you for the wonderful memories mom.

I love that the resolution to the conflict with Kronos is to call his mom

I remember my dad getting this game thinking it was a movie 💀 (to his defense he’s pretty old) and m still revisiting it after so many years, such a good game.

"If this bombs I spent 4 months working on a dud" Becomes the most popular video in the channel by far

47:04 Hades also has a massive reason for helping the heroes keep Tartarus closed seeing as he lives next door.

It was almost a joke in my old friend circle how like 70% of us learned our ancient mythologies through those unit info pages. I remember my bro and I playing this game back in the day, he was partial to the Norse and their more aggro playstyle, whereas I tended towards Egypt cause I liked their myth units more. So many good memories, we might even still have the physical disks back home buried somewhere, if any of our computers can run it.

Okay so, one reason I think you had Set as the patron God in Mission 13 (the tug of war mission) is probably because of the betrayal right at the start of the NEXT mission - most likely it shows that the base you used for mission 13 was actually worshipping Set, and thus turned on you the moment you got the God piece. I thought it was a fairly smart piece of foreshadowing, while also giving you a chance to test Set stuff for a bit in the campaign.

so... as an AOM player, i'd like to talk about some things about the game: 1: The factions have mechanical identities rather than having RTS counterparts. -Greeks are all rounders, stable balanced gameplay, it's an AOE faction. click buttons, train dudes, fight, win. -Egyptian are value monsters. big economy (especially Ra, my go-to) HUGE defense potential, garbage cheap mid tier units (basically meat shields) but godlike myth units. they are huge for intermediate players. -Norse are rush/harass based. it's build fast, fight faster, train a lot, no defense at all, and tower rushes, the game usually stops at heroic age. but at mythic age, basically they get a "double or nothing" button, either ragnarok which kills economy outright, Hel's myth unit speed buff, sending your resource stockpile to nothingness, and Fimbulveltr which deal a huge blow to enemies' entire economy, building and gameplan altogether but leaving you with nothing if those fail. -Atlanteans are late game/steamroll/snowball they are decent at most things, economy is really good, but their units are really pricey. powers are BONKERS powerful, and sometimes end the game outright if well placed. (it's exactly the faction with which you tend to hold your powers until a big fight gets going, or you have an opportunity to summon a tartarus door in the enemy's backdoor/economy zone.) myth units vary, but they are usually either mediocre to good support units, crazy deathballs (hello automatons), or plain broken (Hecatoncheires and Lampades my beloved.) 2: Indeed you are right, Valkyries are very good in AOM. any kind of fast rushing strategy is good as Norse, especially since their cavalry are not that good (it's good but not... hersir good.) having a fast striking force at classical age, with a harass power in the form of forest fire (oh are you cutting wood? wouldn't it be a shame if i scouted you with my Valkyries and burnt your forest and villagers, setting you back on eco, and forcing you to take bigger risks to harvest wood) and said fast striking force at classical age can heal itself back to full if left unchecked, making it a rush strat that could spiral out of control? Ya it's good. 3: The Ulfsark gameplan is a strategy rather well known (or at least i know it well, i've wielded it against all my friends) it's basically a Zerg rush from starcraft, going Thor Forseti Braggi Tyr into upgrade the hell out of the ulfsark and making max population ulfsark is a very strong strat... if games last long enough. but at the moment your opponent sees Fimbulveltr, and a freight train of ulfserk charging and building a fortress in your base, you know you're basically screwed. 4: Fimbulveltr is not a standalone power like Hera's storm. it's an Assist, and a damn good one. it combines a small harassing force of meatshields, attracting tower and fortress fire off your units and to the expendable wolves. but the most important is that it's a power shield. while Fimbulveltr is in effect, no other power can be used. for 35 seconds, no thunderstorm, no eclipse, no ceasefire, no frost, no bronze, no ancestors, no shockwave. if you use it while you push an opponent with your army, you're almost certain to have an impact, and if you play correctly, and you have the army to keep up, you could put an opponent to ground zero right there and then. (example: Fimbulveltr, push with your main force against opponent, use a flanking maneuver with crush comp, before timer runs out, snipe enemy forum if you can, as timer runs out, cast Frost on opponent's fighting force, build your own forum upon the now free colony, and pick apart the rest.) 5: Automatons are indeed a meat shield. they are most powerful in a big number as a frontal assault paired to a flanking army. they are tanky and sure they are not the best damage dealers but if left unchecked due to... say... a big army flanking left side and a tartarus door? they are monstrous, because they don't die unless they fight huge hero comps. TLDR: greek are balanced, egyptian are economy, norse are harass, and atlantean are late game oriented valkyries are a pain at classical age ulfserk are zerglings use Fimbulveltr as you push your opponent, not as a standalone power, but it's a protection power. automatons are an anvil to an anvil and hammer strategy.

You are so right about sound design. Hearing the voice lines from the units was an instant nostalgia hit. Far bigger than any of the visuals.

Age of Mythology was one of the first PC games i played as a kid. It came out when i was 7 or 8 years old and saw my father playing it and wanted to play it too, so i did. I loved it so much, that i even did drawings of the heros and monsters.

Dude, AoM was THE game of my childhood. I remember going to my grandma's house (where my uncle's "good" PC was) and playing all day long throught my school holidays. It's been 20 years, my grandma passed away in 2021 and your video brought back a lot of good memories for me. Thank you so much for your effort and amazing work :) Cheers from Brazil!

2:41:00 The reference ''as the raids keep coming and they dont stop coming'' really got me

If ever there were a game deserving a 3 and a half hour long video about it, it is undoubtedly this one. Criminally underrated masterpiece, I hope we're living in a timeline where Retold does well enough to justify a level of support comparable to what Age 2 is currently getting.

“A place in my dreams” is such a badass mission name considering that’s how all the foes akantos has slain are described.

1:27:22 I've always been surprised they didn't remove the Roc from this mission for the sole reason that it can be used to completely ignore Kamos' main base and attack him directly and quickly beat the mission in under 10 minutes. It's fairly simple: get to the town center, rush ages, worship Hathor, build a Roc, put as many powerful units into it as you can, fly south to the starting island, east to the eastern corner of the map and then follow the map border up to the rear of Kamos' base, disembark your units from the Roc and attack Kamos himself. Once he reaches a certain health threshold, you win.