It’s a hell of a balancing act, for sure. Change too little, on the other hand, and you’ll be castigated for not fixing the broken bits. How do you supplant a game whose star still seems to be rising? Change too much, and you’ll be beasted for fixing what wasn’t broken.

Launching a new Age game now has the air of a prince giving a nervous funeral speech, where he promises to exceed the glories of his father’s reign, even as the king’s body casually bench-presses a horse from the coffin next to him. But thanks to a belting remaster of AoE2 in 2019, the old bruiser is somehow once again the RTS of the day, complete with brand new expansions, lashings of fresh esports, and the largest player base it has ever had. Just the twenty-year fug of strategy dad nostalgia surrounding the series would have been a significant enough headwind for AoE4 developers Relic Entertainment to release into. But it was AoE2 that would be enshrined as one of the all-time RTS greats, and it’s the inevitable benchmark against which AoE4 will be measured, when it launches later this year.

The first and third Age titles were both fine games, of course, as was their stoner cousin Age Of Mythology. Despite being the fifth main game in its series, the only way of looking at Age Of Empires 4 is as a sequel to Age Of Empires 2.

Age of empires 1 vs 2