Probably the most common woe, for all but the most unnaturally gifted players of real-time strategy games, is the feeling of being overwhelmed. Particularly in games from the genre’s “golden age” in the late 90s, there’s a relentless need to focus on several things at once, and endlessly jump back and forth between combat and economy. Age Of Empires 2, beautiful beast though it is, is certainly no exception, even with the concessions to modernity introduced in its Definitive Edition last year.

However. What if I was to tell you there was a way to play the game, totally unmodded, in a way that eliminates this concern entirely? Well, as the bloke off of Pirates Of The Carribean once memorably said, “you’d best start believing in posts about weird, gestalt-consciousness Age Of Empires sessions; ye’re in one.”

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Age Of Empires 2

is about to receive its sixth expansion pack, Lords Of The West, just a casual 22 years after the base game first wololoed its way onto our screens. From January 26th in the year of our lord 2021, players will be able to take the knight-happy Burgundians and the castle-dropping Sicilians for a spin, as well as play through three new campaigns – one each for the new civs, and a third for the Britons, featuring good old Edward Longshanks. Longshanks, of course, was the baddie off of Braveheart, and thus also the baddie off of AoE2’s first ever campaign, where you played as William Wallace in a series of adventures that were totally based on history and not the film.

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Ultrawide gaming monitors are the kind of hardware that might seem too excessive, maybe even a bit too gamer> to bother with for playing games on PC, especially when their demanding resolutions often require powerful graphics cards to make the most of them. Once you try one, though, there’s no going back. I’ve been a big fan of ultrawide gaming monitors for years now, mostly because supported PC games just look fantastic on them. And that’s why I’ve put together this list of the best ultrawide games on PC – to show you exactly what they look like in the flesh, complete with GIFs and photos of them running on an ultrawide monitor so you can see them in motion with your own peepers.

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Looking back at it now, 2020 doesn’t feel like a banner year for strategy games, but that doesn’t mean there haven’t been a few gems. The list below – gathered by a panel of experts and regularly updated – contains games from as recently as 12 months ago alongside classics from as far back as 28 years ago. They’re all games we think you could play and love right now.

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I’ve not posted about Age Of Empires 2 in a while, because there’s been a lot of other things on, but I’m still plugging away with it – I start each day with a quick random match against the AI to keep my hand in, and once a week or so, I dare to enter the adrenaline-soaked APM hell of ranked multiplayer. I lose more than I win, but I’m slowly getting better. This match made me feel particularly good, and it had the plot of a classic farce (only with war elephants), so it seemed like a good one to relate to you. Get your Knight Vision Goggles on, then, and let’s see how it played out.

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‘Building’ is a pretty broad theme. There are a lot of games where you build things, after all, and they can be very different. Helpfully, then, I’ve split this list of the 20 best building games on PC into four sections, each covering a sub-category of this big, messy genre.

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I’ve been having a bit of a rough time in my quest to become good at Age Of Empires 2: Definitive Edition. After my first ranked win, I had a streak of confidence-fuelled victories, and started to feel like maybe I was the Big Man. But oh, no. I was not. The wins took me out of the world of newcomers, into the wide band of the leaderboard frequented by people who actually know how to play, and I got beaten into the ground with a bastard sword. As ever, my weakness was timidity about being aggressive early. I’d try to “fast castle”, focusing on rapid early economic growth so as to get to the game’s third tech tier, only to have a squad of gits march into my base eleven minutes into the game, because my enemy had thrown everything into a feudal age military rush. But now, it seems, my luck has turned.

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Twenty one years after its original release, RTS classic Age Of Empires 2 is finally, improbably, coming into its own as an esport. There’s been a competitive AoE2 scene ever since 1999, but in the last couple of years, and particularly since the release of the Definitive Edition in November, it seems to have blown up somewhat. In fact, since 2pm GMT today, when the third Hidden Cup tournament kicked off, there have been around 30,000 people glued to this orgy of frenzied knight-spamming – and we’re only on the second best-of-five matchup in the first round of 16 [Edit – in the 20 minutes since I started this piece, we’re up to 35,000 viewers].

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Last week, after a lifetime of timidity, I finally bit the bullet and played my first competitive ranked game of Age Of Empires 2. Needless to say, I got battered. A big medieval boot stomped my fingers from the first rung of the ranked ladder, and I splashed back into the mire where I belonged. But after a week licking my wounds, practising build orders, doing maths with 14 wiki tabs open, and archer-rushing my way through endless 1v1 comp stomps, I came back for another go.

This time, my arrow-spamming, catapult-happy Ethiopians were facing off against the Japanese, on the map known as GOLD RUSH. As its name suggests, this map is all about fighting for control of gold deposits, almost all of which spawn on a massive hill in the middle. A massive hill… covered in tigers>. Aggressive map control would be even more crucial here than it had been in the Black Forest, while tigers would become suddenly, and drastically, relevant. But had I learned my lessons from my first defeat – and could I seize my first win on the back of it? Draw your reading swords, armchair knights, and charge on to find out:

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I’ve never particularly been one for competitive multiplayer games. I’ve played the odd bit of Overwatch in recent years, but mostly as a way to hang out with pals, and I quite enjoy the complete anonymity of ranked hearthstone, even though I’m guff at it. But I’ve always been massively scared to play strategy games against human opponents, in case it ruins the illusion that I might be good at them. Plus, I panic! I get disproportionately terrified by the idea of being locked in a map with someone who wants, essentially, to end my pretty game of ant-farming, and so the idea has always seemed too stressful to bother with.

But then, after I fell in love with Age Of Empires 2: Definitive Edition in November, I started watching casts of high level players fighting 1v1 duels as a way to relax before going to sleep, and ended up getting fascinated by the absolute precision with which they handled the game.

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