Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is celebrating its first holiday season with an official Christmas mod, Winter Celebration 2019, that you can download for free until next year. The mod adds lots of cheery, festive touches that, I'm sorry to say, raise some questions about historical accuracy. 

I won't dispute that it snowed at some point during the medieval era, possibly even multiple times, but I'm less certain about the use of icicles as projectile weapons. Did villagers venture outside to root around in naturally occurring piles of gift-wrapped presents so they could feed their family? We may never know for sure, but I have my doubts. 

Here's what the mod includes:

• Snow covered trees
• Patches of snow on all non-water terrain
• Piles of presents in place of forage/fruit bushes
• Piles of presents underneath town centres
• Icicles replace normal sized arrows
• Candy canes replace spears from skirmishers and genitours
• Presents replace trebuchet projectiles
• Snowballs replace cannonballs for bombard cannons, cannon galleons and bombard towers
• Snowflakes replace projectiles for mangonel/onager/siege units

All very suspect. Don't hold it against the game, though. The latest iteration of Age of Empires 2 is also the best, leaving little untouched as it brings the classic RTS into the modern age. If you were a bit disappointed by the previous HD remaster or the first Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, this is a much more significant upgrade. 

Age of Empires 2 is being wheeled out again, not quite new, but definitely improved. It wears its two decades well, but the years are still there, hidden beneath polish and new art and myriad tweaks. The Definitive Edition wavers between remaster and remake, updating nearly everything, from the art to the AI, as well as adding a trio of new campaigns and four more civilisations, but reverence for the original means that the changes, though broad and welcome, are somewhat restrained.

Much of that reverence is justified, and what made Age of Empires 2 stand out at a time when there was no dearth of excellent real-time strategy games holds it in good stead 20 years on. Though its ambitions were similar to its predecessor's, the attempt to combine real-time strategy with city building and Sid Meir's Civilization was a lot more successful the second time around. It was also simply a better, richer strategy game.  

The Definitive Edition makes it easier to appreciate why it had the impact it did. Finally, in 2019, Age of Empires 2 lets you tell your villagers to automatically reseed farms! No more returning from a war to find the fields fallow and my villagers twiddling their thumbs. This might be the most exciting change for me, the most boring man in the world. It really does save a lot of headaches, though, and is one of several ways the new version gives you more control while still cutting down on unnecessary micromanagement. 

Quality of life improvements might not sound like much of a headline attraction, but Age of Empires 2 needed them just as much as the new campaigns and the visual overhaul. Queuing up different units and upgrades, being able to drag and select armies without grabbing villagers by mistake, queuing commands—most of what I wished the first Age of Empires: Definitive Edition included has been introduced here. The result is a more consistent pace that leaves you with extra time to spend expanding your civilisation and commanding armies. 

Those are two areas where it's largely business as usual. You start with a town centre and a handful of villagers, gather resources, plonk down buildings and expand until you've got a big army and an impressive fortified city. Across the campaigns and skirmishes, this familiar routine is repeated, tweaked and sometimes subverted, but while Age of Empires 2's current curators have updated a lot around it, the moment-to-moment civilisation and army management has been preserved. 

Unlike the first Age of Empires, large armies are more manageable thanks to formations and improved pathfinding. They try to take the most efficient route, and while units can still get stuck when they're blocked by their mates, you can switch formations to give them more room to move. Once they get into melee, however, formations crumble and become giant brawls where every inch of space is filled with warriors hacking away at each other.

Melee brawls are brisk and, even with the new and otherwise helpful zoom feature, it can still be hard to decipher what's going on in the scrum itself—it's just a lot of shrinking health bars—so committing your force can feel a bit like giving up control. Units run around desperately trying to get to the nearest enemy, or the one you selected, frequently having to adjust as gaps close. You've either got to micromanage the lot of them or leave them to it and just hope that you've sent in the right units to counter your opponent. 

Battles amount to more than throwing a heaving mass of warriors at your adversaries, though, especially if they're hiding behind some walls. One of the best additions of the original Age of Empires 2 was proper fortifications and the accompanying sieges. Assaulting a walled city is a massive investment in gold and manpower, and a bit of a logistical conundrum. Siege engines are expensive, slow and fall apart as soon as the enemy looks in their direction. They need troops to escort them and fight off the AI—which does seem to do a pretty good job of prioritising targets even on the standard difficulty—and safe positions to begin an assault from. As chaotic as combat can get, sieges and big confrontations still require plenty of planning. 

Microsoft and developer Forgotten Empires have been clear about their intent to eschew big changes to the combat, citing feedback from the Age of Empires community. Even if that wasn't the case, changes to the core of the game aren't what you'd expect in the Definitive Edition, but in other places the alterations are surprisingly significant and meaningful, making the gaps more noticeable. When you've got flashy new 4K art everywhere, a reworked UI and more refined controls, the messiness and lack of clarity in fights can be a bit jarring. Combat doesn't exist in a vacuum, however, and still benefits from the improvements orbiting it.

All 27 campaigns are available from the get go, so it can be tricky to know where to begin. For old time's sake, I had to play the William Wallace tutorial campaign first. All the old campaigns, as well as benefiting from the art overhaul, have new audio, dialogue and updated missions, but if you've played them before, you should find them very familiar. As well as the campaign tutorial, the Definitive Edition also includes some further education in the form of challenge missions. Despite my nostalgic affection for the William Wallace campaign, it only teaches the basics, hiding a lot of Age of Empires 2's depth from new players. While the challenge missions aren't essential, they'll make you a more efficient player and better prepare you for games beyond the campaigns. 

With Scotland behind me, I could start working my way through the brand new campaigns, collectively known as the The Last Khans. Age of Empires 2 already has more civilisations and missions than anyone could be reasonably expected to play while still eating and sleeping, but the promise of New Content is, as ever, seductive. 

Each campaign takes a crack at spinning a historical yarn through the deeds of a specific historical figure, as is traditional for the series. Mission intros and outros do all the exposition, but there are plenty of narrative moments and scripted sequences within the missions themselves. There are multiple paths, plot twists and some elaborate set pieces, and they generally strike a good balance between a bespoke, directed experience and a sandbox. Not every mission is a winner, but even when the execution is a bit off, there's usually still an interesting hook or twist, or even just an unusual map layout, that makes it memorable.

One mission in the Tamerlane campaign begins with a pitched battle. Big Tam's army terrifies a bunch of charging enemy elephants with explosives, causing them to stampede towards their old masters, at which point they get put under player control. After that bloody battle, you've got 80 minutes to conquer Delhi by destroying five castles hidden behind its two walls. There are enemy towns to raid and villages to nurture, but what you do with those 80 minutes is up to you. With the enemy not leaving their city, you're given loads of room to breath and prepare, but once inside it's a tricky fight with narrow corridors making movement a nightmare, and countless guard towers whittling down the invaders. It's great, but I failed my first attempt because a line of dialogue obscured the countdown and refused to disappear. 

That happens a lot. Alerts, taunts and random bits of banter end up just hanging around, long after they're relevant, though it was only once that the bug actually had an impact on a mission. Aside from a single crash and one or two occasions when a large scripted battle caused some brief stuttering, I've not had any other issues. 

The Last Khans campaigns are good introductions to the new civilisations, but they're probably not a good place to begin if you're new to Age of Empires 2, or if it's been a while since you last played. With the standard difficulty, they're reasonably forgiving, and each comes with detailed hints and a scout report, but they're quite a bit more complex than the original Age of Kings campaigns. 

The Bulgarians, Cumans, Lithuanians and Tatars get unique units, techs and bonuses, and they all share a penchant for horses. I've become partial to the Bulgarians, who start off pretty strong. They get an automatic upgrade that turns their weak early infantry into men-at-arms, as well as a wee castle that costs half as much as a regular castle and unlocks recruitment of their unique unit. The Konnick is a cavalry unit that rather conveniently gets a second life as an infantry unit when it's defeated, something I've made great use out of as a reckless commander. The civ has less going for it once it hits Castle Age, so I'm not sure where it's going to end up in the competitive tiers, but I'm more of a comp stomp guy anyway.

Whether you want to duke out against the AI or human opponents, the skirmish modes give you plenty of options. There are ten modes to choose from, including the new Empire Wars mode, which starts you off in the Feudal Age with a small town up and running, cutting out the early game. As much as I love to meticulously plan the town out myself, I'm starting to appreciate things beginning in medias res—within a few minutes I've got an army ready to go out and find some trouble. 

Since the beta ended, there haven't been many opportunities for multiplayer. There's multiplayer lobbies, ranked matchmaking, spectating and leaderboards, with regional servers instead of a peer-to-peer system, and it seemed to be working fine during the beta, but the real test will be when everyone can start playing on November 14. There's still a lively Age of Empires 2 community that plays the HD version, so hopefully it will migrate over and keep the lobby browser full. I'll be playing at launch, so I'll report any multiplayer woes if there are any.

While this undoubtedly goes several steps further than the HD version and the first Age of Empires: Definitive Edition, it also makes me even more eager for a dramatically different take on Age of Empires 2. You won't find that here. This isn't for people looking for something new; it's for people who are already enamoured with the original game, who I still count myself among, and for fans it's the best version of the best Age of Empires game by a wide margin.

We might be in the most interesting period of Age of Empire's history. At last there's a new game in development, Age of Empires 4, while the older games are being given significant remasters. Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition is next on the docket, releasing next week, complete with the expansion-sized addition of three new campaigns and four more civilisations. Ahead of its launch, I got a first look at the new civilisations and talked to the developers about the series' second wind. 

There are a lot of studios working on Age of Empires right now, all spread out across the world and working on different projects. That's why, earlier this year, Microsoft announced that it had formed a new studio dedicated to all things Age of Empires, established to work with each of the teams.

"Age is a 22-year-old IP, and there are several of us at the Microsoft Games Studios organisation who have been here since before the original Age came out—a hardcore group of fans," studio head Shannon Loftis tells me. "So, last spring we announced we were forming a new studio dedicated to revitalising Age, bringing the legacy Age products together and up to speed in a definitive edition form, and then advancing the IP with Age 4, moving it into the future.

"Here in Redmond, we've build effectively a fourth game development team. Currently we're focused on driving Age quality into all the different SKUs that we've got going. We're working on uniting the fanbase and creating a common location and common set of channels to communicate with fans and bring their voices into the development process. It is truly a giant global virtual team working on all things Age."

There's some collaboration, then, and the occasional borrowing of features. All the games will let you have a single meta profile, with the goal being to foster one big online community across the series, and RelicLink has been adopted to carry this out in every game, not just the Relic-designed Age of Empires 4.

Forgotten Empires started out as an international group of Age of Empires fans hacking away at the old games, but since 2013 it's been designing new expansions and remasters. For Age of Empires 2, it's throwing the Bulgarians, Cumans, Lithuanians and Tatars into the mix, leaving the game with a whopping 35 civilisations, but it's also gone back through the entire game, including the more recent expansions, tweaking and updating.

"The Forgotten Empires team went back and audited and edited all 25 campaigns, so they've actually tightened up a lot of things," says Age of Empires creative director Adam Isgreen. "When these campaigns were made, especially the early ones, these were the days where you didn't even know if people knew how to use a mouse. There were a lot of campaign missions that were pretty tedious, like go collect 500 food or kill every single thing, and there were objectives and goals that were really pretty outdated for the way people like to enjoy games today."

Objectives have been reworked and the missions have more momentum. There are plenty of cosmetic changes, too, with more than 1,000 new pieces of art in the campaigns and new audio, including dialogue from speakers of the languages of the cultures you'll find in the game. It's a point that Isgreen stresses, and he sees historical authenticity as a key feature of the series.

"One of our goals is to be a good steward of history," he says. "To do that, we wanted to make sure that we could make it as authentic as we possibly could when were going back to crack it open—really make it a definitive edition … History is only as interesting as the person who taught it to you. We want to be a passionate, engaging history teacher with all of our products, even with Mythology we still want to have a fun time and get people excited about history because it's such a great thing when people can engage with it."

The brand new civilisations will be showcased across a trio of campaigns, and each campaign designer at Forgotten Empires has a background in history, so they're able to apply to some historical context to the stories and missions you'll be marching your armies through.

"This is especially helpful for the stories covered in the Last Khans, since they are rather unknown stories compared to, for example, William Wallace or Joan of Arc that a lot of people have heard of through movies, books or other video games," says Bert Beeckman, co-founder of Forgotten Empires and lead designer. "We noticed from previous expansions that our fans love it when we get into these lesser-known stories, which also makes it harder for our team to get information on the stories we want to tell. In the end, we always find the information we need, be it through books, historical articles or sometimes even reaching out to universities for additional information. Additionally, we try to read stories from multiple angles. A story always has multiple perspectives, especially where there is a winning and a losing side. Each side has their own perspective on the conflict and we want to make sure we paint a complete picture in the end."

Despite striving for authenticity, it's probably not a good idea to use Age of Empires to revise for an exam. Forgotten Empires is more interested in stories around people rather than individual historical events, and for its subjects it tries to find stories of relatable characters, who also happen to lead armies and get into lots of fights.

"Tamerlane [Tatars] is a tale all about conquest from a powerful ruler, while Ivaylo [Bulgarians] is more about the rise to power of a common man," Beeckman says. "Kotyan Khan [Cumans], on the other hand, is a less common story about a Khan trying to save his people. Because the stories are so different, it allows us to create different objectives in the campaigns, which is also helped by the fact that each campaign had its own 'main' designer to guarantee uniqueness between campaigns."

The common thread between the campaigns and the civilisations themselves are the Mongols, and each of the new civilisations is derived from them. That means they've got a cavalry focus. Mobility is a theme, and aggression, but defensive players will still find their playstyle supported, and some of them lean more to heavy units, though still on horseback. You'll see their connection to the Mongols in how they fight, but as they progress, they'll unlock cannons and other things, representing their assimilation of other cultures and technology.

You can see them in action in some exclusive gameplay footage from one of the campaign missions below. 

Despite their quirks, once again there's a consistency among the civilisations, making balancing and learning the gargantuan roster a more manageable challenge.

"Age 2 is fascinating because a lot of the pro players will play random," Isgreen says. "They don't even pick a civ to stick with it. It speaks to this interesting mix of symmetry and asymmetry that all the civs in Age 2 have. It's a fascinating game; it's unique to any other RTS game that I've played or even worked on, in that you have this core set of rock paper scissors that remains the same across all the civilisations, but then you have fringe modifiers. As different as the civs are, we don't want to make them too radically different because it would break that interesting symmetry and accessibility across all the civilisations. At 35 civs, the cognitive load of holding them all in your head, if they were all StarCraft-level different... I don't know what you would do."

The new civilisations aren't set in stone, however. "As we have with every civ that we added with Age 2 HD, we'll put it out in the marketplace and then we'll start talking to people who are playing, and if anyone is OP we'll address that," adds Loftis. It's unlikely that even more civilisations will be added, but the existing ones will be updated as necessary, and new modes and campaigns are also possible.

Actually figuring out what to change is a challenge in itself. When the community was asked about its thoughts on what could be improved for the new edition, they made it pretty clear that it wasn't combat. "Don't touch the combat at all—it's sacred," was the message the team received.

"We had to figure out what to do around it," Isgreen says. "Part of it was identifying what was so special about Age in the first place. It's the pacing of the game, the amount of units you have to work with, the feel of it, the time to kill, how long things take to die so you have time to make decisions. It's very different from other RTS games. So it was starting with that core and building around it, like how can we modernise the UI? Can we? Do people want us to? And running all these interactions with our community to feel out what we can change."

With Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition out next week and Age of Empires 3: Definitive Edition already in the works, that just leaves one game left: Age of Mythology. Like the others, it received an HD remaster, but so far there's been no word on adding it to the roster of definitive editions. Its fate is undecided, but the good news is that it seems likely it will reappear in some form.

"I don't know what we're going to do with Mythology yet, to be completely honest with you," Isgreen says. "Mythology occupies this really interesting space. Do we just do a definitive version of it, or do we do something grander with it, rebooting it or taking it in a new direction? There are so many opportunities that I see with Mythology, I just don't know what we're going to do yet. We're going to think it through. We want to make our fans happy, and if the fans want us to do a definitive version, we'll heavily consider going in that direction."

In the meantime, you'll be able to play Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition when it launches on November 14.