Improvements on the original
OpenAoK plays as the 1999 game does. These are the things it adds, each kept out of the way of the original's own look and rules.
The view
- Zoom. The mouse wheel zooms the view in and out about the pointer, in the game and in the scenario editor, as do
=and-. The original's wheel hotkeys (the Town Center, the next idle villager) are on Ctrl and the wheel. On a touch screen two fingers pinch to zoom; on the Switch, ZL with the right stick. - Fog of war on the minimap. The minimap shows what this player knows: ground never explored is black, and ground explored but out of sight is dimmed, as the map itself is.
- Widescreen. The game's frame can be as wide as the screen, with the interface reaching its edges (Options, Widescreen). It is on by default on phones and the Switch.
- Interface sizes. The top bar, the bottom panel with the minimap, and the text over the world (chat, the game's messages, scores and timers) can each be drawn from 100% to 200% of their size (Options, Top Bar Size, Panel Size, Text Size).
- Production queue. What the player's buildings are researching and training shows in a row of icons at the map's top left. What leads each queue, the item being made and those of its kind straight behind it, is greened from the left as far as the one being made has got; what waits behind something else in its queue, or in a queue held up for want of houses, is yellowed. Each kind shows how many. Clicking one selects the building making it and brings the view there; clicking again goes on to the next such building (Options, Production Queue, on by default). The game's messages move down below it.
Playing
- No selection limit. Any number of units can be selected at once, by a box, a click with Ctrl or Shift, or a double click. The original's limit of forty is still there to turn on: Options, Disable selection limit, which is checked by default.
- Training from several buildings. With several buildings of a kind selected, each unit or technology ordered goes to the finished one with the fewest queued, so the queues fill evenly; one still being built takes none.
- Taunts after / or !. A taunt can be typed as its number after a
/or a!(!11), as well as on its own. - Larger populations. Besides the original's limits of 25 to 200, a game can be set up with a population limit of 250 to 500 in steps of 50, and of 600 to 1000 in steps of 100. The computer players' scripts, written for limits up to 200, play such a game by their plan for 200, with the figures that plan sets by population (the limit, the most soldiers it keeps, its shares of the population) scaled to the game's limit.
Fights
- Aggressive soldiers join in. An idle unit on the Aggressive stance comes to help one of its side struck anywhere within its own sight, not only within three tiles. Defensive units keep the original's three.
- Volleys spread out. Soldiers set on an enemy in the same moment begin their first blow or shot up to six tenths of a second apart, so a line of archers does not loose every arrow on the same instant.
- An army carries on. Soldiers ordered to attack something that falls before they reach it walk on to where it fell, rather than stopping where they were going, and take on whatever they find there.
Where it runs
- Windows 10 and 11, macOS and Linux, from the player's own CD.
- Android phones and tablets. On a touch screen the game is played as with a mouse: tap to click, hold to right-click, drag one finger to select, two fingers to scroll the map, pinch to zoom. A press on a text field brings up the phone's keyboard.
- The Nintendo Switch, as homebrew. The left stick moves the pointer, the right stick scrolls the map, A and B are the mouse buttons, plus is the game menu, minus is chat, and the other buttons are the game's hotkeys. The touch screen works as on a phone.
Large games
Big battles stay smooth: eight computer players on a giant map, with armies and fleets that make nearly three thousand units and buildings in all, take about a third of a millisecond a game tick on a desktop machine.