Age Of Empires Games Ranked
Lihue Barken
Several empires in human history have been contenders for the largest of all time, depending on definition and mode of measurement. Possible ways of measuring size include area, population, economy, and power. Of these, area is the most commonly used because it has a fairly precise definition and can be feasibly measured with some degree of accuracy.[1] Estonian political scientist Rein Taagepera, who published a series of academic articles about the territorial extents of historical empires between 1978 and 1997,[2][3][4][5] defined an empire as "any relatively large sovereign political entity whose components are not sovereign" and its size as the area over which the empire has some undisputed military and taxation prerogatives.[6] The list is not exhaustive owing to a lack of available data for several empires; for this reason and because of the inherent uncertainty in the estimates, no rankings are given.
Empire size in this list is defined as the dry land area it controlled at the time, which may differ considerably from the area it claimed. For example: in the year 1800, European powers collectively claimed approximately 20% of the Earth's land surface that they did not effectively control.[8] Where estimates vary, entries are sorted by the lowest estimate. Where more than one entry has the same area, they are listed alphabetically.
The earliest empire which can with certainty be stated to have been larger than all previous empires was that of Upper and Lower Egypt, which covered ten times the area of the previous largest civilisation around the year 3000 BC.[38]
Two days ago it started on solo ranked. I should have 1524 pts after my last game, but the mechanism took 10 points so far and will keep doing this until the end of the season, unless the support fixes something.
On Thursday, April 21, the American Lung Association (ALA) released its annual State of the Air Report. Once again San Bernardino and Riverside Counties ranked first and second respectively for the worst ozone pollution in the United States. The two counties also ranked in the top ten for the worst annual particle pollution nationally, according to the report.
"How bad is air quality in Southern California? It can be summed up in a few words," said Wayne Nastri, executive officer at the South Coast Air Quality Management District (SCAQMD). "We have the worst quality in the nation when it comes to ozone."
Dr. Karen Jakpor, an ALA volunteer based in Riverside, is forced to plan around bad air days to alleviate her asthma. She consistently monitors the air quality to avoid stepping outside during moments where particle pollution or smog are at dangerous levels. Exposure to toxic air quality has resulted in many emergency room visits and an early retirement from her career in medicine, Jakpor explained.
As a resident of Moreno Valley, Torres says that the fight for clean air is "very personal." She dealt with lung congestion issues growing up and eventually was diagnosed with asthma during her early college years.
Cindy Santiago, 18, believes companies like Amazon and other shipping giants that own and lease warehouses in the Inland Empire are responsible for transforming her hometown of Perris from an equestrian community into a "sacrifice zone." She described the view of warehouses from her former job at the Subway restaurant on Ramona Expressway and the sights of distribution centers next to homes and schools as "devastating".
"The good news is we have some time to work on that," explained Sarah Rees, deputy executive officer at the SCAQMD, about meeting the 2015 federal ozone standard by the 2037 deadline. "The bad news is that we have a massive amount of emission reductions we need to get to in order to meet the standard by that time."
SCAQMD is also implementing incentive programs and regulations to get truck operators to use natural gas as a "bridge" fuel as they transition from diesel to electric power. Nastri says the switch to natural gas can help bring emissions down in the near term. Environmental justice advocates have criticized this approach, claiming that a shift from one fossil fuel to another contributes to ongoing air pollution and climate impacts, while also delaying the more urgent transition to all-electric.
Environmental justice communities and clean air advocates say mandatory air pollution reduction measures are necessary to push industry toward zero-emissions and end decades of deadly smog in historically marginalized communities. "Too many people have an unfair burden," said Will Barrett, policy advocate for California with the American Lung Association. "We need to see a wholesale shift from combustion technologies to zero-emissions."
Despite the challenges, Lucy Sunga, 33, a local San Bernardino artist who is raising her two children in the city, is hopeful that the Inland Empire will begin to see improvements in air quality within the next decade.
"Because people see themselves as the little person going up against lawyers and big money, it does feel like battling a beast," she said. "But I have a glimmer of hope that things can be different and we can actually breathe cleaner air."
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:
(As ever, the screenshots that follow are taken from the replay of the game, so there's no fog of war, and we can observe everything as if we were looking down from atop Olympus itself. I'm the red team, while the blues are my enemies.)
Blue picking Japanese was good news for the most part: the civ's implausibly hench fishing boats would be of little use in this landlocked map, while their fast-fighting infantry would go down like candyfloss in water before my massed arrow lads. Still, Japan's cheaper gathering buildings would give Blue a potential economic edge early on, and if they managed to take the high ground and keep it into the castle age, their fearsome tower upgrade and samurai-spewing castles would probably seal my fate. I'd have to play this one aggressively.
I certainly got off to the better start, according to the replay. As you can see here, Blue had 12 villagers on food before they created a sole lumberjack, which sounds sensible, given you need to hoard 500 food to get out of the dark age. But the holy build order (at least, the one I've been taught) says otherwise, and I obeyed it to the letter: 6 villagers on sheep (actually it was geese, on this map), then 4 on wood, an eleventh to lure a boar, three on berry foraging, and another boar lurer as the fifteenth... it goes on. And since I stuck to the path, things unfolded well enough. But I did wonder what would be going on out there in the dark, on the other side of the hill in the blue encampment...
Chaos with Ed Miliband, that's what. Blue keeps getting "housed" (forgetting to build homes to increase population limit), and is solving their housing crisis by building an actual wall out of houses. Meanwhile, their boar hunt has gone completely tits up, resulting in tabloid scorn as a bacon sandwich messily eats a person.
Here I am about to hit feudal, and as you can see from the resource boxes at the top left, my extra villagers were concentrated on hackin' logs and diggin' gold, in order to fuel an immediate archery push, while I'd also saved wood by foregoing farming and transfering my boar-hunters into ibex hunting (top centre) instead. But what had my enemy been doing in the time they'd already had to luxuriate in the technological wonders of feudalism?
As the replay revealed, Blue had indeed got an archery range up themselves - but rather than building up the army I'd feared, they had concentrated on further walling in their corner of the map, as if they were nervous of something. Indeed, it was only when I looked at the map from their point of view - their scouting had been pretty limited, so they had no idea where my base was - that it struck me. For all my heart had been thumping, remembering my trouncing in the black forest, this time, my opponent was scared of me. I was the unknown figure in the dark; the potential pro-tier, gatling-APM'd AoE2 lord. I was the boy.
And the boy was not wasting any time. Even though I'd aged up with 23 villagers, those lovely Ethiopian bonus resources meant I was headed into castle age even as my first archers strolled out of the range, ready to head for the central hill. I even had the resources spare after ageing up to grab some blacksmith upgrades, ensuring my archers were as buffed up as they could get, the moment they took the field. Watching in retrospect, I feel a delicious sense of power as I see that - for once - I am the more aggressive player.
While these hillside skirmishes have been raging, I've not let myself get complacent. Remembering my experience in the Black Forest, where my initially triumphant archers were wiped out by an attack from mangonels, cavalry and massed skirmishers, I've made sure to diversify this time. Alas, despite the Ethiopians' immensely useful free upgrade to pikemen (infantry perfectly suited to dealing with horses and skirms), I have been a silly boy and elected to make a cavalry reserve instead. I've also started plopping down more town centres. (In other "silly boy" news, look at that idle villager count - once again, I let a load of hunters stand around too long after they'd gunished all the local ibex).
d3342ee215