Age of Empires II content and balance analysis in the context of top RTS games

Age of Empires II is a real-time strategy video game series that was originally released in 1999 (AoEII: The Age of Kings). 2000 saw an expansion, The Conquerors, and it wasn't until 2013 that AoEII:HD was released as an HD remaster of the game with some added content. The latest iteration is AoEII: Definitive Edition, released in 2019.

In a time with ample new video game titles being released, what keeps drawing people back to this series? I aim to answer that through this data analysis project.

First, I look at other well-respected RTS titles, trying to see which of these are played and updated regularly today. Then, I look into AoEII:DE itself, to determine if we can learn something from its frequent game updates and focus on civilization balance.

Top RTS Games Comparison

Compare 11 RTS games, focusing on players over time and frequency of game updates

Analysis of public Age of Empires II games

A look into the players, matches, and civilizations that keep this 20+ year old game going

• Focused analysis on game updates for AoEII:DE
• Focused analysis on civilization balance for AOEII:DE

Project Structure

All code and presentation material available at github.com/rishigoutam/aoe2

Data Analysis

• src/ contains all notebooks used for data analysis and python files to process scraping
  • ↳ rts_player_counts analyzes top 11 RTS games in terms of frequency of game updates and player counts
  • ↳ aoe_player_count_analysis compares the AoE2:HD vs AoE2:DE game data
  • ↳ aoe2de_analysis looks into balance for matches played in AoE2:DE
  • ↳ patch_scraper scrapes game update data (patches) from steamdb.info

Data

• data/aoe2net/ has the match and players datasets from Kaggle
• data/steamdb
  • ↳ /charts/ has player count data from steamdb.info
  • ↳ /game-updates/ has game update data from steamdb.info
• data/gen/ has notebook-generated game patch data and detailed game patch data for AoEII:DE

Graphs and CSVs

• outputs/ stores the generated plots and CSVs from the data analysis notebooks

Presentation

• nycda-project/ contains the presentation for NYCDSA along with other bootcamp-relevant material

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the below projects for providing the data for analysis:

• aoe2.net - Reverse engineered game protocols to extract information from game replay files. Provided API for scraping data (used in the dataset by aoe2stats.io)
• aoestats.io - @jerkeeler/Jeremy K for using aoe2.net to create match and player datasets (big and small) as CSVs on Kaggle
• steamdb.info - For information around number of steam players
• Steam top-rated RTS games
• Microsoft for making the game along with supporting it with updates and new versions all these years
• The Age community for keeping this game alive