Age of Vampires Review

Okay, I've now played Age of Vampires with all of the new civilizations. And I must say, I'm very impressed with how much work was put into making this free mod!

First things first, some general comments:

On the home menu some of the options are hard to click on, but they are all clickable.
The new music and sound effects are very cool! They definitely add to the atmosphere!
The idea of harvesting maidens and nobles for food is pretty graphic, but definitely fits the theme.
All of the new building designs are incredibly well done! Though again, a bit more graphic than standard Age of Empires II.
I love the witches' laugh!

Okay, so here are my two cents after playing each new civilization once in a standard-difficulty standard-map game:

Bathory Clan: I have just one thing to say...Dragons! And these dragons don't mess around! By far this is my favorite new group to play...because of the dragons! They also have cool, really tough, knights riding black horses with blood-red eyes, which are a lot cheaper than the dragons, but not nearly as big in the wow factor.
Dracul Clan: No dragons here, though you do get very powerful vampires. Unfortunately their animations aren't as cool as many of the others (like the dragons and werewolves), basically all they do is shoot little crossbows and turn into bats when they move. Cool, granted, but it pales in consideration with what the other two vampire groups have.
Transylvanians: Okay, so this is a group of vampire hunters. So they make farms like normal, and they don't get cool monsters. Their vampire hunters are decent, but they don't get a castle!!?!?!?!??!
Van Helsing Guild: Now these guys are serious vampire hunters! They do have castles and their elite vampire hunters have incredible range and are very powerful and fast (they're on horses). They can even take down upgraded galleons with very little trouble! Very fun to play.
Vrkolak: I'm not sure how you pronounce the name of this group, but this is definitely my second favorite group to play. The Vrkolak are the ones with the werewolves. And in my opinion the werewolves have the coolest animations/graphics. They walk around as male villagers with wolf heads, and then when they attack they turn into full-blown wolves. It's very fun to watch a group of 40 wolves tear a town (and its inhabitants) to shreds!

So, in summary, I quite enjoy this mod! I look forward to testing how balanced it is in a multiplayer environment when I get the chance.

Fun with the kids

Here are a couple pictures of when I visited the kids for William's birthday. I love Carly and Michael's faces in the first one! William...

Age of Vampires

I've been playing the good ol' classic RTS Age of Empires II again, and I remembered that my kids always get confused when I tell them that I'm playing Age of Empires and think that I'm saying Age of Vampires. Well, I decided to google Age of Vampires, and what do you know, there is a mod that allows you to play Age of Vampires!  Basically this replaces the Age of Conquerors expansion and replaces the new civilizations with vampire clans! They do things like drink the blood of maidens instead of eating sheep.  Hee, hee. I haven't played it yet, but I'm planning on it! You can see the mod here. The video by the creator is in German, which is also kind of fun, especially considering the vampire theme. Though I must admit I don't understand quite as much as I had hoped.