AoE barely runs an economy, while Stronghold strongly focuses on one. Stronghold improves on the RTS genre with the pure strength of both Economic and War aspects of the game. You build up until you're ready to attack the enemy, and then it's a game of outnumbering the opponent, or just decaying his forces until you win. If our content was equal, you'd still have twice the sales.Īge of Empires has great gameplay, but it's not well balanced.
If you have twice the fans and twice the advertising, but I match you anyways, my content must be better. To have matched AoE's so closely in sales, for an indie company with no backing, is a great feat and a sign of Stronghold's superiority. Ensemble worked under the power of Microsoft, and had a lot of advertising and magazine reporting. This makes it appear that Age of Empires has a 0.1 million sale advantage, but that's only if you remove the context.
With 5 games out at the time of those numbers, Stronghold has a rate of 1.2 million sales per game. This competes with Stronghold's 6 million sales (2: near the bottom). With 15 games out, the series has had a 1.3 million sales per game average (1). While Age of Empires has sold more units, with 20 million units sold, it has had far more games. This implies that there is a game in the Stronghold series with numerous unique units, countering Pro's own claim. To start, Pro says that unless you play Legends, you're stuck with the same units.
