Age of Empires II is awesome. Star Wars is awesome. Put the two together and you have something truly remarkable. If you like AoE II or Star Wars I highly recommend getting this on sale. For a couple bucks you have tens of hours of enjoyment. For modern operating systems, here is what I recommend: 1. Install the Expanding Forces Mod 2. Install the All In One Patch 3. Play the game using Expanding Forces Launcher This should give you working looped music and custom resolution support.
This game has a very intuitive system for unit and building management to make it easy for beginners. There is also only a couple different resources to focus on gathering to keep it simple. If you are expecting the sort of depth found in Age of Empires or Rise of Nations, you might be disappointed. This is a pretty casual RTS, but it's still quite fun especially considering the sale price. This game does have some quirks. While using squads to call up a group of units is nice, the actual movement of units through the world is annoying sometimes. Units bunch up and have difficulty getting past eachother. Each unit stops frequently to give themselves leading room for the unit in front of them. The armies travel in lines rather than formations which exacerbate this issue. The infantry tend to lead the march and they get mowed down if they encounter machine guns, snipers, or half-tracks. Direct3D maximum resolution is 1280x720 for 16:9 monitors and 1280x1024 overall. Forcing 8x supersampling on 1280x720 through the video driver looks pretty nice even on my 4K monitor with more saturated colors and no jaggies, especially if you get the unofficial high-res texture pack. Glide wrappers do allow for higher resolutions, but I didn't find a significant improvement with them.
