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Monday, December 6, 2010

Life is filled with lessons

I hope most of you might have experienced this in your final year of college. All that you hear is placement, training etc. If you happened to get any tips from your seniors or staffs, all they say is "you need to have a right attitude which is very difficult to build", "you should go for some personality development classes". Well if you ask me, I would say it can be easily built and no need for going to any of these classes. Lesson can be learnt from every incident and thing you do in your life. I completely believe that they happen just to teach you some valuable lesson. One such example is Age of Empires(AOE). It’s a strategy game in which most of us fail to understand its valuable lessons. This game has personally changed me and my friends in terms of attitude and approach in life. It may sound insane, but its very true. Ask any AOE player, I bet he would say the same, if not ask him to read this post because he has failed to implement them.
AOE

 


AOE is a strategy game developed by Ensemble Studio(Also created HALO), which was a part of Microsoft game Studio. It’s a multiplayer game where the player can choose different civilization which existed in the past, like the Chinese, Korean, Turks, Aztecs etc. You will be like an Emperor taking care of the kingdom during the civilization you choose. Just like any Emperor you need to manage your economy, defense, population and a lot more. Throughout the game gold, stone, wood, food and population are the 4 parameters which are to be considered and rest is your strategy. The game play and Artificial Intelligence is just brilliant. Microsoft has done a lot of research to understand each civilization and have done a lot of detailing based on them. For example we all know that Chinese were good archers and Persians used Elephants at war, Even the game play is just the same when you choose those civilization. For each unit(cavalry, Infantry or archers) there is a counter unit for example elephants are weak when archers are used. Each civilization has its own pros and cons. The winning or losing completely depends on the strategy and the civilization you choose.
So this is about the game description, just to give a feeler about the entire game. AOE will be awesome only if you play with Human opponents. You can play with computer for practice and later If you understand the algorithm its just a cake walk to win with computer opponent.

Importance of time
AOE is a game where speed and time is very crucial. Mastering this may lead you to win the game. During the game based on your resources(4 parameter) and economy you can upgrade your civilization starting from Dark age, Feudal age, Castle age and then Imperial age. Based on these time period different features and up gradation gets unlocked and you can use them. The faster, the better when opposed to your opponent. This is just one example for importance of time, throughout the game you will experience the crunch.

Team work
A maximum of 8 player can play this game. So it obviously means that we can create a team and work as ally. Ally means a lot when you play AOE. For example If you have an ally; you can trade with him, which in return helps you generate more gold. It’s a boon when the gold mines gets over in your area. In fact only through trade you can generate maximum gold. Ally also helps us in crisis, economy, developing strategy and Defense.

How To Improve Working Memory
Not only speed and agility, even multitasking is equally important. Multitasking is the best way to improve working memory. In this game in order to collect food and wood, you need to assign farmers and woodcutters. After sometime you need to keep refreshing the field so that the farmer keeps on working. When the woodcutter cuts all the tress the gap between the lumberjack and the trees increases this also means that the time to cut increases, so you need to build lumberjack every time near the trees. Similarly when the gold and stone mines get over, you need to assign them to do some other job. All this you need to do even when you are at war because if you don’t, then the economy goes down. So multitasking is very crucial.

Tips To Be Organized
In order to upgrade to civilization you need to satisfy certain prerequisite. For example from dark age to feudal age you need to build two feudal age building and need 500 food. The entire game is completely organized and subconsciously you learn how to be organized.

These are just few example that I can think as of now. There are many more valuable lesson that are hidden. All you need to do is just understand them and realize it. As I said earlier every incident and things you do in life, good or bad is a valuable lesson.

5 comments:

CriA'TVT' said...

Your introduction and the correlation with life made me read this post fully. Neat write up. Kudos!

Arumugham S. said...

Oh Thank you very much Bro. I m really honored hearing this from you.

*King of LORDS* said...

Perfect correlation with life. Infact all the strategy games does the same. Expected more of you. It started well but ended abruptly. Albeit,I love it... Thumbs up for u and AOE :)

Unknown said...

Wow, awesome post. i am so "happy" and "learnt" too.

Arumugham S. said...

Thank you all :)