How Age of Empires Mobile is scaling the series' classic historical action for smaller screens: 'We built this RTS around the ethos of control'

Age of Empires Mobile adapts the classic RTS experience for touchscreens, simplifying unit control through troop grouping while retaining large-scale battles, strategic depth, and familiar civilizations, heroes, and gameplay elements.

Age of Empires has been famous for over 27 years, for its massive historical RTS battles, featuring a range of civilisations, legendary heroes and really, really, big wars. But how do you go about bringing a game famous for scale and lots of clicking to phones? The Mobile Gaming Show spoke to Peter Hu, senior game designer on Age of Empires Mobile about how you make a big game small, without losing any of the size.  

"The PC version is famous for it's building, gathering, expanding and battling with other players, and it's RTS elements," Hu tells the Mobile Gaming Show in this exclusive interview, adding "we wanted to restore this experience as much as we could on the phone." The ultimate aim being to take that almost 30 year fan base across PC and Xbox, and bring it to a phone near you (preferably yours). 

But how do take a game famous for clicky micromanagement with hundreds of soldiers in a battle, and make it suitable for finger pokey war? "We built this RTS around the ethos of control," Hu explains. "In the PC version you always use your mouse to click, choose and drag, but it seems almost impossible to make that happen on a phone, as there's so many units you need to control." So what's the solution for the smaller screen sizes across mobile? "In order to make it happen we group separate soldiers into a troop. So, instead of controlling many soldiers or units, you're maybe only controlling five troops in a battle." It's a simple solution that keeps the battles suitably large scale and epic, without giving players an impossible task to manage. 

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That means, according to Hu you get "large scale war with hundreds of troops on one screen". And there's all the tactical potential to a battle you'd expect from the series with the mobile version including things like changing weather you can use to damage enemies, as well the ability to use the landscape to win a fight as you take advantage of things like jungles and trees to hide and launch ambushes. 

There are eight different civilisations currently to take into battle including Byzantine, Romans, Chinese, French, Japanese and Korean, with two more on the way at a later date. There's also 30 iconic historic heros to collect that you use to create teams of three, each with there own unique skills to help you win. And better yet, you'll be able to enjoy all of this through robust single-player and multiplayer offerings.

Age of Empires Mobile will launch October 17 and you can preregister now.