🖥️ PC1999Ensemble StudiosBRUTALAge of Empires II rebuild deck
BRUTAL
Moving two hundred units through a two-tile gap without deadlock is a research problem with a literature, and lockstep determinism across machines is a second one.
The hard part is not game design at all.
The honest NOT REALLY on this list. Every individual system here is promptable, and you will have a recognisable RTS in a week. But an RTS is fundamentally a pathfinding and netcode project wearing a medieval costume, and both of those are the kind of problem where the last 5% takes longer than the first 95%. Build it to learn flow fields, not to ship.
- Difficulty
- BRUTAL · 5 of 5
- First playable
- A project
- The original
- 120 team-years
- Released
- 1999 · PC
- Genre
- RTS
Build a real-time strategy prototype in the Age of Empires mould. Canvas 2D isometric, vanilla JS. Scope it to one civilisation and a skirmish against one AI. Requirements: - Flow-field pathfinding, not per-unit A*. Compute one integration field per move order from the destination, then have every unit in the group sample the gradient. Add local avoidance so units push past each other instead of deadlocking in a doorway. This is the make-or-break system: build it first and test it with 100 units ordered through a two-tile gap. - Four resources (food, wood, gold, stone), villagers that gather with per-resource rates and walk to the nearest drop-off point, and a population cap raised by houses. - Buildings: town centre, house, barracks, archery range, mill, tower. Placement preview with a validity tint, build progress by villager count. - Units: villager, militia, archer, scout, with a rock-paper-scissors damage table plus armour classes, so counters exist. - Three ages with research costs that unlock units and upgrades. - Selection: click, drag-box, double-click for all of type, control groups on number keys, shift-queue for waypoints. Idle-villager button. - Fog of war: three states per tile (unexplored, explored, visible) rendered as a darkening overlay, with buildings remembered in explored areas. - One AI that follows a build order, expands to resources, and attacks in waves at fixed timings. Do not attempt anything smarter. Definition of done: 100 units path through a gap without deadlocking, and the AI kills me if I idle.
- Pathfinding for 200 units that does not embarrass itself — this alone is a career
- Thirteen civilisations of asymmetric balance, tuned over 25 years
- Lockstep deterministic multiplayer, which is far harder than it sounds
- The campaigns, the voice acting, and "wololo"
Flow-field pathfinding for a whole crowd
One cost field computed once from the destination, sampled by every unit, instead of 200 A* searches elbowing each other in a doorway. It is the cheapest way to make a crowd look like it has intent, and it transfers to zombies, ants, evacuating civilians or shoppers in a shop sim — anything that moves in numbers.
ScopeAbout a week— build just this, not the game
Build a crowd-pathfinding sandbox in a single self-contained HTML file. Canvas 2D, no build step, no dependencies. - A 64x64 grid with paintable walls and a goal cell set by right-click. - When the goal or the walls change, compute ONE field for everybody: a Dijkstra integration pass outward from the goal accumulating terrain cost, then a flow field storing the cheapest neighbour direction per cell. Agents sample the flow at their own cell and steer toward it. No per-agent search anywhere in the file. - Local avoidance layered on top: short-range separation from neighbours found through a spatial hash, clamped so it can never overpower the flow direction. - Up to 200 agents, spawned by click-drag, each with acceleration and a turn rate rather than teleporting along the gradient. - Debug overlays on number keys: integration cost heat map, flow arrows, agent velocities. - Print the field recompute time in milliseconds. Definition of done: 200 agents sent through a two-tile gap queue and pass through it without deadlocking, and a full field recompute stays under 10ms.
Not a clone — Age of Empires II re-themed and cut down to something you can finish. The angle is the important reel: it is what turns a project into a weekend. 24,360 ways to land.
Velvet Rope One Room
Age of Empires II, but one level, done properly, set in a heist-movie glam night. Rendered in black-and-white noir film.
Build a browser game called "Velvet Rope One Room". The pitch in one line: a rts in the spirit of Age of Empires II, but one level, done properly, set in a heist-movie glam night. WHAT THIS IS Take the SHAPE of Age of Empires II — its core loop, and whatever makes that loop good — and rebuild it as your own game in a different world at a smaller scope. Use your own names, art and audio, which you want anyway: a reskin of somebody else's game is less interesting than a new one that works the same way. THE ANGLE — this is the important constraint, honour it above everything else One level, done properly. A single space, built to a finish quality you could not sustain across twenty. Every prop and every sightline is deliberate. This is what makes the project finishable. If a decision would push the scope back towards the original's, take the smaller option every time. THE THEME A heist-movie glam night. Casinos, tuxedos and a vault. Style is mandatory; competence is what keeps the style from getting you caught. The theme is not a coat of paint. Let it change what the mechanics mean — a reload, a health pack and a locked door should all be things that make sense in this world and nowhere else. LOOK Black-and-white noir film. High-contrast monochrome, venetian-blind shadows, film grain, and practical hard lights only. REQUIREMENTS - Runs in a browser with no build step. Canvas 2D unless the angle genuinely requires 3D, in which case three.js. - Fixed-timestep update loop with interpolated rendering, so it behaves the same at 60Hz and 144Hz. - Every tuning constant in one CONFIG object at the top, exposed as live sliders in a debug panel. You will find the feel by dragging those, not by prompting. - All content — levels, entities, balance numbers — in JSON or plain data files, never inline in the logic. - Audio generated with the Web Audio API rather than asset files. - Respect prefers-reduced-motion: keep the fades, drop the shake and the parallax. BUILD ORDER 1. The core loop with placeholder rectangles, at the reduced scope the angle demands. No theme, no art, no audio. Make it fun as rectangles first. 2. The angle's consequences. Cutting to bots, or to turn-based, or to one level changes the design rather than just shrinking it — find out how and rewrite step 1. 3. The theme, as content and data. 4. The look, applied last as a rendering layer over a game that already works. Start by writing a one-page plan: the core loop, what the angle removes and what that frees you to do properly, and what you are deliberately leaving out. Wait for me to approve it before writing code.
- openage — a free engine reimplementation of AoE II
- OpenRA — open-source RTS engine, actually playable
Half the time one of these already does what you wanted, and the other half it saves you a week of solving a problem someone documented in 1997.
One count per game. No account — it is tied to a salted hash of your IP, which is not stored in a form anyone can reverse. Every build adds 120 team-years to the counter on the homepage.
Then try these
Questions
How hard is Age of Empires II to rebuild with an AI agent?
Yes — every game is buildable at some scope. The question is how hard, and Age of Empires II is BRUTAL (5 of 5). The hard part is not game design at all. Moving two hundred units through a two-tile gap without deadlock is a research problem with a literature, and lockstep determinism across machines is a second one. Reckon on a project to something you can actually play — not to something that matches the 120 team-years Ensemble Studios spent.
What makes Age of Empires II hard to rebuild?
Moving two hundred units through a two-tile gap without deadlock is a research problem with a literature, and lockstep determinism across machines is a second one. That is why it sits at BRUTAL rather than a tier either side of it. If you want the idea without the project, the transferable part is flow-field pathfinding for a whole crowd — about a week of work.
How long does it take to build a Age of Empires II clone?
Wrong question, and it is worth saying why. Nobody rebuilds Age of Empires II — the original took Ensemble Studios on the order of 120 team-years, released in 1999 on PC. What you can do is reach something playable and genuinely yours in about a project, and then keep going for as long as it stays interesting. Any figure that claims otherwise is measuring a prototype and calling it a game.
What do I lose by building my own Age of Empires II?
Pathfinding for 200 units that does not embarrass itself — this alone is a career. Thirteen civilisations of asymmetric balance, tuned over 25 years. Lockstep deterministic multiplayer, which is far harder than it sounds. Those are the parts a prompt will not hand you.
Which AI coding agent should I use to build it?
Any of Claude Code, Codex or Cursor will handle this prompt. Paste it as your first message, let the agent scaffold the project, then iterate on feel — the second, third and tenth prompts are where a game actually gets good. Work in an empty folder or a fresh git branch so you can throw it away cheaply.
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