Microsoft Age of Empires: Inside Moves (Inside Moves Series) (Paperback)

One sentence on the cover claims "Full of play-tested tactics and strategies, 'Microsoft Age of Empires: Inside Moves' will be your guide--providing you with strategic hints, statistics, and tactical assistance neccesary to lead your civilization to glory." I disagree. There are very few useful strategic hints and no statistical tables. Finding the cost, hit points, attack value, armor value, and range of a unit cannot be accomplished easily with this book.

The book contains one chapter labled "What Every Emperor Should Know." This chapter briefly describes the units and structures, but it leaves out all the marine units and provides very little new information to me. Most tactics from Warcraft II apply to the gameplay described in this chapter.

The cover does not mention single player campaigns, but single player campaign strategies occupy about 200 of the 280 pages in the book. I expected that it would contain campaign tips, but this was overwhelming.

The book provides two multiplayer strategies--both completely worthless. The book contains far more historical information on ancient civilizations than multiplayer tips. I wasn't concerned about ancient emperors; I wanted to improve my gameplay.

I would recommend this book to a beginner mainly concerned with the campaigns or perhaps to a person "researching" ancient civilizations. I rated it so low because I didn't fit into the two categories above. The book has very good campaign assistance and good historical reference. ;)

Tricks / Cheats - if you want these then choose a different game, oh and buy a PS2. Games like this don't work well with cheats, so there probably aren't any. Hence, the book doesn't cover them.

Multiplayer - I haven't even read the multiplayer section yet, because I haven't yet played RON in multiplayer mode. What is noted by others however, is true; this book is about 80% single player. But, in all the single player sections it does make reference to, "this must be achieved faster in multiplayer" or "this will not work with a human opponent", so it does kind of help throughout. Well, a little anyway.

What this book is really good at is appealing to most levels. I always think that if you're a strategy gaming god then you don't tend to buy these kind of books, so rule them out. Everybody else, and I do mean EVERYBODY, should find plenty to interest them and make the purchase worthwhile.

This book can babysit a newbie to strategy games, and spit them out the other end as an accomplished strategist. There is a lot of generic advice that will stand you in good stead for almost every game like RON.

For an oldie there is plenty of game specific advice, obviously tested and pretty well thought out. The only reason I give it just 4 stars is that at the high end the author could have tried a little bit harder. Looking on RON fansites, there are a couple of good ideas he missed that make the game easier.