Last week, after a lifetime of timidity, I finally bit the bullet and played my first competitive ranked game of Age Of Empires 2. Needless to say, I got battered. A big medieval boot stomped my fingers from the first rung of the ranked ladder, and I splashed back into the mire where I belonged. But after a week licking my wounds, practising build orders, doing maths with 14 wiki tabs open, and archer-rushing my way through endless 1v1 comp stomps, I came back for another go.
This time, my arrow-spamming, catapult-happy Ethiopians were facing off against the Japanese, on the map known as GOLD RUSH. As its name suggests, this map is all about fighting for control of gold deposits, almost all of which spawn on a massive hill in the middle. A massive hill… covered in tigers. Aggressive map control would be even more crucial here than it had been in the Black Forest, while tigers would become suddenly, and drastically, relevant. But had I learned my lessons from my first defeat – and could I seize my first win on the back of it? Draw your reading swords, armchair knights, and charge on to find out: