I cannot even begin to imagine how many hours have been “wasted” playing this game. The archetypical RTS (along with starcraft some would argue). A beautiful balance of war and peace, economy and destruction.

These two plugins can enhance the game by a tremendous amount, especially if playing with a friend.

• 1000 population limit: Remember how much it sucked that you could only have 200 people. Problem solved. With this jigger, I regularly have around 200 villagers. Battle is increased by the same amount, so much so that it can slow older computers down.
• Widescreen: Play at full resolution, finally. Fairly simple to install, just follow the steps to the letter.
  1. Download this and this.
  2. Run _ first.

Although single player is fun, it pales in comparison to playing with a friend, especially cooperatively, though I suspect that some are are suspicious. And it does vary from person to person of course. To each his own and all that bullshit. At any rate, it's very simple to connect to a friend or two.

1. Make sure both firewalls are down, and DMZ is preferable.
2. Find out the IP addresses of the player hosting the game.
3. In the main game menu, go to multiplayer.
4. Select Internet. Host or connect, respectively.

This multiplayer is admittedly rather unstable. The game will often crash, “go out of sync” as the game calls it. When it does this however, it will save the game and you can go back almost exactly to where you started. Just save the game often. Don't play in snow. Might as well restart the map. Seriously, it's that bad.

There are websites out there that allow you to find matches and games and play online for reals, you can go try that out.