AOE 2 Speedrunning: December Recap (Xpost-Speedrunning)

So December of 2017 turned out to be a great month for speedrunning in the Age of Empires 2 community. This was namely due to persistent consistent play from Chazzyb17 and his drive to run the whole Age of Kings campaign. His journey started in November with tons and tons of practice. Starting with the Joan of Arc campaign he routed and practiced his way through the Saladin, Genghis Khan, and Barbarossa campaigns as well. Throughout November he obtained 6 world records on individuals levels: 3 in the JoA campaign and 3 in the Saladin campaign. December started with yet more practice leading to another new world record and one tie in the Barbarossa campaign. The 14th saw Chazzy completing a full Joan of Arc campaign run with a time of 31m 30s, compared to the sum of individual levels world record 24m 9s.

He didn’t stop there. His next completed run was a full Saladin campaign with a time of 28m 48s, compared to the sum of individual levels world record 23m 4s. Afterwards, he worked on the Genghis Khan campaign, where there’s one level in particular everyone struggles with. It’s the third level called Into China. It’s not only a 15+ minute level, it also has heavy microing the whole time with very little room for error. It’s the level that we all remember struggling to beat as kids. Naturally, Chazzy obtained a world record of 16m 07s beating the previous record by 28 seconds. However, in a strange twist of fate, it turned out that an old runner named Gombill still held WRs on Genghis Khan 3, 4, and 5. His Into China run was 4 minutes faster than Chazzy’s and his level 5 run was five minutes faster than the next fastest run.

Nevertheless, Chazzy went on to obtain a Genghis Khan campaign run just under one hour. Then he followed it up with a full Age of Kings run finishing with a time of 3 hours, 1 minutes, and 58 seconds.

Then there’s me, spartanj262, or JoeyCapollo on speedrun.com. I joined the AOE 2 speedrunning community earlier this month and obtained world records on Agincourt, Montezuma 4, Barbarossa 6, and briefly El Cid 3. I also got the world record for the Barbarossa campaign run with a 23m 44s, compared to the 19m 13s of the sum of individual levels world record.

Back to Chazzy for a moment. The day after I got the Agincourt record Chazzy tied it. Three days after I got the El Cid 3 record Chazzy beat it by 37 seconds. On the 27th, I mentioned an idea to improve the Barbarossa 4 route and that day Chazzy used that route to shave 25 seconds off of the record.

After Chazzy took my Barbarossa record, I practiced and practiced and eventually retook the record by 25 seconds on the 30th.

SiFly also swooped in right at the end of the month with a new record on Saladin 6, beating the old one by 13 seconds.

Stay tuned for next month when Chazzy starts his Conquerors campaign runs and who knows what else!

Shout outs to Chazzyb17, SiFly, Marauder, BellumZeldaDS, Mhmd_FVC, Cidragen and Abidabla! If you’re interested in running this game here are some helpful links:

Speedrun.com page http://ift.tt/2C6AXTF Beginner's Guide http://ift.tt/2CqTSMr Chazzy's Age of Kings Campaign Run https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9RszCIXZVk