Talk:Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings

Mini titles
What is the point of the mini titles on the walkthrough pages? They're just restating the name of the page. If they're the actual names of the levels, then the pages should be renamed. As is, they're not adding any information, and not following the standard wiki style. The other possibility is to move it to an infobox. -- Prod (talk) 06:18, 24 November 2012 (UTC)


 * It's like the title of an infobox, where we haven't come up with additional cells for the box. The mini title is a more verbose title/description for the scenario, but if I had the game I could provide a better template than the one currently in use. The current template/syntax is "Campaign_title Scenario_number: Scenario_title". The scenario number is not present in the game. I am also not sure if the campaign is actually linear or not (I think it is). A better template would be, for example, "Joan of Arc campaign, scenario #1." Since the title is at the top, it can be omitted or repeated. -- 21:14, 24 November 2012 (UTC)
 * On second-thought, perhaps a floating infobox would make more sense in this case. Three rows/cells: Title, campaign, and scenario number. It could also have number of enemy factions, starting resources, starting units, etc. -- 21:43, 24 November 2012 (UTC)

I vote for "Game - Campaign - scenario # - scenario title". For example: AoE 2, Rise of Kings, Joan of Arc 1, An Unlikely Messiah.

Now maybe some of this is overkill, but the title of the page, or the title of the walkthrough, should include all of the campaign name, scenario number, and scenario name. An option such as "Game - scenario title" is quite jarring.

As to the game itself: All campaign scenarios have their own title. All campaign scenarios have a number, either implied or explicit. All scenarios are fully independent. They cannot be considered "levels". They are linked only by virtue of the general subject, and they are presented in chronological sequence. Normally, you cannot access a scenario without first completing the previous ones in the list, but no scenario has any other effect on any other scenario.

Personally, I see no reason for stating any information in the walkthrough that the player gets by loading the scenario, unless it is necessary for the analysis. After all, a walkthrough tells you what to do to complete the scenario, which is different from stating the scenario parameters. In mathematical terms, a walkthrough is a calculation, not the raw data. For example, in "You have three workers. Produce some more.", the first sentence is redundant, and the second one is too vague to be useful, while in "You have 3 workers. Produce 7 more to reach the magic number of 10.", the second sentence is an explicit instruction, and the first sentence is no longer redundant, because it explicitly justifies the analysis. Of course, if someone wants to go ahead and write down all the scenario parameters, that's fine by me.

As you might gather, my primary interest here is to do the analysis and present the results. --VictorInThePacific (talk) 04:58, 1 December 2012 (UTC)
 * Stating the givens is beneficial, but overdoing the titles makes it really hard for people to type it in. I'd suggest using the same page name that the game uses, as closely as possible. -- Prod (talk) 06:16, 24 December 2012 (UTC)