Genie Engine

[1] The designers received much of their inspiration from the game Civilization, with its proven historical setting; this was noted among reviewers as something positive.

Because the original AI did not "cheat"[11] by attributing itself extra resources or using other techniques the human player could not, it was easier to defeat than in many other real-time strategy games.

For The Age of Kings, Ensemble Studios attempted to develop a more powerful AI system that did not compromise by cheating.

To overcome another significant objection to Age of Empires—that of path finding—the team completely redesigned the game engine's movement system.

Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds was developed by LucasArts by licensing the Genie game engine from Ensemble Studios.

[16] The Genie Engine has several features that are common across all its games, including a scenario editor, campaigns, LAN, serial and TCP/IP multiplayer, background music amongst others.

The games based on the engine have usually been rated highly with Age of Empires having sold over three million copies by 2000[17] and having an average score of 87% from GameRankings.

The design of the Genie engine has been mirrored in later game titles such as Empire Earth,[30] Cossacks: European Wars,[31] Theocracy,[32] Tzar: Burden of the Crown,[33] and Rise of Nations.

[37] Openage is another free software project trying to create a modern re-implementation of the original Genie Engine using C++ and Python.