Bloqués 5 heures sur Age of Empires

NTE (Neverness to Everest) is a new game set in a Tokyo-inspired city where spirits and humans live in harmony until mischievous spirits start causing problems.

The player plays as a paranormal investigator whose job is to slap spirits when the mischievous ones become uncontrollable.

• Collect and customize cars for taxi or delivery missions • Collect apartments and decorate them • Manage cafés and decide who works there • Fish, play mahjong, rob banks • Complete contracts to hunt spirits and the main story

The map is beautiful and the density of side activities creates the feeling that the world is alive, which is crucial for a good open world.

• Three powerful characters called the 3 Gigas Forte that you summon in case of problems • A group of adorable but weak characters at first that you need to unlock • Several other characters to discover

Characters unlock without a 50/50 system, with a guaranteed pull after a certain number of attempts.

The gacha system is one of the most generous observed, with guaranteed protection for players.

The game launched on April 29 on PC, PS5, Apple, and Android.

Hope, a highly-ranked Vietnamese Age of Empires player, faces Matse, a German. The map is small with two players starting on an island and must colonize the central continent.

Hope prepares an aggressive rush: he sacrifices his economy to quickly create powerful units and sends them to Matse when Matse only has villagers.

Harvesting stone very early is an abnormal sign because the only reason would be to build a castle far too early to create powerful units to send quickly to the opponent.

Matse doesn't detect Hope's rush early enough. When Hope finishes his castle, Matse no longer has time to build walls, ending the match under normal rules.

Matse has the nickname 'the terrorist' among Age of Empires players because he's known for terrorizing very strong players with novel strategies.

Facing certain defeat in two minutes, Matse sends 15 villagers into the enemy base to destroy buildings rather than build defenses.

He destroys his main building and rebuilds it in the middle of the enemy base, allowing villagers to shoot arrows at enemy structures from it.

Hope stays methodical: he pulls his villagers back and accepts his base being destroyed to finish building his castle and create his Conquistadors.

Matse realizes that Hope harvests stone, food, and gold, but neglects a crucial resource: wood. Hope can't have enough villagers everywhere at once.

• The marketplace: where all resources can be deposited • The market: where missing resources can be purchased

By destroying these buildings, Matse cuts Hope off from wood access. Hope can't deposit or buy wood and will never harvest it again unless he rebuilds extraction.

Hope only has 49 wood, while rebuilding a marketplace costs 275, a market costs 175, and a lumber camp costs 100. Hope is trapped without access to this vital resource.

Without wood, Hope can't build structures and can't research technology, freezing his civilization at its current stage.

Hope realizes the problem when his villagers can't deposit harvested wood. He spends 20-30 seconds reviewing his buildings before understanding the situation.

Hope launches a massive attack with all his Conquistadors and villagers to destroy Matse as quickly as possible, knowing he can't progress technologically.

Hope remains militarily superior with an army against villagers, but this advantage will diminish over time since he can't advance technologically.

Matse flees to his starting island with a few saved villagers. He has no space or resources, but Hope has no wood so can't build ships to reach him.

Hope has massive military advantage but can't reach Matse. Matse is trapped on his island but Hope can't pursue him.

• Hope sends question marks telling Matse to give up • Matse pings his island to signal where his marketplace is • Matse claims he can restart his economy and return with ships • Hope destroys one of Matse's ships to show he's watching

Neither player can win. Hope can't catch Matse, and Matse can't build a large enough army on a 2-square-meter island.

Fifteen minutes later, Matse seizes Hope's starting island, the only place he can develop without dying. He now commands 'the island people'.

The island is 10 square meters, has two exhausted gold mines, and about seven trees for harvesting wood. It's extremely limited.

He uses the seven trees to make just enough wood for a maritime expedition to access Hope's continental resources and build an army.

Hope has sacrificed almost all his villagers to create Conquistadors and patrols all beaches. When Matse attempts to land, he's detected and destroyed in 5 seconds, twice.

Relics are small yellow objects scattered on the map. If a monk brings them to the base, they generate permanent gold income: very little gold per minute, but infinitely.

Matse has a market on his island, so with infinite gold from relics, he can infinitely buy other resources: wood, food, stone.

Hope can never build a monastery to store relics because he has no wood. Relics are therefore inaccessible to him.

Matse plans a bold heist: send a ship with a monk to steal a relic before Hope can defend it.

Matse sends his ship with a monk to retrieve a relic. But he doesn't stay far enough from shore and doesn't watch his ship, too busy building a monastery.

Hope arrives and destroys Matse's ship. A huge mistake, but Hope may not realize Matse was trying to steal the relic.

Matse must wait 20 minutes to save the 600 gold needed to rebuild a ship and four monks, while Hope has all the time in the world to wait.

• Hope declares he will stand guard for 15 hours if needed • Matse decides to stream the match • Hope explains that even if Matse waits long, he can't build a large army because he has no space to build houses

Both players' actions per minute drops to zero. They may not even be at their computers, thinking through the situation.

Matse thinks about how to dislodge 25 Conquistadors when he can only land a few units at a time.

Hope walks outside and thinks about how to discourage his opponent and convince him that what he's trying is impossible.

Matse seeks a second relic so he can try something more than twice per hour, but Hope has walled off all relics.

Hope has walled off the relics with four towers to protect them, but he did it poorly.

An ultra-niche Age of Empires 2 mechanic: monks have long arms and can pick up a relic from an adjacent square even if it's walled off.

Matse knows this mechanic, but Hope apparently doesn't. He may have discovered it during this match.

Matse positions his monk adjacent to the wall and grabs the relic just before Hope can intercept him, using a feint by moving up first.

Hope becomes frustrated after an hour and a half on this combat island. He lists his problems: no wood, villagers stuck, limited resources.

Hope acknowledges Matse played well with the relic, but declares he has abundant stone and begins building a great wall.

Two hours have passed since the match started. Hope began building the wall about an hour ago.

For an hour, Matse does nothing unusual and stays silent on his island, allowing Hope to build the wall undisturbed.

Matse researches a new strategy: what can equal gold Conquistadors in numbers? The answer is the monk, which he's used for 40 minutes.

The monk is extremely fragile but has a terrifying ability: convert an enemy unit to his side, eliminating the Conquistador and transforming it into an ally.

Neither player has a house, so they're limited to about 20 soldiers. Matse has 20 units and can't create new ones, but he can still convert with monks.

19 monks cost 3800 gold. At the relic generating 30 gold per minute, Matse must wait 1 hour and 3 minutes to save this amount.

Age of Empires 2 has an ultra-rarely-known mechanic: the starting campfire is an indestructible building that can't be targeted and provides vision.

The campfire on Hope's starting island serves as an unwitting spy, letting Hope see everything Matse prepares on that island.

When this match was commentated, observers thought Hope was phenomenally reactive, not realizing he simply had Sauron's eye in the middle of the enemy base.

Hope knows exactly that 19 monks are on Matse's ship. Matse can't know this and walks blind into a trap.

Matse knows his monks are extremely vulnerable on water, so he rushes toward shore. But after an hour away, he doesn't know about the great wall.

Matse chooses to land at the bottom, but the wall isn't finished at the top. However, the bottom wall is completely fortified.

After an hour of waiting, Matse loses all his monks in one second to Conquistadors patrolling the wall.

Matse runs out of trees for more expeditions. If he gets destroyed a third time, he won't have enough resources for a fourth attempt.

Matse accepts he will live only off the relic for the rest of his days and never gather resources normally.

He destroys his main marketplace to make space, waits 10 minutes for resources, then waits half an hour to research 'Chemistry Secrets' technology.

With this technology, he waits another 15 minutes to build a galleon, a very expensive unit but unstoppable on water with massive range and firepower.

Since all remaining food sources are on water, Hope is now cut off from a second resource. He has the whole map but remains under embargo.

Hope could recreate his fishing villager, but his food stock isn't infinite. If Matse tries 50 times, waiting hours each time and creating each engagement, Hope will eventually run out of food to rebuild soldiers.

Meanwhile, Matse's relic is infinite. It's the slowest death in game history, a match that would last weeks.

Is Hope insane enough to win in such a ridiculous and slow way?

• Hope watches Matse streaming, organizing galleon patrols to escort fish • He realizes his opponent is undiscourageable and will never give up • When Hope loses his first fishing villager, he abandons the match

Matse and Hope are very good highly-ranked players, but they don't win tournaments. They're not professionals.

When this match went viral, several commentators wondered if Matse's outlandish strategy would work against the world's best players.

A month later, Era, the greatest Age of Empires player ever seen and undisputed world number 1, streams and faces Matse.

At 5 minutes into the game, when Matse invades with villagers building a marketplace, Era says 'What an idiot strategy! How does this guy beat anyone like that?'

Matse has improved since his match against Hope. He destroys all necessary buildings at exactly the same time and more precisely.

During the attack, Matse hits buildings he didn't even plan to destroy just to burn Era's resources, forcing him to rebuild and lose wood.

Era finds himself in a worse situation than Hope: he's been cut off from wood and doesn't even have an army to defend himself.

Only 5 minutes after the attack starts, Era abandons the match against this novel and devastating strategy.