What is aoe-mini?

AoE Mini is a browser based real time strategy game inspired by Age of Empires II. It is built entirely in TypeScript, with the game logic and the on screen rendering kept separate, so the simulation can run and be tested independently of what you actually see on screen. The visuals use a 2D canvas drawn to look isometric, similar to classic strategy games. The game includes three playable civilizations, each with its own bonuses and a unique special unit, and progresses through four ages from Dark to Imperial, following the familiar economy then military then conquest arc of this genre. You gather four resources, food, wood, gold, and stone, build eleven types of buildings, and train a roster of units including villagers, foot soldiers, archers, and cavalry. There is fog of war, a minimap, combat with armor and bonus damage between unit types, and computer controlled opponents with easy, medium, and hard difficulty settings that manage their own economy and army. To try it, you install the dependencies with npm install and start it with npm run dev, then open the printed local address in a browser. By default you play as the Britons against two AI opponents, the Franks and the Mongols, and the game starts in an auto play mode where an AI plays for you until you switch to manual control. Match settings, including the map seed, opponent difficulty, and map size, can be set through a menu in the interface or directly in the page address, which makes it easy to share a specific match setup with someone else. The project also includes a large automated test suite, over two hundred tests, along with a headless mode that can run a full match between AI opponents with no browser at all, used as an automated check that a complete match can be played to a decisive result. The code is organized into clear layers: shared types and math, the core simulation engine, the map and pathfinding, game content data, the AI opponents, and the renderer, each kept independent of the others.