Mystic Briton is the leader and founder member of the Mighty Mystics. He formed the great team back in April 2000 and since then he has lead them into great battles with incredible success.

Recently we managed to catch the Mystic Briton for a chat and the details of the interview are given below.

I certainly did, after being a Warcraft II and Starcraft Brood Wars player on the net for years, I was a hardened multi-player fan and believed that whilst fun, single player computer games were history. Age of Kings is in my humble opinion far, far better than Age of Empires, AOK is a proper game, it is well thought out, well balanced and you have to be damn skilful to win.

Age of Empires had lots of units, lots of upgrades but no character, graphics and music were up to the standard of similar games released 5 years previous. There were stupid things in the game, clumsy graphics and ugh! it was just horrible. The only thing that was good about it was the fact you could have different screen resolutions, so you could see more of the map at once, but it ran very slowly, even on powerful computers at the time of release.

The units are balanced, as far as I can see there is no one unit, you can get hundreds of, which can wipe out the entire opposition. This means that you have to get several different types of unit depending on the units you are about to attack.

I hate games where if someone surprises you with an attack you never noticed, that the game is over for you, well, while the sounds are not "that" good, you can get your town completely destroyed, build up somewhere else and still come back and win.

Every unit has a counter unit, walls and buildings are significantly stronger than men, which creates a good balance.

The units you get in each age make it worthwhile going to at least castle age in most games.

Which civilisations do you like to play and why?

I keep changing my mind here.... At the moment I like the Vikings because they don't seem to have a weakness, I also believe their wheelbarrow and handcart free upgrades give them an early gathering advantage which is hard to beat. Their infantry can always deal with trebuchets and knights. Their lack of a fire ship is a pain sometimes.

I like the Britons because of their longbowmen and cheap town centres. The fast shepherds are quite handy too. They also have the handy upgrades that Vikings have like Siege Engineers and bracer.

The Chinese are a great civ, I like starting with an extra 3 villagers, I think the fact you get 150 less food is not a problem as you can put the villagers on whatever resource you need. This is more of an advantage if you play on medium or high resources. Their farms also, never seem to run out!! The extra 45 food certainly makes a difference around early castle age when most farms are going fallow...gives you more wood for those vital town centres. Playing Chinese also means you build less houses, as each town centre covers 15 population. Their cheap upgrades also mean that the blacksmith is always used a lot.

I don't play then much but the Persians are worth a mention. I do like storming in with about 50 Elite Elephants, Trebuchets and Paladins, there's just no stopping them! The faster work rate also makes them similar to Vikings.

The Franks deserve a mention. It depends on the map type, but if you are allowed to get to imperial age and you can get there before your opponents, you can inflict heavy damage with those paladins, and they move so fast!

What is your favourite unit in the game?

Hmm tricky one here, I'm inclined to say the trees, but I guess that's not a unit, but the fact that trees are the basic resource and they are all over the map, the fact you can use them to wall in, and as you cut them away the shape of your town changes, I think trees are great!

I guess the best unit has to be the villager, as you only need one, in your enemy's town and he can destroy it.... well eventually... also the Trebuchet, as if protected well enough, there's just no stopping it.