Age of Empires

Age of Empires is an early RTS game which started an entire series. You develop one of several civilizations from the Stone Age to the Iron Age and start a war against your enemies to achieve world domination (though technically, you conquer one map at a time only).

Republic Age
It seems that originally, you were supposed to be able to continue development beyond the Iron Age. There's this icon, text (called, appropriately, Republic Age Not in use in the language file) and several graphics for a so-called Republic Age that are never used in the game.

Stone Age
Stone Age is the very first age in the game, so it's unclear why there's an upgrade icon for it. Maybe your current age was shown somewhere in the interface originally?

Mathematics
A scrapped upgrade that would've fit with the game, but is inexplicably unused.

Scouting
The icon suggests that this had something to do with the line of sight - fitting, as that's pretty abysmal in the game and an upgrade to it would be great to have.

Fish
This fish icon is among the upgrade icons, not the unit icons. Could've been something to improve the villager's fishing skills.

Cartography
Looks like a cartography upgrade, judging from the icon. It doesn't really suggest what it's good for, though.

Pottery
No idea at all on this one.

Unknown 1
No idea here either.

Unknown 2
The icon suggests this was related to the archery, or archers. There aren't any other clues though.

Unknown 3
Possibly something related to trading? It does look like it could fit in there.

Researchable units
It seems that a lot more units were required to be researched before you could train/build them. A bunch of unused text exists for researching several units which in the final game you can train/build straight away:


 * Light Transport
 * War Elephant
 * Elephant Archer
 * Cavalry
 * Chariot
 * Horse Archer
 * Chariot Archer
 * Ballista
 * (Rise of Rome) Fire Galley



These four upgrade icons are not used in the game, and were likely used by some of the above units for researching them.

Trade Workshop
The trade workshop is an unused building. It can be placed on a custom map with some hacking, but it has no function at all. Complete graphics for all four distinct building styles exist (there are none for Rome in the expansion though).



Town Center architectures
These unused Town Center architectures are located between the Bronze Age and Iron Age architecture. They exist for the Egyptian, Greek and Babylonian building styles - the Asian one just has a duplicate of the Bronze Age architecture there, suggesting this was not quite finished.



Road
Buildable roads were planned at some point in development, as evidenced by a text string "Build-Road" in the language file. They would've been historically accurate, so why they were removed remains a mystery.

Ruins
These unused ruins don't look anything like the ruins used in the final game - they're actually reminiscent of the Egyptian Bronze Age Temple.

Discovery
Simply an alternate design for the Discovery that didn't make it into the final game.

Volcano
This is a rather intimidating volcano, complete with lava flowing out of it. This would've made for a very cool decoration in the game... it might have looked a bit out of place though, as the in-game hills and mountains have a very different appearance from what is seen here.

Goat
It's a goat. Possibly intended as another animal for you to hunt for food, although it kinda doesn't fit with the Mediterranean setting of the game.

Horse
It's what it says on the tin, a simple black and white horse. While it can be moved just fine in Age of Empires, it turns invisible in Rise of Rome when moving. It can also be hunted in the original game using villagers (though you can't get any food from it as it disappears as soon as it dies). It was possibly meant as decoration or as part of a mission objective.

Hero 12
It's a simple hero unit, with nothing special to it. Probably a placeholder which was intended for the campaign, and then scrapped.