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    Age of Empires II When you're about to full send, but this banger comes on

    December 31, 2019

    Age of Empires II When you're about to full send, but this banger comes on

    When you're about to full send, but this banger comes on

    Posted: 30 Dec 2019 07:16 PM PST

    Gold please

    Posted: 30 Dec 2019 11:50 AM PST

    What is this? Anarchy?

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 05:28 AM PST

    The missed oportunities from Age2DE for competitive multiplayer

    Posted: 30 Dec 2019 02:39 PM PST

    The release of Age2DE at 14 november was an exciting event. Many were positively suprised by this new remake but also many were a bit dissapointed. We had to get used to the new graphics, and the balance and game stability had to be adressed in a December patch.

    Now,nearing the end of 2019, many of us are still somehwat dissappointed in this (second) remake of Age of Empires 2 by Microsoft.

    Especially within the comptitive community and the frequent viewers of some of the popular Age2 channels on Twitch and Mixer the experience of the game is often negative. There is a fear that this version of the game will split the community rather than unite it (part of the player base can't make the switch to DE because they lack the computer specs to run the game, another part would happily return to the way they played the game before, because they prefer the features of Userpatch or Voobly)...

    The addition of 4 new civs + campaigns, the quality of life improvements (command queue, shift queueing, healthbars on hovering over objects) and the server-based platform all sound really exciting and they are the reason I'm still playing on Age2DE myself (nearly reached 200 hours on Age2DE). However, I will join the group of dissatisfied users that now is in dubio wether to play Age2DE (which is thrilling because it's new, and where my friends and many significant players are active), or the good old version I liked playing on Voobly (WololoKingdoms)...

    ​

    Let's analyse (the current state of) Age2DE in more detail,

    but first, let me tell where I come from:

    I'm HenkDeSuperNerd, you're average 'competitive player' I have no significant Rating achieved to be anywhere near being 'pro' but I have a good understanding of the game. I have probably accumulared a few thousand hours by playing Age of Empires for the last 3 years. I frequently watched streams (mostly T90Official, Nili, Viper, EscapeGaming, or smaller streamers) and I'm also involved as content creator in this Age2 community. I script random maps for my own pleasure, some maps are featured on Community Games day by T90Official. I also made a few tournament maps and helped to create mappacks and adjust maps to fit tournament standards. I have hosted a tournament on Random Everything, a massive mapscript that takes MegaRandom and multiplies the possibilities with infitinity. (It's more like HyperRandom, the mapscript Zetnus made for DE) I've also hosted a map design contest where mapscripters had 24hours to build a map from scratch. A fun event, and not unimportant, a way to unite the community of map scripters. As a player I've participated in some friendly tournaments (some friendly tourneys hosted by members of the T90 discord), I always sign up for King of the Hipp (by Nili), I have played NationCup 2017 for NL_D (the dissaster that was), I have teamed with Viper to lose to Daut (all hail!) in masters and apprentiences, but mostly, I played casual teamgames with friends or randoms on WololoKingdoms around the 1600-1700 Voobly rating.

    So what's wrong?

    Promises (Lies)

    • DE would have an AI able to beat 7 original hardest AI all by itself (this wasn't true: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lt-3F47FD2w )
    • Open beta would be quick to accept a large quantity of players
    • the trailer shown at E3, the Developers have claimed that units getting stuck in the fights were not bugged unit but rather the unit was on no attack stance. Pathing would have improved over HD. (https://youtu.be/EdqS0S2CgcQ?t=780) This turned out not to be the case. Attack move is broken (makes units freeze) and pathing is still a big mess (significantly worse than we see on userpatch)
    • the minimal specs are an intelcore 2 with 4 GB of ram. Recommended is an i5 with 8 GB of ram. (However, I would advise everyone to buy a super computer with one of the latest i7's with 16GB of high quality RAM otherwise you risk experiencing a slideshow or dropping from multiplayer games due to your device running out of memory)

    Why not use what's already proven to work?

    learn from matchmaking from other multiplayer games (such as Legaue of Legends):

    • a reconnect button once you lose connection to server
    • a surrender vote poll
    • a remake poll when someone drops
    • during queue players can browse through tech trees, leader boards, or chat with friends.
    • while queueing with a friend allow players to chat.

    learn social aspects from a platform like voobly:

    • a friend list easily viewed when in the game menu (instead of current system, where your steam firends that are online and looking for games are not displayed differently than someone who is logged into steam playing another game)
    • see who is in game, also filter players when you want to invite them in 'in game', 'looking' or 'AFK'
    • ignore list so you can prevent matching up against annoying players
    • post-game chat & replay option, so you can play again with the same enemies after a successful game
    • watch list & streamer icon
    • players can join a room as spectator, where they can talk to eachother in spectator chat. They can see the chat by the players,
    • see who is in game, how much time has elapsed in the game), hover over players that are in game to see their statistics: their rating as well as number of games played, winstreak, nationality, and ratings from other ladders.
    • see who is online, who is playing, who is looking for games. Great to see what friends might join, which possible opponents you could message to play a quick 1v1 or to see what game to spectate when your two favorite pro players are playing against another.

    Learn game improvements from Userpatch/WololoKingdoms:

    • improved pathing
    • custom AI improvements (Barbarian)
    • map scripting improvement (team-position, up-effect, guard-state(allows regicide+KOTH combo), AI info to be used to display the maps name in a map pack under objectives, direct_placement and group_placement break the scenario editor
    • during game, switch seat to play as an opponent

    Learn from Capture age

    • unlimited zoom
    • total health pool comparison
    • easy toggle of selected player
    • overview of economic or military units
    • important technologies completed

    Listen to (pro) player feed back

    • civ-balancing
    • map-balancing
    • choice of maps for ranked play
    • map bans
    • civ picks, random civ, or civ bans?

    Other (obvious) improvements I can suggest regarding maps and Scenario editor:

    • Scenario editor can use a lot of Qualtiy of Life improvements, starting with a undo/redo button
    • In scenario editor default should be 2 player (tiny) map
    • In scenario editor, it would be nice to be able to copy the seed of a randomly generated map
    • Scenario editor breaks when loading some map scripts
    • In the scenario editor some aditional hotkeys would be usefull. At least you allowed us to scroll through the lenghty lists of units and objects with up and down key with the december patch..
    • copy & paste mode is terrible to work with
    • for custom random map scripts, allow team placement by assigning a player land to a specific player, or a random player from a specific team. The competitive comunity just got familiar with 'fixed position' something that was actually added as an option for non-ranked games. Sad to see this is only limited to casual lobby now. More control of who plays where would also allow us map scripters to make more specific maps such as 'besiege', 'enemy archipelago', or 'overlord'
    • additionally, up-effect (introduced with userpatch) allows to modify stats of units within a mapscript. Obviously that can be abused to create some very werid maps, but it can also be used in moderation to aquire some competitive (tournament) maps like: mangrovemaps (with balance), no-wall-arabia, no-cut-BlackForest, Regicide+King of the Hill combo; or crazy maps like: exploding villagers, exploding kings, battle royale, cannonboar nothing.
    • many bugs still exists and some new bugs were even introduced for making random maps. Maps crashing when only 1 border is assigned, circle radius being affected by the terrain's border fuzziness, lands overlapping, (land)connections not generating properly, etc...
    • it would be nice to make our own art-facets for custom maps, currently every custom map displays with a grey '?' image

    Changes you did NOT have to make:

    Added randomness on (ranked) maps:

    • variable amount of relics
    • variable type of herdables (cows, sheep etc)
    • serengeti type woodlines (acacia trees with annoying gaps in between)
    • reduced number and spread of gold/stone on nomad, as well as frequently forests on hills

    matchmaking features that aren't great:

    • Some maps are very much frowned upon: 1v1 Black forest, mega random.. increasing the number of map choices could be an option?
    • allow at least one ban for every player in a 4v4.
    • pick civ. This leads to same matchups over and over.

    Other questionable decisions:

    • removed ELO display from casual lobby, Why??
    • save and exit is no longer a possibility in ranked games.
    • mod workshop now only transfers the content temporarily. Ok that might be good to prevent sharing of bad content. However, this means players wont be able to find back the mod/map they played unless they subscribe. More importantly: spectators cannot watch a match played with custom content unless they are subscribed to the content.
    • the UI is scalable however some elements wont scale well like unit icons, which are way too small to differentiate
    • the UI shows blue colour units in selection panel/ production panel even for players that are a different colour
    • scenery objects like grass and rocks are confusing and easily mistaken for a tree or other object.

    Then there is civ-balance...

    There were some questionable decisions (goths nerfed by not having supplies), no buffs for some underrated civs like turks, teutons, vietnamese (only minor buff), while some already strong civs gained a bonus: Persians with trash-bows & faster working towncenters from darkage on.

    However, I don't want to go in detail on the balancing of civilizations. Also, I think you are doing a very good job at taking the communities feedback and suggestions into account when it comes to civ-balance. In general, I'm fairly happy with the balance of civilizations currently.

    ​

    Communication, Feedback and Beta access

    First of all, the beta was a big disaster. Too little content was given to the players so they couldn't test things adequately. Moreover, with only multiplayer as a way to play the game (for the majority of the beta) the lack of players deterred (pro) players from playing games. The resetting of the ladder with each update furthermore meant that pro players would face weak players.As a result many pro players (with busy agendas due to ongoing tournaments) did not feel like playing and testing the game.In my experience beta testers were selected poorly. Many participants weren't able to communicate well, had no experience with multiplayer whatsoever or would not bother to investigate bugs/balance and report it. A large portion of the pro and competitive player base as well as many experienced modders/scripters were not invited until the last wave.

    Feedback was possible on the beta forum.The AoE website was relatively new and had many issues to begin with. One frustrating complaint was that there was no way to tell if you successfully signed up for the beta (age insiders). On top of that the forum did not succeed in pulling veteran players away from established platforms such as Aoezone.net (the main place to find competitive players and tournament organisers) or several discord channels. The launch of a new discord would mostly pull in new players that were excited to play the game for the first time, that would (re)post funny memes, achievements versus their first AI game or come up with ideas for balancing or new content. Everyone their rights, but it meant competitive players had little interest in become active on this discord where new individuals (who had never even heard of Aoezone, voobly or the zone) had gained moderating powers or community-sage acknowledgement.The fragmentation of community concerning DE was a real problem. Bug reports would appear on AoeZone, reddit, the AoeDiscord, the official aoe forums, and many other discord channels.The response of the developers was often long awaited for and wouldn't reveal much other than 'we are aware of this issue'A major patch dropped out of nowhere which didn't reveal all changes (many changes to maps for example were pushed undocumented). Similarly upon release nobody knew what content would be available. Many (untested) modes such as single player, scenario editor, mod workshop and many scenarios from the campaigns appeared to be buggy and sometimes unusable upon the official game launch. The multiplayer servers soon got overloaded and eventhough many people (including me) were positively surprised by the new features such as command queues, destruction animations and 4 flashy new civs, the product felt not appropriately tested for launch, which tainted how I felt about the game.

    Bug reports continued (actually, only now many issues started to be reported, the launch of the game can almost be considered a launch of an open beta, open to everyone who pays for the game). Forums exploded, and again the reports of issues got spread over many different platforms.Reports were still often not properly addressed. Later on we saw a Twitter message from Evan, the community manager where he voiced his opinion on how to be better community members. This topic was taken personal and people showed their dissatisfaction with how developers shared their progress and how people from the team would not handle bug reports appropriately.

    CONCLUSION:

    While a lot was promised some crucial things are missing from the game.The community wishes were known before the launch of the game. Diverse other (community) projects had independently investigated what features are crucial. Still, those features were not implemented into Age2DE

    Voobly brought social aspects such as friend lists, watchlist, profiles and chat in a game lobby.

    Userpatch brought improved pathing. Added functionality for AI-scripters and MapScripters, and optimizations to reduce lag.

    Other online multiplayer games (I referenced League of Legends, as that is a game I have played myself) brought a server based matchmaking system that worked well, with a reliably queue, bans, ability to navigate while queueing and good integration on social aspects while queuing with your friends

    CaptureAge showed how the spectator experience can be enhanced with features such as unlimited zoom, easy toggle between players, total health pool, quick overview of all economy/all military, and display of completed researches.

    The communication between developers and community was lacking in several aspects. Mainly players felt unheared and not appreciated for trying to help the developers by giving feedback or suggestions. Also we feel powerless when there is no transparancy in what things are being worked on, what things the team is aware of, and how important our feedback and suggestions actually are to the game developers.

    I know the team is working hard, the community managers might be relatively new to the AoE2 scene, and the programmers might not have the gaming experience. I also know they had to work hard to get the game ready for the release date. I know the priority for the game is single-player since that is what 90% of the customers care for mostly. I know that part of the dev team only got involved recently. I know that it might not be on top of the list of Microsoft to release a good game, let alone to keep everyone happy by improving the multiplayer.

    But I also know that there are many people who have put countless hours in playing with friends they made via the internet. People they meet regularly at LAN parties, at public tournament viewings. I know that the streaming scene for Age2 has been exploding for the last 3 years. I know that Age2 tournaments are not to be taken lightly. A few people can make a living of playing or casting tournaments, and the game is pretty much setup to become e-sports (which Microsoft seems to support by donating to pricepools). That makes me wonder: How important is the competitive Multiplayer scene of Age2DE to you?

    submitted by /u/HenkDeSuperNerd
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    We need to see ratings in lobbies so we can play against equal teams.

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 04:03 AM PST

    Title says it all. I hate having games where the teams are imbalanced. It's not fun curbstomping noobs 1v4 without any resistance. It's also not fun playing 3v4 with your 4th teammate being a briton player who's making unupgraded cavalry archers before taking his boars

    submitted by /u/fietstasfabriek
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    Mr. Llamma was not happy with my skirm, hussar, siege ram push

    Posted: 30 Dec 2019 09:10 PM PST

    Waiting for DE to boot after clicking launch like..14!!!

    Posted: 30 Dec 2019 03:01 PM PST

    NAC 3 Viper vs Hera showmatch meme

    Posted: 30 Dec 2019 01:31 PM PST

    Steppe 1v1, Player Beside Eachother? Another DE Mapgen Bug?

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 07:25 AM PST

    Change Ressource Amount on herdables/trees etc

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 07:16 AM PST

    Is there a way to do this in the Definitive Edition editor? There are loads of ressources/variables and attributes you now have access to but so far I could change the HP bars of gold mines (lulz) but not the amount of gold they carry (same for cows, trees etc obviously).

    Some help on this would be really muj grande! 11

    submitted by /u/Alkhalim
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    Why The F* Is MegaRandom In RM? Hella Unbalanced. Opponent has 17 Gold To My 6...

    Posted: 30 Dec 2019 01:20 PM PST

    Has anyone encountered this bug so far?

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 06:09 AM PST

    [SoTL] Loom in AoE2

    Posted: 30 Dec 2019 10:06 AM PST

    New to the game and trying to beat campaign on hard. Super stuck on "Fall of Rome" Attila the Hun. Any help appreciated

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 12:30 AM PST

    Yeah so I have literally been trying for days. I mostly go pure paladin and Treb and it is so hard for me to keep up with fighting the 4 enemies that start off fully built and strong, and kill them before their wonder times me out.

    Any advice appreciated. I've been playing like a week.

    submitted by /u/-X-Fire
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    DE Ranked System

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 01:49 AM PST

    Why don't they have a forced-random instead of the current civ-picking system?
    Why can't it be more competetive and challenging, more sportive.
    50% of my games are against Cumans, yes, even at post-patch era. And then the casucal Aztecs/Mayans/Spanish on Gold Rush and Chinese on Nomadic maps.

    submitted by /u/SHAWNSHAWNAOE
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    Rome Was Destroyed in One Day - strat + map

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 07:41 AM PST

    Damn Roomba - the Worst AoE2 Teammate Confirmed

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 07:40 AM PST

    You need to clean your dong once in a while buddy, there is smegma piling up at the tip

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 07:39 AM PST

    Replays suck?

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 07:33 AM PST

    I've tried to watch back recordings of games to find particular moments but you have to watch it from start to finish in order to find the point you want. Even if you speed it up it still takes ages.

    submitted by /u/Altoids101
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    Thankyou

    Posted: 30 Dec 2019 11:23 AM PST

    Yesterday I made a post asking when to start playing ranked play and today on my 3rd Rank match I won for the first time. I want to thank everyone who told to just jump in. Thank you.

    submitted by /u/elbowbread
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    Age advancement requirements not showing up on tooltip

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 06:05 AM PST

    TL:DR: Running Steam DE and age advancement requirements do not show up on the tooltip.

    Thanks to awesome tweaks, graphics in DE and Spirit Of The Law's content I have started playing again - after 10 years of not touching the game. The age advancement tooltip in TC initially shows no info about what resources and building it takes to advanced to the next age. Once I have the appropriate buildings in place it shows the resource cost of advancing. Is this normal? Was it always like this? It is kind of annoying having to memories the cost of ages for a beginner to ensure proper build order.

    EDIT: I am on whatever Steam version is latest.

    submitted by /u/Hakkensha
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    Do some maps have no berries? How to fast castle then?

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 05:45 AM PST

    I've been practicing my fast castle times but I keep running into exceptions to the rule like frozen maps that don't have berries, or maps where the boar are twice as far away, etc. I haven't quite found a replacement for the berries.

    Should I just double up on the deer mill or go farms?

    submitted by /u/jeff88888
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    AoE 2 DE steam random crashes

    Posted: 31 Dec 2019 05:41 AM PST

    Faulting application name: AoE2DE_s.exe, version: 101.101.34223.0, time stamp: 0x5dfb2884

    Faulting module name: ucrtbase.dll, version: 10.0.17763.719, time stamp: 0x15f8b9b3

    Exception code: 0xc0000409

    Fault offset: 0x000000000006e91e

    Faulting process id: 0x10d0

    Faulting application start time: 0x01d5bfdb2df6674e

    Faulting application path: C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\AoE2DE\AoE2DE_s.exe

    Faulting module path: C:\Windows\System32\ucrtbase.dll

    Report Id: f2464938-baff-4e81-888c-30171497a8c2

    Faulting package full name:

    Faulting package-relative application ID:

    submitted by /u/Eco_IV
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