Indeed they are the priority.
Meta in 2022 for game developing:
dont fix broken things, instead constantly introduce new things. The former doesnt attract new players the latter gets you attention.
General Ideas:
Trading
I’d like some fine tuning of trade in 1v1s. As is, its just too easy to shut down early trade (and mongol lategame trade) for it to really be worth anything. Off the top of my head, I’d recommend reducing the total amount of res gained per trip and proportionally increase the speed so the the net income is the same. This way its harder for a few spearmen to stop the entire tradeline and it hurts less to lose each individual trader. Or anything really that makes a trade boom viable and/or easier to transition to at later stages.
Testing
Instead of a whole complete scenario editor, would it be possible to make a game more where you can control two opposing civs and essentially fight yourself? See, balance arguments get pretty heated and depend heavily on practical tests…which are pretty hard to pull off atm. I think a place to test units and comps against each other would be … healthy for the community in the long run. It’d also make it easier to give and take feedback on the actual design of units.
Specific:
Landmarks
Some landmarks need some help - generally the market landmarks (chamber of commerce, sutlanhani trade network,etc) cuz they cant be placed optimally for trading lest they get sniped for being landmarks. Maybe just make it so building them lets any/all markets provide their perks or such not.
Redundant techs
To use a specific example, consider the Camel Rider. After the rework it was a pretty solid medium cavalry, imo. For all that, it didnt see much use except for the longest of games since it needed so many techs to scale up - camel rider barding, shields, handling - in addition to the blacksmith/uni techs. These could just be worked into the base stats of the unit of unlocked with unit upgrades. Similarly, the siege elephants tech in age 4 is pretty bad since by then elephants dont have even a shadow of a chance to matter - moving it to age 3 might give it a window to be useful.
Delhi
The problems are weird (in a bad way) landmarks, and a literal useless unit (war elephant). To start with consider moving the Hisar Academy to age 2, displacing the Tower of Victory to age 3 and the House of Learning to age 4. The age 2 Hisar academy starts of giving a minimum amount of food that scales up to the normal 600 food/min based on techs researched. An early food bonus is good for direct rushing and investing into vills for booming - covers 2 holes in the Delhi game at once. ToV is strong enough to be an age 3 landmark and works better with age 3 units besides so it could displace the House of Learning easy - offer an age3 choice of aggressive or defensive play. Then upgrade the House of Learning to be a real age 4 landmark by letting it research free university techs at a normal speed (not modified by scholars).
Then the war elephant - I get it if giving it splash damage might be a bit too much. But as is, its really only good against units that choose how much it counters them and unlike spears it isnt even disposable. If raw power isnt the best way then focus in on it an alterante siege weapon - just a bit more damage vs walls and some more speed to at least escape melee infantry and I can work with that.
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You guys could check out this poll if you want to. That is about that if the next pair of civs has Byzantines as one of them, that you could select which civ could pair with the Byzantines.
they could add voice chat for teamgames for example i dont know if that possible
The game urgently needs hacks to be fixed ( maphack, drophack). There are too many that you find and they ruin your gaming experience.
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I know it’s not ideal, and the game should provide what you’re asking for, but you can actually do it fairly easily if you have 2 PCs and 2 copies of the game. It’s still more work to set up than how you can do it in AoE 2 DE.