Age of Mythology Retold has a lot of cool features non of the AoE games have.
Individual Difficulty
Each AI can be set to a different difficulty. This allows a lot more variation and interesting matchups. For example you can give yourself an easy AI to have some support against a Hardest AI instead of having to give you an ally with the same difficulty as your enemy.
AI personality
Each AI can have one of a long list of personalities. From basic ones like “Aggressive” and “Defensive” to more exotic ones that only attack after you attack, ones that build up a large army before attacking, ones that focus on supporting their allies, ones that try to expand as much as possible and so on.
I don’t need to explain why this adds a lot to skirmish and Coop gameplay.
12 Players
AoMR doesn’t just support 8 players like all the AoE games but a whole 12. This allows for more epic battles but also makes creating custom Scenarios a lot easier. You probably know a few official scenarios that struggle getting around the 8 player limit like “Ragnar”. Having 4 more players would help a lot. More then that would be appreciated too of course.
Auto Queue
You can enable the feature to automatically queue civilian and military units. I know a lot of you don’t want to play that way but would it hurt to have it as an optional feature in lobbies? It would make the game a lot more approachable to casual players.
Auto Economy
This is a feature that already exist on the Console Version of AoE2 so why not bring it over to the PC version to. I know pretty much no one that will read this post will need this feature but it would make the game a lot more approachable for new players. It might help convince one of your friends to give AoE2 a try that was too afraid of learning such a complex game so far.
Random events and bonuses
AoMR introduced the Arena of the Gods and Gauntlet gamemodes which offer unique modifiers for each match. This feature has been added to Skirmish lobbies too. A lot of those are very Mythology focused so they wouldn’t make sense in an AoE game but some could work for AoE too. Having the ability to turn on random modifiers to get some more variety in your gameplay.
Summary
AoMR adds a lot of lobby options that none of the AoE games have so why not add some of them to AoE2. You might not need some, or all of them, but would it hurt if they were there?
For me, I think it is a must. After playing AoM Skirmish mode and AoE 2 Skirmish, I prefer AoM slightly more, and I think it is because of the personality. It mixes up the gameplay and leads to nice challenges and more variety. It could help with the problems with the difficult jumps we have right now.
I would like to see that, but I’m not sure if the engine can do it. It would also lead to a lot of work, as all maps would have to be overhauled and checked for bugs with all the possible player and gameplay combinations.
It’s a nice feature for casual players. One difference is that AOM has a population cap for villagers, whereas AOE 2 does not. This could become a problem for casual players because they end up with more villagers than necessary. For this, I think a option were you can set up / limit the maximum number of villagers via Auto Queue. Another problem could be that too many villagers can overload a player, causing unnecessary stress because they have to handle a lot more villagers and deal with a lot more idle villagers. Here Auto Eco Can Help with it.
I’m not the biggest fan of this because Eco Handling is one of the game’s core features. Taking this away could. This could lead to an experience that would ruin the fun of the game. But I understand why it’s there for consoles, and it could allow players who are overwhelmed by the ECo management of the game to enjoy AOE 2DE.
It could cause problems in the same campaign mission if you only have a small number of villagers or limited resources.
Another concern I have with the auto-queue/auto-eco feature is that it could make the switch from single-player or lobby multiplayer to ranked harder, If neither of them were allowed. I think both auto-queue/auto-eco are not good QoL Features for ranked or casual ranked players. I have a theory about the “real problem of low-ranked players”, and it’s not villager production, it’s resource spending. But this is for another thread.
That would be really nice. I think an option to modify the gameplay would be cool. This could be a place where things like the exploding king/villager from the T90 community games or other interesting gameplay modifiers like 10x upgrades can be placed without the need for a mod or modded maps.
The engine can’t do it. The question is how much work would it be to make the engine be able to do it.
You need to consider that AoE1 was in development for maybe like 3 years and then AoE2 another 2 years with AoC that totals 6 years. They took 6 years to write the engine and make all the other things. AoE2DE released 7 years ago. The post release support for this game was already longer then the entire development of AoE1 and AoE2 combined. I think they should know their way around the engine by now.
It would be the biggest most complicated change but it would enable a whole new dimension of gameplay tbh. Imagine the campaings they could make if they had 12 or even 16 players available in each scenario.
Auto economy is always worse then manual economy. The more people learn the game the more they get annoyed by how auto economy is handled and start doing things themselves.
Auto queue is a different thing though. It is just plain better. It’s like when they introduced the auto farm reseeding in the Definitive Edition. A lot of people complained about how it takes the “skill” away from the game at the beginning but I bet most of those people would not be willing to go back to the old farm queue or even manual reseeding in the old day. Auto queue definitely reduces the mental load the game puts on a player, it’s up to you if you love that or hate that. For someone who just wants to relax while playing video games after work auto queue is a gift.
I can tell you. If they would add auto queue to ranked (what I’m not suggesting that they should) then a small group of people would be super upset for a few months, a tiny group of people might even quit the game out of protest, but a year later almost everyone will be used to it and 2 years in almost no one would want to go back.
Auto queue actually helps with the resource spending issue. Auto queue is not limited to villagers (in AoMR it’s a lobby setting if it should be villager only) so you can put military units on auto queue too, helping you to drain your resource stockpile.
And yes auto queue doesn’t make the game trivial. You still have to consider when to turn it of or how to prioritise things. So it doesn’t make the game play itself.
Sorry, but I think this is a weak argument. What’s the alternative? Either you deal with it, or you stop playing this game. And because there is no other game like AOE2 DE, leaving is a very dramatic step. And up to a certain point, people just go along with it, but that doesn’t mean they agree with it or think it’s cool. First and foremost, they simply accepted that this is now the way things are and started to come to terms with it. But If it good or Bad You can reade out of it. Take Netflix, for example – they’ve raised their prices slightly. People have been complaining, and after a year the complaints will die down, and even more so after that, as long as enough people say, ‘It’s rubbish, but I still prefer Netflix.’ So I’ll pay the price. Would you be happier if it were cheaper again? Yes.
It’s silly to judge it on that basis alone
But you don’t need to Auto queue for that. You can start the game right now and just play at your own pace. In Skirmish mode and Campaign mode, you can adjust the difficulty, and in Ranked mode, based on your Elo rating, you can play against players at your skill level. For a relaxed gaming experience, you don’t need Auto queue or Auto Eco, the game has plenty of ways to let you do that.
Okay, but auto-farm reseeding, as a feature, doesn’t have the same significant impact on gameplay and player levels as auto-queue combined with auto-eco.
Because Resseding Farm wasn’t a feature that defined the core of the game and its gameplay loop. It was just a small mechanic that was there. Yes, it created a skill, but not a game-defining skill that, when removed, completely changed the game.
But auto-queue/eco are Mechaniks that will directly be attached to the core Mechaniks.
The core mechanics of the game, the main gameplay loop, involve gathering resources, building a base and producing units and go up the Ages and Tech tree in order to defeat the opponent.
It is simply wrong to compare the two, as they operate at entirely different levels of influence.
No auto queue will just reduce the memory space you need to remember to click a button and the time it takes to click it. But now people will have to handle not 50 units, but 200 units, which will stress them in other areas. For example, if you have more than 60 military units, you can control them all at once, and units like to attack enemies that are close. Now, more units will run around and do things you don’t want them to do. If you aren’t able to use control groups and unit stands, it will cause more mental stress than if you just had fewer units.
Yes, it’s up to everyone to use it or not. But, and this is just speculation, people who don’t make villagers because they forgot to create one will either use it and end up with more than they can handle, or they won’t use it, so they won’t benefit from it.
And for the ranked ladder, those who want to climb or maintain a certain Elo have no option but to use it, because using it will be more beneficial than not using it.
If the top players don’t leave, they will get used to it and abuse the mechanism, whether they like it or not. They will find the best way to use it and when not to use it. And with time, they will use it for other things, like Mikro Units. So, in the end, it will just destroy the Elo ranks of people and create other skill checks for different Elos. You no longer need to click a button multiple times with the right timing; you just click one button and decide when to deactivate or not.
In the end, you can like the way it changes the ranked mode or not. Personally, I don’t like it. For me, creating and producing units is a core skill of this game, and changing that would create a whole new game. As I said, I have no problem with it for single-player or lobby multiplayer, but for ranked it just creates a feature that gives those who use it a clear advantage over those who don’t and I don’t think that that kind of thing makes much sense in competitive mode. And there is no necessity for that. For those who want to play in a relaxed way, they will get to a certain ELO level where ther can play like ther want. And for those who want to play like the pros, there is no other way than to spend time and effort into it. There is no other way because they will always find a way to distinguish themselves from lower Elos via different Skills.
Auto Reseed, Auto Farm Placement, Auto Scout. These are different to Auto Queue because they eliminate annoying tasks or give players the opportunity to improve their skills, but they don’t them better then players b who don’t use them but have the skill.
With Auto Eco, I don’t have many of the problems I have with Auto Queue because it has a clear disadvantage: the Eco will not be able to be as efficient and flexible as when it is set up. But I have no idea how good the current version is on Conlose.
Lastly, the best way to improve is to understand why you do the things you are doing, why you have constant vill production, why and when is one stable is better than three or the other way around. The auto things that directly interact with the core mechanics will not help people to understand why it’s better; they just help with the mechanics. Without understanding, the next step to improvement will be even harder.
P.S. I must say I find it hard to write an argument. I would prefer to have this in conversation because I don’t think the things I want to say come across in writing.
There was a rumor a while back that we would be getting up to 16 players. I don’t know what came of it, but I suspect, if it ever was a thing, that it got shelved or delayed due to performance limitations.
If such a feature were to be implemented, I think the best functionality would be a time delay after the last activity was completed. And if you don’t have the resources, or the like, it would automatically turn off for that unit. There would be a setting in the lobby to determine the time amount, say 5, 10, 15, 20, 30 seconds, or disabled. Ranked would, of course, have it disabled.
As long as a thoughtful limitation is applied, I could see it being a reasonable addition.
Occasionally I’ll go and play some SWGB, and that doesn’t have those features. I think the one I notice missing the most is the auto-reseed: it’s just so nice to not have to think about that. Assisted farm placement is awesome, though: it doesn’t always place the farms where I want them so it’s not perfect, but when your economy starts to get really big, spending 3 seconds instead of 15 to place a bunch of farms is really nice.
I would not recommend their removal, but if DE got discontinued and I had to go back to the OG I would, because AoE2 is my game.
Having so many years of post-game support is precisely a good argument towards making it more difficult, old engines tend to break in many unexpected ways when they touch something and touching the pillars of the code may not be easy (ever heard the expression “spaghetti code” in videogames), I don’t know if you know coding, but I can tell you that trying to make sense of the code someone else (or even yourself) wrote long ago is very challenging and most people tend to document it well.
The larger the game is, the more difficult could be altering the engine and testing that nothing broke. That’s the main reason they usually tended to make sequel games, getting a “blank slate” to alter the engine without danger. With more modern engines, things are usually more structured and easier to develop, that’s also the reason why more games get post-release support this days
The proposal seems to be that the automations would be optional, not forced , you don’t have to auto-economy (it is mostly for controller players and it seems to be good) and auto-queue (that is already present in other RTS without major issues). You are also not forced to use current automation, you can deactivate the auto-seed and not click auto-scout
You can’t always please everyone no matter how much you try, you need to appeal to the majority that will keep playing the game
The important part of my argument is not that people “get used to it” it’s the “they don’t want to go back” part.
Obviously people don’t want to pay more for Netflix because that’s obviously worse. Also something that every user will agree on. Adding Auto Queue will only be hated by a small group of people, while there are many who will like the addition. That’s a completely different situation.
Also I never said it should be added to ranked. I just said if it would people would get used to it and even start liking it after a while.
Relaxing doesn’t mean it has to be boring. If you play on a lower difficulty it will feel unrewarding. If you send your huge stack of knights into a Feudal Age base it’s just boring because you know you gonna win.
Adding auto queue is not about making the game easier it’s about reducing the mental load of playing the game. Reducing the stress it causes.
No it’s not the same. But I already said that auto economy is not something you want to keep using anyway. So that is not a good comparison anyway.
Auto queue is something that gives you an advantage. You never miss out on queueing a new villager while not having a lot of food pre invested into a queue of upcoming villagers. It is a bigger thing then auto reseeding but it’s not a fundamentally different thing. Both reduce the busy work and mental load while playing.
Not really. We can just look at existing games with auto queue and see how they are like. Age of Mythology is not an entirely different game, it’s very similar to AoE2 in many ways.
I don’t think it will but I know people are afraid of that. People are afraid that their learned skill will not be needed anymore and that they learned it for “nothing”. That’s why I never suggested it to be added to ranked.
I have played AoE since like 1999 and of course I know how to keep up villager production. But I just don’t want to have to constantly keep that in mind. Playing AoMR just feels a lot more comfortable in that way. It’s a faster game so in the end there is enough other things going on but going back to AoE2 and AoE3 is annoying for me now.
I don’t really see how it would be that much of a performance issue. What takes up more performance, 16 players with 200 population or 8 players with 500 population?
The feature should be marked as “unsupported” in some way and they should not add more then 4v4 to ranked and it wouldn’t be an issue. I think for most cases it would be enough for only supporting 8 human players and then optionally 8 addition AI players but I think some people would really love to have 16 player diplomacy matches.
That could be a cool setting. But that would mostly just be needed to make it work for ranked honestly.
Those numbers are pretty high. A villager takes 25 seconds to train to a 30 seconds delay would more then double the train time.
I think 1-5 seconds delay options would make more sense. With 5 seconds your villager train time goes up from 25 to 30 seconds, that already puts you massively behind.
The devs have talked about refactoring old code multiple times in the past. And I’m pretty sure a lot of the core code of the game has been entirely replaced over the years.
Oh yes I know very well. But If it was your job to work on that code for pretty much over a decade by now you probably should know your way around it.
Though it would have probably been better to not use the original engine for the Definitive Edition and instead remake it from scratch using a modern Engine like Unity that has good 2D support.
The biggest struggle of developers working on an old franchise is balancing new vs. old players.
If you just cater to old players then your player base can basically just shrink. New people are rarely willing to get used to none standard ways to play and will be annoyed of missing quality of life features.
But if you cater to much to new players you will lose your biggest fans which have been supporting you for years. Also new players might be scared away if the notice that a developer doesn’t do what the community wants.
It’s hard to find a balance. Developers are forced to “try” out a few things that they know that some people in the community won’t like. They knew some people wouldn’t like the 3 Kingdoms but they hoped that the amount of new players it could bring them would outweight that. Similarly the next Viking themed DLC is not what the majority of the community asked for but it’s certainly something that can catch the attention of people that haven’t heard of AoE2 yet. This is way they are probably hesitant to make an Africa themed DLC. Most people in their target markets (The Americas, Europa and Asia) don’t know much about African history and will likely not be that hyped about a DLC with that setting while most long time players see a huge gap on the map that needs to be filled.
AOM retold had an engine level rewrite to run the game on multiple cpu threads specifically to make those 12 player lobbies possible, its a very extensive procedure to do, if it ever happens for aoe2 expect million bugs out of that, kind that could be unpatchable
the game frequently crashes, the lobby browser is unusable, the in-game chat is unusable. I wish it “broke more” so i could finally get a refund for this dumpster fire
The largest map size in AoE2 is kinda unsupported right now already and 4v4 games on it are definitely not playable on the minimal hardware requirements.
Of course pushing it up more would bring more machines to it’s limit but it’s a player choice to do so. I think 16 or just 12 players on a smaller map would be easier to handle then 8 players on a Ludicrous map.
But the original AoM already had 12 player support.
Huge bugs are somewhat of a smaller issue because they can easily be caught before shipping an update. Yes they obviously take a lot of work to fix but the chance that they accidentally slip though or considered minor enough to ship an update anyway is a lot lower.
It’s of course the biggest change to the game engine ever but also the biggest enabler for new kinds of experiences that can’t be have today.
I believe it was on Zetnus youtube channel that he found it leaked in the files that they planning to add a 16 civs limit, but it was a long time ago and we haven’t officially seen it yet, so it is either too difficult to implement and gave up, or they are still working on it but it is taking long to make work.
8 players with 250 population is already a struggle for a lot of machines. That’s why there’s a ranked benchmark, so that low-end machines don’t ruin the experience for everyone else.
Maybe counterintuitively 16 players with 200 population. More machines to communicate across the network, more server demand; more inputs per second to resolve; even more map area for the players to have their own spaces: all of this will take up resources that simply increasing the population doesn’t.
“Why allow 16 players at all if you won’t add the option in ranked?” You know as well as I that this is something that will be a complaint.
AI players actually take up more resources than human players do.
That’s not to say that it wouldn’t be possible, but there would need to be a significant overhaul of the engine in order to be able to support that many players. Although they may be gradually doing portions of that with each update. In that Dev Talk or whatever, the guy said pathfinding has been improved from taking something like 90% of computational resource to just 10%, which is huge. So I imagine they are getting other performance improvements from other system reworks. Who knows, maybe one day we might get an increase in player count.
But for the players who would be most inclined to use it, and who would get the most use out of it, double the train time is a small price to pay for 100 villagers instead of 20.
There could be an argument for those options, but really a 1 second delay is basically nothing. I mean, who wouldn’t use it if it meant you never got 30 seconds idle TC ever again? How far behind can you get if you have 120 villagers instead of 70 villagers? 5 seconds of idle TC time per villager is about the level of a 700 to 800 Elo player, which is way too strong for the average casual or new player.
ICK! No! That’s the part I dislike the most about Stronghold Crusader DE: it’s not their own engine it’s just an off the shelf model.
No, we’ve only got a mere thousand bugs. A million bugs would be a whole games worth of bugs for every single bug we have now.
Side note: when’s the last time you reported one of those bugs? And did you include the requested information to go with it?
That’s the rumor I heard. But yeah, performance is the likely culprit, although lack of monetizability probably put a damper on it as well.
