Yes, exactly, games and sagas evolve; even The Conquerors with the American civs wasn’t the same as AoK… By now, the developers have jumped the shark several times (from the original The Conquerors to The Forgotten in 2HD, and in 2DE, not to mention: Lords of the West with one button techs, Dynasties of India with the Indian rework, Return of Rome and the Romans, the 3K versions and the reskins of buildings and 3K heroes, and finally the last DLC, The Last Chieftains, with effects like poisoning or natives with gunpowder). I’d say that AoE 2 is already directly AoE 2.8 or 2.9. The moment they add the colonial era (which they already started doing with TLC), it will be AoE 3 (graphical differences aside, of course)…
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yes I can expect them to do that. btw Persian change was mostly just a reskin, Caravanserai doesn’t affect 1v1 ranked at all. The changes to Chinese are shit, and I am frustrated that they stole original Chinese from me. They lied about splitting them.
I don’t think the original developers got everything right, I am glad that they made some changes. But during HD’s life you could always (and still can) revert to previous patches/data sets. Not doing this in DE is such a stupid and frankly evil move.
fake UU - not a gimmick
cataphracts - do you mean the negative armor, not a gimmick, qutie a few other units and buildings have negative armor
do you mean area of effect? again, lots of other units have this (even melee units)
berserk - yes, regeneration is a gimmick. can’t argue there, utterly pointless mechanic
Huskarl - what could possibly be gimmicky about them? they have no unique mechanic, and they have a clear role.
this is ignoring the whole point. Yes, game evolve, but updates to games shouldn’t be forced down everyone’s throat. Especially with steam providing incredibly easy to use tools to allow reverting to previous versions, aoe2-devs deciding not to use them is just shitty. They are stealing from us, for no reason other than spite.
this is purely conjecture.
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I think it is the opposite. Since 2 to 4 classical civs has gone through some major changes, I think most of the other 14 will also have some major changes in the future.
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Fair view to have. I understand it. But I cling on hope for something good. Personally, I enjoyed The Last Chieftains.
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My theory is that their new multiplayer support system might interfere with having rollback version, It is a niche feature anyway, and you still have HD for a more faithful version, base DE is already very different if you are a purist
Gimmick is something ubique or anti-intuitive, having units with different counters than expected is a gimmick in itself, or the Franks with melee at range
If the definition of what is a gimmick is subjective, then that argument is worthless and not a useful argument in any discussion, It would be only wathever you particulary don’t like arbitrarrely.
And why your opinion would not be? You talk like you have the ultimate truth but you don’t have evidence.
I’ve seen real mad communities in total war and paradox, and if the people really don’t like something, It is made known and changes happen or development ends, I’ve never seen something near similar in aoe2. People in general serm happy with aoe2
I think that’s a reasonable theory, however 3 points against it:
- I would be fine with server based match making not being an option, just let me play peer to peer instead
- this doesn’t seem to be an issue for other games
- aoe2DE had roll back versions for tournaments in the past, so it is technically possible.
HD is buggy as hell, and missing QoL features
is it really too much to ask to be able to play the game I bought?
no:
A gimmick is a novel device, trick, or feature designed primarily to attract attention, increase appeal, or boost sales, often with little intrinsic value or long-term utility
having a different counter is not primarily for attention, but has intrinsic value. I think a reasonable way to distinguish between gimmicks and fully fletched features is this:
A fully fletched feature changes how I play the game. If the “feature” doesn’t change how I play the game, or its effect could have been achieved without introducing the feature then it’s a gimmick.
examples of features:
- Huskarl’s high pierce armor. Clearly not a gimmick, as it’s core to how Huskarls are used
- Cataphract’s negative armor. Also clearly not a gimmick, it’s core to how they counter pikemen.
- Axemen’s melee at range: it means the unit is affected by the blacksmith upgrades you are getting for your cav anyway. unit is not affected by ballistics. unit is strong against units that are weak to melee damage, while weak against those with high melee armor. It clearly changes how the unit plays (+ it isn’t even a unique feature, mamelukes, bombard cannons (and BBT in AoC) also deal melee damage)
examples of gimmicks:
- berserk regeneartion: doesn’t matter at all in fights. After fights you’ll still put them into a castle or next to some monks if you want them to be healed up.
- keshik gold generation: nobody cares about it. it’s so inconsequential that if removed nobody would even notice
- Hussite wagon’s arrow blocking: ditto.
I think most mechanics exist somewhere on a spectrum between gimmick and fully fletched feature, and can be a gimmick for one unit (eg charge attack for roman units) and a fully fletched feature for another (charge attack for coustillier).
I don’t think the definition is subjective (or at least not any more than any other word’s definition). Calling anything unique “a gimmick” makes the word meaningless and we will need a new word that fits the original definition of the word.
In essence what I want is units that play differently, not units that are superficially unique. Ideally this can be achieved without introducing new gameplay mechanics, but it’s tolerable if those mechanics at least affect how a unit is used.
you made a statement, you need to provide evidence for it.
my opinion is that some suits put out the directive to make as much money as possible, fuck the players.
people were pissed at V&V, people were outraged at 3K.
People like T90 are clearly unhappy with many of the new civs, but they have MSFT looming over them. He has mentioned on occasion that he misses old-school civ matchups. Of course it’s easy for me to say to “just organize a tournament without these civs, or with a data mod that reverts stupid changes”, but the reality is that Microsoft controls large amounts of the funding for these events. So saying “grow a spine” is really easy for us, but unrealistic for them.
have you seen the reviews for the DLC? Apart from chronicles, the last DLC with “mostly positive” or better reviews is over 4 years old. (and this doesn’t account for the people who dislike them enought to not buy them)
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So everything according to your subjective and expert opinion appatently.
I disagree with this. Not much value during fights, but afterwards is a different story. Melee fights tend to have spread out damage - if you have 30 berserks survive (and injured), you’re getting 40*30==1200 hp/min without any loss of momentum (since the berserks can still raid or take down buildings). Using monks for healing often requires extra attention. Garrisoning inside a castle means giving up momentum (something Vikings can’t afford to do). And regen is also helpful in campaign missions where you may have extra time between fights.
Several players also like playing the new civs. Unless the tournament is about using classic civs, excluding ranked civs will get pushback from players too (assuming the civs weren’t just released)
But realistically, I don’t think the Britons are going to get any changes to their range bonuses (possible exception for Yeoman price - that has happened in the past as I recall).
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Especially since they don’t have herbal medicine to cut down the time further.
Yes, I think that’s going to be the most logical path… if you have a Norse DLC, you’d get a Viking rework, if you have a German DLC you’d get a Teutonic rework, if you have a Balkan DLC, you’d get a Slavic rework, and so on…
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That alone is enough to break the balance. Feudal Age balance is built around having only a few unit types available. Just +1 range already makes scouts and skirmishers much less effective as counters.
So you mean turning the Archer line unis into the Longbowman line units, kind of like Flemish Revolution?
Just making the Longbowman replace the Crossbowman as the Archer line upgrade would be much more straightforward and simpler.
Sure, if the Celts can’t upgrade them into Elite.
I can see the reasoning, but I also think removing their trebuchet upgrade would make the civ feel too one-dimensional and overly focused on archers. The Britons really need good siege units, otherwise their pushing power is pretty limited.
Hobelar is clearly a better fit than Longbowman as the shared regional unit for the Britons and Celts.
The English, Scottish, and Irish all made successful use of hobelars. During the Scottish wars, both sides fielded them, and the English king at the time even tried to block Ireland from exporting hobelar horses to Scotland.
On the other hand, the Welsh, while ethnically Celtic, often served as subjects of the English in many major battles (whether by choice or not). Thousands of Welsh foot soldiers in the English army during theScottish wars. The Welsh also formed the forces used in the invasion of Ireland. Their longbowmen ultimately served English interests. Additionally, it’s said that the Scottish archers used much smaller bows that could only be used close up, which gave the English archers a big advantage.
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It’s certainly not directly on topic, but I’ll try to liven up the discussion with a bit of visual flair using a few pictures… 
If you think this doesn’t belong here, just let me know, and I’ll delete the post, np… 
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In what way did they “split” them? They still have the +3 vill start and Chu Ko Nu, so…
Same. The balance was a little off with the Muisca and Champi, but other than that it was a pretty good DLC.
*fledged
I don’t really see how +1 range on archers could impact the fight vs scouts that much. Scouts can just avoid the archers or close the distance quickly. At best the archer player gets off one more shot with full micro.
The skirmisher matchup could be more significant, but I doubt +1 range on archers will even be as impactful as +1 range on crossbows is now.
Not like Flemish Revolution, it’s more like if the crossbow upgrade was moved to the castle and delayed to Imperial Age. But it’s not just a crossbow replacement because that would require a new unique unit to replace the one in the castle.
Hence, the addition of siege ram. I would have also added siege engineers, but they already had it.
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Indians and Chinese went through essentially the same process:
- Dynasties of India: Indians got a major rework, with a new unique unit, a new regional unit, some changes to their bonuses, and a new name. Three new civs, which would previously have been represented by Indians, were added.
- Three Kingdoms: Chinese got a major rework, with a new unique unit, three new regional units, and some changes to their bonuses and unique techs. Four new civs, which would previously have been represented by Chinese, were added.
This process is widely considered a “split” for Indians, so for consistency it should be considered a “split” for Chinese as well.
(Not that the word “split” is really the point. The Chinese, Koreans and Inca civs that DE launched with have all been taken away from us recently.)
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nowhere do I claim to be an expert, but most of the things I wrote aren’t subjective:
- two of my 3 reasons of why I disagree that the rollback interferes with the multiplayer system are factual
- i give a dictionary definition of gimmick (well, wikipedia definition). Admittedly what follows is my interpretation of how that applies to aoe2, but I haven’t seen anyone make an argument of why that interpretation is flawed or wrong.
- people were pissed at V&V and outraged at 3K. is that really up for debate?
I think I’ve done a reasonable job highlighting what is my opinion:
but most of what I wrote isn’t subjective, so I find your response pointlessly dismissive.
I think you missed my point (or I didn’t make it particularily well). Yes, there are situations where this gimmick provides value, but when would you use this unit differently because of regeneration? Or alternatively, how much worse would the unit be without regeneration?
TommoChocolate already provided a fairly concise answer. The changes to Chinese were arguably bigger than the changes for Indians->Hindustanis. More importantly Chinese gameplay is now dominated by Firelancer nonsense, so the civ plays very differently.
oops. With aoe2 in mind I must have thought of fletching. thank you 11.
And to a lesser extent Vietnamese
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By that definition Mountain Royals was a Persian split.
Except that it is. People call Cysion a liar because of that word. A truly unfair thing to do if it’s not the point.
By that definition 3K is as much a Vietnamese or Korean split as it is a Chinese split. If that’s your definition of “split” then it would be very easy to disappoint you.
You should not call someone a liar for for not knowing how you would define a word.
Although… if I’m not mistaken, fletching comes from the same linguistic root fledge.
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The Chinese were reworked quite heavily. I like the new iteration, but I agree people should be able to load an earlier patch and play the old ones.
It might not have been a “split” in a proper sense btw, but imho it’s even worse than a split – instead of splitting between cultures or even subcultures/regions that are at least contemporary, we got three late antiquity kingdoms that don’t even pretend do represent long-term history of the respective region (Wei kinda does it by featuring later Xianbei stuff but it’s almost definitely a mistake rather than a conscious choice given that all AI leaders are named after Cao Wei kings and commanders, their history section description also doesn’t talk about post-3K history at all)
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I think it all boils down to introducing variant civs without explicitly naming so.
Italians received 2 additional variant civs.
Slavs received 2 additional variant civs.
India received 3 additional variant civs.
China now has 3 (or even 5) additional variant civs.
It’s bound to happen at a certain point because eventually you run out of unique civs…
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I disagree, and I’m not sure why you would say that. Neither Armenians nor Georgians are Persian. Shu, Wei and Wu were Chinese kingdoms. Jurchens are a bit more arguable, but they were previously represented by Chinese in an official campaign before the civ was introduced.
I also don’t understand why you would say this, since none of the 3K civs are Vietnamese or Korean.
No. @TheTowerDefender said (and you quoted) “I am frustrated that they stole original Chinese from me”. The point is that in the process of this split (or whatever you want to call it), content that was in the game when we bought it has been removed.
People call Cysion a liar because he’s a liar. In that interview, as well as saying Chinese would not be split, he said that the original Chinese civ would remain in the game (a lie – it’s been replaced by a significantly different civ with some of the same features) and that the 3K DLC was adding five new civs because they were needed for the campaigns (also a lie – Khitans and Jurchens don’t feature in the 3K campaigns).
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not really. Persians got Caravanserai (a building completely irrelevant in most games), Savar (mostly a reskin of Paladin), a rework to their UT (following the trend of removing UT that only affect castles UUs). Neither Armenians nor Georgians are Persians. More importantly, Persians play basically the same before and after the rework.
how did you get to that conclusion? first there was 1 chinese civilization, now there are 4 (or 5) chinese civilizations. that means the Chinese were split.
There is still only one Vietnamese and one Korean civ. How is this hard to understand?
Vietnamese and Koreans were seriously reworked, much to their detriment, which did disappoint me. I’m sick of having content stolen from me.
I am calling the devs liars because they lied:
- they said they were done adding civs. less than a year later they added 2 new civs, they have added 18 civs since then.
- they said DE would allow you to play like it’s 1999, yet many core elements and features from the original game are missing. Additionally many features from HD are missing.
- they said V&V was a campaign-oriented DLC, yet there isn’t a single campaign in it
- they said V&V would be polished, yet it contains the same known bugs as the free version and not a single new asset
- they said they would not split Chinese - we now have 4 (or 5) chinese civs.
- they said they were adding the civs they needed to “tell the stories we want to tell”, yet Jurchens and Khitans have not a single scenario, let alone campaign.
I call them liars because they have repeatedly and consistently lied.
The bigger point is that they are taking content away from us, and replacing it with something else. I feel cheated by this.
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