Buggy Story Difficulty Available in Windows

[JuanmiPallaresN]

GAME INFORMATION

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• GAME BUILD #: 101.103.16877.0 (#147949) 18848918
• GAME PLATFORM: Steam
• OPERATING SYSTEM: Windows 10

ISSUE EXPERIENCED

^{DESCRIBE THE ISSUE IN DETAIL (below). LIMIT TO ONE BUG PER THREAD.}
Some errors are observed as Story difficulty setting is available on the Windows version of Age of Empires II DE.

• Error 1: AI Script Error pop-up is shown when playing scenario # 5 in the Chronicles Battle for Greece campaign. Please see attached picture.
• Error 2: Difficulty level on the top of the screen says legendary yet this felt very easy, like standard difficulty. Please see attached picture.
• Error 3: After completing a level on “Story” difficulty, it’s impossible to get a completion medal for the scenario (I tried Hard but did not get a gold medal). Please see attached picture. I also attached save game files.

FREQUENCY OF ISSUE

^{How often does the issue occur? CHOSE ONE; DELETE THE REST!}

• 100% of the time steps to reproduce are performed. (ALWAYS)

REPRODUCTION STEPS

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Here’s the steps to reproduce the issue:

1. Launch Age of Empires II DE and navigate to the China section of the campaigns. Set the difficulty level of a campaign to Legendary. I tried Liu Bei.
2. Navigate to Chronicles Battle for Greece Grand Campaign.
3. Observe that difficulty setting is set to “Story”. Please see attached picture.
4. Select scenario 5 and play it. You’ll see the AI Script Error pop-up when the scenario is loading, and the legendary label for difficulty (top of the screen where it shows the game speed) once the scenario is loaded.
5. Win the level without cheats (I attached save files from my game, just load and win the level). After clearing the level on “Story”, you’ll observe that there’s no medal, please see picture.
6. Set difficulty to hard and play the level again. Use my save file to win quickly, you’ll notice that you don’t earn a gold medal.

EXPECTED RESULT

^{What was SUPPOSED to happen if the bug you encountered were not present?}
I expect Story difficulty to not be available on Windows of if the development team decides otherwise for Story difficulty to be properly supported.

I expect no error pop-up, that users are able to earn the correct medal, an accurate difficulty label, user is able to select the difficulty in the drop-down menu and that only properly supported options appear.

IMAGE

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GAME FILES (SAVE / RECORDING)

^{Attach a SAVE GAME (.aoe2spgame) or GAME RECORDING (.aoe2record) of the match where you encountered the issue. Link it below if using an external file service.}

GREECE_5_HARD DIFFICULTY.aoe2spgame (2.1 MB)
GREECE_5_STORY DIFFICULTY.aoe2spgame (2.0 MB)

[cmfrydos]

Great report, and kudos for pushing through an unsupported difficulty level!

It looks like this is a side effect of several teams touching the game at once. The Chronicles team (CaptureAge) probably didn’t realise that Forgotten Empires had just introduced the Legendary setting. Because the dropdown remembers whichever difficulty you used last across the whole game, the campaign defaulted to Legendary, even though that mode isn’t officially supported for Chronicles scenarios. Unfortunately, this might have corrupted the medal data in your Relic cloud record.

@JuanmiPallaresN

Set difficulty to hard and play the level again. Use my save file to win quickly, you’ll notice that you don’t earn a gold medal.

From what you’ve shown (and from our PMs), my best guess is that you were the first to complete that scenario on Legendary, and the game awarded a “diamond” medal. The campaign UI isn’t designed to display that tier, and due to the ranking logic, it won’t allow a lower medal like gold (from Hard) to overwrite it.

Now, to clarify two things:

• Medal completion data is stored locally, in your player.nfp file. Technically, it can be modified, and doing so should reset or adjust medal progress. I’ve sent you another PM with a file that should work offline, but I doubt it will hold online since:
• Relic’s cloud service backs up your profile, and it likely noticed the Legendary clear and now enforces that state, meaning any local changes get overwritten at sync.

That’s something only the devs can resolve on their end, if they allow resetting or editing that server-side profile state.