I had no problem at gathering resources south of the blue base even before cleaning the first base. And then a castle and a couple of TCs are enough to defend.
I played at medium, since my partner wasn’t at my skill level and was afraid. But onestly, I beat at hard in the standard campaign, and it is as I remember.
Alone wasn’t too much challenging, with 2, and consequently a flank covered, it’s even easier.
My point is, that both players can simply boom until you can attack. It would be cooler if one should boom, and the other rush to protect himself/his ally.
Much like the Tourus, both players have the same role.
-A separate medal showcase: after doing some hard co-op with my friend, I got disappointed there’s no medal/mark to show my accomplishment. I wouldn’t like my co-op medals to overwrite my single player medals but I’d like to know my progress and completion in co-op, similar to how Halo shows highest difficulty completed on both single player and co-op.
Currently it’s pretty lackluster but I expected as much from a beta, I have high hopes for for this because I’m a huge RTS fan and I always wanted a co-op campaign of Aoe2 like this.
we tried Mission Tours in coop and compared the map to the singleplayer layout. The AI bugs, does not produce new citizens and is therefore not a challenge. Additionally, in coop you have a fully-fledged second base with walls, towers and citizens. This creates the basic problem that all missions become significantly too easy. But a completely different point makes us wonder:
Wouldn’t it be much easier, more sensible and no effort and no balancing problem at all if all singleplayer missions were playable in co-op with shared civilization only? This way no map has to be changed and you minimize the effort for Microsoft to one week of work and have original balanced missions. It wouldn’t even matter if you play coop with 2 or with up to 8 people. Whereas 8 people sharing a civilization would be a bit overloaded. But hey who wants it, can have it!
Many games have coop campaigns (CnC Red Alter 3, etc.), but which game has the possibility to share the civilization? Use that as an advantage instead of leaving out the possibility in coop.
So I played Bapheus the other day, and I have to say that it was the one that I actually enjoyed the most up to now among the co-op missions.
The mission was perfectly adapted to the 2 players game style. The only thing is that once again both players play with the same civs… That’s fine for that scenario, but in the long run it becomes a bit boring…
Anyway, nothing in particular to share about this one, it run smoothly and we had no issue of some sort.
The only thing that I was wondering, is thay the second player got both the enemy Turkish cities that we defeated. I was the one to deal the killing blow in both cases, and we allied with the third one, so maybe those factors came in somehow…?
Anyway it’s not a big deal, since they aren’t that useful… I was just wondering if it’s how it should be…
I played my first co-op campaign last night, with a friend who is new to the game. We played the first scenario of Suryavarman I. I think the co-op campaigns are a great addition to the game, and their existence was the main reason I was able to get him to buy the game.
I’d played the single player version the day before, so knew it was a pretty easy scenario, which was a good thing as it was made harder by having to defend his base from the AI as well as my own.
We didn’t experience any problems playing it. It would be nice if they were presented in the same way as the single player campaigns, with the bronze, silver and gold medals for completing them.
I played the entire Khmer set with a stranger, who joined my public host.
I have to say, I am really impressed in a positive way!
No crashes, no latency.
From a gameplay perspective the difficulty was way too easy, I felt that I could win without my teammate.
Also there is no dependence on certain units/tasks/whatever from your teammate. You bacially can’t lose, if there is one player knowing about the game.
But it’s an amazing addition to the game for casual players in it’s current form.
Also it’s a technical foundation, which opens all possibilities for the level designers.
Now it’s all about the maps.
I was wondering, why this was not introduced in HD Edition even. I think coop was the most obvious thing to add to the game, and it existed in forms of scenario maps before.
Love everything about coop. So well implemented. Only improvement I can think of is bring back the voice overs / intros? I miss them a little when playing coop
I have to agree that many scenarios are way too easy, even on hard mode.
You could do some easy changes. For example in the last Khmer one, you win by defeating 3/5 enemies.
Solo, dealing with attacks on all side make this challenging, but at 2, this was too easy. Changing this to defeat either 4 or 5 enemies on hard should make this way more interesting.
IMO the coop campaigns were all far too easy; for a mid-level player (around elo 1200-1300) like me they were no challenge at all. To make them more challenging for higher-level players while keeping them accessible to others I guess you could make the hard difficulty (much) harder while leaving the others as they are. Maybe this approach could be taken with some single player campaigns as well.
Another thing that I’m missing in coop so far are achievements; some DE campaigns had very creative and challenging achievements attached to them (e.g. The Kushluk Assassination, A Truly Roman Emperor) though I suppose they will be added after beta (if at all).
They’ve definitely adjusted them relative to the single player versions. My friend and I have lost the 4th co-op Suryavarman 4 times now, so I just had a go at it in single player to see how it compares, and did it easily first time. I didn’t feel like I was getting attacked anywhere near as much in the single player version. My friend is new to the game, so isn’t very good, but I think even if I could clone myself to be the other player, the co-op version would be harder than the single player version.
That’s not to say you aren’t right that the hardest level should be harder, but it may also apply to the single player versions. Elo 1200-1300 isn’t mid-level, 1300 is top 17% of ranked players, and will be a higher percentile than that of all players.
I think there needs to be a bit more balancing done on the coop, which isn’t surprising at this early stage. The 4th Khmer campaign was tough (coming from a 1650 player), and I needed a second attempt. 5th campaign, was dead easy though. Definitely don’t need the 500 gold tribute every few minutes.
My friend and I managed it (on the easiest difficulty) at the 6th attempt. The winning strategy was for me to play the Indians and basically leave him to die so I could give all my attention to making sure the castle was protected, and working my way along the other land mass to clean everything out. He hung on for long enough that by the time he died, I was pretty established and could take the islands out. Definitely much tougher than any of the previous Suryavarman scenarios.
I did notice one possible bug, in that after he was dead, he could spectate and see the whole map, and tell me things that I couldn’t otherwise see.
So the new PuP brings a bunch of changes to co-op:
Now you can see the pre-mission slides as if you were in single player
Now if you click on the player colour you can switch sides, ie.the lobby host isn’t forced to play in the first slot.
The new AI handicap option is available in the lobby settings so you have a way to make the missions easier/harder if that’s what you want
As of the new campaigns themselves, in Tariq your ally is always Saracens instead of Berbers, and in half of the Tamerlane missions your ally is not Tatars, so it’s pretty great to have more civ diversity in co-op.
I think another difficulty (hard difficulty) could be interesting for the co-op campaigns or make the difficult one more difficult. We have made the different campaigns and missions with a friend (we are 1000 – 1200 players), compare to the solo mode, it was practically “boring” for me.
I have the feeling that a second player have been added with the same population that the main player but without an improve of the ia so now human player(s) have the double of economy and army against the same enemy than the solo mode.
For example, in the Huns mission 6, in solo mode, we fight against 3 ia on our right side witch make wonders, so we need to rush against 3 armies and in parallel, on the left side we have to defend against the Teutonic ia, it’s quite difficult.
In co-op mode, against exactly the same enemies, my friend helped me quickly to defeat the violet ia then he defeated the Teutonic ia. During this time, I was free to rush the cyan ia without an enemy in my back so no stress. To finish, we attacked together the red ia, 1 vs 2, the ia was easily defeated.
An interesting and difficult mission became easy.
Maybe add population to the different ia and make them a little more aggressive ?
The other day I played my first Co-op scenario, Attila 1. The other player walled his base and eventually I had to escape to his base. The thing is, enemies didn’t attack the walls. They gathered beyond the walls and enemy archers shot us from the outside, but never they attacked the walls. Neither Persians, Scythians or Romans attacked the walls.
