Coop Campaign

Took a bit longer than expected, but scenarios 1-6 of The New Atlantis campaign are now available to play.

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Hi everyone,

The entire The New Atlantis campaign is now available!

The latest update also adds some fixes for a few Fall of the Trident levels.

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That’s awesome to hear! Thank you so much for your hard work!

Could you write a disclaimer that Extreme and Legendary difficulties don’t work? They do launch, but throw an AI error at start, and the AI is afk. We got misled by the description that says “All difficulties are available”.

Better yet, if you could add AIs for those difficulties that would be amazing, because Titan is pretty easy with 2 players so far. I know it is quite a large amount of work though.

Also I noticed some missing cutscenes, in particular the intro with Arkantos’ dream and all the post-victory cinematics. Is it possible to add them back in? The story gets fragmented otherwise, especially for people who play the campaign for the first time. Maybe edit the triggers, so it plays the cinematic first, then triggers the victory? And about cinematics that are standalone maps, just add them, so players can watch them together and understand the story better, then instantly trigger victory after they end.

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Thanks for taking the time to give this constructive feedback!

I have tracked down the cause of that AI error: every AI script loads a set of global modifiers from a shared file based on the chosen difficulty. These modifiers control factors such as the delay before the first attack wave, the number of units to send in each attack wave, and how frequently to send attacks. However, no modifiers were being set on Extreme or Legendary difficulties and so other AI scripts would fail to load.

Fortunately, this means I can easily add modifiers for those difficulties, to increase the size and frequency of enemy attacks across all levels. The most annoying part will be updating all triggers that currently occur on Titan only to also happen on Extreme and Legendary.

In terms of cutscenes, the Arkantos’ dream and all post-victory cinematics are separate levels. I’m planning to add all of those at some point so you can watch them together. Unfortunately, you’ll need to host those separately, so it won’t be as seamless as the singleplayer campaign, but at least you will be able to watch them together and understand the whole story.

Not sure when all of these things will be done, but I’d say my current order of priorities would be:

  1. Add The Golden Gift campaign and the Reginleif mythical battle
  2. Make all levels playable on Extreme and Legendary difficulties
  3. Add all of the cutscene levels, so they can be watched together

Again, thanks for providing details in your comment - it’s much easier to fix things when people explain exactly which parts aren’t working :smile:

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Sounds awesome! Super excited about these!

Glad to hear the Extreme and Legendary difficulties won’t be as impossible to do as I first assumed. I thought they were entirely new AIs, but turns out they are just Titan AI with more cheats and modifiers ontop.

I had no idea post-victory cinematics were separate maps, but it makes sense - way easier to make than to do the cinematic on the same map, where the player might have armies and buildings in the way.
I’m okay with hosting them separately, just make sure they are named clearly, so people who don’t wanna watch them can skip them. :slight_smile:

Keep up the great work! <3

Extreme and Legendary difficulties should work now.

These difficulties are essentially the same as Titan difficulty, but the AI will attack more often and with larger armies. As such, you won’t notice any difference on levels where the enemy doesn’t have a base, but at least you won’t get an error when trying to play :slight_smile:

Let me know if you encounter any issues.

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Damn that was quick! I will be sure to try it out and let you know if we encounter any issues.
Thanks again for all your hard work! <3

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Hi all,

I’ve added the cutscenes for all of the campaigns, so you can now watch them together.

The cutscenes are separate scenarios, so you’ll need to host them just like a regular scenario. They are located in the cinematics folder inside each campaign.

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Thank you for your hard work :heart: , but there is an issue with the latest scene files you added. The scenes are slow, or the animation is slow. I don’t know if this issue is happening just to me or to everyone, I just wanted to let you know about it.
Here is a link to the video showing the problem.

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Hmm, that’s really strange. Do you have any other mods installed? If so, let me know which ones and I can try to reproduce the problem.

All the speech and camera shots are correct, it’s just the unit animations that are slow. Here is a side-by-side comparison (mine is on top, yours is on the bottom).

Really can’t think of any reason except other mods that would cause this. Would also be good to know if the cutscenes work for you in the actual campaign, or if you see the same issue there too.

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Yes, I have a set of mods, but I only activate 6 of them when I play in co-op mod because the rest are incompatible or out of sync.
All scenes in single-player mode work well, and even in co-op mod with Levels, only the separate scenes don’t work well.
I will ask my friend, when he is free, to test the separate scenes and let me know the result.
This is the list of my mods



Note: The separate scenes have been tested with the mod 'Allow Dummy AI Players

I did some research and testing to see what the issue is or which mod is causing it, and it turns out that it is caused by a mod called ‘Cuca UI FHD - Transparency and Panel Priority’ It’s strange that a UI mod is the cause of the problem :sweat_smile:.
Thank you for your response, and sorry for any inconvenience :rose:.

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No inconvenience at all! Glad you tracked down the cause so quickly :smile:

Out of curiosity, I compared the UI code from that mod against the base UI. Some of the modded code isn’t valid, but I still don’t see any logical reason why that would slow down animations in these cutscenes specifically :man_shrugging: .

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wow incredible work so far ! Thanks a lot, you should be hire in the Microsoft Team man !

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This Mod is fantastic!
A friend of mine & I greatly enjoyed playing through the campaigns together.
Please keep up the good work!

A sidenote: We noticed that if one of us has the Original Voices Mod - Mods - Age of Empires installed and the other did not, it would cause an Out of Sync Error. So, for you future players out there, make certain either you both have that mod installed (highly recommend) or you both do not.

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Hi author Benderman, Thanks so much for your effort.

currently I am on mission 16 - Good advice with my friends.

But we facing a bug where we could not select our hero/ army.

Please advice. thank you.

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Hi!

That’s due to an old workaround I used to hide the minimap during mid-game cutscenes. Since a recent game update, that workaround is no longer needed, but evidently I had forgotten to remove the trigger from a couple of levels.

I’ve just uploaded a new version which should fix that problem. Let me know if mission 16 works for you after updating the mod.

Thanks

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