Overall I am very happy with all of the recent updates for Age of Empires: Definitive Edition. At the same time there are still some things from nearly 16 months ago when the game released which have not yet been addressed. One of those things is the missing minimap flare feature.
Hello darkness my old friend.
This is a feature that would greatly be appreciated for communicating with your teammates in multiplayer games. Adding this feature now before the Steam release would also “complete” the game visually. The feature has been suggested multiple times on the forums since the game released.
100% agree with this. As a long time aoe player, this feature is very important for team games as most of us do not voice chat while playing. It will benefit team games and will polish the game further. Moreover, we also need seperate elo for rm (1v1 & team games) and dm (1v1 & team games)
I have been thinking about this function. They actually could also add a hotkey that will focus on the area where the flare has been placed (works for all team members). The same hotkey could also be used and respond to any ta-da sound and then focus to the area where being attacked. And if there are multiple areas then cycle through those areas. That would save a lot of time instead of clicking at those areas all the time. The gained time will benefit the micro and macro aspects of this game in general.
July 2020, how have they really not added the minimap flare yet??? I was playing with friends last night and we were all VERY frustrated by the lack of this feature!!! Devs, if you want AOE1 to get anywhere near as close in popularity as AOE2, then at a minimum you need to add this feature!!!
Well, the announcement for update 38862 brings new hopes for this feature to be added. It HAS to come eventually, so we don’t see the empty circle in the top left of the MiniMap anymore
The game’s shaping really well, though. Certain things are slowly being added and fixed, so I guess it’s gonna be a perfect time to return to the game when the update arrives
The feature was anchored deep in part 2 under highly complex binary codes. With the empty field next to the minimap, they left themselves the space to implement it at some point. But it turned out to be more complex than they remembered and after a team meeting of several hours it turned out that nobody remembers how the code was created. It is assumed that this function acts as a kind of master code for AoE2 and that AoE1 would have to be completely destroyed and rewritten to make the flare function fully and securely available.