Feedback on new August Update 153015

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Since the PUP July 2025 thread has kind of escalated into a “I hate competetive players who ruin the game” I’ll try and give my feedback here hoping, it’s more visible.

First of all: The new Update is GREAT!!! I think I really felt the better pathing already.

Now my more detailed thoughts on what I am not so satisfied with.

  1. Not so sure on the Sicilians getting a triple buff. I think, they are already quite strong with being able to build their tower [Donjon] in Dark Age to not only accelerate Donjon Rushes but also unit output. Now Donjons are not only a mere prerequisite for Archery Range and Stable, but also a full replacement for Barracks. In fact I missed the upgrade option for Spearmen but now with a triple buff making Serjeants even stronger & cheaper can easily snowball, I think.

  2. Even more bothing is the triple buff on Magyar Hussars, a [basically only food cuz the unique tech is cheap and a Castle Age tech] unique unit, that already was super strong.

  3. At the end of my game I just noticed that you also overhauled the tech overview [hovering version on top of screen]. Instead of grouping per unit type you now group per Production Building, leaving out Archery and Siege Techs like Ballistic, Chemistry and Siege Engineers, that you cannot check upon quickly. For Monk plays the Monastery techs are already relevant but not included anymore. I also always missed the Castle in that overview - like the Unique Techs [with short explanation what they do] and the Unique Unit Elite upgrade, Conscription, Hoardings [don’t really care about Sappers though].
    I think, these [Univesrsity, Monastery, Castle] should be re-added in a future patch. There is still space for one line and adding two more lines is still ok I think. When viewing at that overview you are not looking at the action on the screen anyway.
    For university you could even leave out the uncommonly researched techs like Heated Shot [actually used it in this game - for only one occasion though] and Arrowslits to save some space. Same for Monastery.

Checking Blacksmith upgrades in one spot only will only be a matter of adaption and is a good change, I think.

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Here are some more proposals for future updates:

  • let people stay in the lobby after leaving a game // if they queued up for Ranked once, they will probably not play a Campaign after that in most cases
    • this is even more important for team games, because you always have to invite everyone you play with again after each game concludes
  • - I really liked the introduction of custom Civilzation choice but then again I am not using it at all, because if I did, I would always have to choose my favorite Civs again after each game restart [or maybe even in each new lobby - can’t recall how it is] - it shouldn’t be to hard to create a local file to save favorite civ choices and overwrite it everytime there is a change in the custom civ selection – okay nevermind - I just checked this and you actually already did that - GREAT JOB!!!
  • maybe add a preferred player color, too [I always use orange or gray and actually dislike playing as one of the blueish colors]

Big W as well on the anti-laming changes. Now the only way to lame is basically stealing boars and dispersing hunt before killing it, which affords quite some apm on medium elos so laming will probably become less an issue. Thank your for that.

Guess that’s it for now. Keep up the great work! Maybe just don’t overbuff already strong units next time :grin:

8 Likes
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Just for the love of God nerf Poles now with the old Folwark collection rate.

2 Likes
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Here is my feedback:

  • Developer Notes:

I really like seeing them in patch notes (as for Turtle ships and pathfinding this time). The more the better! Especially when a civ (Poles farming) or a unit (Magyar Huszar) gets a significant buff. Even if not everyone agrees, it is always nice to read about the intention behind it, even if it will sound obvious to some players.

It would be awesome (but maybe add too much workload to be doable) to add one or two notes about what has not been done, like:
“we are aware that civ X on map Y feels unfair to play against, but are not ready yet to change anything because how how it affects other settings/civ identity/have not understood yet the extend of unfairness. Please feel free to talk about it on the forums”

  • Controversial features:

since a lot of features and ideas may be controversial (building attack range, auto farms, no hunt decay, etc), it would be great to have a way to deactivate it, either in SP/Lobby options (as currently for team vision and potentialky in the future for food decay), or in a player settings (as currently for building attack range and potentially in the future for auto farming). I personaly dont mind my opponents using auto farms, but I would like to disable it so that I can place my farms as I wish despite my clumsiness.

And it would be nice if the devs could notify some potentially controversial features they are working on. Whenever a PUP with one of those come, there is a lot of debate on the forums/reddit, and there may be a lack of time for the devs to decide what to do. I personally was happy when the change of the chinese start (+50f -1vil) of an older PUP was reverted, and this could surely only be done thanks to the discussions.
And as always, whatever decision is taken, it is nice to see a Developer Note, even if it only recognize it as a feature dividing the community.

I believe that we, the aoe2 community, enjoy decisions following discussions much more than those coming out as a surprise.

  • Pathfinding:

I haven’t tried out the new patch yet, but it sounds awesome! I like how corrected problems are listed, and some comment about the hard work done behind the scenes, even as vague as it has to be.

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Overall, it looks like a good patch indeed. I am not a lamer, but as a more traditional player I will continue killing my boars with 2 shots of 6-vil-TC + garnisoning out. This change will not bother my play.

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You don’t have to use auto-farms if you don’t want, it is not something you can do involuntarily, you need to press an extra button over an specific building.

2 Likes
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I don’t see Poles needing a nerf. Not even seeing them that often on the ladder recently. Every civ needs their bonuses and of course there are difficult or just bad matchups but that doesn’t always mean, that the civ is too powerful. https://aoestats.io/ shows only 48,6 % win rate, while Khitans are still on 52+%.

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There is a specific hotkey to enable auto-farm that can be moved out of the shift key ? I will have to check that, it would be great.

I usually select many villagers, then press shift, put a mill fundation and finally farm fundations around it. My cursor sometimes hovers the mill fundation due to my clumsiness, but I could always put farms without problem before auto farm patch. But now this triggers the auto farm placement and auto moves my cursor at a farm position where I dont want it to be.

I need the shift key to place farms in a row with selecting my villagers one by one to place farms, which I dont want to do. And auto farming will apparently now also activate upon hovering farms themselves.

1 Like
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given its a feedback post on current patch, the 3d water shader doesn’t work at all anymore, thought i should mention

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You should make a big report. Can you share some pictures for more clarity over what you mean?

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you know how it looks with 3d water disabled in settings? thats what it looks like now regardless of what that setting is set at, since PUP

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examples
i did write down the bug report so we’ll see how deep the problem is depending on how long it might take to fix

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Yeah let’s try out this. Imo this is the biggest Pathfinding patch we ever had. It seems they didn’t try a lot of this in the PUP, so we have again something different.
For me it looks like this will lead again to a melee meta. Which is a bit sad as we got nerfs to archer units that were favored in the previous, more ranged units favoring pathing. Especially the skirm nerfs seem very unnecessary in this context for my take.
The big question is if it’s such a good idea to change up the meta so much with the different pathing releases. Cause in the aftermath what I observe is that’s basically only the ranged units that then receive nerfs because some melee units (Knights) are seemingly untouchable.
Maybe we should hope that devs in the probably upcoming Knight feast HAVE to react and overcome their reluctance to tweak this relict of original disbalance. The Hei Guang seem way more like the way Knights should have been designed all along - we could go even more in that direction.

I am curious to see if the new Pathing is a step up. But I also already like the devs communicate so well what they tried to achieve. Thumbs up!

1 Like
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Can you try verifying the Steam files? I cannot reproduce the issue, the 3D water rendering works fine for me.

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depends, what did you test with? it works fine in campaign/historical battles and co op
i am verifying atm but i have my doubts its the problem

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I checked in RM and you’re right, it seems to be restricted to RM for some reason. I’ll report the issue :+1:

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Animal food not spoiling after being killed by the TC or military units is a dogshit balance change that lowers the skill ceiling of the game. Nili seems to imply on his “What happened in July video” that the change is aimed at new players. The problem with this assumption is that new players do not shoot the boar with the TC. The first step to a boar lure is shooting the boar with the villager, and then remembering to bring the villager back to the TC. The most common mistake is to forget to move the villager, or not move it fast enough. Shooting the boar with the TC comes long after this. It has nothing to do with new players.
Same with the laming of animal food from military units. This has more of an effect on mid-high elo than it does on anything lower. Therefore, the change fails to address helping new players.
It seems like a popular change with the not new players who are not good enough at the game to develop the consistency of actions to properly shoot the boar with the TC and people with low resilience who can’t deal wiht being lamed.

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There is a specific hotkey to enable auto-farm that can be moved out of the shift key ? I will have to check that, it would be great.

While placing farms, if you hold CTRL alongside SHIFT, then assisted farm placement will be disabled.
Not ideal, I guess, but it should work.

1 Like
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already reported friend
3D water shader no longer works since July PUP/update 153015 - Age of Empires II: DE / II - Report a Bug - Age of Empires Forum

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pre medieval insignificant polities of 3k “civs” still in the game after the patch. Also I still can’t find the stories they wanted to tell with Khitans and Jurchens. Khitans still have the wrong castle skin and an appropriated UU. no unique voice lines for khitans or jurchens.

9 Likes
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Bringing auto-farming up, I still have a wish to make to improve it: [which probably describes the problem FurtherLime7936
has]

Depending on the initial position of my first houses or straggler trees I either start building my first farms on the left or right corner of my Town Center. Same goes for the Mill.
As of right now auto-farming only works in one direction of not all four sides of a drop-off-building already have farms placed around them.
It should be so that the games checks, if there is already a farm placed on the building and then align the auto-farming according to that positioning. This way only the first farm would need to be placed manually.

Currently I am actually fighting against auto-farming of its intended placement doesn’t match my initial farm placement, which actually makes it even less effective than manually placing farms.

Also farms in second row are not placed aligned to the first row sharing the same 3-tile-border, but instead centered towards the dropoff building (Tower Center). For some reason this is
So in second row farms should be aligned according to their neighboring farms if possible.

I did some testing in game and auto-farming apparently always wants to go counter-clockwise unless all 4 sides/starting points are blocked by a structure already.
Have a look at the documentation attached

AoE - Auto-Farms
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And since I am to new to post 2 images, there will be a follow-up on mills.

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Follow-Up Post

AoE - Auto-Farms 2
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Also recently I had games on Four Lakes, in which I basically had NO woodline, because the one and only I had was kilometers away causing me to be late with fishing ships, production buildings and everything and basically lost me the game [my opponent really wasn’t doing a lot but I COULD not do a lot without leaving my base, which I hesitated to do against Fast Castle Serjeants who just eat Villagers for breakfast].

AoE2 - Four Lakes Woodlines
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