This game is more balanced than ever, and the 2 new civs are just average at best, so there is no difficulty in balancing anything.
Like it or not, HD proved that AoE2 will either expand, or die.
It is either more civs and campaigns, or lack of official suuport and a dead game.
This is what happened to Starcraft 2, and that game had a MUCH bigger scene than AoE2. Most players only play Singleplayer, and only pay for Singleplayer content, like it or not.
No, it was pretty dead, and had a miniscule scene. It will not survive dying again.
As i said i donât mind more contents LATER and later means at least 3 or 5 years from now, we need to fix now on fixing the bugs, balances, pathing and crashes
Microsoft would pull the plug and kill it off, before it made even a year without sales. This Industry has got faster and faster, and there is no 3-5 year period nonsense anymore.
Either the product shows continuous sales, or gets abandoned as âcompleteâ.
The game cannot be sustained on an endless cycle of bug fixing and balance updates alone, especially not in a 3 or 5-year timeframe if there is no financial aspect to it. It is impossible to balance everything and very unlikely every bug will be fixed. Each patch will bring its issues, especially because everyone demands their changes get added and then get mad because itâs not what they wanted or it didnât pan out.
Microsoft cannot please everyone but at least they havenât killed the game yet. Fix the bugs, sure. But itâll be an endless cycle because nobody can agree on how to balance a single civilisation for starters.
Microsoft should divert resources from AoE II: DE to give AoE: DE some love. It feels as if they have forgotten about the game that started the entire franchise, the game hasnât been updated in months and the entire community around AoE I is completely ignored by the developers. There is a trending topic on the official forums and here it is, Why is Age of Empires 1 so stagnant?.
I would love an exansion for AoE1 DE, but that game never sold as well as 2 De, so there is no chance for that.
Microsoft wants money, like any company, so it will invest in the product that actually sells, and both AoE1 DE and AoE3 De have no sold that well, and have minimal player retention.
I would love additional AoE1 content, that would be great - but I reckon because it lacks the playerbase of AoE2, itâll just slowly die simply because itâs not AoE2, which is unfortunate.
I would totally be on board with additional content for 1 and 3 whilst giving 2 a proper fixup, but I feel the chances are too low.
AoE III has a smaller playerbase and it gets more love. And I think the reason Microsoft wants more money is because it has more businessmen than passionate programmers like Bill Gates now. And the design language for some apps like MS Teams is terrible.
Well to be fair AoE3:DE is far more recent title and it was in a rather dire state upon release, but youâre right that it shipped with more content. I havenât touched AoE1 in a long time so Iâm not up to speed with its current state but it definitely deserves more love.
But to do that, they would need more resources and that probably means turning to the AoE2 market for such projects. Lords of the West was clearly testing the waters, I reckon they could do the same for the other two just to see if thereâs an appetite.
Interestingly, the Celts unique unit, the Woad Raider, is not a medieval unit but rather is more of a reference to the Ancient Britons (who were Celts), which the Ancient Romans encountered. Though there could very well have been Scottish highlanders that still carried on the Woad Raider tradition of painting themselves with paint from the blue woad plant, the âmedieval Woad Raidersâ would have worn kilts, not stripped long pants, which was more of a Celtic Britons clothing style than the Irish, Scots, or even the descendants of the Britons: the Welsh.
Personally, I do think that the Woad Raider ought to be visually adjusted to have a Scottish/Irish kilt rather than the leggings, just so that the unit is more âmedieval-likeâ. But it is neat that the original Age of Kings devs back 22 years ago wanted to put in that minor Ancient Celts reference.
I believe you mean âCanute the Greatâ, king of Denmark and England, and leader of the North Sea Empire?
He was not Norwegian, but Danish. He inherited England after his father, King Sweyn Forkbeard of Denmark, conquered England, and upon his death, his 2nd son Canute inherited England, and then would inherit Denmark after Canuteâs brother Harald II died. Canute was recognized as âKing of Norwayâ though, due to him forcing the Norwegian jarls to accept his overlordship. Canute was descended from the rulers of Poland on his motherâs side.
Thanks! I admittedly am not entirely well-versed in a lot of oriental and other minor kingdoms and civilizations. I will look up the Tonga Empire, starting with the link you provided.
Admittedly, I have been swayed by many of the other arguments that other AoE2 players have made about adding the Mississippian peoples as their own civ into AoE2 (as well as the one âtrue Northern American civâ, if we consider Aztecs and Mayans to not be âNorth Americanâ but Central American).
Particularly, someone posted in the forum, some sketches a person made of Mississippian structures that would be feasible as Age of Empires 2 buildings. The Mississippian peoples did create some impressive structures in the Illinois basin, while the Finns and other African peoples were not really creating great buildings (except by borrowing from the Swedish Vikings and the Slavs, in the case of the Finns).
To be fairâŠeven adding a Mississippian civ would be a long stretch. It might be not very likely to happen even with those sketches made by that one player (it is somewhere in the Forums, if you want to look it up).
Exactly. That could be one reason why the Mississippian civ, or many other African civs cannot be added into AoE2 as ânew civsâ because of the Navy issue. The Mayans and Incas at least had some evidence of a navy, since they were near oceans. The Aztecs also literally had their capital city in the middle of a lake, and they definitely fought tooth and nail with some of their own build warships against Spanish Conquistador Hernan Cortezâs makeshift Spanish fleet in defense of Tenochtitlan.
Many of the proposed new African civs were landlocked. Only the Ethiopeans, and the Berbers were among the few African civs that did have real navies. (the Mailians may have too, in their nationâs river waterways, and along the Ivory Coast. I am not entirely sure if they did though)
The Mississippian culture did indeed exist. They were prominent enough, that the famous river, the Mississippi river, was named after them.
The only question is: are they reasonable enough to be added into AoE2, and operate in AoE2âs mechanics, and historical medieval setting?
According to SOTLâs video on the Teutons civ overview, the reason why the Teutons have powerful siege units, is because the âBohemians were known for building powerful siege weapons in the medieval agesâ (not his exact words, just paraphrasing)
I myself am unsure if this is true, but it seems reasonable as Bohemia was fought over by the warring German nobility, and by the Poles (who are Western Slavs), and by the Hungarians (Magyars).
If SOTLâs statement is to be held trueâŠthen it might be that the original devs of Age of Kings intended the âTeutonsâ civ to represent both Medieval Germany, and Medieval Bohemia.
Some history scholars have associated the Byzantines as part of the âwestâ when comparing to the whole of Christendom (both Catholic and Orthodox Churches together) against the whole of Islam (such as the Crusades period). But it is true that the Byzantines themselves did not associate themselves as âWestern Europeansâ but rather as âGreeksâ.
If were are to get into the nitty gritty details⊠the Byzantines (i.e. Medieval Romans, descendants of the Eastern Roman Empire) were technically âEuropeanâ in lieu of much of the Byzantine Empire owning European lands (southern Italy, nearly all the Balkans and Greece, and their capital city of Constantinople is situated in the European continent, albeit a stoneâs throw away from Asia Minor, which is geographically considered part of Asia)
It is all up to debate however.
As I already said to Wolfstack at the top of this post, yes the Celts are more of a âAncient period Celtsâ from the Woad Raider and by name âCeltsâ. But we must understand that the medieval Scots, Welsh, and Irish were indeed Celtic peoples, and the onesâalong with the Bretons of Brittainy and the Galacians of Northwestern Spainâwho had the strongest claim to being true descendants of the Ancient Celts.
My hunch, is that the Age of Kings devs only envisioned the original 13 civs as being the most representative of most medieval peoples (they did include the Conqueror 5 civs a few short years after AoKâs release), and that is why Celts glosses over Scots, Welsh, and Irish, and the Teutons glosses over all the Germanic medieval peoples (Saxons, Barvarians, Prussians, etc.), Franks glosses over the French and the Burgundians and the Frisian peoples (though now their is an actual Burgundian civ to better represent the Burgundians and the Frisians, it would appear AoK devs wanted to keep the game simple and with not that many civs)
I have seenâand playedâother videogames with much MUCH worse problems than Age of Empires 2: DE currently does.
Even if the Danes were to be granted their own civ, it would be difficult to distinguish them from the Vikings civ that already exists.
And: if you separate the Danes, why not also the Norwegians and the Swedes? Then you would be creating THREE civs out of one, and how would you be able to differentiate all of those 3 peoples, when in medieval times, they were actually quite similar culturally, socially, and militarily.
(When the Vikings invaded the British isles, all Vikings were referred to as âDanesâ even though Norwegian Vikings and Danish Vikings were ethnically different from each otherâŠbut to the victim British peoples, they all sounded and behaving the same, as they were all Scandinavian cousins)
