get a grip fella, lol
Well, after returning to the game with DE after I dunno, almost a decade I think that the current normal speed is just fine. At first I was like “hey, this is slow as ■■■■” and switched to 2.0 but the thing is that in Age 2 the macro is a lot more involved than in most other RTS so actually you have A LOT to keep track of and that keeps the pace up.
So if you want faster gameplay I guess Age 4 will be your thing because a speed increas would only be possible by streamlining some mechanics. Age Online does this really well, there both the resource gathering and the general base / troop management is smoothed out to the point that you can get to max pop in 20 minutes if you want to. And Project Celete is still maintaining Age Online so you know, if you don’t like the pacing of Age 2 there’s always an option for faster AoE.
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It’s not just that competitive play is 1.7 because that’s what players are used to. It’s also the case that players stuck to that speed for a reason. It’s not about being ‘institutionializd’ to like 1.7 … it’s about the fact that 1.7 allows players to micro more … which is a part of the game. And the fact that the OP says he doesn’t like microing anyway is telling!
And it’s NOT the case that players never played 2.0 over the years. It IS the case that only noobs played it. OP is clearly a noob … and there is nothing wrong with that. We were all a noob once. But you can’t act as if 2.0 is more competitive when you clearly don’t speak for the competitive community.
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How is this related to anything being outdated?
Have humans evolved to prefer faster game speeds?
If you want a faster game there’s plenty of things you can do about it.
I like to play Factorio, which is a much slower game.
With the Sea Block mod pack, making that game much, much slower.
Maybe people on average now have a personal preference for faster gameplay.
I prefer to see more micro.
Institutionalization can happen when people are forced into a situation, go play on Voobly until they fix the lobby system.
Unit and tech queuing should allow for faster game speed and the ability to focus on other things than minutia.
The purpose of these changes is to make the game less frustrating.
So when you lose it’s due to a difference in skill, not because you forgot to press some button.
It allows for more micro and better play at the same game speed.
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The normal game speed is plenty fast enough for my preferences. I don’t think the purpose of AOE II DE is to somehow “catch up” with Starcraft 2. The game was given a fresh look and other updates players have been asking for for years primarily to breath a little life into the franchise. I do think, along the lines of similar thinking to your concern, that there could eventually be different ranked categories for speed setting and victory conditions/map… but the reason that wasn’t done immediately upon release is because we need as many players in the matchmaking queues as possible. I don’t think a queue for slow games and fast games would help. Ive put aside my other preferences just to have regular ranked games… I personally prefer larger maps and higher population but if we made a queue for every playstyle there wouldn’t be enough players in each queue. Give it more time though… I think we will see a few variants on ranked settings eventually…
also since rank and elo don’t matter to you… just set up fast games with players and AI combined… you will find some games.
Enjoy and have fun
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Heavily disagree with the op. If you want a faster speed game they exist for you. However the majority of us prefer the way the game is.
I could imagine high-level micro being possible at 2.0 speed.
Yes, I know it has been too fast for micro in the past 20 years, but that was with more lag.
DE is a much smoother game (or so I’ve heard) and I could imagine that allowing for 15%ish increase from 1.7 to 2.0.
Perhaps only a 10% increase to 1.9. Maybe it will develop in that direction.
Maybe.
in steam game the majority of players used to play at normal speed which was 1.5. But now it just strike a balance. The top players are playing at 1.7 speed which are nice.
Yeah… i would be carefull with increasing the speed in ranked mode. You will defently lose more players than you gain, including myself.
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Well atm there’s loads of server issues. But perhaps in a year it would organically shift to higher speeds.
Not something I’d demand, but something I wouldn’t be surprised to see.
You have no clue what you’re talking about. Did you even follow the aoe 2 scene? Game speed is one of the few things that is good atm.
Sorry but I’m super triggered by all your comments, I’m actually starting to think that you’re trolling 
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The people who think that 2.0 can be competitive just haven’t played or followed competitive AoE2.
It’s not simply that pro’s can’t micro at all on 2.0. Of course they can. But even at the top level there will be more errors due to mislicks or miss micros and people will lose less for strategical reasons. When this is a strategy game.
The fastest starcraft 2 speed is actually 1.4 times speed! It’s a faster-paced game so 1.4 is more than fast enough for Starcraft 2 … but 1.7 is more than fast enough for AoE2.
And I’ll repeat again … people HAVE played at 2.0/fast speed a lot over the years … it’s just always the noobs who play it (when we’re talking about RM). And there’s a reason for that. People who think AoE2 will ever be competitive for RM at 2.0 just have no idea what they are talking about at all. They may think they do but they really really REALLY don’t and clearly haven’t played competitvely.
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the fact that this game plays at a faster rate than almost any other game shows you asking for even faster speed to make no sense. On the other hand, DM games are almost always played at fast speed so maybe you should try your hands on DM then… Micro is a critical component in RM games and fast speed pretty much makes it impossible to keep track of your eco and micro your units… I’ll even give you a scenario… Cav archers vs Skirms where if you dont micro, you’re army is pretty much dead. and then you have to make sure your eco is running smoothly.
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I’d just like to say that strategy is not “micro”. “Micro” in this game is a skill… a set of techniques that a player learns and becomes familiar executing them.
Strategy is your over arching concepts that you make goals. Every action in game then is either contributing to your strategies or it is a mistake.
Speed changes affect the options for viable strategies and the micro techniques effectiveness. For example, when the game is going fast or you have death match resources, it becomes less effective to micro and focus fire your archers because your time might be better spent gathering and producing more archers using a “quantity over quality” strategy to overwhelm an opponent who focuses too much on micro. The point I think a lot of posts are making is that at 1.7 speed you can reasonably micro the military and economy… at 2.0 it is less possible to do both and you’d have to choose and move in a more macro set of skills. In fact, the macro skills become your micro skills in Deathmatch and 2.0 speeds. Just sending as many units as possible rather than focusing on appropriate counters and using your “skill” to turn the tables in a small skirmish you may have otherwise lost without focusing on the micro required to win it.
I’m all for variants on the ranked match categories and I don’t think fast players lack skill. I do think that the games are very different with a speed change because it completely changes a players set of strategies and skills that are viable.
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Not interested in this game being made faster. This is AOE, not Starcraft, Dawn of War or Command & Conquer (all fine games, but different, and that’s just as well).
Also not sure what the point of throwing out poorly veiled barbs is by calling the standard game speeds “training wheels”. Then again, in general I’m growing increasingly weary of how all games MUST BE HARDCORE PRO and not just, oh, I don’t know…fun?
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Well tbh there’s a difference between being “competitively balanced” and “hardcore pro”. Without counting the new civs (since they’re kinda op atm), I’d consider AoE2 a “competitively balanced” type game, since managing things are kinda straight forward. You have to grow your economy, make units, atk your opponents, defend your city and if you’re good enough you can micro to improve the effectiveness of your army. However, focus on “CAN micro”, I’d say more casual players still have a chance to play decently even if they aren’t perfect at everything, they can still do well. The only units in the game that I consider hard to use are the onager line and monk, onager because they can friendly fire on your melee units if you aren’t careful, and monks because you need to individually target them.
It’s different from games like Starcraft II or Warcraft 3, where there’s the standard stuff and then even more stuff on top of them, which makes me consider those “hardcore pro”. In Warcraft 3 you’re pretty much playing an RTS and a Moba at the same time, because you need to manage hero units that have skills and also itens, making the game much harder than any other RTS i’ve ever seen (+ the most counter intuitive mechanic I’ve ever seen that literally punishes you for having too many units), meanwhile Starcraft II is pretty much a “spellcaster war”, each race has 2-3 spellcast unit type that you NEED to use in order to properly fight the other player’s army while they use their own, if you don’t have one you’re in a big disadvantage. For people who don’t know much abt the game, imagine if onagers did double the damage they do, their projectiles hit almost instantly and the projectiles hit an area 2 times bigger, but they’re twice as expensive and they don’t atk by themselves, so your only option is to atk ground with them. This kind of thing fits much more as a “hardcore pro” game imo, which is much different than what AoE2 is.
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The original poster will hate me because I would rather play on casual 1.5 speed since that’s what I played on HD Steam. As the guy above stated the different speeds are almost different versions of the game and he’s right. I personally don’t like 1.7 Voobly speed because I’m used to playing at the 1.5 speed and the strategies are different. Furthermore, just changing the game speed IMO gives certain civs a greater advantage in gameplay. At the end of the day, there should be more options with the ranked settings and they’re garbage in their current state. I played mostly closed maps like Arena and BF on Steam, so playing Arabia isn’t fun at all. Let alone playing on a faster speed too which makes it worse for players like myself.
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I also greatly prefer 1.5 speed, which I have gotten used to over the years. Faster speeds are too fast-paced, which makes it harder to play
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I don’t agree with this at all. I do agree that changing the speed can cause you to have to play in a different way but at the end of the day what determines that is how much multitasking you’re able to do, there’s no way any specific civ can get a benefit from that but not others. Either you play well with all of them or play badly with all of them.
Now, I have nothing against your taste for game speed, it’s fine if u’d rather play on 1.5, but when it comes to ranked matches it needs to follow how things work in the competitive scene. A competitive rank needs to follow a set of rules, and those shouldn’t be changed from player to player.
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