I’m not arguing for banning it, but I can see why people are concerned about such things, as I think the mod with coloured cuboids for resources absolutely ruins the look of the game. If it provided enough of an advantage that you couldn’t be competitive without using it, I’d personally stop playing the game, as it really does ruin it that much for me. So I can see why people are concerned about where it’s all headed.
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Remember the pros get most of their income from streaming. I highly doubt they’ll use mods that actually make the game bad to look at.
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I will add this …
I use the grid, small trees, & small walls visual mods always.
The reason for this being because AoE is an isometric game. Meaning, I cannot rotate the camera.
I make the trees/walls smaller and add a grid, because I cannot rotate the camera to be able to easily tell what is behind these objects or if there is a hole in my walling.
I do think that if the game were truly 3D, that we would have less of a need for these particular visual mods. I also think that gives you a specific category to place visual mods: To Assist in lack of 3D, to Assist in other areas of gameplay.
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This is how I feel like. I like the game look as it is. If it’s going to become compulsory to turn it to something ugly in order to be able to compete, then maybe I will stop enjoying the game and stop playing it. That is losing a customer and shrinking the player base, so it actually is a corporative and business matter that devs have to adress.
Not saying I’m right, rather I mean that devs have to decide what they think is the best for the game as their product and to the playerbase as their customers.
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Curious to know what you mean by small trees being intrusive? Full-sized trees get in my line of sight all the time, causing a pleb like me to miss the fact that I have poorly placed a defensive structure, leaving a gap for the enemy to use to attack me. The day I found small trees mod I began to enjoy the game even more, but that’s just me. 
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The graphics of Age of Empires 2, especially on DE, are just incredibly beautiful! Some people enjoy to create lovely sceneries in the editor ([POLL] Works of Art - Beautiful Scenario Designing), and also the campaigns mostly look like this. The woods appear as real forests, untouched for thousands of years!
That’s one aspect of the game. But on the other hand, there is competetive play. Here, every action of the player must be as efficient and exact as possible to achieve the best results. Therefore, many players have decided to reduce the beauty of the graphics by adding a grid and reducing the size of the trees. Now, there are no ancient forests anymore, but only tree nurseries. And because woods are nearly everywhere, you will always have this uglier graphics, no matter where you look. That’s why I say, small tree mod is very intrusive, while e. g. Age of Mandala only alters some buildings, and everywhere else it still looks beautifully, so I consider it to be less intrusive - other players might think differently about this.
Some people go one step further and remove the useless plants, because they look too similar to the small trees. Some even use Age of Cubes to make the trees more reliable to click on and reduce their variety.
At the moment, every player can decide, how far he wants to go this way from a beautiful game to an efficient one. I myself have decided that it is not important at all for me, how it looks. So I created some local mods that change the graphics to my personal preferences. Most players might not want to play with these graphics, because they are ugly. But for me, it is much more frustrating to lose a game to a single hole in my wall, that was impossible to see.
Do these mods give me an advantage? For sure! My Elo is probably about 10 Points higher than it would be without. But who cares about Elo (outside the top 100)? And also remember: No matter what your Elo might be, your winrate will be 50% as soon as you play enough games.
How can this be considered to be unfair, if every single player can decide how much he wants to improve efficiency at the cost of beauty? Is small tree mod unfair, because someone might prefer the original look and therefore doesn’t want to use it?
None of these mods are necessary to play competetively, but they all might help preventing some frustrating experiences. That - at least in my opinion - is a good thing!
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I still can play without this bug, but i cant play without the small trees mod. That mod is much more valueble to me. If i uninstall the small trees, then i want it back.
The mangonel range mod isn’t working. Has it been blocked by the devs? Maybe they acted already
Don’t worry! The mod has just a messed up path structure. You can simply copy “u_sie_mangonel_walkA_x1.smx” to a local mod of yours.
But the range indicator isn’t really exact when moving south east or north west, so I would not recommend using it.
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anyway aren’t such modes pointless on units since they can move?
I think that if the devs haven’t banned a visual mod it’s ok to play in ranked.
Additionally I think it’s up to tournament organizers to specifically ban mods or strats in those tournaments as they do. It might be fun to have the “Vanilla Cup” where all games must be played with normal trees and no grids 
might be comedic!
I personally only use a light grid because I dont like the aesthetic changes, but that’s just my preference.
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Can I have a visual mod that tells me when the opponent is forwarding so that I don’t have to scout? Kappa.
Oh wait, build a palisade on a wolf. 
There are so many mod and non mod exploits already that it’s hard to police this. And, this is definitely not going make trushes OP. I’m not for or against it.
Most mods won’t make a difference of more than 100 ELO for any player. It won’t change the ranked dynamic bc tower play accounts for <10% of gameplay. Bad players will still have bad habits that cause them to lose, don’t worry.
Let’s not be too dramatic.
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Will fix that sorry for the messed up path, since it’s Alpha i was just trying to see if it could work so it’s a rough estimation of the range, not very accurate.
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Just fixed it, sorry I made it a little too quick, be aware the range is roughly correct and extremely incorrect if there is an hill
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I feel conflicted about this myself - I do enjoy the aesthetic of the game and appreciate the hard work done building maps and scenarios. The eye candy is really enjoyable - however, that all goes out the window when I play. You mentioned removing plants - I use that mod, as well as the no stumps mod. One reason for this is because I don’t have a robust laptop - it’s over five years old so I have to do what I kind to reduce or eliminate things that impact on gameplay.
Thanks for your comments - a very interesting read! 
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Thx for fixing, noticed it in my game yesterday that it suddenly worked
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