The fact they sold free workshop content for money. More money than 3 new civs with new missions.
The fact they lied in the February announcement.
The fact the missions didn’t get polished unlike what the description says.
The fact it has the same boring voice and no new artwork
The fact it didn’t add any scenario editor content.
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It sounds like there are some major difficulty scaling issues, and some other things that should be looked at here.
TBF I think the combination of a defense scenario and easy mode AI is bound to be underwhelming almost regardless of the scenario design. At least the last time I played around with Scenario AI difficulties, the easy AI couldn’t be relied on to do much of anything except roll over and die. IMO the easy AI has almost no use case in its current form and would be better implemented as one of the more competent AIs, but with a handicap or something. Last I checked it basically can’t do anything in a way that would present a challenge. I’m curious whether you’ve played other scenarios or campaigns recently on easy and found them enjoyable. Although AFAIC most of the new campaigns have custom AIs, and Vortigern seems to use the standard scenario AI.
Your complaints are valid though, and the scenario should be looked at (especially the “warnings”), as it sounds like its possibly the worst in terms of difficulty scaling. It’s a completely different game on hard (and most everything seems to work), and probably on standard as well.
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To some extent sure, but this scenario has some flaws that greatly compound those inherent problems. If it was just the frequency of landings or the number of troops, unit comp, etc, etc, then yeah, sure that’s underwhelming but that’s what higher difficulties are for. If everything was well designed, and the difficulty just wasn’t hard enough on easy, I wouldn’t be complaining on the forums.
But because the saxons want to land just south of hadrians wall, you need just put a few towers on the english channel and call it a day. same for gaels who attack right around hadrians wall. just a few towers over there and you’re fine. picts seem to prefer that side as well…75/25 in my experience they’ll attack the west side of hadrians wall. And this all is specifically a problem with this scenario, where all the gael and saxon attacks are landings and there is no navy, you can’t build a navy, etc. Even the ai, on it’s dumbest days, on a normal map, you still have to do a little something to respond. They bring some siege at least sometimes and you’d rather not just let your defenses take it on the chin. But here that isn’t the case. You can set up a few towers in two locations, have some arbs patrol hadrians wall, and walk away from the game. There’s only one other scenario I can think of that even on easy, you can just walk away and be fine indefinitely
If this were a boxing match the problem wouldn’t be my opponent is to weak or too slow, but he just keeps throwing punches northward, just hoping I’ll obligingly put my face there. If I move to his west then it’s not really a contest.
I don’t need some 9-dimensional strategy, co-ordinated simultaneous attacks, something that’d bring a tear to Eisenhower’s eye, just have more than one spot to land and pick at random.
Maybe using the standard ai is the cause of the landing location problem. I don’t know enough about the aoe2 ai to say.
I think the pict dock causing resignation is just a bug that can be patched out. I feel like if you’re going to resign and have an NPC say “oh gee our chiefs are dead” then both chiefs need to have died first. That just seems like a simple bug.
Another admittedly small nitpick, the hints say nothing about you not being able to build castles. Just that you can’t build better walls or towers…tho even then my post imp briton watch towers had more hp than the byzantine watch towers. If the verbiage of the hints was the only problem I had I wouldn’t be complaining on the forums.
So If I had to judge myself I’m better than medium but IDK if I’m better than hard ai. However I have a job that’s pretty mentally taxing, so most days, I don’t want a challenge, I want a chill relaxing game. Even so those chill games offer a lot more challenge than this did. Maybe 1/3 of the time the scenario feels underwhelming, but I wanted the chill game so I’m not complaining.
I’ll be honest, I don’t know exactly what the problem is. I think in part cause it’s really not clear what makes the saxons revolt. And to be fair, if everything is working correctly, that’s actually a good thing. If the saxons revolting is too predictable, then you’d just play to just barely avoid them revolting. Kinda defeats the purpose.
Maybe to start, just turn off the warnings and make the saxons un-revoltable until you’ve recruited them once (beyond the starting recruitment). If doing nothing makes the saxons likely to revolt then it feels inexorable and you have zero influence or agency. In a different scenario having no agency is fine. Henry the Lion is going to backstab you no matter what. That’s fine. I love it in those scenarios. This is not that kind of scenario. If you’re going to be warned/punished for playing with fire then perhaps you should have played with the fire first.
My summary by hearing some rumors
Pros
- can play Filthy’s scenarios in many languages
- can play some scenarios with new features
- some palody text (this can be cons)
- good map creation (eg. Japan in Nobun4g4)
- some scenarios can play repeatly (with different goals) or as a RTA (eg. Charlemagne)
Cons
- no storied campaign
- very large and long scenarios(this can be pros)
- many bugs
- AI problems
- there seems less polishment though devs said they did very much
- no new texture for units and buildings
- maybe less new illu5t in story pages
- high price
(I don’t mind it if the content is really good) - only one bad narrator (no Japanese narrator)
- many localization problems
(in my language Japanese, It’s worse than previous dlc; that’s probably microsoft auto translation. I saw a player who confused how to select a clan in Nobun4g4, because the Imperial Palace got two translations “皇帝の宮殿” in text and “帝の御所” in commandpanel. Other scenarios also have bad translations)
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As usual, I’ll mention that neither AoE2 nor AoE3 have support for nonEnglish languages
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Also, they lazily reuse old intro sketch (more like cartoonish draw) into this project, like one of Wallace’s taken over to Charlemagne. I’m sure this is not the only one.
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Just looked thru the two japanese scenarios from the historical battles and from V&V. Lots of re-use. putting together something to show it off
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Yeah they just grabbed artworks from other campaigns instead of making new ones. Not even new maps like Charlemagne or Nobunaga do. As far as I know, there are zero new cutscene drawings. Which, for a “single-player focused DLC”, is a pretty odd choice.
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So this is what I came up with.
There was only one slide, the third slide for Shimazu, I couldn’t find elsewhere. I checked Kurikara, Kyoto, Lake Poyang, Noryang Point, and skimmed thru Le Loi. Maybe it’s new, maybe it’s elsewhere. IDK
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Also, and maybe this is just a result of my 4k screen, but the historical battles/V&V menu items aren’t centered for me.
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Hmm… Could it be from the Art of War?
@CitingOregano34 I looked there briefly. Didn’t see it there.
On the topic tho, I did notice Art of War re-used a couple slides as well, tho as far as I could tell, which to be fair I wasn’t checking the art of war slides exhaustively, at least half seemed original.
I just checked: it’s from “Booming” in Art of War.
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This is kind of related to my earlier comment about the easy AI, it only “knows” how to do a couple things and doesn’t seem to be capable of much adaptation or have a plan B. It mostly seems to be a holdover from the original AoK/C days where the only way they had to make the AI easier was to make it Artificially Stupid (by the same token, the hardest AI had to cheat for resources in order to be challenging). I’m sure they’ve changed some things in HD and DE, but at it’s core it seems similarly incompetent. Which is why I think it could use a rework to where it “knows” how to do the same things as the Hard/Extreme AIs, but executes them less often, with less efficiency, with a handicap, etc. That said, even on hard mode I think the AI still usually lands where you’re talking about, but you can’t exploit it as you don’t start with enough res to get a tower up there until well after they start landing.
Yeah, no new in-game art of any kind. Like I haven’t gone slide-for-slide, so there’s maybe a 1% chance they hid one in there to troll us (they didn’t, but I would respect the hustle). But I did recognize around 2/3 of those I encountered despite not having played most of the historical battles or campaigns for a few years. So I don’t know that it’s worth the effort to prove something that we have every reason to assume. Even if there was 1 new slide, that doesn’t really move the needle as to value added, just a trollish easter egg at that point.
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And if I’m being completely fair, I can understand re-using slides sometimes.
This is a perfectly good slide of a map of japan showing different factions. No need to create another map for the same time period. If depicting japan as divided, or showing where different factions are relative to each other is the goal, no sense in re-inventing the wheel.
Conversely, there are examples like this.
Someone help me out here…what does an archer have anything to do with petals falling or cranes soaring?
I think the best correlate is Kurikara’s first slide.
It, like the first slide of nobunaga, is setting the scene and establishing the mood, but this slide is actually relevant. The narration says you’re going through a mountain pass, and you see a mountain pass.
I’m not demanding literally every single slide be new, just for the sake of being new, I’m a reasonable person.
But what seems to have happened is they had a library of existing slides, the intro and outro scripts, and someone was told to do their best.
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That is what I thought DE ai at lower levels to be, but perhaps that is not the case. Again I don’t know a ton about the ai.
Yeah, I don’t know the inner workings of it, all I know is that all my interactions with it have been disappointing. Trying to get it to consistently attack in a city defense scenario I made for a friend on easy mode was something I could never quite make happen, despite it having a huge numbers/tech advantage. You can sort of band-aid it with triggers, but that’s not really a solution. That was about a year ago, so it’s possibly been improved, but I doubt it.
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So I was spelunking through the aoe2de resources trying to find the slides, just to see if any had been added recently…
And I found “shield_multiplayer_normal”
Original DE main menu
New V&V/Historical Battles Menu
I swear the DLC development was a studio wide game of “new assets is lava”
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FE saw people criticizing Mojang for being lazy and took it as a challenge 
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