I really ask for the support of this community.

Hello. I have been playing Age of Empires 2 DE for a long time, my Steam account has over 200 hours. This is a really good (albeit outdated in places) game that can still be fun, despite the fact that Age of Empires 4 has shifted more attention to itself.
And when playing AoE 2, I always experience the same problem of perception of its design, namely the same basic units.
I understand that this is a tribute to the old version of the game, but we are still dealing with a re-release, which, among other things, gave the players new content, such as HD DLC, and here I want to turn to the developers.
Dear FE staff, I am writing this post on behalf of caring players. The community has been asking you for a long time to create a paid DLC for Age of Empires 2 DE that would add visual cultural differences to the base units of the factions. Of course, we are not talking about creating a unique species for each faction, but at least have differences between ethnic groups - Europeans, Asians, Africans, Arabs and Indians. Listen to the requests of people who have supported and continue to support you.

My request to the community is very simple. I ask you to make every effort to promote this request as high as possible, to make it as visible as possible. The presence or absence of this or that content depends on your requests and requirements.

4 Likes

Yeah, no - I don’t want indistinguishable Knights, Soldiers, or Trebs. The only exception I could handle is the new trade carts and different monks. Other than those, no.
There are already different architectures for large portions of ethnic groups. That’s enough

6 Likes

It should be perfectly fine as long as there is an option to turn it on and off.

7 Likes

But then as a separate Datapack, I don’t want to have filespace wasted by those graphics

2 Likes

Yes, exactly like HD DLC, just a checkmark in the settings section.

1 Like

I agree even now the game is huge in size adding more will be hard to handel by older pc’s.

2 Likes

Try browsing mods. I{m pretty sure there were a couple popular regional unit reskin mods.

1 Like

Alas, all of them are either of poor quality or not relevant.

2 Likes

I’m fine with this only if its client side only and an optional dlc with no other content tied to it.

6 Likes

This sounds like a good idea but it will just make it harder to tell what your fighting.

2 Likes

Yeah please don’t make it confusing.
I actually like that opposed to many other “modern” games, aoe2 is “easy to read”. You see a knight, you know what it does.
Keep the base of the game simple. The game itself is complex enough, no reason to confuse the players with lots of different skins. It’s a rts, not a rpg game.
I am sometimes still confused with the appearance of different buildings in certain architecture sets.

2 Likes

I know I pop over to a khmer players base looking to raid and am pretty sure I come across houses but they are actually little bunkers. So confusing. 11

2 Likes

I only want skin textures changed, at least for vills and monks. I guess having those be changed for military units is probably a lot tougher (as apparently each skin is a completely new unit?) from a technical standpoint, but at least vills (which iirc is already hard as they all have several different looks as well?) should have regional looks.

I doubt that will happen. Most prob we will just get the heaviest update of the game so far or we will not get this at all

Im pretty sure it wont happen either way

Yeah I think just skin colour only is the best way to do this. It would be too much work to do much more than that and I don’t want the devs’ time to be wasted on aesthetic features which will do nothing to improve gameplay. Especially when there are far more pressing issues in the game which need fixing.

It improves the game experience visually and the sp community would love this.

2 Likes

Yes. Or it could confuse the game experience visually and increase ethnic tensions and nationalism.

2 Likes

Games like rise of nations did this decades ago did it do anything you said above?

1 Like

Never played it. And the point about confusing the game still stands. Plus aesthetic changes are a waste of devs’ time at this point. Aesthetic changes should happen only after actual gameplay issues have been fixed. So yeah, skins would be nice, but not a priority.

Thats why I said there should be an option to turn on and off.Sure dev time should be used to fix stuff but players should not have to pay for fixes.

I dont really understand why do you think like this about a game tho.