I was a beta player,
Does it have too many online players around 150+?
Can I find the game easily on the lobby ?
Beta was horrible so I wonder if it worth buying?
Iāve had no other serious issues than now after updating to Win 10 1803 the game freezes most of the time when I try to write something to the ingame chat. It unfreezes if I alt+tab out and back in, but needless to say this is super annoying. I know a lot of people are having this issue. It seems that the development has completely stalled, but I very much hope that they at least fix this chat issue. Iām still happy that I bought the game though. Thereās just something about it that keeps me playing a few matches a week, and thatās all the gaming Iāve done for months now. During weekdays thereās usually 2-5 lobbies looking for players all the time and during weekend 5-10. Iāve always found a game within 10 minutes, which is not unbearable for me.
Honestly, the game has advanced very little since the beta. I think almost the only difference is that you can play Single player and campaigns. The Editor interface still looks the same as the original game. still missing textures, icons and modeling. Still the units collide and block each other.
Letās hope they do not abandon development.
So, if you were in the beta, you know what youāre going to find.
Itās good game.
I never played the first 1 but everything im reading on here I donāt think I want to try it now
I personally think it works well enough, just donāt be too picky - the original also has issues 
The main annoyance for me is the one chat problem.
I cant recommend a game which is forsaken 1 month into release. Im sorry but networking (which is really bad) kills the game. Also overall lazyness and shady behavior from both FE and MS make it hard to recommend to anyone honestly.
Lets see this scenario, I talk 2 buddies into buying this game.
We make a lobby 3v3 for us to play together. Aside from level problems, and waiting for more than 10 minutes, we get the game going.
Finally the game starts andā¦ its frozen. Well okay i remember Aoe2 freezing at start of the game then is all good.
Yeah the game starts for like 3 secondsā¦ frozen again for 10 seconds.
Well it can happen i guess. The game resumes and ā¦ guess what? another big freeze.
So if you like playing freeze simultator this is your game
Im sorry but networking (which is really bad) kills the game.
Iāve played 72 hours of Age DE multiplayer so far, and Iāve had a blast. The vast majority of games went without a hitch. If you or your friends have lousy internet connections, or noisy Wifi, etc. it wonāt work as well and thereās nothing the game can do about it. Age uses a peer to peer topology by default (unless you check the āHost as dedicated serverā checkbox), which means the quality of your net connection matters.
The host needs to make sure everyone has good connections. The tools are there in the game lobby to figure this out. Thereās a ping matrix (with green/yellow/red boxes) showing the latency between every player (and whether or not forwarding is occurring). If a player has red ping, or it changes a lot between yellow/red, or if they have a lot of packet loss (press tab then hit alt+m and study the statistics), the game isnāt going to run well.
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Well yeah the boxes system is useful.
But in reality you play with few ppl out there, as there isnt much ppl to pick games.
Most are from all over the world and the game will lag, I understand its logical for this to happen.
But, this game is way too over sensitive to high pings, as i play aoe2 for example with ppl far away and while it still has a great delay, the game doesnt freeze all the time.
The game is fine if everyone is green, but some yellow 200ms ping its enough to destroy a game.
I played a lot of games too, and mostly have been a struggle
Depends on what youāre looking for. Personally, I never encountered any of the serious technical issues anyone else did, so if all youāre looking for is a pretty Age of Empires 1, then yes, go right ahead. My biggest issues with it are that I donāt think it holds up as well game play wise as AOE 2, so if youāre looking for the ādefinitive AOEā title, Iād say no. To be honest; I mostly bought it to support Forgotten Empire and their work on AOE 2 DE.
My biggest issues with it are that I donāt think it holds up as well game play wise as AOE 2
But thatās the thing: Age 1 is not Age 2. Ensemble spent a few years improving on the formula after shipping Age 1 to make Age 2.
I think what everyone basically expected with DE was basically Age 2 mechanics (with key things like formations) in the Age 1 universe. I wonder if the reviews would have been better, and there would have been less hysterical screaming from the players if we had just modded Age 2 with Age 1 art and content and left the ancient Age 1 codebase alone.
Clearly, the fans were not prepared to actually have to deal with the Age 1 engineās limitations and quirks (even after we improved it).
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It would be trivial to increase the max allowed delay (max turntime) in Age 1 DE MP. Perhaps once MS starts updating the game again, they can fix this.
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Rome Returns mod. Is that you are talking about?
I know that it is not AOE 2. I also know it was never meant to be AOE 2. That changes nothing about the fact that AOE 1 as a game system simply lags behind the sequel, thus my two cents on what might be the ultimate AOE experience. Like I said, if someone is explicitly looking for āAOE 1 with new artā, this is great. Not so much if one is expecting the best AOE system. Personal opinion, obviously.
If MS continued funding the project we would have kept updating and improving it. Modern game projects interact with the community and are continually updated/bugfixed. I donāt think theyāve figured this out yet. Perhaps when/if the product comes to Steam theyāll resume working on it.
I personally disagree with people who want Age2 features in Age1. AoE DE should remain Age1 gameplay style. But indeed, they shouldnāt have stopped improving/bugfixing it.
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i think it was a better decision to use age2 codebase, as it will need much less work. yeah maybe you could make formations way simpler than in age2 to make it more aoe1-like. But you will fix a lot of issues of age1 (pathfinding mostly). i know old fans wouldnt like it but they should get used to it. much like lets say CS1.6 -> CSGO. Old try hard fans had a hard time getting used to the new engine and mechanics, but essentially its the same game.
I dont mean changing the balance of the game, just use the age2 game as a start.
Also you will have a lot more features non-gameplay wise, like online maps transfer, replay system, lobby system and so on.
Age DE sprung up from a key developer working on the original title in his spare time, over a long period of time. MS finally took interest and FE negotiated with MS to make DE.
I never heard anyone speak about modding Genie 2 to make DE. (I donāt know if that idea was ever discussed or not.) It would have definitely resulted in a different product.
Chopping the wood takes less time than waiting for the pathfinding to solve it. 