I love how the OP started the topic the answers are piling on but he is nowhere to be seen yet :P. I hope he remembers and gives the game a shot again.
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Same! a lot of people talk about the game as if it was Warcraft 3 Reforged, I mean, there were a considerable amount of bugs on release, but most of them were addressed throughout this year, there are still some things to iron out (no spectator chat yet smh) but game is perfectly playable for like 99.99% of people, if it wasnāt the Steam reviews wouldnāt be āVery Positiveā since release and āOverwhelmingly Positiveā recently
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Is it worth it? Yes. Is it as fast as SC2? No. Do you get to interact with your opponent right from the start? Depends
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So how is Age of Empires DE compared to the original?
Bigger and more competitive than ever. The ranked 1v1 ladder is actually remarkably good at matching you with opponents close in skill until you are in about the world top 3% (which I donāt think youāll have to worry about for some time). There are over 42k active players on the 1v1 ladder, so queue times are usually under 2 minutes.
The people in this thread complaining about lag/bugs are not necessarily wrong, but for 1v1 play the server performance/ping is relatively good. When I started competitive play in 2018 all connections were p2p and that was actual hell.
I have a vague memory of AOE2 being a bit slow and receptive compared to SC2. Getting sheep and building up took several minutes every game and you did not start interacting with your opponent until the second age.
The game might feel slow by comparison when starting out, especially since APM plays a less significant role in competitive games (300-400 APM is normal for pro players, mid-level players probably average 120-250). Thatās one of the starkest differences between these two games. If you invest time into having a good build and different openings, youāll find you are engaging pretty early (within the first ~5 minutes of play). Over time, you will find that scouting and gathering information about your opponentās strategy takes up most of this time in the first age anyway, so you wonāt be dying of boredom. The game also runs slightly faster than it did up until 2019 (1.7x game speed is standard in ranked matches, instead of previous releasesā 1.5x speed).
So is it worth investing your time in and is the ranked 1v1 games unique enough that you will still have fun after a few thousand games?
Short answer, yes. Long answer, if you like RNG manipulation and learning about obscure bonuses, you will improve faster and enjoy the game more. After a couple hundred games you should be developing your skill at reading the randomly-generated maps so you can incorporate the lay of the land (hills, resource positions, woodlines) into your strategy decisions. Plus, thereās over a thousand possible civilisation matchups to analyse and consider.
Also how is the game length?
1v1 matches are typically between 15 and 30 minutes, with a tendency to run longer rather than shorter.
It also depends on what maps you prefer playing, as āclosedā maps tend to favour longer defensive games and āopenā maps put early rushes in focus.
Also how is the balance? Is there anything that is much harder to defend than to use or is the game balanced overall, i.e. is every civ viable in a competitive 1vs1 setting?
As far as Iāve seen, people tend to agree that the current iteration is the most balanced that the game has ever been. Updates over the past year have radically changed some civilisations to balance them, but there are no ābrokenā civs that people feel they have to main to increase their elo. Between two players of commensurate skill, civilisation matchup matters more, but a player with ~100 elo on their opponent should be able to win with any civ.
That said, tournaments include a civ draft and some expert players release tier lists so itās not too hard to figure out who the favourites are. Itās easier to learn all civilisations one-by-one now for new players. Picking a āmainā civ used to be very uncommon, but now the ranked ladder allows for it to be the default method of play. Having 35 (soon to be 37) different factions makes playing full random pretty overwhelming for some people, but it can also be a fantastic way to rapidly acquire game knowledge.
A lot of SC2 players have come across to AOE2 since DEās release, which is fascinating to watch. Especially all the click spam in Dark Age at ~1100 elo 
just remember to breathe and get upgrades!
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Thanks for all the replies. I actually bought the game and played for like 20 minutes but have not still decided if I should go back playing or not.
The things that really bother me:
- The zoom setting feels wrong after playing SC2 for 10 years. I figured out how to zoom in an out and set the default zoom, but the game feels too zoomed out. I play with 4k on maximum settings on a 55" monitor but I feel like I am so far from the action, I am used to being closer to the units. Not sure how to even micro units when being so zoomed out.
- The graphics even with 4k, the enhanced graphic free download and everything on max is still bad by modern standards. SC2 is 10 year old game but is still crisp and beautiful with 4k and everything on max.
Still I guess I could maybe get used to the zoom setting again and ignore the bad graphics if I get used to the game again. Not sure if I could go back to the slow tempo though. I really like the tech tree and the random map generation but I do not like the huge number of civs. I think the original game was more distinct before they started to add so many civs after AOC.
The primary advantage is that there is no Protoss. I hate Protoss with a passion. SC2 is balanced on pro level but for normal players it is much easier to play Protoss compared to Terran. I hate how unfair it feels playing TvP and how much better you must be as Terran in order to have a chance against a Protoss player if you do not have pro level micro, macro and multitasking.
So just having better civ balance is a huge advantage. I played several thousand AOE2 games a long time ago and do not remember losing once to an opponent that played worse. In SC2 that is common and very frustrating.
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If you hate the addition of a lot of new civs you migth not be happy to hear that there will come a new DLC with 2 additional civs soon. Also these have techs/bonuses that feel more like AoE3, which pretty much flopped, so no clue how you can then make the decission to add those mechanics to AoE2 as well. But wellā¦ FE things are always strange
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- That is a huge screen for PC gaming, lol. That aside, maybe you could leverage this thread to tweak the zoom. Instead of zooming out more, you could probably use it to zoom in moreā¦ but it would affect your whole Windows zoom level: PSA: How to zoom out more with an nVidia graphics card
Or maybe you could try playing without the UHD graphics enabled? No idea, but could it, theoretically, look better and/or give zoom levels more appropriate for your preference?
- SC2 has an approx 11-year leap in game engine and computer tech over AoE2, given AoE2ās September 1999 release date. Weāre lucky AoE2:DE looks as good as it does, imo. The main thing I might want now are shadows that are more crisp, like AOCās were, which should be pretty do-able. I think most any game made in 2011 will look better than most any game originally made in 1999, particularly if the same game engine (a 2-D one, at that) is being used/leveraged 20 years later, as is the case (generally speaking) with AoE2:DE. SC2 used a 3-D engineā¦ which is a lot easier to make ācrisp and beautifulā and relevant to todayās graphics expectations, imo
AoE3 and AoE3:DE, technically, have better looking graphics than AoE2:DEā¦ but theyāre in a 3D engine. And AoE3 came out in 2005. How does SC2ās graphics compare to AoE3:DEās?
Iām glad and fortunate Iām of the mindset that gameplay > graphics for the most part, rather than the other way aroundā¦ so Iām impressed by AoE2:DEās graphics with how they are and can focus on gameplay more than appearance
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It sounds like something is wrong with your settings. This is what the ranked benchmark looks like for me at 4k with enhanced graphics fully zoomed in. Is this what youāre describing as too zoomed out? Iāve never seen any streamer play the game this zoomed in.
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Turned out the enhanced graphics pack had not been installed. When I installed it from steam instead it worked correctly.
Now everything looks great in 4k and with everything on max.
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Cool. I see you posted this new thread, too; so am linking to it in case anyone sees the above thread and wants to see your final conclusion on the 4K graphical fidelity:
Glad it worked out
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