I don’t know how long the expansion has been released, but it seems no one plays it already.
Today I just bought ROR, and opened the game, no unranked lobby and no ranked lobby. So there isn’t a single person in the whole world that is playing ROR multiplayer? It seems more dead than AoE1 DE.
I think lobbies are bugged, but it is also kind of dead.
It also doesn’t help that the lobby misses basic features that really put a strain on players who, if these features weren’t missing, would be willing to host games.
AOE2 introduced Koreans to attract Korean buyers => failed.
ROR introduced Lac Viet to attract Vietnamese buyers => failed.
For the upcoming DLC featuring Persians, I really hope that the Persians will buy it this time.
Where did you get the info next DLC is about Persians?
It is death because of bad design choices of the devs. Even more: It was never really alive because of this. I really saw the potential, but the devs made some really bad decisions, killing it before it was released.
It’s a guess. A new DLC is apparently underway, somebody posted a image of a hidden DLC on the steam info page, but no official statement about it has been made yet. Some people associate the upcoming Persian redesign with a Persian related DLC because they line up in terms of time. Imo the expansion probably doesn’t have anything to do with Persians (I doubt the DLC will be released this year, maybe early 2024), the Persian redesign will probably come in the November - December patch for the anniversary if you ask me. Announcing a redesign and waiting more than 6 six months to incorporate it and to tie it with a DLC that probably won’t come out this year (already working on a lot other projects for the game and just starting to work on the DLC doesn’t sound like its coming out in less than 3 months) makes me think that they are probably unrelated. But feel free to joke about this post if I turn out to be wrong. 11
RoR wasn’t planned correctly. I think they didn’t know who was supposed to be their target audience, they didn’t give incentives to new players nor old ones, didn’t incentivice casual players nor multiplayer. Really, most people bought the expansion only because they wanted to play Romans in AoE2 after they decided to make it a multiplayer civ (a controversial civ choice in the opinion of many, myself included). I just don’t get what was the point of this expansion. They haven’t even terminated the AoE1 servers, which was rumoured as one of the reasons for making this expansion. The idea was good, but was implemented with as many errors as possible.
At least DOI didn’t fail despite billions of Indians, Bangladeshis and Pakistanis not buying it. 
I still play it and it is my main game, but they really need to add a proper lobby system for it.
Pretty much this. The main game has a perfectly working ranked matchmaking system, yet somehow this isn’t extended to RoR.
Hell, we should be able to queue for Age2 and RoR games simultaniously, just like we can for conquest and empire wars rn.
I do quite like Return of Rome, the SP campaigns are lovely.
Yes ror like AOE DE bad game ever, lose far from AOE classic. Highlights only about balance civ
I love that they tried to rework AoE I again.
The main thing that I think went wrong was the communication. It was not very clear what this expansion was in the beginning so everybody speculated and dreamed up their perfect version of a reworked AoE I.
Their dreams did not lived up to the end result so most people were disappointment.
I hope that the devs will continue their support for RoR because it got a lot of potential.
Adding the classical campaigns should had happened from the start but I am glad that they will add it later.
For the future I hope that every upcoming DLC for the original AoE II also give an update to RoR like a civ or a new campaign.
would have been less work to just to add gates back into AOE1 DE…
I really hope that RoR gets fundamentally rebalanced so that it is way more similar to AoE2. As it is now, it’s simply way too punishing. There are no hard counters to anything, and all of the unit stats are insane. It needs a lot of work.
And no, the hardcore fanbase doesn’t matter, because they’re still playing the original CD version, so we can ignore them.
It’s probably because AoE1 is more like old school RTS where newer units are just better than older and weaker units kind of like Dune 2, which differs a lot from C&C and Red alert style.
Team game in rtr is actually very good. But they brought all aoe1 stats that can not work properly on age 2 DE engine. Need lots of work to rebalance
Wipes brow
Pants
Well that’s my energy for the day, time for bed.
ROR has been made only for the AOE1 players after Microsoft decided to stop updating AOE1. It’s not dead but the community is small.
Most of AOE2 players do not play ROR.
And the terribly bad designed lobby doesn’t help…
It never even started