Hi there! I’ve always loved AoE2—it’s a huge part of my life. I was really excited when this version came out, but I’m having a problem: it looks terrible on my PC, both the graphics and the interface. It seems like there’s an issue with rendering and my resolution—or at least that’s what I suspect, since I have a 1366x768 monitor and the game might struggle with that resolution. The bottom line is that the image isn’t sharp; I’ve tried various settings without ever getting a decent result. After playing for a while, my eyes start to hurt and I feel a bit dizzy, which is awful. I’ve tried changing font settings and setting the interface scale to 150%, but nothing works—it doesn’t improve. I’m sure I’m not the only one experiencing this, but I haven’t found a solution or even a potential fix yet. Does anyone have any ideas?
I wanted to include more images, but it only allows me to post one since I’m new.
Thanks!
Odd if it wouldn’t support that monitor very well
Have you tried disabling anti-aliasing? And increasing sharpness a bit? Turn off edge fog animations. Disable map biome lighting, too. Disable 3D Water, unless you like its bright, shallow look
See if those help. In my opinion, they at least help make it look more like AoE2:HD and earlier, which I prefer. Image gets sharper/crisper even on a normal 1080p or 2K screen. And for the water that makes water look darker and deeper
If not, I’m sorry, I don’t know what to do. Maybe there is a way to adjust nVidia Control Panel settings to help, but I wouldn’t know what to do
Good luck!
Hi, thanks a lot for your reply.
Honestly, the setup shown in the image is the best one I found (keeping only the animated fog while disabling anti-aliasing, the vignette effect, and the map lighting —sorry if those aren’t the exact names; I’m translating them from Spanish).
To be honest, I got used to it over time; at first, I felt a bit dizzy though perhaps that was just because I was so accustomed to the other interface, which was much sharper and larger. Still, I feel there are things that could be improved, but well, it’s fine as it is…
What I do think looks terrible, though, is the civilization selection screen:
Also install this mod, which makes the numbers larger in that resource section:
Other than that, I don’t think there’s any solution other than playing around with the existing settings and seeing what looks best.
Thanks for the reply!
You’re welcome! Glad it is working out. I think if it is still blurry or not clear, then the game maybe doesn’t treat your screen resolution with respect. I’ve only viewed your post on mobile screen so can’t see exactly how it looks.
I had a 16:10 (1920x1200) monitor early on in DE’s life, and fonts looked bad. Artifacts in the letters and numbers. They finally fixed that for the most part after some years, but it took quite a while of posting in bug report area
But it sounds like you have found a graphical sweet spot you’re happy with 
I viewed from PC and looked in-game. Your screenshots looks quite a bit like if I pick 1080p as my resolution. It’s probably how the game renderer is processing the image. Not bad, but could be better, I’d think. I don’t know the technicalities behind it.
On 2K which is my monitor, it does look more sharp, imo. Which is why I think it’s the game rendering engine
One last thing, though. You don’t have the Enhanced Graphics Pack installed and enabled do you? Be sure to disable it from the Steam game menu if you do. Right-mouse the game in Steam, go to Properties, then DLC. This graphics pack is only for 4K users. I can’t remember the side effects for enabling it when not on 4K, but I remember that it wasn’t ideal
PS: I just noticed posting screenshots to the forum isn’t going to give us the best results of what we actually see on our respective ends. The forum is compressing and making the image worse than the original. My 2K example from my screen looks pretty bad in the forum, but in-game that is not the case.
It shrunk down the H x W size of my image. And CTRL+Mouseweel to zoom in shows is is lower resolution
