Limit Age Advancement Mode

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Hello there!

I would like to discuss a new CASUAL game mode idea and improve it together.

I would LOOOOVE… LOVE… love… to see an advanced setting or game mode that prevents players from advancing to the next Age for an adjustable amount of time.
(With a tested, recommended/intended value by default that players can change.)

This way, I could set… let’s say… 15 minutes. So I can’t click the Feudal Age upgrade button until 15:00, then I can’t click Castle Age until 30:00, and so on.
(X + X + X time limits in minutes.)

OBSERVATIONS

I know each Age has completely different timing requirements:

  • Limiting Feudal Age to 10, 12, or 15 minutes doesn’t change much. Players usually click up between 9:10 and 10:25.

  • BUT—limiting Castle Age to 20, 24, or 30 minutes changes A LOT. Players usually click up between 12:10 and 13:25.

(Yeah—pro players, perfect play, numbers taken from the internet.)

EVEN MORE FLEXIBLE CONFIGURATIONS? (and personal comment)

Based on that, what if players could set different values for each Age?

For example:

  • 16 minutes for Feudal

  • 8 minutes for Castle

  • 8 minutes for Imperial

(X + Y + Z time limits in minutes.)

Comment:
To be honest, I would love as much flexibility as possible. But I also don’t want this to become a pretentious or unviable idea that never gets considered. I’d rather aim for a middle ground—a balanced idea that’s enjoyable for the most people.

COMPATIBILITY WITH OTHER GAME MODES

Having a single value repeated for every Age (X + X + X) is not necessarily a bad thing. Let’s go back to the 10-minute example. It may not change much for Feudal in a standard game… BUT what about combining this “Limit Age Mode” with “Empire Wars”? Now that sounds MUCH more interesting.

OBSERVATIONS V2

Yes, I know that being locked into Dark Age (or any Age) with a civilization that has strong bonuses there could be unbalanced. But this would be a CASUAL mode, mostly for fun. Not all civilizations are balanced across all maps or modes anyway—we all know that.

REASONS AND FEELING

I can’t remember which game I saw this setting in, but I LOVED IT. Right now, you barely experience the first two Ages at all. You don’t build military buildings, much less units—it’s a frantic rush to Castle Age, and then the game begins. (Yeah, I know it’s not literally that extreme—you get the point.)

I’m not trying to change how the game “should be played.”
But AoE2 is still a game, and people love playing it the way they want.

I personally try to be competitive and learn how the game “should be played,” just to be prepared “if I have to” :stuck_out_tongue:

BUT—most (if not all) of my friends are WAY BIGGER fans of AoE2 than I am.
They watch pros, streamers, tournaments… and still don’t enjoy playing competitively AT ALL.

They’ll call you a s#ck b#st#rd for reaching Castle Age—even at 20:00—just because of HOW FAST you are compared to them…
…and they won’t play a second game with you EVER.

INTERESTING DATA

I also found two interesting stats from Steam achievements:

  • “Win ANY medal in any Art of War challenge”: 6.4% of players

  • “Win a Gold Medal in any Art of War challenge”: 2.4% of players

When most average achievements sit around 50%.
(Wow! I love these new Advanced missions! they are SO great to learn playing the “how you should play”.)

What do you think about it? How would you improve this idea? Do you find it interesting… or EXTREMELY BAD? If you like it, would you consider logging in here in the forums and giving a thumbs up so it might get noticed by Microsoft? Thanks for reading! :stuck_out_tongue:

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I think this would greatly benefit from an automatic age up once the time hits.

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You should be able to do this using triggers in the scenario editor. Use a timer condition with effects to unlock the age up technologies.

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YOU KNOW!!–I was thinking about the same when writing my post, I just didn’t wanted to make it so wildly different from the original game but I honestly think it’s an amazing idea,

Players will focus on units instead of be saving for upgrading,

5

I think empire wars has this issue far less than rm. Rm you often wall in dark age, so feudal age aggression is not that effective.

Empire wars you can go instant aggression, lirerey showed in red bull how devastating full millitary play can be. We saw extended feudal play in the final, we saw castle age, and late game imperial long games.

Hard limit is a fun gimmick but I don’t think it would be rly balanced at the high level, taking away from the games options. I wouldn’t mind it one a map for fun, but as a hole game mode I rather stick to empire wars

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Though I would appreciate if some of the timing based advantages would be smoothened.

I think the timing meta shows that the balance is pracically off. We need to reset to making “going up” a decision again.

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Well, if the videos had worked for me, the stats would have been 0.00001% higher :wink: I had issue for a long time where the vids didn’t play, so I never did them - 'Art of War' videos are not visible

And if many had similar issue, they may have given up on them, too.

I’m not a fan of the OP idea; I’d never use it. What would be better, imo, is to have a user-specified (in lobby) countdown timer for each age, and when the time runs out, all players on the map advance to the new age. It might simulate the world advancing in age, rather than just a civilization.

Not sure I’d ever play that way very much even, but I’d definitely do it more than the OP idea

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Always automatically aging up after a set time and without the ability to manually click up could be a pretty interesting game mode. Of course not that balanced since a lot of civs are based on timings or have cheaper/faster age up as a bonus.

The intervals should be the same for all ages I think. That might mean you spend less time in Dark Age but is that really an issue since you don’t have to save up Food for the Age up. Generally you would have more resources. Since technologies still exists there is of course still a choice.

The Age up UI could change to always show the process to the next age on top like it now does after you click up.

Potential settings:

  • 5 minutes: you get through the ages much faster and need to try some unusual strategies
  • 10 minutes: still pretty fast but Feudal Age would already feel a little longer
  • 15 minutes: should probably be the default option. Dark Age is a little faster but Feudal Age is a lot longer
  • 20 minutes: it now takes an hour to reach Imperial Age. This would really require some new strategies since defensive buildings are kind of ahead of siege for most of the game.
  • 30 minutes: Epic mode. Probably something you’d want to play on a large map with many players.

This would also be a good mode to play with your friends that aren’t that good at the game yet. This way no one will be significantly behind and you kinda force your friends to build military unit early since they can’t just invest all into technologies.

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I really like (and may even prefer) you idea about the global progress bar and automatic upgrade!,

I would stick to 15 or 20, but talking about the Epic mode, Casual players love the “epic” feeling of building a huge empire and having time to do so (even with shapes instead of efficient layouts hehe). Every single board game I play, people would prefer extra turns once the game finishes. In every RTS they want giant maps for having extra space and time to build and research everything.

Yeah, it’s not intended as “sim city mode” but I think this mode would definitely allow more space and variante, not having to focus so many resources on advancing age.

Once again, it’s not precisely about balance but a variant I would love to see. It don’t intend to overtake the default gameplay and nowadays every non-default option (game mode, MAP, starting age, pop limit) will give advantages and disadvantages to some civilizations,