March 2, 2020 – Game Version 101.101.35584.0
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In the Art of War “Booming” challenge, the Imperial Age research doesn’t appear in any of my Town Centers despite having satisfied the two Castle Age buildings requirement, so it is impossible to complete the challenge.
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In the Art of War “Rushing the Enemy” challenge, the villager kill counter doesn’t work properly. My first villager kills get completely ignored, making it very hard to finish the challenge in time. Villager kills might or might not register later on as you keep killing enemy villagers.
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The Alpine Lakes map is completely broken, villagers just stop gathering from fish even when a mill is very close to said fish. They seem to almost always go idle each time they drop off food, and you even have to manually path them directly next to the fish, otherwise they go idle. Either fix this issue or remove the ability to gather deep fish with villagers altogether.
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The Hideout map generation can be very buggy at times, with my opponent’s palisade walls spawning inside what should be my base and vice versa.
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Cavalry (and that probably goes for all melee units) behavior is incorrect. When I select a group of Light Cav/Hussar and right click on a specific enemy unit (onager for example), instead of focusing on said unit they act as if I used the attack move, and half of them proceed to ignore my command attacking random nearby enemy units (enemy halberdiers ffs). Only a few (if any!) of my units might actually attack the selected target. Happened multiple times in the same game (first noticed that in February), and the problem persists as of March 2. This is seriously game breaking.
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Incorrect farming behavior; if the farms are already built and you task all your villagers to gather food from one farm, they will behave as intended and spread out to all the farms. However, if you already have some available farms (already built) and you task some villagers to build a new farm together, after they complete this new farm, all villagers will go idle except for one who starts farming the newly built farm. Intended behavior should be that the rest of the villagers split up to the already built nearby farms instead of going idle.
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The ability to scout for enemy buildings outside your line of sight using building foundations is an unfair mechanic and should be completely removed from the game. Many pros including TheViper agree this has to go, despite it being a bug that’s been exploited by everyone since forever.
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Increase the number of units that can be simultaneously selected, you can currently only select up to a fixed number of units.
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Hovering over a player’s name or score (right above the mini map where players’ scores are being displayed) should show their civilization in a tooltip that appears for as long as your mouse is hovering above their name. This would help so much since not everyone (and especially casual players) is interested in memorizing the unique civilization shields and clicking on the chat menu to see the civilizations is time consuming.
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Add an option to buy and sell resources directly on the game UI as well as in the Market to eliminate the rather unnecessary micro of having to go to the market all the time (players that like doing that can still do it of course).
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Introduce a toggle button in the market (or next to the mini map) that reveals all allied markets’ positions on the mini map so you can find trade routes easily in even the most hectic games. Maybe show allied markets as coins or “M”s on their respective positions on the mini map.
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Scouts’ stats should better reflect their base attack value of 5. Scouts in the Dark Age should show 5-2 attack (-2 could be in red color for extra clarity), instead of 3 attack like it happens currently, since their base attack is actually 5 and they just get a -2 attack debuff just for the Dark Age. Once in Feudal, stats should show 5 attack instead of the 3+2 currently. After that, any upgrades should show up like they do on any other unit. For example in the Feudal Age, Scouts with Forging should show 5+1 attack. Current Scouts showing 3+3 with just Forging is kind of misleading (for newer players especially) and unnecessary, giving the impression that the player has more upgrades on them which is obviously not the case.
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Unit/ship and building attack speed (as in attack rate or rate of fire, not projectile speed) should show in the unit stats, it is too important to be left out. Attack speed upgrades (or unique upgrades/bonuses such as faster firing Mongol cavalry archers for example) should also show in the stats, much like they do for attack/armor/range. Maybe upgrades and bonuses unique to a specific civilization could show in green to showcase that uniqueness.
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Also while we’re at it, it would be nice if unique bonuses like the Lithuanian relic bonus for cavalry attack could show up separately in green. So let’s say I select a Lithuanian knight with Forging and 2 relics. Knights have a base attack of 10, Forging gives +1 attack and the unique Lithuanian relic bonus gives +2 in this example, so it would be nice if the stats showed 10+1+2 to emphasize what the actual upgrades and what the unique bonus offers. That could apply to any of the unique bonuses or technologies affecting the values of Attack, Armor and Range, in both buildings and units/ships. Examples would be upgrades such as Incan Couriers or Italian Pavise for armor, Aztec Garland Wars for attack, Briton Yeomen or Teutonic Crenellations for range, and with civilization bonuses like the Lithuanian relic bonus for Attack or the Teutonic +1 melee armor starting in Castle Age. For example, an Italian Crossbowman (0/0 base armor) with Padded Archer Armor (+1/+1) and Pavise (unique tech, +1/+1 armor) researched should show 0+1+1/0+1+1. So basically to sum things up, units/ships and buildings should show base values and generic upgrades separately in black (as they currently show) but anything unique to the civilization can be added separately in green. This is a nice way to distinguish generic upgrades from anything that is unique to a specific civilization and is also helpful for new players to showcase what unique upgrades (which otherwise just go unnoticed) can offer to certain civilizations. Make this an optional toggle either within the game UI (next to the unit stats) or in the Options menu. That way people that like it can activate it while people that either don’t like it or find it distracting can ignore this.
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Another suggestion regarding upgrades and the UI would be to show all the upgrade icons that could affect the selected unit/ship or building next to or below its stats. When one of these upgrades is researched, the respective icon gets checked to show that you’ve completed this upgrade. Alternatively, not yet researched upgrades could show up dark or black and white and once researched they could show up brighter or colored. This can not only come in handy for players of all skill levels as a reminder of which upgrades you’re missing on a specific unit type, but is mainly extremely useful for new players trying to learn which upgrades affect each unit. This should also be optional, so that people can choose to disable it if they don’t personally prefer it to the current view.
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Player profiles need to be introduced. We should be able to see the ranked ELO of players updated in real time. Also things like how long someone has been playing for, how many games they’ve completed on multiplayer and their clan. We can also look to add social features to player profiles later on. Maybe players that worry about the privacy aspect of this could be given the option to hide it, however it is important for the feature to be there, at least for people that don’t mind it.
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Multiplayer clans need actual features. Currently clan members cannot even chat with each other.
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When I’m watching a recorded game, there should be a cursor, much like in a youtube video, to track progress of the replay and also to choose the exact in game time you’d like to watch. This would be a massive improvement to the current experience. Consider implementing features from “Capture Age” as well to improve spectating. The current spectating system is terrible; extremely buggy and unintuitive to use. Needs to be ripped off and rebuilt from scratch. Decouple it from the game and set it to open with a different program if you have to. Anything would be an improvement.
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Saved games and Replays should be able to run even if they are from previous patches of the game. Currently that is impossible and many old games are unwatchable as a result.
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Add the ability to rename Saved Games and Replays in game instead of having to manually change the file’s name in windows explorer.
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Single Player games appear on my “Replays” list with the name “rec”, despite the fact that I’ve unchecked the “Record Game” option in the Single Player setup screen.
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The event mod for the AoE1 Anniversary Celebration is being forced on me every time I launch the game, despite having unsubscribed from it. Such previous mods were properly removed once I unsubscribed from them in previous patches, so this must be an issue introduced in this patch (35584).
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In the Options menu, there are 3 grid options currently (light, dark and no grid). While the options are nice to have, both the light and dark grids available are too pronounced (too bold). Therefore, you should make 2 extra options (so 5 options in total), for a light and a dark grid respectively, just less pronounced, making the grid still noticeable but less distracting if that makes sense. There is already a mod (by Zetnus) that does this, but this is too important and useful to be left out of the game’s options in my opinion, especially since you already have some grid options.
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In the Option menu, add an option to remove plants that are not trees, much like the mod “Useless Plant Remover” does, just without it breaking every time we get a patch. This is also too useful to be left up to modders, much like the “Small Trees” and “Zetnus’ Improved Grid” mods.
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Selecting either “Confirm” or “Cancel” in the “Options” menu at the “Ranked” multiplayer tab will get you back to the main menu instead of the “Ranked” multiplayer tab. That’s fine if I click “Options” from the main menu, but not if I click it from the “Ranked” tab in multiplayer.
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Add the option to view the Tech Tree in the “Ranked”, “Lobby Browser” and “Spectate Games” tabs. In the Ranked tab, I should also be able to view the Tech Tree while waiting in queue (automatically kick me out of the Tech Tree if a match has been found).
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In multiplayer, in both the “Lobby Browser” and “Spectate Games” tabs, the tooltip for “Password” filter is incorrect. Hovering your mouse above the “Password” filter incorrectly shows the tooltip for the “Spectators” filter instead.
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Add filter for lobbies with AI in them (both for the “Lobby Browser” and “Spectate Games” tabs). Make sure the tooltip for it is the correct one (sad how those are always incorrect).
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Add filter for lobbies that are full for the lobby browser. Make sure that tooltip is the correct one.
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Fortunately my settings for single player actually get saved properly. Sadly that’s not the case with multiplayer. You should make it so that all filters and settings (checkboxes and drop down menus) get saved in all lobby browsers (both “Lobby Browser” and “Spectate Games” browsers), so that players don’t have to input the same settings in every session, which gets very tiring.
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In the unranked multiplayer lobby, currently there’s a drop down menu where you can only select either one specific server or all of them to be displayed. Instead of a drop down menu, each server should be clickable so you can tick which servers you want to see results for and untick the ones you don’t care about. Maybe you should add a checkbox next to each server name in the section that shows server pings. That way people will be able to pick among multiple servers so that we get a wider selection to pick from while still filtering the high ping servers out. This should be implemented in both the spectator and the unranked lobby browsers.
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I’d like to see English in the lobby browser as much as possible (or whatever language I have chosen for that matter). Lobby browser information showing in 500 different languages is annoying and confusing. While I understand that the name of each lobby will always be in the host’s language (and should be since the host gets to name it), everything else in the lobby browser should be automatically translated in the language I have chosen, not the host’s language. In a previous patch, you made it so that the “Location” column (which really should be called “Map” instead for clarity) shows the maps in only my language, as it should, improving the lobby browser’s readability. So the “Location” column is fixed now. However the “Language” column is still not minimally translated like it should be. Currently the language column shows the language of the host in both my own and the host’s language preference. That is unnecessary. Should only be my own language preference. So if a lobby is German for example, the “Language” column currently shows “Deutch (German)”. I have English as my preferred language, so is should show just “German” instead of “Deutch (German)”. If my preferred language was German, then you just show “Deutch” and nothing else. If my preferred language was Chinese, then just show me the Chinese word for German and nothing else. Simple and clean.
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Server names are looking kind of long and confusing in my opinion. Also, they take up so much space in the lobby browser, and the information of one column bumps into the other, looking messy and rather tiring to look at. The lobby browser needs to be simple, clear and easily readable. I suggest we change server names to abbreviations (WESTEUROPE could be WE or W-EU for example). Maybe in the section that shows server pings you can put each server’s abbreviation next to the respective full name for whoever wants to see it, but the “Server” column in the lobby browser should be as clear as possible and therefore use just the abbreviations. This will also minimize the bumping to other columns issue, especially for smaller screens. Currently on my 15.6’ laptop display (which is not even that small of a screen to be honest), text from one column bumps to other columns’ text, looking quite messy.
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In the Tech Tree, add clarification for the Chinese and Mayans that they get their extra starting villagers only once they build a Town Center.
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You should completely remove the option to disable crossplay. I honestly see no reason for crossplay to ever be disabled, as this only fractures the playerbase even more than it already is (due to platforms like Voobly, HD and GameRanger). Another issue (especially for higher rated players) is that since most pros play on Steam, people playing on the Xbox version of the game can deliberately disable crossplay to get matched with worse players and therefore inflate their ELO and rank.
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You should also look to completely remove AoE2 HD from the steam store at the very least, as new players (especially casuals) get very confused as to which version they should buy and DE is by far the superior product between the two. The existence of HD reduces the playerbase in both platforms.