List of urgent must-fixes

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

This is not a simple vent post of “Fix pathing!” It’s a compilation of symptoms that break gameplay, that hopefully facilitate debugging for devs.

It’s also a players’ version of “We are tracking these issues.” since the official Known Issues page doesn’t contain a single word “pathing”, yet it claims to “only include the most visible or disruptive issues that prevent you from enjoying the game” :smiley:

Note that the order is not by importance, but by difficulty of fixing imo (easiest to hardest). I’d welcome additions to the list in case I miss anything important.

1. Shift left click perceived as shift right click

Example: 1v1 Cenotes | Magyars vs Celts | vs Hera - YouTube

I’ll explain using this example: Viper tries to select 3 vils using shift left click, but the 3rd click registers as a right click on the farm. Basically when shift is held, your left click can also be perceived as a right click, and has higher priority than left click. This makes it impossible to shift select vils under TC.

2. Units regroup

Example: Top 5 Most Annoying Things In AoE2 - YouTube

If you play xbows vs knights you probably noticed that when you focus fire and run away, the xbows always regroup (as video shows), and barely run any distance away. (Attack move doesn’t have the regroup issue, however.) This is theoretically a nightmare for archer players, but ironically balanced with melee pathing that’s as terrible (mentioned below).

3. Units refuse to attack

Example: AoE2 | Funny Fails Compilation | Clips of The Week - YouTube

Often seen on mangonels, BBC and even archer/skirms (ranged units in general), that their attack is cancelled, if you right click enemy target right before they fire.

This issue has two aspects, one being the bug above, the other being a flawed design: reload is counted from start of attack animation, but it does not reset even if the attack doesn’t actually finish. This makes microing high frame delay units like CA very hard, they literally would never shoot if you keep switching targets right before they fire: CA reload doesn't reset between target switches - YouTube My proposal to this is simply resetting the reload counter if the projectile is not fired.

4. Units refuse to move

Example: Units don’t move! When I gave them move commands 1 million times

This issue has not been fixed totally, although patch notes did include “Fixed an issue where units were unable to move when using Guard stance” (Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition - Update 87863 - Age of Empires)

5. Pathing - Individual unit freeze

Examples:

Can happen to any melee unit, most often seen on scout rushes. Scouts randomly freeze for seconds, and countless 1hp vils survived. It’s not even that the they got blocked by anything (maybe air?), like in the 2nd example above.

6. Pathing - Mass units freeze

Examples:

Happens when melee units engage. Multiple units would freeze synchronously. It probably is the same problem as the previous one, I’m not sure. But this is definitely not a lag/network issue.

7. Pathing - Unit takes detour

Examples:

Units walk a different direction from your command, sometimes totally opposite, when nothing is blocking the way. You can easily observe this every game, that your scout just doesn’t walk straight to where you clicked (4th example above), or your boar luring vil doesn’t walk shortest path back to TC (3rd example above).

All these issues can be easily repro’ed in Editor, and I’m glad to offer further help in case devs need. I’d appreciate it if @RadiatingBlade could have this post pinned to increase visibility :smiley:

28 Likes
3

Shift queue attack command for siege weapons doesn’t work properly.

4

I have stopped playing for a bit because of how bad the pathing is. Sure, military pathing is horrible, but I will keep watching it constantly and can at least fix it. But when villagers walk half a mile to the opposite side of the woodline, I am done. What am I supposed to do here, watch over every single villager?

Respects for the high effort post with citations, my dude.

3 Likes
5

Thanks for your post.

Now we just need wait for the guy that post under every bug report that the “issue is now being tracked”

And see what and when it will happen

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6

The ROR Scenario Editor, especially Gaia items are all fuzzy and not rendered properly. Terrible that this was allowed to go unfixed.

3 Likes
7

The first problem might also be in relation with the TC bug. Apparently since Xbox patch, for Xbox players there is a separate selection area around buildings, which seems to have bled over to PC players as well, which makes selecting villagers very awkward under the TC. (pic taken from the Rage Forest discord)

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Not 100% sure if this is a bug or not, but if it is true it certainly explains 90% of the weirdness and problems I have with villagers right now.

2 Likes
8

The patch notes fix regarding the “units unable to move when using Guard stance”, is based on this bug report.

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9

I asked the person who reports stuff to the team if there is something new, no response

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10

No, we’re not going to do that. But don’t worry, the developers watch these posts.

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11

When I see patch notes say:

Fixed an issue where Units stop for a moment before reaching target.

we have been testing and polishing a new short path finder, which will replace the legacy code in the near future

I’m so excited. Then I did the test. Alas. (Talking about Issue 6 here.)

Thanks for fixing Issue 1 tho.

12

Maybe scenarios aren’t counted under the Single player modes?

On Reddit, I saw Umdeuter post a short clip of a 1v1 Skirmish against AI, where the pathfinding seemed a lot better.

3 Likes
13

It could be. I actually didn’t see much freeze when I played skirmish vs AI either.

But what is the fix of “Units stop for a moment before reaching target” then? This should apply to MP already.

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14

Screenshot (247)
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I checked on this post the recent patch. Several Gaia things are still blurry as F still. What’s going on?!

15

Apparently some assets on 1080p are blurry because they upscaled some assets on lower resolutions and that somehow impacted higher resolution assets.

(Take this with a mountain of salt, don’t quote me on this, just saw someone say this during Viper’s stream today.)

16

I’ve still got melee units just stop chasing. It’s so infuriating.

17

Hi Devs, is anything being done to fix these terrible blurry things??

18

I did a test on the PUP. It seems Issue 6 (Mass freeze) is fixed. Issue 5 (Individual freeze) remains. Thanks devs for at least making some progress.

[Good job devs, censoring some random string of my youtube video link!]

On the other side, I don’t understand why unit regroup has not been fixed. It has existed well over a year, and it’s such a manmade error which should only require a one-line fix.

1 Like
28

Crossbows are not supposed to easily run away from knights or dodge mangonel. Knight and mangonel are the supposed counter to crossbow.

29

Lol are you saying they are designed to be lame like this? But every single unit behaves like this now, not only xbow.

Besides you can still kite back using attack move. It’s just focus fire or stop micro triggering the regroup.

30

Knight mangonel are designed to be the counter to crossbow, but it’s just,that knight pathing has been so bad, and crossbows in a mass can do so much damage, and people micro so well nowadays that mangonel is not even a counter to crossbow anymore. It shouldn’t be like this