Making Age of Empires a 21th century RTS

Age of Empires: DE I - Discussion
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Hey people!

I believe that some aspects of the original Age of Empires aren’t attractive anymore even for the fan base of the game, let alone fans of StarCraft 2, Warhammer 40k and other popular RTS franchises. So, I would like to share with you some of my thoughts about how the development team of AOE: DE could make the game more attractive for the next generations of players, and better for the old ones.

  • Campaign improvements

Full voice acting - some audio commentary after completing a objective, discovering a important place on the map or losing a hero unit. The idea here is to make playing the campaigns a more unique experience, and improve the storytelling aspect of them.
Imagine “Well done, warriors of Carthago! The filthy Romans will not dare threaten our people again!” being epically acclaimed at some moment on the First Punic War campaign!

Optional objectives - could be killing a target, building a tower above a hill, bringing an artifact to the designated place, and receive rewards, like units or resources. Most of the campaign maps have lots of blank space, ready for these adds.

  • Visual improvements

New environment elements - In AOE II we have statues, carts, tapestry, ruins and fallen leaves to decorate the map.

Unique wonders for each civ - sumerians building Egyptian-like pyramids, that’s weird. Recent discussion about it here: https://forums.ageofempires.com/discussion/1748/wonders#latest

  • Gameplay improvements

Defensive stance as default - If I want my units to persecute an specific enemy unit, I click on it, right? I always thought to be really annoying my units behave like psychotic serial killers.

“Don’t attack” instance for catapults - Well, you know what I mean lol

Formations at the gather point of units - In WarCraft III, units don’t move in formation, but they organize themselves on a basic square-like formation when they reach a designated point. This proved to be useful, because it helps to keep the units together when they move again.

Please, share your opinions about these topics below!

1 Like
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Hello, i actually loved so much aoe , but i stop to play for a big reason… no elo rating , no multiplayer good lobby sistem , no friends list in game, no chat oustide the game, and please dont try to convince me that xbox live do this function cause xbox live born for xbox user that dont have keyboard, is not a PC user friendly platform… U wanna look to the future but in this case is better u take a look at past… msn gaming zone ( where voobly copy his sistem ) is ten time better then any other lobby sistem , also is better then steam… I think blizzard make a big work on battle net and u need to do somenthing like that if u wanna have some improvement of the game.

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Keep playing on Voobly. :wink:

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Age DE was not an easy game to ship. It was several months late and everyone misunderstood how complex it would be to resurrect an ancient codebase and make it work as a modern multiplayer UWP title. It is a small miracle the title shipped at all given the many hurdles that had to be overcome.

It would certainty be possible to upgrade the engine’s movement and pathing to support formations, to improve the multiplayer lobby, improve the campaign, fix the modding issues, etc. But it’ll take a lot of sales and public complaining to make this happen IMO.

1 Like
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Rating was present in the beta , and after they remove it, so i dont think its so difficult to put it. The reality is they abandon the aoe de project before its finished and now there isnt support or any improvement

3 Likes
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They need to work in the game. but they wont, as they have already moved on. its sad, i cant recommend this laggy buggy mess to anyone tbh
its so forsaken its annoying.
https://forums.ageofempires.com/t/units-color-in-icons/31053
They cant even update little things that wont take too much effort.

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Few more suggestions to improve game play

  • Force castle not to attack rams, when under heavy attack it is difficult to micro manage castle to attack in coming units, while infantry taking care of rams.
  • Set monk to conversion mode when not healing units, so so you don’t have to order every time.
  • When attacking set priority to attack certain type of units like monks, villagers etc…

Also is it possible to make it touch screen friendly, (we have a large touch screen monitor) not priority.

Another important feature (atleast for me) make playable on other OSes like MacOS and Linux.

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Blockquote Age DE was not an easy game to ship. It was several months late and everyone misunderstood how complex it would be to resurrect an ancient codebase and make it work as a modern multiplayer UWP title. It is a small miracle the title shipped at all given the many hurdles that had to be overcome.
It would certainty be possible to upgrade the engine’s movement and pathing to support formations, to improve the multiplayer lobby, improve the campaign, fix the modding issues, etc. But it’ll take a lot of sales and public complaining to make this happen IMO.

Mostly of them doesn’t know about development

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Blockquote more suggestions to improve game play
Force castle not to attack rams, when under heavy attack it is difficult to micro manage castle to attack in coming units, while infantry taking care of rams.
Set monk to conversion mode when not healing units, so so you don’t have to order every time.
When attacking set priority to attack certain type of units like monks, villagers etc…
Also is it possible to make it touch screen friendly, (we have a large touch screen monitor) not priority.
Another important feature (atleast for me) make playable on other OSes like MacOS and Linux.

Force no attacking to ram, that’s very crazy and unrealistic idea.
No, don’t be lazy try to perform a macro, this are RTS game not a TBS.
No, playable in Linux is a hard work and very expensive.