Personally I find the population limit system of AOM better over AOE II. It’s also more logical. A War Elephant should indeed take more population than a peasant or a priest. Also the max population limit is based on a fixed max amount of houses, pop limit upgrades and the amount of TC’s you have. Here I am not saying they should adopt the TC way of AOM, but maybe compensate with houses that can take 15 pop each.
Wouldn’t a custom settable pop cap be the best choice, then you could adjust it if you have a beefier computer.
I don’t like to make so many choices 
I much rather like to just click start and have a balanced game. When you take more than 200 pop the AI always outnumbers and outsmarts me. Especially in AOE II HD.
Yes, adjustable pop limit till 1000 would be nice, then players can choose for themselves. Also make sure to include it in singleplayer. Because you could not change the pop limit in singleplayer, only in multiplayer.
Oh boy, I remember playing multiplayer with AI just to get that bonus pop limit. Later I found some multiplayer groups which slowly died by the years.
I believe they will add bigger maps, and a bigger pop limit. I only hope they will keep the same population counter (1 unit = 1 pop point) and not how they did on AOM (certain units taking more pop, up to 6 I guess).
The best thing to do, thinking from a developer point of view, and from a player’s point of view, is to just import/copy the game settings menu (I am referring to map settings, pop and so on) from AOE 2. It’s simply easy to get by, practical and with enough information to get the point of it quickly.
About major changes… I really wouldn’t like them. Like someone said, to add morale and stuff like that… That isn’t AOE. And I guess we all simply want just a REMASTERED product, with better of everything, but the same content and maybe a little more that doesn’t change the structure of the game.
I also want to say that you can’t compare AOE 1 with AOE 2 too much. It takes places in difference times, with difference civilizations. (some years ago someone was really upset that aoe 1 doesn’t have trebuchets).
…What I would really like to see are… GATES! I would feel such a satisfaction to be able finally to build a gate.
and GATHER POINTS. Anyone who played AOE 1 knows, or should know, quite well, what a pain was to not be able to set gather points for buildings.
Any suggestions? comments? feel free to add.
@“Hersir Aegeen” said:
…What I would really like to see are… GATES! I would feel such a satisfaction to be able finally to build a gate.
and GATHER POINTS. Anyone who played AOE 1 knows, or should know, quite well, what a pain was to not be able to set gather points for buildings.Any suggestions? comments? feel free to add.
We have a whole thread about gates here, maybe you want to argue why you need gates there, because on my end I don’t like that idear 
@“Hersir Aegeen” said:
…What I would really like to see are… GATES! I would feel such a satisfaction to be able finally to build a gate.
This would be a great addition to the game, but how we will manage to break down the gates without siege rams the catapults are not easy protected units for this job i think and i dont belive they will put new units in game that easy. Maybe they have some ideas for expansions pack that we will see in the future for sure.
@Manello1 said:
We have a whole thread about gates here, maybe you want to argue why you need gates there, because on my end I don’t like that idear
Haha, not necessarily worth arguing the gates, a line of phalanx can cover pretty much anything and easy. Meat gate, meat gate!
I managed without. OH I 'member! Member when walls were used to keep the camel/ knight rush off the villagers?
@Sergentanis said:
This would be a great addition to the game, but how we will manage to break down the gates without siege rams the catapults are not easy protected units for this job i think and i dont believe they will put new units in game that easy. Maybe they have some ideas for expansions pack that we will see in the future for sure.
Ummm, well, catapults were quite the thing to raze everything. Researching something in the governement center was improving the range of fire and giving a area damage + their upgrade in the siege workshop. Of course, the standard game wasn’t allowing every civilization to get those upgrades, which result in a loose - win situation under a siege circumstance.
Overall, yeah, gates would be something cool to have, but at the same time annoying.
@ABetterBadger said:
an army of 200 soldiers would be a pain in the ass if they don’t significantly revamp military unit management, though. And I’m dubious that they will…
I think they will. Aoe 2 hd has pretty decent ways to manage armies, and they said they are going to add all the features you would expect an rts like age of empires to have.
Managing armies seems one of the top priorities to me.
I hope the pop limit is at least 200. And agree with OP that the maps should be correspondingly bigger. Considering that the original 50 was limited mainly because of hardware at the time, it makes sense to raise it since they are, in essence, modernizing it.
I would say do away with small, medium, large, etc… classifications and instead go by letting users decide the numerical value of how big a map should be up to a max.
Well, around a population of 200 is enough for peasants and for your army as well, since the movement system is still tile based as far as I have seen and micro managing a 100+ units is more than enough.
As for map size I think that They should be multiple sizes, like in Empire Earth(small, big, gigantic etc.)
Ofc. being able to change population cap is mandatory. 
hopefully it’s possible choose pop limit. however as in aoe2 too high pop destroys game’s balance
What I would do is make 200 the default, 500 the maximum and 50 the minimum.
the amount of military units should be a percentage of population and max population should be determined by map size, so the bigger the map, more population. this would be great because if you want an army, you must have enough citizens to provide resources…
Besides all the choosable options, the same way it was on the original game but with higher limits, I remember the number of units that were selected with a double click were limited. Point to take into consideration, if the pop limit goes up, also should that hidden number to make it easier to move that many units.
On the other hand,while many people play on gigantic maps and enjoy it, in terms of ranked play bigger maps are futile, since gaining terrain was one of the most important things in competition, there is no point on having all the space in the world at least for competitive matters, specially because reinforcements wouldn’t be possible; plus walking around for some time out in the nowhere is tedious.
I’d prefer to keep the easier system of small, med, large, etc. and population really doesn’t need to be much more than 300 I’d say, though throwing in other higher possibilities might be nice for some people
Personally I think they should give the user the freedom to adjust the population limit in P vs P multiplayer, but keep the single player static. Just cause I think it’ll be difficult to create a balanced and smart AI when taking into account different population limits.
Would there be new campaigns for every civilization?
I would like to see an increase in pop size. However I hope it won’t break the AI as it seemed to do in AoE HD. An increased map size would also be a welcomed addition.