My thoughts on the new update so far

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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  • Arabia:
    • Increased the chance of generating a map with lower elevation.
    • Herdables now spawn between 18 to 24 tiles away from the players’ town centers (from 20 to 24 tiles).
    • Added multiple visual themes for the map.
  • Runestones:
    • Forests now generate closer to the player’s town centers again.
    • Forests surrounding the players are now larger (from 45 trees to 65 trees per forest).
    • All elevation immediately around the players’ town centers has been removed.
    • Herdables now spawn between 16 to 20 tiles away from the player’s town centers (from 20 to 24 tiles).
    • Boars now generate closer to the player’s town centers (from 16 to 14 tiles).
    • Slight variation has been added to the player’s starting location, so they no longer generate in a perfect circle.

These are all pretty big changes, hopefully the one about arabia hills means that there’s much less odds of having claustrophobically close hills surrounding the town center. Or better yet removing the odds of having such hills entirely.

I’m happiest about the runestones’ ‘all elevations around the tcs are removed’ finally. Hopefully that happens on arabia as well, or at least reduces town center area hills to a minimum.

This looks fun

  • Amazon Tunnel:
    • The center of the map is now accessible on all settings (more than 2 teams, free-for-all etc).
    • The starting forest clumps are evenly distributed, larger, and slightly closer to the players.
  • NEW! Ranked Deathmatch is now available in Custom Lobbies!

Very good, I’m looking forward to and hoping for many more ranked lobby game modes, including nomad and regicide.

  • Fixed an issue where players were unable to click anything on the ranked screen if a match is found in match making while the civ screen is opened.

This is a big one, I’ve been experiencing it allot as of late.

  • Removed the “Preferred Region” filter from the Lobby Browser.

Can’t say I’m a fan of that.(may or may not be a good thing, depends on if it’s as I imagine or not)

  • NEW! Ctrl+right click can be used to attack a target, ignoring any retargeting command. A unit will only retarget if:
    • They cannot path to the target object.
    • The target has been killed.
    • The target has moved out of range.

This looks very useful

Coming Up…

2022 Will Be Busy!
At the close of last year we mentioned that there’s plenty on the horizon for Age II:DE, with our plans to continue updating and supporting the game for a long, long time. It’s the New Year and as we deliver the January Update, we’re working through a ton of planning in parallel and thinking about how we can best share our aspirations with you (and trust us, there’s some really cool stuff in the works!) We know you’re interested in this info, so we’ll be sure to follow up once we’re ready to reveal just a few of the things coming to Age II:DE in 2022!

This looks like they’re on the final stages of getting ready to share their roadmap.

  • Villagers no longer go idle after going back to work if two Town Centers are selected.*

This is a big one for me since I use the select all town centers hotkey and usually hit the town bell at certain times if needed with all of them selected. I’m glad it’s fixed cause this was a huge problem at times.

  • Co-op campaigns have left Beta mode! Featuring 6 full campaigns and 5 historical battles!

Glad to see it’s made its strides and is now fully functional.

  • Shift queue attack behavior improved for group of units.

Now this I’m curious about, will military units of all types and even buildings such as castles follow the shift queue orders properly?

  • Handicap mode now makes resources last longer, to balance out faster gathering rates.

This will help newer players a bit more in terms of build order habits, glad to see the improvement to this system.

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Can you be more specific please?
In which way does that look very useful to you? Can you give an example of a situation where it would be useful?

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When wanting a unit to attack a specific unit in a group, instead of having to use stand ground to keep them from switching targets on their way to that unit, simply use this new feature.

At least that’s what I’m imagining from the reading of this description.

I’m curious if this works with groups selected to attack a single unit(ignoring others) or just individual units towards individual units, however.

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Why do you have to use stand ground? I mean thats the default behaviour for a simple right click. You can try it right now in the editor. Just place a monk behind hundreds of other units, and then send your units to kill that monk by right clicking on hi. They wont change target or otherwise detour from their task until they kill the monk. Then restart the scenario and Ctrl+right click on the monk. The result will be exactly the same

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That small addition is about the most intreguing part about the update to me.
I hope we get signifigant thematic map visuals.
But What I am most anxious for the devs to add is:
Region specific Random map options.

An OPTIONAL setting where you can select specific random map biomes based on region.

And better events/rewards.
This event and rewards is soul numbingly boring and visionless.
I want events celebrating the cultures of each civ. For instance a ME civ event that includes rewards such as all dark age houses become Berber tents for ME civs(and African Huts for African dark age houses + Steppe tribes dark age houses become Yurts , All Mongol houses should become Yurts), Add a reward that allows all ME civs cavaliers to look like the AoE3 Mameluke cav found in the Saloon.

Make a civ event for the Japanese that allows each reward to unlock a AoE3 Japanese unit such as the Yumi archer line added to Aoe2, the Samuri line added to aoe 2 , make the AoE3 Ninja the AoE2 Japanese champion as well as the entire cavalry line. It will be perfect for civ event rewards.
Units to be ported from AoE3 DE:
Mamluke for ME cav
All the Japanese, Inca and Aztec units, Spanish pike line, some Chinese units, the Mayan spearman for the AoE2 Maya halb, the Husa and Ethiopian spears and archer and all of the desert outlaws, and many more!

Any DE3 unit wielding a sword ,spear, club , mace ,lance ,bow should be added to AoE DE2 allocated to correct civs.

If you really want to connect AOE2 to events of today, give us a Plague event, with rewards such as a ‘‘Plague doctor’’ Profile Icon and give the Mongols a unique tech (Biological Warfare) that allows their trebuchets to slowly drain the HP of any unit located within 3 squares of the impact point by 1 HP per second for 10 seconds. Depicting how the Mongols flung rotting ,plague ridden corpses into enemy cities to infect the besieged.

Please make event trophies and rewards/unit reskins civ specific. I don’t want to choose only one trophy for all of my civ TCs.
I want to have the Steppe cav archer trophy for all the steppe tribes, the Turkish Bombard trophy for the Turks only, The Teutonic Knight trophy for the Teutons and so on. Please.
I don’t want Amazon arbs for all my civs only the Mezzo civs.

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Why do you have to use stand ground? I mean thats the default behaviour for a simple right click. You can try it right now in the editor. Just place a monk behind hundreds of other units, and then send your units to kill that monk by right clicking on hi. They won t change target or otherwise detour from their task until they kill the monk. Then restart the scenario and Ctrl+right click on the monk. The result will be exactly the same

When you do a scoutrush with 4 Scouts and click at a specific vill in a crouded woodline e.g., one or two of your scouts will always chose other vills to attack. That is the default behaviour for aggressive stance. On stand-ground they will all attack the selected vill. And now we can (hopefully) do that with STRG+Rightclick instead.

3 Likes
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Oh. I rarely use aggresive stance, probably that{s why i didn{t notice any changes. thanks for clearing that out