My updated campaign tierlist

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Hello everyone;

I’ve now finished another full campaign playthrough and wanted to share an up to date tierlist regarding my feelings on all the campaigns, battles and v&v scenarios (including RoR content). The criteria are very simple - it’s just my personal feelings on the campaign design combined with how much fun I had with it in my recent full playthrough. Last year I posted a campaign tierlist on reddit at the end of this longer post:
https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe2/comments/1ayv0ta/a_one_sentence_review_for_every_single_aoe2/
Since then, I’ve played some of the campaigns multiple times, and all of them at least one additional time; I’m now a bit stricter on what’s needed to get into S-Tier, looking at my current thoughts - now, here’s the list - there’s also a bit of a ranking within the tiers:

S-Tier: Jadwiga, The Grand Campaign (BfG), Rajendra, Jan Zizka

A-Tier: Algirdas & Kestutis, Tamar, Tamerlane, Attila the Hun, Honfoglalás, Pyrrhus of Epirus, Devapala, Xie An, Mstislav, Prithviraj, Kotyan Khan, Francisco de Almeida

B-Tier: William Wallace, Babur, Ismail, Thoros, Barbarossa, Charlemagne, Vinlandsaga, Trajan, Sargon of Akkad, The Hautevilles, Vlad Dracula, Liu Bei, Bukhara, Seljuk, Voices of Babylon, Vortigern, Bayinnaung, Otto, Ivalyo, Fetih, Sforza, Alaric, Sun Clan

C-Tier: Grand Dukes, El Cid, Genghis Khan, Bari, Cao Cao, Saladin, Karlsefni, Sundjata, Constantine XIII, Glory of Greece, Tours, Kurikara, Stephen, Hastings, Gaiseric, Lepanto, Cyprus, Drake, Shimazu, Kyoto, Noryang Point, Ascent of Egypt, Art of War, Nobunaga, Dos Pilas, Ragnar, Robert

D-Tier: Edward Longshanks, Le Loi, Montezuma, Joan of Arc, Gajah Mada, Suryavarman I., Manzikert, Agincourt, The First Punic War, Finehair, Ironside, York, Lake Poyang, Pachacuti, Tariq ibn Ziyad, Temujin, Yodit

Feel free to share your thoughts & opinions, where you’d agree and disagree or any questions on how I came to some of my rankings :slight_smile:

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Agincourt deserves a tier of its own as you can win it with one single click and staying AFK :upside_down_face:

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The biggest opstacle in Agincourt is the terrible pathing.

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It’s still very short and super easy even if played as intended. Though I’m not 100% sure the 1 click solution still works, at least on hard difficulty, which this list is based on. Tried it some time ago and it didn’t get the job done.

I used to have an F-Tier, with Yodit, Temujin and Lake Poyang in it, but the Yodit rating was partly based on story and civ representation (while this list is more gameplay-focused, so Yodit barely makes it to D-Tier), Temujin has been improved to be slightly less boring in a recent patch by now, and Lake Poyang is a lot more bearable with the changes to the chinese navy (researchable dragon ships, and the Lou Chuan now being included). Felt surprisingly “normal” to play this time around.

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The main gimmick of Agincourt is indeed having some lines from Shakespeare.

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Which historically is what doomed the french army. Had pathing been good, the chivalrous french knight would have steamrolled the perfidious english archers :upside_down_face:

(though some historians blame the weather too)

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Ah! So all we need to do is pretend the pathing issues in the game are caused by terrain! I suppose that could work. I think you just solved the issue.

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Well I did have a unit of hoplites stuck on a fountain for 5 minutes…

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looks pretty good at a first glance. id agree with sun + liu bei at b-tier and caocao at c-tier. honestly caocao could even be d-tier if you were feeling brutal.

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Really? I only watched the campaigns on YT and didn’t play them, but Cao Cao looked like it was the best one to me. Although none looked particularly exciting, as every scenario kind of looked like a generic build and destroy but with some sort of capture village/city/camp objective. Only Cao Cao mission 4 looked somewhat interesting, the ones where you could choose a brother to ally with.

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Cao Cao has two significant problems that put it a tier lower than the other two 3k campaigns for me:
a) the storytelling is noticeably less interesting compared to the other two campaigns. You’re just your typical ruthless warlord trying to conquer everything, and, unlike in the other campaigns, there aren’t really any sidekicks or other characters to keep things interesting, so a lot of the in-game dialogue is with unnamed advisors - feels very generic.
b) Except for mission 5, where you’re forced to build a navy (with, by far, the worst naval civ in the expansion), you can just spam cavalry and win. Very one dimensional in terms of unit composition. The first campaign, you need at least to get some anti-cav infantry to support your archers, and the Sun Clan army is quite flexible and might consistent on many types of units. In general, Cao Cao, despite having two swords, is a lot easier than Liu Bei, except for the final mission.

It also doesn’t help that Cao Caos special ability sometimes bugs out and results in your hero unit being stuck, sometimes for the remainder of the mission.

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Ah, I see, thanks for clearing that up. Personally I thought Liu Bei’s campaign was a really poor representation of the actual story, and as for the Sun Clan one, I also thought there were a lot of errors storywise, and generally the story doesn’t seem very interesting, plus very repetitive gameplay. All this is also true for Cao Cao, but from what I saw, a lesser extent than the other 2.

Anyways, if you are interested in custom campaigns, I very recently uploaded my own Cao Cao campaign using the Chinese civ (it’s a coincidence that I was working on a Cao Cao campaign while the devs were also working on one). It’s fully “voice acted” (using a.i) and I’ve portrayed Cao Cao not as a typical villain, but someone with noble goals, such as restoring order& putting an end to the chaos, but after constant betrayal and getting let down by his allies, he becomes more authoritative, self centered and ruthless in his methods as the campaign progresses. I’ve also developed Cao Cao’s relationship with Yuan Shao, Liu Bei and Guan Yu much more than the official version.