Games like Dota 2 have great gameplay in a variety of network conditions. Even if one person is lagging, the game doesn’t lag for others. Age of empires doesn’t implement this and therefore, anyone with any internet can only have the experience of someone with bad internet. Units lag, can’t micro, and extremely delayed commands. Not to mention out of sync errors. Why isn’t age of empires moving away from the simultaneous simulation model to something a little more modern, that actually works well in other multiplayer games like starcraft? I don’t think AOE 4 is going to change any networking aspect of the code either, it’s still going to be a bad experience in multiplayer
It’s not so easy to move away from peer-to-peer, the game would need dedicated servers for this and probably a major rewrite of the network code.