Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition, is not so new player friendly. Maybe this is because the devs always view it from an “old players come back” point of view, but whenever I introduced a friend in AoE2 (4 so far) I ran into these 3 exact problems:
1) Moderate is too easy & Hard is too hard for new players → Really, as soon as you learn how the units work and stuff like that, a new player can beat the Moderate AI 100% of the time. At the same time, will lose to the Hard AI 100% of the time. This sucks if you want to play vs AI.
So as a solution, it would be cool if the game had an Advanced AI difficulty. Someone who plays aggressive like Hard (doesn’t camp waiting to die like Moderate) but develops as slow as Moderate.
This could be the balance new players need.
2) Give the player the options to set the difficulty of EACH AI rather than ALL AI → Meaning, being able to set one AI to Hard and another to Moderate, and stuff like that.
3) 800 Starting ELO → I see the AoE2 forums are full of this complaint, so why nothing is done about it? The 1000 ELO is way too much for a new player. People with 1000 elo are already of average level of skill. Rather than starting from the bottom like in any other competitive game mode.
Out of all 4 I introduced in Age of Empires 2, exactly 0 of them play competitive. Why? “because it sucks because you always play with people far better than you, I lost 5 games and I still play with people way better than me, this is BS, this whole rank system is BS”.
What do you want me to say? “Oh, just lose 20 games and then you will play with people of you skill level”. Yeah, good luck with that. The system is broken.