Optimize performance or AoE II: DE is dead on arrival

I’ve been playing AoE II HD recently and noticed that, despite many patches, it still has major performance issues on the large maps with many players and high (> 300?) pop limits, even in single player where internet is not a factor. Chief among these is unit pathfinding, which essentially becomes non-functional at high pop limits and drags FPS down to < 1.

To be honest, I’m not sure why they bothered with features like 500 pop limit and LudaKRIS map size when it is obvious that the game engine in its current form cannot handle them.

If you look at the AoE I: DE forums, poor unit pathfinding was also a major problem in that game as well. I hope the Devs have learned their lesson and realize that this problem desperately needs fixed in for AoE II DE. Please optimize pathfinding for 2018 hardware! Otherwise, the modern additions to the game are pointless.

I realize these are simply remastering jobs, but this fix will keep people playing the game for much longer!

7 Likes

YES!!! When you play with large amounts of units, they just bug and don’t move for a couple seconds wasting time. It is very frustrating

2 Likes

It probably is easiest to use in AOE 2 DE pathfinding from AOE 2 AOC. That one works better than AOE 2 HD pathfinding.
Though I do not agree, that improving pathfinding is most important thing in AOE 2 DE and also it certainly won’t kill the game to use AOE 2 HD pathfinding.

Population limit over 200 is not balanced in this game with regard to upgrade costs, amount of resources on map, etc. It reduces possibility for exact management of units and instead changes game to clashes of large unmanaged armies and endless need to find new work for villagers, because there simply is so many of them, that someone always depletes his resources.
Playing with population limit over 200 is pretty extreme way of playing and a niche, not mainstream. I don’t even know any campaign scenarios which have so high limit.

Actually even population limit of 200 is not balanced in a same way, as originally intended, because upgrade costs and amount of resources on the map are the same, but population limit is not 75. So gold runs out too quickly, etc.

So I can’t find, that game being sluggish on high population limit would be a huge problem, although it definitely would be good if pathfinding would work better/smoother than currently in AOE 2 HD.

2 Likes