In AoE2: DE, it’s very common to play with mods that alter the look of the game for you. That move UI elements around, that apply custom skins to different units (such as Snowmen At Arms or Musketeers instead of Hand Cannoneers), that help remind you of your civ’s unique bonuses, or the ever-popular small trees mod.
Some of these provide almost critical quality-of-life features to users.
These mods work in ranked just fine.
At the moment, it looks like AoM:R doesn’t let you do this. I installed just one mod: bottom left resources. Never mind that this should be a default included option, there’s a good mod to fix this for you. It should be possible to use this and other mods that only affect the UI/unit models in ranked games.
But at the moment if you try, you get an error telling you to disable mods before playing online.
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Visual mods are allowed in AoE3DE too so I think this is just an oversight and not a decision to ban them.
Making a system that can verify that a mod is indeed just changing the UI is some effort and I assume they decided to dedicate their resources to fix critical bugs and major issues before release instead.
I hope this will be fixed rather sooner then later though.
Bottom Left Resources should be a default option anyway though.
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Some stuff should not be allowed. Players will begin removing textures from the game potentially. I don’t see why you can’t swap out god portraits though.
I am not even playing ranked because I hate any UI without resources on bottom left.
What’s wrong if they do remove textures, or add in new textures that they think are easier to read? In AoE2 it’s not uncommon for players to use mods that turn all trees into little cubes, and nobody has a problem with that. As long as it’s not giving you access to information that would have been impossible for you to know otherwise (e.g. exposing the fog of war), it should be allowed.
That’s a terrible thing and shouldn’t allowed. It will make the game look so unpleasant to watch. It’s a huge problem. It also gives players an unfair advantage. They should be banned.
Ok, so don’t do it? We’re talking about giving people the option to play the game how they want. I don’t play aoe2 with cube mod because it looks bad. Some people do play with it. Let each person make the decision for themselves.
It’s not an unfair advantage because it’s not giving you access to any information you couldn’t have before. Only making it easier to access information that’s already available. It’s basically like accessibility features.
Terrible idea. I doubt they’ll allow players to ruin the visuals.