Yes, in fact AoE 3 and 4 have campaign-only civilizations, although several eventually made it into the multiplayer of those games (United States, Malta, and Knights Templar)… so I don’t see why AoE 2 couldn’t have something similar…
So… let’s make some single player civs and test them out. Who’s in?
The juice might not be worth the squeeze if their bonuses require more than simple data modding.
The same as modeling and animating their unique units.
Need 3D model from Blender first with Cycles, then texturing, dozens of renders, hundreds of PNGs, then pack as SMX. And they aren’t the only steps. Is all of this worth it to create a new campaign unit from scratch? And what will happen if the people rally for pushing these civs to ranked as well, like there aren’t already enough ranked civs?
I can create the unit, but will the unit be worth creating considering all the time and effort spent? Honestly, I wouldn’t go more than data modding without being impressed.
Editor already has units like the war dogs which does the excat same thing.
People complain about too many civs because of the asymmetry and unusual mechanics introduced by Indian, Chinese and South American DLCs. If the civ is straightforward to play with generic units like Tatars, Lithuanians, there’s nothing much needed to be “learnt” new when playing such a civ. Solution to this problem is limiting the number of civs per asymmetric DLC to two and releasing such DLCs once in 3-4 years. Like you have Indian DLC with just Gurjaras and Bengalis, three years later Chinese DLC with just Wei and Jurchens. That’s fine.
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What about limiting the number of ranked civs to 50?
Already passed that count so best we can hope for is less than 100.
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So would the ideal single player civs be going forward? If they do well they could eventually be worked into multiplayer
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I’d prefer 30.
Best we can hope is 53
The game can’t handle more civs without sacrificing quality and downgrading the existing civs.
Even Champi was the result of the unit bonus bottleneck. Because if they had the militia line instead, their militia line bonuses would overlap with the existing civs’ bonuses.
You’re frankly delusional if you hope for that, considering they’re gonna milk this for all it’s worth and as shown before the average player doesn’t care what they’re being sold as long as it’s more content.
It’s why you’ll see much more positive reception on Social media for the DLCs like on Facebook or Twitter.
You’re frankly delusional if you hope for that, considering they’re gonna milk this for all it’s worth and as shown before the average player doesn’t care what they’re being sold as long as it’s more content.
So, once again, making SP-exclusive civs, units, mechanics etc. is the solution.
agreed. I have given up hope that aoe2 will ever reach a playable state again
Yes, I feel that AoE 2 (and the saga in general, now that we’re on the subject) has too many DLCs so quickly and so frequently that they don’t have time to rethink things in a better way. It’s just adding DLC after DLC to keep the machine running… It was better in the 2HD/AoMEE era (2013-2016) when you had one DLC per year… AoE 3 DE and AoE 4 only had one DLC each in 2022 and 2023 and nobody batted an eye…In 2024, none of them had any DLC because of the development of AoMR… and in 2025 they let AoE 3 die to revive AoMR…
You can join me in playing HD, it’s honestly fun even without the QoL stuff.
The problem in my opinion is that there’s no other way viable way for them to make money and if you watched Age of Noob’s video on the possibility of an AoE5, you’d know they sunk too much money on AoE4 which ultimately wasn’t a success. To the point I genuinely wonder if it was profitable.
So they’re sticking to the only thing they know that they can monetize, which is DLC that adds civs for the game in the franchise that has the largest playerbase (AoE2 has like 5X times more active players than any of the other games) and also the cheapest to make content for. So they’ll keep doing it as long as it essentially pays their debts and bring Microsoft more money.
I’ve tried before, but it feels so clunky. And I’m pissed off that I bought a game on false promises
The sooner you learn that 90% of promises are false, the better. People are inherently untrustworthy.
HD is just a modpack for the OG game,people even ported all the new civi stuff HD added to the OG game.
I’m still impressed they could backport engine changes like Regen for non berserkers etc
Who infused these people such amazing talent