Several simple requests of must-have things for AoE 2

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Sound issues:

  1. There must be an option to off the units’ answers but leave the story talk on, separately. Like in any strategy of last 25 years. Repeated, meaningless answers are really annoying.

  2. Unit acknowledgements must not repeat kwa-kwa-kwa style when many similar actions are done. Phrases must have a «cooldown» so 20 houses build order would only make 1 phrase.

  3. Elephants must make real elephant sound (not dev blowing his nose). In AoE 1 ported content this works properly already, just do the same for AoE 2 elephants.

  4. Bull cart must not neigh like a horse.

  5. For some reason transport ship makes noises of chicken coop.

Historical accuracy:

  1. Make peasants of different ethnic races have different models.

You already did this in AoE 4. I certainly don’t think that each of the 40 races should have a unique worker model, but there should be certain types: European, African, Muslim nations, Middle Asian (Mongolian related), East Asian, India nations, Native American, Slavic.

But the current state, when even in the campaign of the African and American peoples we see white peasants, is nonsense.

  1. Also priests, knights and kings need more models and names for different civs.

  2. Wild boar must not be in America, it was brought there later. It will not ruin the campaigns if just removed or replaced by some deer.

Edit: I really like the idea proposed in the comments to replace boars in America with tapirs.

Technical:

  1. Restart button doesn’t mean restart. It means “load the useless save before you loose”. Why?!

  2. Queen mod must not work in campaigns, it turns all historical kings into a bad joke.

  3. Queen mod must not be a mod at all, it must be integrated in standard skirmish with queen probability of about 20%. Because why manually choose between variants when we can have it all in the core mechanics?

Probably fixed already but I will leave those for log:

  1. bug with animals walking backwards.

  2. bug with units sliding inside trees during battle.

  3. When monks are included in the same squad with the army and they are pointed to enemy building, but they cannot turn it, they fall into a stupor and do not move. This must be fixed.

  4. Sargon 4 mission too hard. Even on lowest difficulty. Attacked all sides by stronger units, time limits, help 2 allies and there is no gold on the base! (though I didn’t check it since May, so mb it’s already fixed).

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This would be a fine addition but it should never use the cartoonish aoe4 graphics.

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They need to add the African Elephant models to AOE2DE. They were made for AOE1DE. Similar for the lion and alligator model sprites.

Bulls should be added to the editor like cows/spawn on maps as herdables.

Agree with the peasants race addition, same for priests/monks and the kings/queen spawn.

The javelina (wild boar) should be replaced by a tapir model (maybe a black/white version and the South American tapir - its already in AOE3DE.

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Totally agree about monks and monarch models.
I like the idea of boars being replaced by tapirs but not sure how much historically accurate is this. Did they live in areas of Maya and Inkas?

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Baird’s Tapir live in Mexico and other parts of Central America. So given that most large animals had higher populations before people started hunting them down en masse or destroying habitat for farmland, I would say yeah it’s most likely they would have overlapped in territory.

You also have Tapir in South East Asia as well.

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I’ve added your suggestion about tapirs to the main text.

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Here. Tapir | Age of Empires Series Wiki | Fandom

They inhabit South and Central America, including the Andean region, as well as Southeast Asia. So two variations could be included since they would be making the effort to add them anyway. But Giraffes and Hippos are another large animal that could be added, in addition to Bison, Yaks and Seals…(huntable/herdable in case of Yak).

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To me, it’s fine that the Javelina is simply a renamed Wild Boar, because they look similar to boars IRL and were present in South and Central America.

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Highly disagree. They are visually quite different. Peccary/Javelina are much smaller. The wolf sprite and the Wild Board sprite are also far too big. See how big the wolf and Wild Boar are compared to deer and other animals.The deer needs to be resized to the size of the Gazelle at least, or their sizes need to be swapped…Resizing is needed badly.

Screenshot (248)
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Peccary

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Wild Boar

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The jaguar can be renamed to leopard and added for south asian maps just like boar/javalina without any visual change.

We can also have black white bears using the same model recolored.

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Does anyone have the tech skills to do this?

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If Florida maps get added, we can get the alligator as a renamed crocodile.

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You can see the African elephant and AOE1DE Alligator here near the gazelles on right. They are extremely well made assets.

Screenshot (9)
Screenshot (9)1920×1200 446 KB

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I recently checked the changes in the game. I was pleasantly surprised that some changes (thanks to me or by coincidence) were made:

  • the wrapping rule now interacts well with the resource line
  • Sargon 4 mission has become easier
  • also I didn’t see moonwalking animals (may be just was out of luck)

Still needs a lot of those changes, especially about sounds.

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Pretty good list. The only thing I disagree with is putting unit’s speech on a cooldown as I and I suspect others subconsciously use this as confirmation that the game has registered your actions. If they stopped doing that I would probably get disoriented specially if I was giving repeated orders of the same task such as building several houses one after the other as I would want to make sure that each of those house foundations really did get placed.

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This could be optional. For high competitive gameplay this might be needed. But when player just walks the campaign, especially on easy, he just does not need this.

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We need dogs, hunting dogs which can herd deer and other huntables. They can also attack, albeit with smaller attack except against unarmoured units.

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The unit sounds are very dated for sure.
AoE3 improved that a lot whit giving almost every unit of a civilisation a different voice but AoE4 elevated that to a completely different level.
AoE3 uses AoE2 voice lines for some Minor civilisations, Outlaws and Mercenaries though.

But AoE2 has a lot of civilisations so it’s prohibitively expensive to rerecord all of them.
There are probably also technical limitations too.

And then there is also the fact that a lot of people like the voices, mostly out of nostalgia.

About the repeated voice lines.
I think no voice on repeated would feel wrong, but the fact that villagers only have one builder voice line can be a little annoying.
Maybe add a second shorter quieter voice to actions that gets played when a command gets repeated quickly.
So for example:
“BUILDER”, “yes”, “yes”, “yes”, “yes”, “yes”

That would apply to other often repeated tasks like walking too.
Less repeated tasks like attacking, mining, wood cutting, etc. wouldn’t really need it.

But I don’t think the AoE2 engine can handle that yet.

Missing regional skins (at last for skin colour) makes the game a lot less immersive in my opinion.
That’s why I made a poll about those kinda things a while ago.
[poll] Cosmetic DLC

Turns out a lot of people would even be willing to pay money just to get regional unit skins.

Or at last give us the civilisations crest on the shields of generic units:
Civilisation crest on generic units

It’s a mod. It replaces the skin and voice lines of the King unit with the Queen. So that will always also affect the campaign too.
Like all other cosmetic mods do.

It would be nice to just make it a feature to sometimes have a Queen in skirmish.
We need regional queens though.

I like the idea of a new game mode where you have a King and a Queen and you only lose when both die.
So you have 2 lives instead of 1, basically.

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This is just a lost of wishes from a player. Claiming these are must haves is way too much. Most of them fit the description “nice to have” or even “not needed” for me.

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Thanks for the interesting post.

I didn’t suggest re-sounding civilizations; they are sounded normally. We are only talking about having two settings: disabling replies and rarer replies.
Only elephants, bull carts, a transport ship and maybe some other effects that are not human voices need to be remade.
Personally, I played StarCraft 2 for many years and had the sound COMPLETELY turned off and played under Winamp. I was in the diamond team league. So I know that unit voice acting is over-emphasized, at least until it comes to competing in the higher leagues. The only sound message that should always remain is “we are under attack.”

Selling skin colors is a very bad idea. I wouldn’t like to explain why. In general, I don’t like the idea of selling skins at all. We already support the game enough and I believe that the authors are able to update it with such content at no additional cost. Moreover, they spend development resources on skins for square piggies and balls and other nonsense. INSTEAD they could gradually introduce worker, monk, king and queen skins.
I took part in your polls and voted everywhere for moderate options like “I want it, but for free” and “I want a moderate variety of buildings.”

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