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.