I’d go one step further and say that Dawn of the Dukes was the only good DE DLC.
lords of the west had big issues with civ design: especially the single use techs, but also civ identity and civ choice (did we really need burgundians, why aren’t they called normans instead of sicilians)
DoI really started the trend of stuffing bullshit mechanics into every civ, like the shwarma rider magic shield, mode switching etc
Exactly!
And thats why Three Kingdoms should be on Chronicles or its own Game Variant
They could keep Jurchens, Kitans and release Tanguts while keeping Heroes only on Campaigns not Skirmishes or MP
Yes, I didn’t want to be so extreme, because otherwise many will say “the last great DLC was The Last Khans in 2DE launch or RotR in 2HD” and so on back to The Conquerors or even AoK itself… I want to be more forgiving and say “well, the devs must be running out of ideas for new civilizations, so they’re simply influenced by AoM and AoE 3 (and at some point they’ll do it with AoE 4)… in the other games they’re influenced by AoE 2 for many things, so I see it as logical that AoE 2 will also be influenced by the other games in the series to maintain a certain connection between the games in the saga…”
Likewise, and while you’re at it, give those civilizations campaigns: Jurchens (Wayna Aguda/Jin-Song Wars), Khitans (Kushluk against Genghis Khan), and Tanguts (Li Yuanhao)… Regarding heroes, you have two options: either leave them only for campaigns or give all civilizations a scout hero (as in AoE 3 and a little bit of 4)…
Despite the name, they are a split of Franks and Vikings. Burgundians represent the late medieval French, and Sicilians are the closest thing we’ll find to Vikings outside of Scandinavia.
I more meant that especially Burgundians are such a minor entity in the political landscape that including them as a civ was stupid. Sicilians being unclear in their identity if they want to be Normans or Sicilians. Either way, that is probably my smallest complaint about this DLC
If they actually added Heroes to every single civ I would unironically start hitting Forgotten Empires with chargebacks. That would be a mask off rug pull
If they do that iI uninstall the game.
uninstalling means nothing to them. you need to at least change your steam review to “not recommend”, ideally also hit them with refund requests
I agree that this is happening. But who asked for this? None of us bought a game that was advertised as live service. Doing this kind of change without an opt-out is just scummy by the dev team.
Yes, I think they’re testing it to see how the community receives it, but I believe they’ll eventually implement it… the question is whether they’ll include heroes as a class, like AoM Retold (based on age, like the Franks: Dark Age: Charlemagne, Feudal Age: Reynald of Châtillon, Castle Age: Joan of Arc, and Nicolas Durand for Imperial Age), or just a single hero scout throughout the game with some passive and active abilities (like in Age of Empires 3 and 4)…
Yes, it’s a good option… to write a review saying that while it’s a good game, being a live service game, it has many DLCs and mechanics that might not appeal to everyone…
Being Microsoft, I expected it, since they’d been doing it since 2HD… When they announced the DE trilogy in 2017, I said, “They’re going to milk those poor games dry”… The only thing I didn’t expect was that they’d milk AoE 2 DE so much and that it would have DLCs for so long (I thought that after Return of Rome in 2022 or VaV in 2024 it wouldn’t get any more DLC and that they’d just focus on Return of Rome or Chronicles)… It was a disappointment that 1DE came out without any new expansions and that they abandoned it in 2020 during the pandemic to focus on 2DE (although it’s a logical decision, it’s a bit sad because of the potential 1DE had for its historical setting)… What hurt me the most was that they abandoned 3DE in January 2025 (actually, they had already half-abandoned it in 2022) just when they had finally touched Europe and were including nostalgic maps from 2 and Age of Empires (Black Forest, Scandinavia, Mediterranean, Archipelago, Acropolis, Anatolia, etc.) and included historical maps with European conflicts from the early modern period (Italian Wars, Eighty and Thirty Years’ Wars, the Swedish/Polish Deluge, the Great Turkish War aka the Siege of Vienna of 1683, the Great Northern War, the Napoleonic Wars, and the Russo-Turkish Wars aka the Crimean War) (1494-1853)… In the canceled 3DE Baltic DLC that they would launched by the AoE 3 DE 5th anniversary in last October, they were definitely going to include several more scenarios that were missing (the Swedish-Danish Wars, the Spanish/Polish/Austrian Wars of Succession, the Seven Years’ War, the French Revolutionary Wars, the Italian Risorgimento, and German Unification aka the Dano-Prussian War, the Austro-Prussian War, and the Franco-Prussian War) (1523-1870)…
the big difference: in 2HD you can select the data set in-game, and even fully roll back the version on steam. neither is an option in DE.
Yes, that’s true…they got really lazy in 2DE…
What happened with those “CivHero” entries in the file icons.json? Haven’t checked whether they are still around.
Hopefully the idea got abandoned.
Took a look at icons.json, they’re still there, and they added Macedonians, Thracians, and Puru.
I see two ways to implement heroes without it being too annoying:
a) They are trainable only at Wonders (so they are basically meaningless in most games, as building a Wonder isn’t worth it unless with wonder victory condition)
b) They are a separate mode like Regicide
I prefer option B, even if you mix it with CBA, then you already have a MOBA mode…
Hi, as a new player to the game, where did they say it was a campaign based dlc?
I started playing on ps5 and we can’t download mods to the game like pc so in essence based on what your saying should of been cheaper for pc players as “only 5 new scenarios” and labeled mainly for console players as this would be the only we we can access the modded scenarios.
In terms of 3k, they are factions not civs so really they should have been in a chronicles dlc and kept out of ranked due to hero units. They should also of finished the story by having a chronicles as it ends way before the the actual end of the three kingdoms as wei came out on top initially before being taken out by Jin dynasty so they should also be in the game?
For console players though the more dlc the better as we are massively limited by not being able to access mods, for example we can’t even play the official AOE louvre mod scenario which is crazy considering it’s meant to be official and for all players.
in lots of the announcements (mostly taken down now), but even still in this promotional video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2E721-vptOo (full of other lies)
yeah, this DLC is definitely better value for console players. but even then, the content is just really low quality compared to other campaigns.
yeah, considering that mods can be downloaded from within the game (ie it doesn’t use steam’s mod infrastructure) I don’t understand why they haven’t added that functionality to the console versions.
Watching that they seem to think a scenario which is just historical battles are a campaign when a campaign to me is a series of missions following on from one another which doesn’t seem the case.
They make it sound like they made big changes to the current modded scenarios you can play when by the sounds of it they haven’t.
The 5 new scenarios are fine but it’s not a £15 (I’m in the uk) worth of dlc.
Out of interest what are would you like to see coming up from bits they haven’t covered?
For me they should have added more content to 1DE as they didn’t add anything new really and there are plenty more things they could do in that time period.
Then they should sort out 3de, the campaigns should have been historically correct and they should make the dlc they cancelled although according to steamdb it looks like something may be happening.
Then as I said above just take out the 3k and hero units and keep them exclusively in the 3k campaigns and actually finish the story arc with the Jin dynasty.