One of the things that I loved of the HD edition was that if you don’t owned a (or all DLCs) you could still play with one of the DLC civilizations in multiplayer in a weekly round with different civs, that at least never left behind people to have fun with them at least if it was a mere one.
Currently, of my friends on steam who plays AOE 2DE all now have the DLC which I found sooo unfortunate because all will have fun with them while I will probably stick with the old ones, besides the new civs are clearly too strong, and facing them but not using at least one of them is pretty sad IMO.
If I’mnot mistaken @FenomenoAOC made a post about some strings that indicates a civ rotation of something.
I hope that MS read this consider the idea, which probably would help thousands of players.
Those one:
IDS_POPUP_CIV_UPGRADE_SUBHEADING "Available Civilizations Rotate Weekely."
IDS_POPUP_CIV_UPGRADE_TIMER "Next Rotation In: \n%sdays %shrs %smin %ssec"
IDS_POPUP_CIV_UPGRADE_TEXT "Upgrade to the full Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition to unlock unlimited access to all Civilizations, all campaigns, all multiplayer feature, Skirmish versus AI, and more."
But now I checked string file again, and they are removed. It doesn’t mean that civ rotation is abandoned ( Developers could remove those to hide them from community ), but we still don’t know if that civ rotation was for multiplayer for players who don’t own Lords of the West. IMO, third string I copied here from my post, may indicate it was meant for demo version of the game. In game data there are images of disabled campaigns and button to upgrade game to unlock full content.
I’m pretty surprised they did bother toning the new civs down in some aspects, even though they are too good in others (hi first crusade) I think other civs have more than a fighting chance.
Asof the idea of a rotation, I don’t think it can work with the matchmaking system and the fact it’s only 2 civs, so you an’t just reuse the HD system.
Balancing is trial and error. They released the DLC with the mindset of rather making them a little bit better right now and toning it down after getting feedback. The problem is “IT IS BROKEN” after 0-4 games. Now this is a balancing issue and will not persist for the longest of times. Both civs will recieve tuning in perhaps a few weeks to a month, depending on the devs schedule.
The issue isn’t owning or not owning the DLC and craving that a relatively cheap dlc is free is insane to me.
I doubt their pay for civ strategy anyway. I gives me a bad ‘déjà vu’.
They have been there and tried that already (with AOEO) and it didn’t end too well.
Adding a few civs per year for free would make it able to keep your online fresh meat MP audience.
So I think it would be better to generate more money out of additional DLC sales (with new campaigns for the new civs), AOE merchandizing, tournament sponsoring and civ sponsoring.
Although I do think it’s good to make AOE II a true civ fest by adding more unique civs.
Yes, continues balancing and fine tuning of all civs will probably always stay important for this game.
I didn’t buy the DLC, however I think that civ rotation will be unfair to the people, who did. Also, in HD, civ rotation worked because there were a lot of locked civs and as such, the rotation was barely reliable. Right now there are only 2 civs and rotating them would, again, be unfair.