Suggestion - Warcraft 3 added (12v12) from it's original 12 player support. Why can't AOE2 get (8v8) 16 player matches from it's original 8 player support?

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Warcraft 3 originally supported 12 players but later expanded to allow 12v12 matches, increasing the total player count to 24. Age of Empires II has long been capped at 8 players. Why not expand AoE2 to support 16-player (8v8) or 24-player (12v12) matches? It would open up exciting possibilities for massive team games, custom scenarios, and large-scale multiplayer battles.

If performance is a concern (especially for ranked), the game could auto-limit graphical assets like textures and models to classic 2000s-era fidelity when more than 8 players are present. This would maintain performance while unlocking epic-scale matches for the entire player base without limiting it for a select few.

Edit: Also, consider the population limits: 500 population for an 8-player game equates to about 4,000 units total, while 200 population for 16 players results in approximately 3,200 units. Functionally, the game already supports the population for larger player counts.

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Perhaps, increasing this limit would be great for campaigns, scenarios and above all it would be very useful for creating and converting scenarios and campaigns into co-op (even with two-three-four players)

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I think the main reason is technical limitation.

The game uses an ancient engine where many things are hardcoded. Really hard to know in how many places of the code the engine is only build to handle 8+1 civilisations.

For example the “resource” values have a lot of player specific resource IDs where there isn’t space for more resource IDs unless they are put in a completely different ID range.

I don’t think performance is the main reason. I still have some hopes that they might manage to increase the player number one day anyway. AoM has 12 players and having those additional 4 players is really nice, especially in large scenarios.

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That’s even more reason to overhaul it.