I’w been reading the forum and (re)watching some of the videos from Hera, Sitaux, T90 and Admiral Wololo on suggestions and concerns over the future of Age of Empires 2 and I thought I’d compile a list of things that I heard being requested by people with a touch of my personal opinion on top. I wanted a new thread for this hoping it doesn’t get lost as a comment and if it gets enough upvotes, maybe it will raise the devs’ attention. I’ll try to sort things from most to least realistic and provide detailed reasoning so as to what is the thinking behind everything.
Correct civs alphabetical order in languages other than English
Address power creep
In an attempt to always bring new and exciting units to the game, and to push for more usage of unique units, there’s been a noticeable power creep of units lately which affects the game’s balance in very undesirable ways. Some units have way too much attack while others are being left behind. This removes strategic depth for the player and feels unfair to the opponent in multiplayer matches.
Opinion: I think the simplest and most effective way to address this is to have a periodic "nerf patch“, where some units are being nerfed based on feedback from pros, casters and community members alike
The "siege tower taxi“ and similar "exploits“:
(Maybe this is just a personal grudge, but quoting T90: "this doesn’t feel like aoe2”.)
Due to some changes to things such as garrisoning and pathing, there’s been a new wave of tactics that feel more like exploits than authentic age of empires 2 gameplay. I can name two: the siege tower/ram push with fire lancers and the patrol stacking on stand ground. I saw both of these tactics used in high level play, and had them used on me on low level play. neither is fun. both are way too strong and they remove the joy of strategic gameplay in favour of some cheap micro tricks.
Opinion: I think the easiest solution would be to allow rams/towers to garrison units only one by one with a slight delay in-between, but there’s other possible fixes such as adding a reload timer to gunpowder units or not allowing fire lancers to reload their charge attack while being garrisoned. Note: I would like to see some kind of pack/unpack mechanic for the siege tower, as i feel like the unit has always just been awkward and clunky.
Tournaments should be announced in the in-game menu:
Almost every game with an active esports community has this. It would be nice to have streams displayed directly in the main menu when a game is being played, but even just an announcement on the right of the main menu would be nice. As far as i know only the Redbull events are being announced in-game and even that is just a half-baked announcement hidden in a submenu.
Better placement matches
As I have a background in mathematics, I understand that you cannot just start new players at 900 elo or so, since that would skew the average down, but you should really improve your algorithm for placement matches. That is if you have any… In case you don’t, you should have new players’ elo predicted by an algorithm based on their first few matches instead of just dropping everyone at 1000 elo (like you did when i started playing). You should just plug in a few metrics such as eAPM and feudal/castle/imp time into an equation. I feel like this wouldn’t take a lot of effort and it would boost multiplayer player numbers since i’w met a lot of people who just gave up on ranked after being beaten heavily in their first few matches
Rework the reworked water (and add it to the game?)
The fact that you wanted to rework water is a good idea. Everyone thinks water play is like the most bland/uninspiring part of this game and the fact that the dock has two pages is awkward. I think people like that you tried to address those issues, but the rework needs a bit of re-thinking… (will not go into further detail as there’s entire threads for this, and I think you are working on it)
Add more interactive learning content beyond Art of war
There’s lots that can be done here. I think it’d be best to consult content creators like Spirit of the Law and Hera to give some ideas/feedback. I thought that having the option to play in "learning mode“ vs AI would be interesting, where an AI mentor could point out some mistakes like for example making a stable then not using it, making too many farms, not upgrading eco on time, doing things inefficiently etc. - sounds like a lot of work to do something like this well though
Add a regional reskin DLC
Yeah I heard on some podcast that there’s no built-in support for it and it would potentially bloat the game by taking up a lot of extra space but I know some people who would give a kidney (myself included) to have a DLC with regional unit skins… Even just having different skin toned units for different regions would be awesome…
Improved player interactions:
I’w heard this complaint ever since the beginning of DE and i’m shocked it hasn’t been addressed. In-game interactions are terribly simplistic. There’s very few interactions you can have with the community in-game and even those are buggy and clunky.
Here’s some feature requests from low-hanging fruit to fan fiction:
Add a ' left the lobby‘ when people leave the (ranked) game - I’w been talking alone way too often 11
Add a way to send a friend request to your (ranked) opponent
Allow team chat while in queue
Improve Lobby system - I have no insight on this as I am a ranked only player, but I have heard multiple times that this is one of the worst parts of Aoe2DE
Redesign the chat - Opinion: I would change the legacy chatbox to be less intrusive (aka. not a fullscreen overlay) similar to games like League of Legends, but more importantly: I’d add the ability to quickly see/select which people you are writing to - having all this on the diplomacy screen is just bad 90s UI…)
Add a way for pro players to add their twitch/youtube channels next to their profile (on the leaderboard) to help promote them
Add voice over IP - yeah, this is just wishful thinking
Rotating Casual Game Modes
This is completely opinion land but I have watched so many community games from T90… I loved the drama, the friendships and the backstabbings in game modes such as "Exploding Kings“, "Sudden Death” and "10 times shared civ bonus” and I had always wished I could easily participate in them… I think this is an unexplored potential of this game and would love to see it happen sooo much (+ would go nicely along with improved player interactions). The idea: Add a casual multiplayer game mode (for ex. exploding kings) which changes every few months to keep things feeling fresh - just like URF / One For All / etc. in League of legends for example.
Opinion: just replace quick play as no-one seems to be using it and you don’t want too many modes either such that queues are not that long - but i’m sure you have the numbers to make the decision
Porting all AoE1 campaigns to ROR - self explanatory - ROR was kindof a letdown because of this…
Move three kingdoms civs out of multiplayer - This is a very often requested change that i don’t think will happen, but is worth mentioning - many of us feel like these civs are way out of line both historically and game design-wise from the traditional aoe2 civs and a lot of people want to see these civs removed from ranked multiplayer
Yes I know. There’s not a lot of immediate financial incentive for many/most of these changes, but I think it’s important for the devs to listen to feedback from the community and make sure the whole game is being taken care of, not just the parts that make money…
Definitely support point number 12. There are so many people like me (at least within my friend group)who immediately turn off the streams whenever we see 3k political factions pop up. It’s just stupid to see antiquity factions that existed even before the huns face medieval era civs. And the hero units just don’t belong in a pvp games or even in single player skirmish games.
A fix for the ram/siege tower play would be: If the ram/siege tower is destroyed, garissoned troops die with it. So in exchange for the speed you have a risk of losing all your units. High risk and high reward.
An additional thing about the Three Kingdoms:
Convert the Wei to Khitans, the Khitans to Tanguts, the Shu to Tibetans, the Wu to Tai. Make minor adjustments.
I like this compilation in general. Afaik, regarding the siege tower/fire lancer cheese, the main issue is the interaction between these two units and rams to a lesser degree. They should add a delay to the fire lancer’s ranged attack (the same implemented to other ranged units) nerf fire lancer’s by giving them a little bit of spearman armor, and redesign siege towers, which design is laughable. It is useless for it’s niche intended purpose, and it is instead used as an infantry deployment unit. Imo, siege towers’ speed should be reduce to 0.5 or 0.6 c/s instead of 0.8, and not allow infantry to speed it up. At the same time, they should reduce it’s training time, and actually make the wall jumping mechanic a thing. It’s hilarious that the core function of this thing is apparently bugged, and even when it works it’s borderline useless. They should provide some mechanics to be able to jump back to the siege tower to prevent units from getting trapped accidentally (or purposefully *cough*Sitaux *cough*. I don’t want to sound like a douche, but the siege tower is garbage design. It’s not fun, it’s buggy, it’s mostly useless, has lots of unintended/unexpected negative effects and the things it’s actually helpful are completely unrelated to it’s intended design and are considered goofy at best and dumb exploits at worst.
I have found the original answer I was referencing from a podcast with Cysion - Forgotten Empires-es Head of Production: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDmFganFyx8&t=1426s - TLDR: He esentially says that the game would be too large (possibly even 0.5TB) and there would possibly be memory usage issues
Yes, but there is no need to make a skinpack for every civ, just for every region. They have added like 50 skins with the monk-uu patch. And it’s like 25-ish skins per region, so 4-5 times that.
Making them toggleble could be the bigger issue, but I don’t know aboug that.
Garrisoning one at a time would just make the units more clunky. I think a better change would be slowing down the siege tower (though I would not like to see them slower than rams). Adding a pack/unpack mechanic would also make the unit even more clunky to use.
As I recall, there are mods that do this sort of thing. They could provide some official recognition for such things, but I don’t think making their own would help all that much (particularly since not everyone does the tutorial or art of war missions). The completion rates for steam achievements: getting an art of war medal is 6%, completing the tutorial is 17.6%, and the most common achievement is destroying a ship using a melee unit at 53.5%.
They already have base 0 pierce armor in castle age, so they aren’t exactly great against ranged units (though they are affected by gambesons, so they max out at 3 PA in castle and 6 in imperial, though only 2 of the civs can actually get to 6 PA). They might not die to skirms, but other ranged units are still quite effective. And fire lancers additionally have shock infantry armor, so they’ll die against other infantry units as well (especially the militia line). The main advantage fire lancers have is that they don’t cost food, which is often the hardest resource to get in early castle age (and is similar to the wood/gold cost of siege units)
I wish they would allow all civs to add extra eco before castle age.
Formerly I thought it would be enough if all civs could build a second TC in feudal similar to Cumans. But this isn’t an option anymore with how fast the castle ages come in (not only in phosphorus, but actually the standard “hamstering”).
We need something in dark age already. Similar to fishing but ofc way, way slower to snowball.
What I generally refer to is that Castle Age just adds too much of core game mechanics. Super strong military, Monks, Siege, Castles… and Eco! I think adding some eco in the dark ages (ofc slow/limited) would be an interesting concept to allow for more dynamic games and less “pure timing focussed” as it is currently.
One conceptional idea:
What about an “upgrade” to lumbercamps.
“hire additional workers” or something like this
For 200 g you get 2 additional villagers at that lumber camp. But each lumber camp can only research it once.
It’s fairly expensive and in dark age you need to make a mining camp first to get it. In feudal you would make one at some point aswell, so it would be more affordable to do in mid/late feudal. But then this may conflict with a faster castle age uptime.
I think this could be a way to allow limited addition of extra eco at early stages, an interesting option for players who prefer to play the more “defensive” playstyle. It’s probably not really worth it to spam 5 lumber camps in dark age to get 10 more vills because this would be very expensive and delay you too much to castle age. But I could see it being an option to get like 4 additional vills there, paying off 7 minutes later into the game.
Nomadic set - for Huns, Cumans, Mongols, Khitans
Chinese set - Jurchens, Chinese civs, Koreans, Vietnamese
Byzantine/Caucasian set - Byzantines, Bulgarians, Armenians, Georgians, Serbians and Vlachs if added.
More King, Queen, Merchant/Trade cart models - Indian, Eastern European, Southeast Asian
The East Asian set is terrible for the Chinese as it is, even more so for the Mongols. Everything is poor quality Japanese architecture. Possibly the worst of the original sets.