Updated | 13-05-2020 | Features and Ideas | #101.101.36906.0_4941835

Hi, let me start by saying I’ve been playing aoe2 multiplayer for approximately 10 years already on quite a high level - currently 1v1: 15xx and TG: 23xx rating.
AoC, HD, Voobly, DE - I know them all. I am also familiar with Age of Empires 2 pro scene.
I’m amazed by recent progression of aoe2 and thankful to Definitive Edition team for listening to player base input.

The purpose of this topic is to give information to the team of developers which new features or feature changes could be implemented in order to improve players’ experience and capabilities in Definitive Edition.

Section of Features and Ideas:

  1. Changing the way Box Formation works so the box itself is always filled even if it consists of only 1 kind of military unit (e.g. Cavalry Archers). Thanks to that ranged units would stay more compact instead of making a hollow ring. It would make this formation actually useful for bigger numbers of ranged units when micromanaging them.
    Originally Box Formation was intended to be a protective formation with fragile units in the middle against melee opponents. It would still fulfill its role and at the same time it could be used for micromanagement on the highest competitive level.
    Updated:
    Box formation should work in a way that when you click on the ground, the middle of the box settles there, not the front of the box. Would be much easier to control the box.
    The 1st attached picture shows a group of 18 Cav Archers standing in the most common and default “Line Formation”.
    In comparison the 2nd picture shows 8 units in “Box Formation” which works perfectly fine and is used in competitive scene.
    3rd picture shows a group of 8 Cav Archers and one monk in Box Formation which works as intended as well (monk in the middle of the group).
    4th picture shows how badly Box Formation scales up with this time 13 units. The hollow middle is presented.
    The last picture (5th) shows how unusable this formation is with example of 23 Cav Archers. If the middle was filled with units this formation would be even preferable for ranged units thanks to the shorter distance of center of mass to the furthest unit in the formation when compared to other available formations.


    Personally, I would find this change to be the most refreshing improvement. I really hope you could implement it!

  2. Updated:
    Add “Triumph” or “Wonder Victory” as a victory condition:
    win by conquesting your enemies or building and defending the Wonder.
    Add “Relic Victory” or “Holy Grail” as a victory condition:
    win by conquesting your enemies or collecting and holding all relics.

  3. Add “Select all Idle Military Units” hotkey

Updated:

Additional important ideas and needed features inspired by community posts, threads, suggestions and comments:

  1. A shortcut/hotkey for dropping the relic with a monk

  2. A shortcut for cancelling the queue in the building
    (1st unit, 2nd unit, a last unit in the queue or the whole queue in a selected building/buildings - implementation of either of those has its pros and cons over the others)

  3. Ability to lock gates before they are built
    (with the same hotkey you can lock gates normally - after they are built)

  4. Allow Attack Move and Patrol commands even if Trebuchets are selected with other military units (especially that we now have hotkeys such “Select All Land Military Units”, “Select all Military Units Visible on the Screen”).

Readers - I encourage you to give out your own opinion on above changes and add your own input in comments but please:

  • respect each other;
  • make sure that you’re adding something researched and constructive to the topic;
  • before posting your opinion make sure that it’s clear, grammatically and stylistically correct so there’s no misunderstanding on anyone’s part.

Thank You.

Best Regards
RediRodion

2 Likes
  • Cameras locations hotkeys
  • Cycling button hotkeys (to be able to have differents type of building in a same ctrl group)
  • Possibility to custom ui command pannel (mini-map placement, size and shape (rectangle feel better than parallelogram one take less space))
  • Select all type of units by shift clicking instead of double clicking
  • New builded gates could be choose to be closed or open
  • Units health bars colors betters visualisation (green= good; yellow= ok; orange= bad; red= critical)
1 Like

Line formation should be more compact. For 6 or fewer units (at least) there should be no difference between line and box. This is currently the only use box has. If we fix line to do this anyway, then we can get rid of box entirely and replace it with something more creative.

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The line formation already exists to keep the formation “filled”. With box formation, you could make a pikeman square wall and have a large group of archers or monks inside protected from cavalry, just as an example. This is what box formation is for, so you can have another group inside it. Not just a singular monk with a relic.

Why?

And its not even 5 relics, it depends on the maximum relics for the map. If you know you are playing standard, then try and get atleast one relic. Simple. You should be going for some relics anyway normally.

For idle military units “,” is the default key, press Shift+ , to choose all (max. 60) idle military units.

2 Likes

That’s a little bit underwhelming that you’re simply negating all ideas without giving anything of your own - just as you did in other of threads I opened:
07-05-2020 | Game Balance | #101.101.36906.0_4941835

I will still try to respond to your replies with all seriousness.

The line formation already exists to keep the formation “filled”. With box formation, you could make a pikeman square wall and have a large group of archers or monks inside protected from cavalry, just as an example. This is what box formation is for, so you can have another group inside it. Not just a singular monk with a relic.

And the formation would stay that way for cases you mentioned. In your example the monk in the middle would be a “filling” object or objects. Basically it wouldn’t change it. At the same time if you started adding more and more pikes with this singular monk to the formation then instead of drastically increasing perimeter of the square it would fill in the square until capacity is reached and then creating a square with sides larger by one unit filling it in as consistently and as much as possible.
Let me clarify - It wouldn’t change mechanics of “Box Formation” that you presented. It would change how it scales up - creating a filled square instead of a hollow one!
Wouldn’t it be just splendid!

Why?
And its not even 5 relics, it depends on the maximum relics for the map. If you know you are playing standard, then try and get atleast one relic. Simple. You should be going for some relics anyway normally.

“Why” is actually a good question! I should have explained myself. Well - the change was asked by multiple most popular aoe streamers and some pro players in order to prevent games from dragging on and create potentially more entertaining endings of the game with multiple destructions of Wonders.
Imagine seeing how the Wonder crumbles and the player that invested into it resigns, because that was his last hope!
Keep in mind that the set purpose would be for 1v1s not teamgames!
Let me further explain the idea. The mentioned victory would allow players to win not only by conquesting the opponent but as well by investing loads of resources into a fragile building that then needs to be defended.
So you could ask why not just use “Standard Victory”? - The issue is with the Relic Victory that is a part of the options of winning a game in those setting. It creates this situation where everything else apart from gathering relics early on is put aside. Gathering all relics and starting the countdown in castle age is a small investment (you still get gold profit from relics). If you add defensive castles around Monastery then it’s is just too hopeless, tedious and unstoppable. This way of winning a game usually doesn’t feel rewarding nor entertaining at all.

But your comment made me rethink my proposed solution and I would change it to that:
Keep everything as it is so no one can argue that something was taken away from them but add the following options:
“Triumph” or “Wonder Victory”:
win by conquesting your enemies or building and defending the Wonder.
“Relic Victory”:
win by conquesting your enemies or collecting and holding all relics.

For idle military units “,” is the default key, press Shift+ , to choose all (max. 60) idle military units.

I tested it multiple times so I doubted myself. So I tested it again and your statement is not truthful.
There’s no “Select all Idle Military Units” hotkey and simply holding shift while pressing “Go to Next Idle Military Unit” hotkey doesn’t do anything.
I think you might have confused it for “Select all Land Military Units”, which serves different purpose.
Please, test arguments you make before publishing your comments.

Best Regards

If your idea makes the underused box formation more useful, why not I guess?

People who don’t like Wonders are thinking more about super campy plays with 10 layers of walls, this kind of stuff. Effective Wonders victories are rarely last resort strats.

I don’t get your reasoning. Having one relic is enough to deny the enemy their relic victory. You just need 1 monk to do so (as most of the time you will at least have one super close to you) and then you’re safe. Only way this wouldn’t work is the enemy has map control over like 80% of the map, but then the game was going to end pretty quick anyway.

Cool name tho.

Maybe it’s because you downloaded a hotkey set up that has a different hotkey for this function. You should look up in your hotkeys settings first, I bet I’ve seen it there.

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I don’t get your reasoning. Having one relic is enough to deny the enemy their relic victory. You just need 1 monk to do so (as most of the time you will at least have one super close to you) and then you’re safe. Only way this wouldn’t work is the enemy has map control over like 80% of the map, but then the game was going to end pretty quick anyway.

Having more map control than your opponent doesn’t necessarily mean that you are winning the game if your enemy has better economy at the same time. With relic victory this would be the case.
In high level games small things end up deciding the game but relic victory is just too intrusive when investing into Wonder in Imperial Age is not.
Mentioned options would give people more freedom in what they want to play. Literally no one loses here.

Maybe it’s because you downloaded a hotkey set up that has a different hotkey for this function. You should look up in your hotkeys settings first, I bet I’ve seen it there.

Listen, I researched what I said - checked in the hotkeys list, I’ve played this game for 10 years, I have my customized hotkeys, but I still changed them to what your friend - @Hardform said he has. I tested what he proposed and it didn’t work. Probably, he just said what he expected to work without checking himself.
So telling me “to check something first” after I already responded to him is disingenuous. Saying “I bet I’ve seen it there” is unresearched by you. You didn’t check it - you just follow what your friend is saying or just as him expect it to work this way.
I asked you in the first post to “make sure that you’re adding something researched and constructive to the topic”.
Please, comply with my requests :slight_smile:

Cool name tho.

Thanks! Relic Victory could be called “Holy Grail” or something associated with collecting artifacts.

If your idea makes the underused box formation more useful, why not I guess?

Exactly! I see we came into agreement at last.

Best Regards.

1 Like

Very true. I don’t believe that an idea should be countered with another one. If I don’t have a good idea to give, I’m not going to give any. This doesn’t mean that ideas that are presented should simply be applied just because there wasn’t a better new idea, despite an existing idea already being better than the new one. For example the relic victory belonging in standard together with wonder and conquest victory is in my opinion a better one than just removing relic from it and keeping wonder in. I mean, why is wonder superior to relic? Both are gimmick victories tbh. But conquest mode already is the no gimmick victory mode (and all ranked games are played on conquest). So if the “standard” mode encompasses wonders too, relics fit in the same.

I see. Not a bad suggestion then, at first sight. When we delve deeper into game mechanics however, it becomes clear how it stops working at a point. The problem is the selected units is capped at 60. Right now you could make a 15x15 square to fill with a lot of ranged units for example, whom which you could control separately to snipe targets, with your suggestion with a mixed group, the melee units would break formation on command to reach out to the targeted enemy. However if you would first choose them all to make the formation and then control only the archers, the melee units would rearrange themselves into a filled formation, so the usefulness of the box also disappears. Since formations only work for one group, 2 different groups do not start making formation just because they happen to stand inside one another, but only when selected together. (or if they were selected together previously, but just had a long distance between them, if they meet enroute to destination, they’ll combine) But right now, you can move the melee box around the archers to anywhere you want and they stay in formation and you are free to control the archers inside however you like, of course having to micro them to stay inside the box formation. But the box would also be very small if it was a filled one with 60 units, only an 8 by 8 square. However I would like the box formation to work differently, it should work in a way that when you click on the ground, the middle of the box settles there, not the front of the box. Would be much easier to control the box.

I did indeed confuse it with that, just made a quick test if it selected all my idle units in a game and voila. Didn’t think its function was so different from villagers. Odd choice for a function imo, it should be idle units instead, cause those are the ones you want to find.

In my honest opinion, wonder victories are gimmicks. I have no problem with games dragging on for hours, that’s entertainment. Defending a wonder can be too easy sometimes, even if you were a losing player, so that player shouldn’t of earned the victory anyway. It’s best that ranked games are indeed played on conquest mode.

These could be good additions to the game options pool though. Right now, relic victory as a separate thing is only possible in “capture the relic” which has no timer, and when you make a scenario yourself the winning conditions have an option for relic victory.

I forgot to reply earlier, I have many tabs open, tried to check my text through a few times and made some changes to it, hopefully no mistakes 11.

You make valid arguments.

Additional important ideas and needed features inspired by community posts, threads, suggestions and comments:

  1. A shortcut/hotkey for dropping the relic with a monk

  2. A shortcut for cancelling the queue in the building
    (1st unit, 2nd unit, a last unit in the queue or the whole queue in a selected building/buildings - implementation of either of those has its pros and cons over the others)

  3. Ability to lock gates before they are built
    (with the same hotkey you can lock gates normally - after they are built)

  4. Allow Attack Move and Patrol commands even if Trebuchets are selected with other military units (especially that we now have hotkeys such “Select All Land Military Units”, “Select all Military Units Visible on the Screen”).

If it’s helpful to provide reasons on why any of these can be extremely useful in game feel free to ask! I’d be happy to answer.
I’d like this game to go even further beyond!

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