What do you think about the dlc campaigns

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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I just finished the campaigns and i have to say im a little bit disappointed.

First off i will only talk about the gameplay, because even tho i’m interested in the story, i cant judge about how accurate the story is or useful it was to choose these persons to represent the civs.

I will talk about the difficulty and how fun the gameplay was.

I need to add that i played all campaigns on “hard”.

Let’s start with the one sword campaign “Thoros”:

Difficulty: Considering it is supposed to be the easiest of the 3 campaigns it had some challenging missions. The third mission even nearly forced me to restart, because i forgot to pay the seljuks the 2nd time and the pressure was really high from all sides after that…just when i was about to restart things changed when u only had to fight them. The last one had also some tough situations. All in all i would say this campaign even succeeded a little bit my expectations considering it should be the easiest.

Gameplay: It felt sometimes a little bit boring because most of the time all you had to do was destroying castles or just finish of the enemies…you knew right from the start what you had to do and there were no plottwist or unique mechanics.

Two sword campaign “Ismail”:

Difficulty: It started promising with the first mission where i had to restart because i didn’t expect this ambush at the destination point…but that’s it. After this part the mission was pretty easy and none of the other missions where really challenging. The start of the 4th was okay because u had to do some micro. Overall disappointing tho. It felt like this campaign was easier than the first one even tho it should be the other way around.

Gameplay: Once again the first ambush was unexpected and i liked that “plottwist”. Other than that the campaign had no special elements either. The idea of the relic carts in the last one was pretty good…but the implementation wasn’t that good. It felt like pretty wasted to go for them, because you could win with defeating 1 enemy right away anyway and they were hidden so deep in some bases, that it wasn’t really worth it…getting all 10 before you finish the mission was kinde unnecessary…it’s like you only keep ur enemies alive just to get these…which failed the point a bit imo.

3 sword campaign “Tamar”:

Difficulty: Considering this is supposed to be the toughest campaign, it was a huge disappointment in my opinion. Some scenarios took some time before you finish them but there wasn’t a single one where i was pushed even close to restarting.
50 minutes on mission 2 were way too much, because u could push the other 2 pretty fast and after that it was easy anyway, because your allies get strong. I think u even only had to survive here and not defeat yellow? but even if you had to defeat yellow it would’ve been easy.
scenario 3 could’ve been challenging if you couldn’t convert vils from green…but because of that it was also just a matter of time until u win.
4 and 5 were also no real challenge in my opinion. I thought at first doing all secondary goals in the 5th campaign in time would be hard but i achieved that the first time as well.

Gameplay: I liked the last one which was similiar to the last one of Jadwiga…

So why do i like those campaigns not as much as for example dawn of the dukes?

One point is that the campaigns are way too easy in my opinion. If i play a dlc on hard i expect it to have at least 2-3 missions where i need to restart more than once and figure a way out how to beat this. I liked especially the poles campaign in that regard…

but all the 3 campaigns from this dlc were not even close to that. I think i only had to restart once in the first mission of ismail because i didn’t expect that ambush…but after you scouted the map a little more this wasn’t hard either.

Gameplay: It’s not that these campaigns are totally boring to play…but i felt like in Dawn of the Dukes they start bringing unique things in the game which many people liked…i think i will remember some of the scenarios even in 5 years because of that…these campaigns didn’t have these things…i will probably even forget about most of them in like 1 or 2 months.

Also one campaign always had 6 missions…why not this time?

Steam achievements: For sb who likes to do these i also want to add that they were way too easy. The first achievement in Ismail was impossible to do the first time, because u don’t know where to find him…but after restarting once this wasn’t a big deal either…The only one i don’t have yet is last one of THoros…but i don’t think that i will need more than a 2nd try for that.

Would like how you guys felt about this dlc.

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I agree with you. The difficulty was all over the place, but none of them felt hard. And yes, the campaigns were fun but not very inspired. The one I had the most fun with was the Persian one, the others felt ok. The achievements were too easy except for the Thoros’ one you mentioned (which I tried to get and I think I did get but for some reason it didn’t register or something). For whatever reason these campaigns felt off compared to the ones of the last two DLCs.

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I kept the vils safe at the beginning…but i destroyed the castle when purple was still around the base. Purple killed some vils of teal after that, which is why it wasn’t fullfilled. At least that’s my guess…maybe the same thing happened to u.

So next time i will destroy the castle at the very last, so they can’t kill vils from teal.

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Thoros has balancing issues because Castle Age Champion spam makes the campaign boring in the first 2 missions. The last mission was challenging and memorable.

Tamar has an issue with Monaspas becuase they’re so broken. They melt buildings fast and I didn’t need to make any siege in the first 3 missions. Overall the gameplay is better here, the missions I didnt enjoy are the 2nd and 3rd.

I haven’t played Ismail yet. I agree only 5 missions for each campaign is annoying. Dynasties of India was the same, but it had a complete rework for Pritviraj 5 and slight changes to Almeida 5 and Bayinnaung 5.

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I agree with you in most things you said. But also wanna elaborate.

Ismail: High A-Tier
Absolutely loved the campaign, but i think the difficulty decreased a lot from the first to the last scenario. I needed some restarts in the first mission after the ambush and trying to kill Farruk Yasar, and in the fourth mission be it fighting the uzbeks in Merv or because the useless ally Babur got defeated. The last mission had a lot of potential to be a mission like Suryavarman 5 (Which is among my favorite scenarios). But instead giving the choice to defeat just the ottomans made it so easy and disappointing, you don’t even need the Qizilbash allies; it’s so easy to just defeat everyone and don’t even get to find the relic carts.

Map design is amazing in every single scenario and the narratives are the best of this dlc by far. I think all scenarios encourage you to use the best things that persian civ offers, be it elephants or savars and add some cav archers or Kamandaran crossbows.

Tamar: High B-Tier
This campaign was by far the most disappointing from the DLC. Missions are extremely easy (no way it’s 3 swords) and it took me only 1 and a half hour to complete the whole campaign by just throwing endless waves of monaspas into the enemies, the only mission where you actually need to add something different (halberdiers) is the last one and before of that is overall so repetitive fighting the ex husband over and over again for more than half of the campaign when they could have used the spot of the 2nd scenario to feature something else about Tamar’s life. In the end, the only thing near to a real challenge was doing the secondary goals in the last mission.

The map design is amazing and the narratives are okey. From an historical point of view, i really loved the concept of the campaign, similar in some regards to some missions i proposed in a georgian concept i made for a civ concept tournament, which is something i like. But it ended up in some sort of a Jadwiga 2.0 campaign, but the polish campaign is a thousand times better and memorable.

Thoros: Mid B-Tier
I mostly liked the campaign. It’s a bit harder than 1 sword, but still in the easy side of difficulty. You fight a lot of byzantines (which judging the units available, should absolutely counter Armenians) but they feel so easy to defeat. The third mission is cool because the templar knights start attacking early, and seljuks can become a threat if you don’t pay them. Fourth mission takes some time to complete and mission 5 indeed can become a bit hard, but nothing impossible to deal with.

I think this campaign is also about just spamming composite bowmans and halberdiers (galleys in the fourth scenario) and it feels monotone. Map design is really cool except for the 4th mission (Do someone actually believe that horrible and amorphous piece of land in the middle of the water is nearly close to what Cyprus looks like in a map?) and the narratives are gold with this old french crusader talking…

And yes, i have the same thoughts about the achievements and the campaigns with 6 missions

EDIT: I played the campaigns in hard difficulty (not relevant), and played them in Spanish (Latam), the language i speak natively and oh boy, i hope i’m not the only one noticing the poor job devs did translating not only the campaigns, but the whole DLC (even using non existing words), which makes me feel even more disappointed about the campaigns and the whole dlc.

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I haven’t played Tamar yet but I have played the other two (on Hard)

Thoros: This campaign is very average. I would be harsh on it because it is a little bland and easy, but considering it is the ‘1 sword’ difficulty I not going to criticize this too much. Overall decent but nothing blowing me away

Ismail: This could actually be my least favorite campaign of all time. Extremely repetitive missions, even blander and easier than Thoros and this is meant to be the ‘2 sword’ campaign. Every mission is just the same. there is no difference or interesting twists about your economic situation (all of them you can just boom). Each enemy feels the same and you have the same ally in all missions. I honestly believe that the designer really didn’t feel motivated to make this campaign, I can see a lack of passion in it. It is a shame considering how much more passion I have seen in custom campaigns.

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I felt like even if you had to defeat everyone or most of them, it was too easy. The only reason i defeated the ottomans more early was because of the steam achievement.

In my opinion you don’t even need them, because monks were also a general problem. In most campaigns you couldn’t convert enemy units, or at least they died after the conversion…in these campaigns most of the time monks play was too strong, because the AI doesn’t focus them good enough and monks are already the strongest unit in the game. Especially the last one of Tamar felt so easy because of that…and it was even intended.

Well not just custom campaigns. I felt like they made a huge step forward in Dawn of the Dukes just to go back to the roots. Yeah it indeed feels like there is not much passion. Even some small things like making your hero stronger in combat was interesting imo but wasn’t used in these campaigns. Most of the time it’s just boom until you spamkill your enemies.

I hope the campaigns in the future become more challenging or they even add another mode for the game…because this was way too easy.

Either way they should change the ranking of the campaigns. None of them is worthy of being 3 swords and i think the only campaign being worthy of 2 swords is even the first one 11

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