Fire whoever is behind all of the horrendous decisions like Siege Engineer affecting ships, inflating food prices, Missionaries being affected by armor, Magyar Huszar buffs, and some Hand Cannoneers countering what they are supposed to be countered by, etc.
Three kingdoms campaign and civs (Wei, Wu, Shu) moved to Chronicles equivalent.
Proper medieval campaigns for civs that don’t have one, starting with Chinese, Khitans and Jurchens. Then, any of the others. Why not selling campaign-only DLCs? Done right: real campaign (not V&V), and not Chronicles. $10 for 3 campaigns of 5 scenarios could be a fair price.
A menu to choose the biome in custom games
Khitans and Jurchens in Temujun scenario
EDIT: additions inspired by things proposed by others members
Porting all AoE1 campaigns to ROR
Correct civs alphabetical order in languages other than English
Please add Navy for base game. I hate the way they currently are. I just want to skip water maps the moment I see it. I mean it is so tilting to the point actual winner/loser is decided after an hour of game. Why even in 2025, I cant garrison my Fishing Ships when enemy attacks? There is absolutely no depth in it. Current water meta ends in Castle Age. Its somewhat ok at early Feudal but after that I hate it. Slow War Galley rotation feels more of a nerf after upgrades. That is if you know the current meta of mass galley vs mass fireship. Most of the civs lacks answer to water battles in late game. Just apply Chronicles water. It’ll atleast make it more fun to use compared to now.
Decoupled graphics from engine stats so we can finally customise our civs to look exactly how we want to and still play the regular game without getting a cheat warning.
Such an easy thing to implement considering it’s only client-side cosmetics.
Other than that more content is always welcome, not less.
To keep up with updates I assume. Every new patch breaks something and some mods are very fragile constructions (like the game itself after all). So it basically becomes a full time job/work/chore to keep mods functional with so many updates.
Not sure what they can do about it but Robbylava recently made a video about the topic to propose some solutions.
Even better should have been to release those on I DE client with RoR delivered as Quality of Life Changes + New Content, not the all-cluttered mess we currently have on II DE client.
Age of Empires II was always about Medieval Period of History not Antiquity. WE and MS made a big mistake on dropping support for I DE. Then, all these issues with civilization pool, ladder, content, setting, heroes, UI/UX would not have existed at all!
And is becoming worse and worse over time. Thats for sure, sadly!
As well as what @SamePorpoise303 said, it’s also much harder to make graphics mods than it used to be on HD – making graphics that look right alongside the more advanced DE graphics is just too much for most would-be modders, especially with destruction animations for buildings and the huge numbers of frames for units.
Also HD used to have a commonly used data set that allowed people to mod each civ’s buildings separately. DE doesn’t have that, and since it would need to be a data mod it would be difficult to maintain.
More Three Kingdom civilizations pls, like the Yellow Turbans, Yuan Shao’s army and Lu Bu’s army. These extremely unique and important civilizations are essential to the game.