The answer: never
If it was possible without recoding huge portions of the game it would have already been done, or modded by the community…
Still, I host AoE2 Lan Parties on a regular basis and it always sucks when we are 9 or 10 people. Therefore I secretly still dream it being added to the game at some point…
Would be fun for unranekd
I dont know if is possible but for unranked mode is a great idea for laughter
I actually think there needs to be more player slots. The technology should be there, this is an entirely different release 
Not hard to code that, there is in fact 9 players (gaya is a player) that mean player id is on more than a byte. I think a dev could easily do that in a week.
Normally Devs only release stable games after the beta. Normal devs would care about all the stability problems of the game and would have fixed nearly everyone after half a year into the game. But here we have something different… We get events and mods, but still crash every second game, get reset campaign progress, a lot of bugs because of cheatcodes, that are no longer available, and get “homour” answers when they fix a gamebreaking bug/exploit that they left in game for a whole month (the month were the cheater reached top 1).
So please stop dreaming of a working AOE2:DE with 5v5 as long as we are not able to play a 4v4 without someone dropping/freezing after an hour of gameplay
The problem is : there is no full time developper on AOE2 DE. It’s a guy working on AOE4 spend few hours a week to improve aoe2 de…
i really want that - 5v5 or 6v6 could be cool
I would love that 5v5 and 6v6 mode. It would make the problem of 1 person disconnected much less relevant, since 4v5 is not so unbalanced like 2v3 for example.
It also allows for many civs to add their team bonuses, which is very interesting.
only for lobby games could be 5v5 it will be cool
we are waiting about it … 5v5 please !!!
I think the answer would be never. I dont think the engine can handle this number of players.
Also you will get the same issue if you are with just 11 or 12 if 5v5 is supported.
I like the idea, but i think it will stay as a dream for AoE 4 (i think).
First push them to get 4v4 games to work then we can think about 5v5! Right now, when playing 4v4, there is a 50-50 chance that at least one player will disconnect at some random point in the game.
Is good suggestion but sure that it generate many bugs
You forget SP players like me. Age of Mythology supports up to 12 players if I recall correctly. Surely AOE2:DE can handle that too, at least in SP. Would also make map sizes like Epic finally useful for something.
still waiting for 5v5
Or 20v20, why not.
20v20 Nomad please.
When the forgotten empires mod came out for the original game there was the option to set the maximum population for players to 1000.
At one Lan we made it a challenge to boom and reach 1000pop first.
At some point the game became extremely laggy because some of the older PCs were struggling but the game was not unstable. It didn’t crash.
It would certainly not be a problem to play 5v5 with a max pop of 200…
just lobby games 5v5 can be possible ?
Before DE with old PC we was able to do 8x1000 and now 8x200 that 5 times less unit in DE…