What kept AoM alive all these years, two decades, wasn’t the single player.
There’s many very old RTS games with a small yet very dedicated multiplayer community. However, it looks like the multiplayer community in retold didn’t grow significantly. With many singleplayer players leaving the game after having finished the campaigns you will end up having a massive drop in the playerbase. AoM.gg shows a total of roughly 18k 1on1 ladder players after three months. After 1-2 weeks there were like 1-2 players listed iirc and I have no idea how or even if the site manages inactive accounts.
are u sure about 100k player on ladder about stormgate?
The game seems to have peeked only 4k players.
At the moment the game has several issues:
- Terrible netcode
- Random performance drops, even in 1v1 scenarios
- Very many weird bugs
- Balance
The game is fun for casual settings, but it is very unlikely it will attract a large pro scene.
It’s completely modern. It only came out a few years before 4k became popular, but otherwise it’s nothing to envy.
Too early to judge.
Although you are right that imitating SC-2 is not the way to go, since SC-2 is already perfect at what it does.
I think what they are trying to prove is a point of redemption, since AOE-3 has always been considered the black sheep, and although the intention is not to rival AOM or anything like that (they have a lot in common), it is to make the company see that if they consider AOM a success, then it would be contradictory to show AOE-3 as a failure.
They don’t even allow him to participate in official tournaments, even though “the AOE saga is celebrated”
It’s not, because it’s a cutting-edge game even today. It has fantastic graphics and physics. Plus 2010 was already a very advanced year, it was just the last decade XD
Plus many games are trying to copy the formula.
In other words, something can be considered modern if it has not become obsolete and is still current.
AOE-4 could have had a much higher average than AOE-2 with the right decisions.
SC-2 was refined until 2015, before that it was almost like a beta.
Catering to pros is a devil’s bargain that the RTS genre has taken for far too long. Focus on enlarging the community, then the pros will follow. Cater too much to the pros, and they will warp it to serve their interests at the cost of everyone, including eventually, themselves.
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i will admit blizz was ahead of time with SC2’s UI and controls so its no suprise it hasn’t really aged, to be fair the game for my liking is too much of a micro RTS as opposed to macro RTS (basically most of your attention being spent on economy and buildup)
Yes. Even during the first week (Feb 2024) when the game was only open beta for the kickstarter backers it had 10k ladder accounts already. After the first week the game went fully open beta and after another 1-2 weeks it had like 100k ladder players. Thing is that there were lots of SC2 players trying it out and also many former SC2 players who were nostalgic and probably wanted to try out something similar.
SC2 to me feels like the most modern competitive RTS out there despite its age. It’s just such a good program. Units do what they are supposed to do. It’s highly responsive. Pretty much zero bugs and it still looks very good.
I liked retold in the beginning but what I really couldn’t get used to was the weird unit movement. It looks like some units at certain circumstances are on a glider. Like the movement of the feet doesn’t match the speed they move on the ground. Maybe it’s a cause of the engine? I’ve seen it in AoE3 as well.
Thats for sure. Most pro games in AOE2, 3 and AOM, are BORING BORING BORING to watch. They almost have to be, because in order to be ‘the best’ you have to use only the very best most optimal unit compositions and strategies, and civs/gods at all times, and have an inhuman apm. And then resign at the first hint of disadvantage, sometimes I don’t even know who won. The result is a bunch of identical compositions, mirror matches, and stutter step dance micro. I much prefer watching any game NOT in the ‘top 50’. A lot of casters just keep casting the same old few people with the emphasis on who is playing versus the actual entertainment value of the game itself. The ideal would be not knowing at all who is playing who (i.e. just player 1 vs player 2) so the focus would be on the actual gameplay. For example I recently had a game where I almost won using a Titan but then the opponent barely managed to beat the titan and then came back somehow and won. You will never see such a ‘pro’ game.
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+1
The biggest issue I see, most RTS just don’t push the right buttons to be fun in PvP.
But are altered for PvP only.
Just look around how many people play Stellaris, factorio and they are billions.
RTS need to rediscover their single player roots.
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Tbh pro games are not that boring and identical. Aoe3 obviously is vastly different from game to game. Aoe2 composition can be boring, that is the game design it doesn’t have a lot of units to choose from, but then the strategy involved can be interesting, and there are a lot of messy crazy games too. Most pros don’t give up easily in tournaments but maybe in ordinary ranked games yes. It seems you dont really understand what is happening in pro games, whats the situation what’s the strategy used, who has advantages, etc…that’s why you dont know who is winning and why they resign. Maybe you should watch pro games with some commentary so you know what is happening.
On the other hand i think low elo games are boring. T90 has low elo legends and most of the games he has nothing to talk about, no kills no fight until 40 mins, and then after that long time the eco difference can be so big and the fight doesn’t matter anymore, a big fight after 40 mins of boom then game is over predictably
I’m paraphrasing what I’ve heard from a comment relating to other games but it went along the lines of: “Pro-players will sooner or later optimise the fun out of games.”
Developers should be extremely careful when balancing the game if they want to relly on pro-player feedback.
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aoe4 was in a worst situation ultil it’s first DLC. And actually it is horrible by graphic, bugs, cheats and it is very unbalanced. The problem is that aom is an hard rts to play. Players now want a mono build, mono units mass and win as aoe4 is.
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I almost never use just one unit in mass. I always look for an army of a select combination of units. Mostly infantry and archers as the bulk, a couple myth units and a couple heroes. Depending on gods, tech, relics, who the enemy is, that can and will differ. A lot of it is trial and error.
A job that charriot archers suck at, spearmen may do amazingly, and vice versa.
War Elephants always accompanied by priests, I learned that recently in a skirmish match.
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“Given the opportunity, players will optimise the fun out of the game.” is a quote I heard, coming from a developer of an Anno game. Maybe he made a quote too, but if so, IDK where it comes from.
An example of this is that in several Command and Conquer games, most multiplayer matches last less than 3 minutes, with no more than 7 soldiers being built by two players combined.
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It came from Civilisation game-designer, Soren Johnson and his blog here GD Column 17: Water Finds a Crack | DESIGNER NOTES .
Another thing I’d like to note is that top players and lower level players have RADICALLY different tier lists-
Most people are having a hell of a time dealing with the norse and consider the Egyptians and Greeks to be underpowered. Meanwhile, IAmMagic’s teir list puts them so dominant that we might as well be in different universes.
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That quote is such a lovely quote. thanks for sharing.
From mainly aoe4 player perspective. I really wanted to jump from aoe4 to aom retold and I didn’t manage that. I felt too much that I’m playing a remaster/remake game of an old game and not a newer production than aoe4. I quit like a while ago with 50h gametime so I don’t know what’s already fixed but I recall:
- weird or sometimes bad pathing of units,
- inconsistent shift+click
- not having different rally points paths so I don’t know if I missclicked my TC rally or not
- no visible feedback how many points on ladder have I lost or gain
- farms visibility on high grass, in some cases were invisibile
- no indicator if there is a hole in woodline or somewhere when I put my walls (e.g. in aoe4 there is a little mesh when you put blueprints of walls)
- things like market glitch with collecting all the gold with one trader path (this is a thing that was present in aoe4 and they still did it that way)
- I’ve had some hotkeys problem but I guess that’s because of my personal preferences
- cannot attack move on my minimap
- I like rank system on aoe4 and no “milestones” of this type put me off from playing ladder a little
- no possibility to look at someones replays from in-game profile
- custom games were not visible at all and later there was huge delay in browser when launched, so we couldn’t make a tournament with live casting and you couldn’t watch someones games from his profile for example, so there was no possibility to watch custom games live
- I don’t like sound spam when I click fast in-game, I wish there was an option for legacy sounds and sounds with delay so i don’t hear for example te-te-t-e-t-etp-ro-vu-vu-pro throughout half of my game
- no map bans on ladder so I was forced to play water and hybrid maps when I really wanted to learn basics first
- lacking some hotkeys like: cancel last unit production in queue or save camera position
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Most of the things you mentioned have been fixed (although not all of them). But thanks for sharing your opinion.
Edit: the Shift click bug (the most annoying one) still exists.
It’s the utter lazyness of the devs. Buggs that are simple code line errors that can be fixed in a few minutes are still ongoing and have not been addressed even though people have been posting bug reports. This game has been abandoned. AOTG was released bugged, stayed bugged and there is no reason for it, and frankly if they never released it it might have just been better. I can’t explain why simple code lines errors or omissions are not being fixed other than no one is working on bug fixes. One person using 5 minutes of his time each day since AOTG has been released could have fixed all the code line bugs by now. But let me give you my favorite example. AOTG faster classical ageup for Ullr is missing from techtree_mods.xml. There are lines for every classical age minor god in that file and it looks like this:
<effect type="Data" amount="0.00" subtype="Cost" resource="Food" relativity="Assign">
<target type="Tech">ClassicalAgeOceanus</target>
</effect>
<effect type="Data" amount="0.00" subtype="Cost" resource="Gold" relativity="Assign">
<target type="Tech">ClassicalAgeOceanus</target>
</effect>
<effect type="Data" amount="5.0" subtype="ResearchPoints" relativity="Assign">
<target type="Tech">ClassicalAgeOceanus</target>
</effect>
So how do you fix the omision for Ullr. Well you go into that file, you copy those lines from any of the minor gods, you paste it underneath and you change ClassicalAgeOceanus (since i used oceanus as an example) to ClassicalAgeUllr. Takes a few seconds at best, yet we are coming up on months since this hasn’t been fixed. This is not just lazy, it is insultingly lazy. If these people worked for me i would fire the whole lot of them. My other explanation is no people are working on this, instead they instructed chat gpt to make the game
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