Intro:
Hey! I’m reading the AOE forums and news page from time to time and everytime I’m sad, because there’s no update for AOE 1 DE, “only” II and III It’s especially sad for me, because since the last update, I cannot delete scenarios (I tried so many things, they always reappear after restarting the game. Reinstalling doesn’t help, another drive doesn’t help, same with things like no internet connection, etc.) I know, that friends have the same issue and other people on the forums too.
Main issue for me:
Now you might ask, but why is this such a big issue to post about this? Well there’s a legacy bug from the original, that certain scenarios or a certain number of scenarios lead to constant game crashes, if you wanna play scenarios. In that case you moved scenarios into another folder and swapped them again with others, so that you never had too many scenarios in the games scenario folder. I don’t know, what causes the issue, but this workaround helped very easy. Now with all scenarios constantly reappearing, the workaround no longer works. Since months I’m unable to play scenarios without constantly deleting them. This is very annoying, especially because I loved to create them and they require a lot of testing, which is now a real pain. Maybe some people know my Seleucid campaign from the mod section and know, how much passion I put into them. So it’s really sad I’m more or less unable to put more work into it. I really hope we get this year another update and no matter what the content of it is, I hope this issue gets solved! I already wrote a support ticket months ago, where they assured me, they look into it, after all their suggested solutions hadn’t work - the issue appeared after the update. Since then there’s silence. So let’s wait and see - I guess that’s all we can do.
My offering to the devs:
About my support offering: If the devs or the publisher agrees, I would revisit all campaign missions and would improve them - especially the AI. I wrote this massive feedback about all missions long time ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/aoe/comments/c7tl4f/campaign_feedback_all_missions/
I guess all campaign players here agree that especially the AI requires improvements in a lot of missions. The AI is very often super aggressive, where it shouldn’t be (E.g. play Crossing the Alps - Mission 1 Enemies of Rome and you know, what I mean). Also some AI build orders are weird. E.g. in “Odenathus, Lord of Palmyra” (Mission 4 Enemies of Rome) the AI builds a lot of ships. Everybody, who has played this mission, knows that this makes no sense at all - the map is almost land only, there are just some very small rivers on one small part of the map and a small lake.
I would be able to improve and solve these things, but of course I need the files from the devs. I would do this without any payment. I just want everybody being able to enjoy all campaign missions as they are intented - because I don’t think stuff like I mentioned above is intented and such issues appear very often.