Will there be an update? + I'm offering support for the devs

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 :frowning: 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.

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At this point I just want bug fixing updates.

This is a cool 2D isometric and charming RTS game which covers the Paleolithic up to the Iron Age, which is fantastic and even though not as deep as other RTS games, it can offer significant hours of entertainment, specially for fans of the franchise. Microsoft really could improve this game further, yet it seems like they barely try!

Did you played recently? many of of the suggestion were fixed
Some scenario has different AI behaviors but changing the difficult raise the ‘‘challenge’’. The only mission that is still frustrating to casual players is Holy Man.
The game is good now, no more problems with hitboxes and pathfinding like before.

Depending on what kind of demands you have. Have things like pathfinding been improved? Yes. Is it good with it? No. It is unfortunately still disastrous by today’s standards.
Also, normal functions like formations or flares are still missing by today’s standards.
So criticism is still definitely justified.

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Actually, although now it’s way better than before, the issue with units getting stuck was not entirely fixed after build 46777.

Well, flares is needed but the game support it? jokes aside
One thing that p*ss me off is the defensive stance and my units return to previous position and ignore my march with formation to a destination. It’s like they ‘‘now we are where the human wants, let’s come back’’ :worried:

I don’t know how many QoL could still be added to the game.
My demands now would be new content but both are merely a dream :thinking:

You forget Crossing the Alps. Hell, I wouldn’t be complaining if I was a top skilled, pro player, but it’s not just me or casual players only. Although it is possible to win/defeat those scenarios, the ways to achieve such effect is unintended, mechanics-wise. Players must use exploits or resort to weird tactics that would not be needed in the original game and/or with the unofficial patch.

Crossing the Alps could be nightmare if you don’t defeat red player or spend too much time havoking on yellow base or western-red base. All yellow troops go to the main base and leave the alps. The brown player sometimes makes some ambushes. It’s pure RNG for me.

Please provide feedback on that matter here. The more information on bugs, the better.

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I seem to remember that this mission was quite easy once you found the right path. And I think this one was “easy” to take the lower path and care as little as possible about the enemies. The main thing is to get the elephants.

After the latest update I played not all missions again, but quite some - especially some of the more broken ones. I will check some more, but most of my raised issues still exist and while many missions are at least okay, the AI could do a lot better and some missions with just some very small tweaks would be way better. I will check again some more missions, but e.g. as some others mention is “Crossing the Alps” still broken - even after the last update, which was released a couple of months ago. Also “Odenathus, Lord of Palmyra” had still the ship issue - bad AI build order (I will check it again, I played it a month ago and I think it still had the issue. That issue really offers a weird experience, but could be easily fixed with a build order change for the AI).

Many of the campaign missions still have so much unused potential, which I would like to adress. If the scenario delete bug gets at least fixed (which I mentioned in the op too), then I’ll try to fix the campaigns with the data from community pages (at least the maps are provided and maybe the AI can be extracted) and I’ll upload the improved campaigns in the mod section. But I think fixing the official campaigns would be a better solution.

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