I played a lot of other RTS. AoE1 was my first followed by AoE2 but then quickly Empire Earth. AoE2 was never my only game.
Empire Earth 2 was very disappointing but it was quickly followed by Age of Empires 3 for me which turned out to be my favourite game in the series. I only discovered AoM later.
I also tired other RTS like Warcraft 3 and Dawn of War 1 which I both liked. I did play Dota 1 a little but I never liked that so games like LoL and Dota 2 were never for me.
I spend a lot of time playing Starcraft 2 and I was semi successful in ranked there, something I never managed in Age of Empires.
I never stopped playing AoE2. I played the Forgotten Empires when it was still a mod and then a little bit of HD and now of course DE. AoE4 was a big disappointment for me though. It sounded so good on paper but somehow it never felt right when I was playing it. Not sure why but I quickly lost interest and went back to AoE2DE and AoE3DE.
Yes Starcraft 2 unit controls feel a lot better then any AoE, partially because the game doesn’t do formations. The units just directly do what you tell them. They each move at their max speed in the most direct line to their target, which means flying units will just ignore cliffs while your other units walk around. In AoE units stick together so it will never feel that directly.
DM is always played on 2.0 speed and no DMer has any issues to micro.
As a “retired” DMer (heck, I was not even GOOD, my greatest thing was to win Ragnarok Silver League), I have no problems in playing SP or the campaigns on fast speed, never had to pause to micro (with an amazing eAPM of…40-45 on MP!, SP I relax much more) and I have all achievements until Return of Rome and V&V. The missing ones are from TMR, TTK bullshit, The Last Chieftains and Chronicles.
Yes, in my case, since I started with AoE 3 in 2005, I don’t have that nostalgia lens like AoE 2 players, and even though AoE 2 is a fantastic game and I’m a hardcore AoE 3 player, I recognize that AoE 4, while it started off somewhat complacent and lukewarm, has improved a lot with the DLCs and is now a very decent and recommendable game… even AoE Online, whose cartoonish aesthetic many of us didn’t like, improved a lot with Celeste and is my second favorite AoE (third would be AoM Retold, which, while not an AoE, I consider part of the saga, and then AoE 2, even though I put almost 2000 hours into 2 DE, not counting the dozens of hours in 2 HD and AoK and TC)…
Sure, AoM would be AoE 2.5… and AoE 3 is more of an evolution of AoM than AoE 2, that’s why many AoE 2 players who skipped AoM got lost when they got to AoE 3… it happened to me the other way around, I played AoE 3 first in 2005 and then AoE 2 in 2006 and I said “wow, they are super different” and a little later I played AoM a few weeks later and I said “ah, that explains it”…
Remember what I said in the main comment:
“I was also in the AoE2 bubble for many years, I know what it’s like…”
Age of Empires 2 is BEAUTIFUL…
So the answer to the question seems to be “yes,” we would buy another version of AoE2. We’ve already bought 3 versions, their expansions and DLCs, why not buy a fourth? Maybe they’ll improve it a little more… haha
I remember when I was very young and played AoE1 for the first time, I couldn’t stop playing, then I discovered that AoE2 existed, and only then did I realize that the Farm was automatic in AoE2, which impressed me and made me think that it wasn’t necessary to keep building a farm all the time like in AoE1, and that made me see AoE2 as an evolution, something as simple as that…
My first experience with AoE2 was a demonstration that it was possible to play online with dial-up internet, that was incredible, few will remember that time… Things were simple, but a lot has changed…
It’s interesting to read your perspective, but despite having played AoE2 since 1999, my experience has been quite different. I’d already played campaigns in several other RTS games (most notably WarCraft II and StarCraft) when I first played AoE2, and my initial impression of the AoE2 campaigns was quite mixed. I really enjoyed the more straightforward missions (especially Crucible) but many of the others seemed overcomplicated, grindy, and/or too difficult. Usually I would cheat through them just to see what happened.
It was only after AoE2DE was released that I tried playing the campaigns again, properly this time, and found that I appreciate them much more now that I’m older and understand the game better. Yes, they’re buggy, and the difficult levels are all over the place, and sometimes the hints are misleading, and so on… But overall I think they’re a lot better than I original thought.
I played StarCraft II when it was new and replayed the campaigns recently. They play much more smoothly and the quality is consistently high (apart from the Nova campaign, which feels quite uninspired to me). But I don’t think I would say they are necessarily better than AoE2 campaigns. I like both, they play very differently from each other, and I wouldn’t want AoE2 to be more like StarCraft II or vice versa.
As for “quality of life” and AoE2 being “archaic”… apart from improved pathing (which is frequently requested), I find it difficult to figure out what you’re asking for.
I don’t understand what you want to happen here. You need to click on the Town Centre because you need to tell them where to garrison. How else could it work? Do you want a hotkey to garrison in the nearest building?
Similarly I don’t know what you’re asking for here. There’s a hotkey to build structures (actually two, one for economic buildings, one for military buildings) but it’s not alt, at least not by default.
Increasing/removing the selection limit would be a sensible change, but it’s rarely relevant I think. I’m not opposed to a hotkey to select your entire army, but I think it wouldn’t be that useful since AoE2 has very hard counters and very different unit roles, so you rarely want to order your entire army to do the same thing.
Hold shift rather than alt.
Not sure what you mean – they have to travel between markets/docks.
Control + mouse wheel…
It’s not possible to attack a building foundation before construction has started, so I don’t know what you mean here. (Though I agree that pathing could be improved.)
Can we please stop with this idea that if someone likes the same thing for a long time, it must be because of nostalgia. I’ve played AoE2 since 1999 but I feel no nostalgia at all when I play it. I have much more nostalgia for WarCraft II, but I replayed that recently and found it quite underwhelming. Nostalgia is neither necessary nor sufficient to enjoy something old.
Not sure if you have any particular motive for posting this, but to me, AoE4 graphics look like marshmallows and cake decorations, plus the lighting looks really unnatural. I much prefer AoE2 graphics (though I have mixed feelings about DE graphics versus the originals – in many ways they’re better, but they’re also less crisp).
Yes, that’s true… while the classic AoE 2 campaigns are 25 years old and mechanically a bit simple, they do have greater narrative depth, since they last quite a while and can be played little by little… something that modern or post-WC3 RTS missions are very short because it’s just going from A to B and attacking or defending B… there are AoE 2 missions that take me about 2 days if I play them little by little, whereas AoM, AoE 3 and 4 missions I do in a maximum of 1 or 2 hours since they’re usually 1v1, 1v2 or 1v3 and then on to the next thing…
At no point did I say that everyone plays this game out of nostalgia.
This is the problem with quoting words out of context.
What I mentioned is that campaign content, especially the 1999 Vanilla campaigns (JeanneDArc, Barbarrosa, Saladino, William Wallace), are unlikely to get reworked, because they have their own fandom, and like one of the reasons, for nostalgia’s sake, nobody who plays the game to relive those old times (including me) would want them modified just for the sake of keeping up with the trend of reworking everything.
At most, the changes that some campaigns have been received have to do with civilizations that were used as placeholders (Teutons used as Hungary and Polony in the Genghis campaign), and that were not the correct ones for enemies, and that now that there are more truthful ones, they are included, but in general, the narrative and most aspects of the levels are maintained.
For example, the Pacachuti Campaign, now feels more “Inca” than ever without those eagle warriors.
On the other hand, when I commented, the topic was in the AoE4 forum, so I could discuss things about that game, especially directed for new AoE4 players. But now that the topic is in the AoE2 subforum, it loses its purpose, since this has been discussed quite a few times, for example:
There are things that are appreciated in each game, and things that are not, and that’s why some prefer to play single-player or multiplayer content from one game or another, notable differences between 2D vs 3D, micro vs macro, etc., etc.
I was the one who quoted you. Apologies if I misrepresented your position. I didn’t claim that anyone was saying that everyone plays this game out of nostalgia, so it seems we’re both misrepresenting each other.
If someone wants to play for the campaigns for nostalgia, they’d be better off playing the original version (or the closest they can get to it – probably The Conquerors with user patch 1.5). The DE versions of the campaigns are very different from the originals, and in many cases have been changed even further when new civs have been added – plus the civs themselves have been rebalanced a fair bit. I agree that the old campaigns shouldn’t be changed for the sake of keeping up with the trend of reworking everything, I just don’t think nostalgia is a good reason.
Happily, some DE campaigns change so little that it’s not a big deal.
However, others were remade so much that I prefer the original. For example:
I liked “Judith’s campaign” better in the original HD version. The final level is more intense and has a pretty cool final battle inside the city. They removed that final battle in DE, I don’t know why.
Also, El Cid campaign is better for me in the Conqueror version, because the Western Arquitecture and brown cliffs fith better with some spanish cities designs.
Then, regarding the voice actors, in the Spanish DE version they changed ALL the voice actors from the original AoE2 and Conquerors campaigns, I suppose to avoid paying royalties to the original actors. And well, the new voice actors don’t compare at all to the originals; it makes you admire the dedication the distributors put into the 1999 and 2000 versions.
Fortunately, there are mods to change the voices in the cutscenes back to the originals; it’s a really close-knit community.
Technically, they were reworked since The Forgotten, as each new dlcs civilizations were incorporated into the original campaigns, so they are no longer technically the same campaigns from 1999…
William Wallace: No new civilizations were added, but the console version combines the first four PC scenarios into the first scenario.
Joan of Arc: The Burgundians from LotW were added in 2021.
Saladin: The Italians were added in TF in 2013 and the Sicilians in LotW in 2021.
Genghis Khan: The Tatars were added with TLK in 2019, and the Jurchens and Khitans in 3K in 2025.
Barbarossa: This was heavily reworked during the first European DLCs: the Burgundians were added in LotW, and the Bohemian and Polish civilizations in DotD, both dlcs in 2021…
It’s because it was very difficult and they tried to simplify it quite a bit… for example, I couldn’t pass Judith’s third level because I got overwhelmed by the elephants…
Yes, they did the same thing in Retold… in AoE 3 at least they kept the original campaign voices, but they ruined the native voices instead…
You missed cumans they replaced the mongls in the 4th mission.
I think mongol campaign is the only one which had new civis replace old civis in every mission.
1.tatars khitans
2.khitans
3.juchens khitans
4.slavs cumans
5.poles bohemians
6.magyars
Kereyids, Uighurs, Ungirrads, Naiman and Tayichi’uds I wonder if anymore of these could be changed to other horse people like turks huns cumans for more varation.
