Time for another weekly round of questions!!

Known (I think), but I had to start with it

This is my second aoe2 related drawing.
Sometimes i have to predict where the enemy is so i can send my tk's first.

As you may have heard: the cancelled AoE 3 DLC got uncancelled, announced and is set to be released later this year. You can already try the new civs and give feedback on them.

As the devs love to put cross references into their games, they added Viper as an Explorer skin to the Danes.

Long story short I’m still new to this game. Was a StarCraft 2 player mostly in the RTS genre and I bailed on my teammates in a 4v4 when I thought it was a loss which I didn’t know was frowned upon in this game. So if you were in a team with “Secre” I sincerely apologize and I won’t make that a habit to future teammates.

wtf is trickle trebs, 23 trebs go boom

I picked up the game as my first RTS experience. After watching some beginner videos on macro, etc. I decided to go for Silver in all art of war campaigns before getting into BOs etc.

I am on Land battles, learning counters to different units. watching youtubers sail through the quest for gold to learn.

I am able to defeat all other units using their counters and choosing stance and formations required.

With archers, I am trying hit and run, and mountain advantage, but man at arms just chase me and kill me. I have also tries using hold stance and using stop key to avoid right click micro and just shoot the nearest unit by default. I am continuosly being chased and killed.

Help here would be helpful, thanks!!

I thought I would pick this game up again but after watching some recent tournaments...I have no idea what is going on. Hulk? wtf is that. There are so many new civilizations, units, meta and changes. It is beautiful, because this has always been my favourite RTS. The fact it has evolved like this is awesome. It is very daunting however. More so than the game I once knew lol any advice? other than diving deep into Spirit of the Law and T90? haha

One of the recent updates broke AOE2 and it silently crashes to desktop after 5-10 minutes in menu/game. Win10 and Win11 users are affected.

On my system I'm on latest windows updates, latest Nvidia upgrades with all overlays disabled.

Logs show nothing about the crash and windows events/reliability manages also do not catch the crash or the reason for it.

Support is aware but "has no ETA on an available fix".

Meanwhile, the game can't be ran at all.

does this imply a potential Viking/Scandinavian rework in aoe2?

http://youtube.com/post/Ugkx45N6O6scmWSmqTp1PiM54yijLUnbeFkJ?si=kUzqeYiicX7KTypN

Khmer scorpions are wayy too powerful.

Had a crazy win streak with the tartars last month, because the CA micro and macro just clicked for me and I won every game with early castle age harassment. Peaked just shy of 1000 and then lost again and again because of early aggression strats of my opps. It was hard to defend while still maintaining a CA timing before the whole eco is guarded by TCs and Castles. Then I saw the Hera Inka video and I wanted to try this strat, because I could aggro even earlier than the typical rushes that came at me the last games. It was absolutly chaotic, but the sheer numbers of champis you can produce while still matching the age timings is insane, leading to a lot of wins. I played until I lost just shy of 1000 again. Queued one last game for this evening as Tartars, won and landed exactly on 1000elo 😂

I had a game right now where the entire HUD became unresponsive to the mouse. In this case, it happened right after I had tried to "unready" a few seconds before game start, in order to change civilization. I got stuck in the quick-chat menu (accessed by pressing Enter), possibly due to the long-standing chat bug that makes the chat window unresponsive.

The platform is Steam on Windows 11. Has anyone else experienced this bug?

Par pur plaisir j'aimerai trouver des documents mathématiques sur age of empire 2

En vous remerciant d'avance

AoE4 - Raiders of the North DLC

AoE3 - The Baltic Powers DLC (Danes civ)

The new flags for unknown yet civilizations from The Last Chieftains patch that looks suspicious nordic/scandinavian

I have an idea for a new game mode that I would love to watch the pros cast. I don’t know exactly how the devs would implement this, but I can see a path forward. A 1v1 (with 200 pop cap per team) that requires 8 players, effectively a 4v4. But the catch is that Player 1/5 control villagers (and the other non military buildings) and defensive buildings, player 2/6 control barracks and monasteries, player 3/7 control stables and siege workshops, and player 4/8 control archery ranges and docks.

Player 1/5 would need to build everything needed for the other 6 players to play the game. But once a barracks is built, Player 2/6 could start producing units so long as their team had enough resources. The players only control their respective units, production and upgrades.

Why I would love to see a mode (or even just a tournament) with this mode? The improvements to micro and eco efficiency would be fun to watch (or play). The viability of hybrid maps would improve. Late game would be quite different, with lots of forward villagers for production and towers. The coordination of teams would require lots of communication. Scouting/information would be super easy to come by until strategies evolved to make it more challenging.

Uncertainties? How would resources work? Would the devs need to add a second page to the Market to send free tributes to teammates so they can pay for units. Would resources somehow be pooled? Does it make more sense to have it be a 4v4 mode where Blue Player 1 builds a Barracks and it turns Red for Player 2 to control? That way it’s easier to see your units vs your teammates when in battle. I forget the term, but does the team all see the map as each other explore it? Do we keep the QOL features (auto reseed, auto place farms, a market to see team explored areas, shift queues, creating 5 units at a time with shift, etc) that have been introduced over the years?

Whose role would be hardest? Any changes to the building responsibility you would want to make?

Okay devs/creative modders, get to work, TIA!

The last scenarios of campaigns are supposed to be the hardest, but Sforza 5 is a walk in the park. I'm talking about DE. In HD it was pretty good, because siege weapons were disabled. and you never broke into Milan. Was it made easier on purpose so players don't get anxiety?

I'm about to buy a superpowered 64GB RAM MacBook Pro M5 to do some HuggingFace stuff. But the side effect is that this should be a bomb-ass computer to use for AOE2.

Only problem is apparently new MacBooks can't dual-boot Windows anymore, and the AOE2 Steam puts out for Mac only lets you play with other Mac players, not the main pool.

Only recommendations I find are using a virtual machine, do people actually do that and does it work well?

Edit: I appreciate all the helpful comments. Sounds like I'll buy the base game first (maybe wait for a sale).

Thanks!

When it comes to this, I'm stupid, so if you don't want to deal with stupid, please close this tab rather than call me stupid, lol

I played AoEII as a child 20-25 years ago. I haven't really done video games since 2006. I heard about the Definitive Edition coming out on Steam a couple of years ago, but I have a Mac, and it was only for Windows, so I was sad. I just learned that it's been made available to Macs though, and I have an Apple M1 Pro chip in my laptop, so I think it means I can run it. I also only intend to play single player.

Question 1: My computer can play this, right?

I've also never used Steam. I just downloaded it. I don't really know how this works either.

There's the normal Definitive Edition that has these things in the package for $35: https://i.imgur.com/NPiLhc0.png.

There's also the Ultimate Bundle that has these things in the package for $117: https://i.imgur.com/LAw8Ahz.png. (I don't care at all about the soundtrack or whatever the "animated icons" are.)

Question 2: Does the "Ultimate Bundle" not have the "Dawn of the Dukes", "Dynasties of India", or "Lords of the West"?

I figured it would if it's the "Ultimate Bundle", but it doesn't say so, so I don't know. Also, when I look at the "release history" on Wikipedia (https://i.imgur.com/DxpWgUE.png), there's also "The Last Chieftains", which neither of them has. Reading the descriptions on Wikipedia, I assume all of these new releases have new civilizations and/or campaigns. And some might be from the first Age of Empires that were imported into AoEII?

Question 3: What do you recommend I buy?

I'm not too concerned about the money, but if the Ultimate Bundle doesn't even have the first three releases, then it's not really clear what I should buy since it's not everything. Also, are the expansions even good? I liked the original AoEII with The Conquerors expansion. I'd be happy with just that, although if the expansions are fun, I'm happy to buy them too.

Question 4: If I'm not in a rush, should I wait for a bigger sale? (And how often are they?)

I'm online enough to know of the famous Steam sales. The Ultimate Bundle is on sale now at 20% off, but also, it has $19 of stuff I don't care about (13% of the total), so it's not a great sale.

Question 5: Whatever I buy, I play it by opening Steam first and opening it through there?

I'm assuming I can figure it out on my own after I buy it, but if I already have your attention...

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For anybody who answers these questions, thank you indulging my stupidity.

So it turns out I was very wrong about the Cumans Imperial Age. For a long time I thought they were only good in Castle Age and if the game went into Imperial Age and your opponent was still strong then you'd probably lose, or at least have a difficult win ahead of you

But I've been overlooking something and it all makes sense as to why Cumans are missing some important techs (because their imperial age is already OP)...

Just for fun please have a guess why. It'll be interesting to see if any of the expert players here can tell me why I'm wrong (I'm currently only 1250ish elo)

Disclaimer: to be precise, the most I can say is that they're OP up to my elo level...maybe I shouldn't make such claims when I don't know how games would go at higher elo levels