I have also posted this on Reddit. I'll be checking both sites, but if you could participate over there, it'd be better to have as uch of the community gather requests in a single place
Hello guys. I am NOVA, an AoE2 player and streamer. After news broke in that Microsoft was gonna release and Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition, I set up to make a list of things that needed to be fixed, added or changed. Throughout the last months, I’ve taken notes and came up with this. Since I am just an individual and I am not very experienced with other RTS’s, so I thought the best way to go about this was to let the community chip in, too! I will make a youtube video out of this, so feel free to provide respectful opinions, additional requests or just feedback or commentary.
The following list contains exploits, bugs, quality of life improvements and other things. Age of Empres 2 is a FANTASTIC game, but many of these things can make it extremely frustrating from time to time! Let’s put our voices together and let Microsoft know what the community wants for the definitive edition of its favourite game.
As a sidenote, many things included here might have been already confirmed to be featured in the game, but I am not aware of this (nor did I get into the beta). Some of the changes I talk about are unlikely to be delivered on day one, but I’m sure they could be added post-release. Also, as mentioned in the list, I think any significant changes should always be optional! Let’s please the community, not force anything down our throats.
Finally, I want to say that I like what I’ve seen so far from the details they released. Many of my original requests were deleted from the list due to them already being confirmed (such as zooming ability, scalable UI, vill count per resource, etc). But I think in order for this to be really the definitive edition, a lot of these requests, and hopefully yours, too, need to be considered and hopefully implemented.
Reddit - Dive into anything
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Hello guys. I am NOVA, an AoE2 player and streamer. After news broke in that Microsoft was gonna release and Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition, I set up to make a list of things that needed to be fixed, added or changed. Throughout the last months, I’ve taken notes and came up with this. Since I am just an individual and I am not very experienced with other RTS’s, so I thought the best way to go about this was to let the community chip in, too! I will make a youtube video out of this, so feel free to provide respectful opinions, additional requests or just feedback or commentary.
The following list contains exploits, bugs, quality of life improvements and other things. Age of Empres 2 is a FANTASTIC game, but many of these things can make it extremely frustrating from time to time! Let’s put our voices together and let Microsoft know what the community wants for the definitive edition of its favourite game.
- Pathfinding: This is a must. Because of the current implementation, a lot of frustration can result from seemingly simple pathing that units cannot resolve.
- Group pathing needs work: if you have a group of 3 melee soldiers targetting a villager, they trip one over the other and take ages to do damage. This is also applicable to stuck lumberjacks because they can’t resolve pathing if other units stand on the way. Also relevant when moving a group of villagers. It's cool that they don't know formations, but they move around keeping perfect distance between one another instead of gathering at a desired point.
- Another example of bad group pathing is having a group of soldiers, where one or more units are a bit far away from the rest of the army. When you try to move your army, they will move around the point you sent them to, keeping perfect distance between them as if they were villagers.
- Units knowing what’s in the fog of war without scouting: While this might be useful for knowing whether you’re fully walled, it is an exploit and should be fixed. It can also backfire when we try to send our army to some seemingly-clear area inside the enemy base, or we’re being chased away by some army and suddenly they close a gap in the fog of war and our army turns around and gets slaughtered.
- Some people enjoy that units know what they can't see, so an alternative to changing the current behavior could be adding a "force-walk" hotkey to have units actually attempt to go to a particular point, even if it's blocked by something in the fog of war.
- Ungarrison in the right place: If we have the gather point in the north east, units shouldn’t ungarrison from the south west side. If there was a way for units to know that a side of a building is enclosed by other buildings, it’d be great that they ungarrisoned from a different side.
- Group pathing needs work: if you have a group of 3 melee soldiers targetting a villager, they trip one over the other and take ages to do damage. This is also applicable to stuck lumberjacks because they can’t resolve pathing if other units stand on the way. Also relevant when moving a group of villagers. It's cool that they don't know formations, but they move around keeping perfect distance between one another instead of gathering at a desired point.
- Consistent hitboxes: This might be related to pathfinding, actually. It comes to mind whenever a militia gets trapped by a villager, but a villager will walk through a militia as if it wasn’t there, or the other way around. Ghosting through units isn’t cool, man.
- Allow building and unit ignore hotkey: Few things are more frustrating than trying to deny a castle with some archers, but attacking the castle foundation instead of the villagers because the cursor targets the foundation even a full tile away from it. Or losing an entire army because of targetting a deer instead of clicking the floor. If building selection can’t be fixed, then a hotkey to just path would be great. Just ctrl+right click and move under that tower instead of targetting it even when not clicking the actual sprite.
- Consistent selection: Might be related to hitboxes. It is currently hard to select the right things, as adjacent objects get selected instead.
- Foundation scanning and scouting: It might be a cool trick to pull off, but these exploits undermine to an extent the scouting and getting vision aspects of the game. This includes using palisade foundations to gain vision, or using a farm outline to see where enemy units are outside the base.
- Additionally, I think being able to place foundations in the fog of war whenever we don’t know those tiles are taken should be doable. The foundations should disappear after we get vision of the taken tiles.
- Foundation replacement refunding: If you have a line of palisade foundation and you place a gate on top of them, the individual wall tiles get replaced, but we don’t get the resources back. This adds an unnecessary hurdle of having to delete wall foundations to be more efficient.
- Allow foundation override for everything: While we’re at this, it’d be good having the chance to use something such as Ctrl+click to replace unbuilt foundations with new ones. I think being able to place gate foundations on top of unbuilt wall foundations is a good principle, and I don’t see why we shouldn’t be able to use this elsewhere. Did you place a blacksmith when you intended to add a monastery? It’d be great being able to select the monastery, hold Ctrl and place it on top of the blacksmith foundation. Of course, give the resources back.
- Fix farm laming: Or apply it to other foundations (prefereably the first one) There’s no reason why farms should be different than other buildings.
- Fix tower hopping.
- Downhill mangonel deleting: shouldn’t be a thing. Downhill damage should always be accounted for, otherwise, it shouldn’t be there.
- Trebuchet projectile not dealing damage: if a trebuchet is destroyed while its projectile is in the air, it won’t deal damage.
- Add an option to close the gate manually so enemy units don’t keep them open. Having the gate stay open when having your own units or ally units under it makes sense, having it remain open when there's only enemy units under them does not make much.
- Keep wolves in the fog of war. Some tournaments even remove them altogether.
- Allow picking a position for team games (flank vs pocket)
- Add a modern pinging system (missing enemy, need support, army spotted, etc) and, if possible, push to talk. Players should be able to disable this themselves.
- Add online leaderboards with recorded game files for top players/top games, or make an api for ranking services to access this data and make their own service where one could filter game recs by civ matchup, player elo, game duration etc
- Actually display stats: The current stats displayed when we select things don’t work with every item. Selecting a building will not display armor values, and units are lacking reload time, attack delay, etc. If some stats will be accessible only through the tech tree, then make it consistent and complete. A lot of the tech trees descriptions miss stuff, and the way stats are displayed in each description is inconsistent in several instances.
- More flexible control groups: Allowing more than one control group number for the same units (such as assigning a scout 1 and 2, where 1 selects the scout alone, and 2 selects it as part of an army)
- Scrollable progress bar in recorded games: This could be done in steps of 15 seconds, or less, by having snapshots of different states of the game at different points in time.
- Scatter attacking vs focused attacking: Currently, targetting a unit with soldiers in the attack stance will result in those soldiers attacking several units instead. The workaround of placing them in stand ground isn’t ideal. Something such as single right-click to attack the unit group and double right-click to attack a specific unit without changing stances would be ideal.
- Scatter building vs focused building: When you place a long wall foundation with more than one villager, they will distribute to build separate tiles, but this doesn’t work when shift-placing multiple foundations of other buildings. Something such as single right-click to build several foundations separately and double right-click to build the same foundation as a group would be ideal.
- Trade route: let us set a waypoints route that trade carts follow to control the stream of trade units.
- Let us rotate gates (already available for user-patch players, but absent from HD)
- Smart grid option: While the grid mode is great for placing foundations, a lot of people dislike having it on at all times. A toggle to have it display only when placing buildings would be a good addition.
- Add a hotkey to lock to-be-placed foundations beyond existing buildings, for when the grid isn’t good enough (such as in hills). Basically, make not yet placed foundations respect the hitboxes of existing buildings.
- Highlight a resource when hovering over it with a vill or selected. This would be fantastic for lumberjacks, as right now it is impossible to tell which tree we’re targetting until after clicking it.
- Make villagers seed farm foundations around a new built TC: If there is a natural source of resources around a TC foundation, vills building that TC will go take those after finishing it, but it doesn’t work with farm foundations. Mills work like this, and so should TCs.
- Let fishermen drop fish in docks: why only fish from boats?
- Queueing fish traps: Should be a thing
- Don’t disable patrol when a vill is inside an army
- Add unit-only stance or hotkey: Prevents patrolling units to never go past a building.
- "Tab" status window: This pop-up window would display ally status (# of vills, army and current resource count for allies) and player information for allies and enemies (ping, score, spotted unit types maybe?)
- Add a toggle for the “center view” behavior: When hitting the go-to hotkeys, the view moves to the selected building. Being able to disable this would make it easier to queue villagers while fighting. It would also save control groups for other things if we wanted to queue unit using the single queue mechanic to queue units without control grouping the buildings.
- Add edge-push scrolling option: Make an option to let you move the view as much as you push the cursor beyond the edge, not at a constant, fixed speed whenever the cursor is at the edge of the screen.
- Add a hotkey to select a group of enemy units so you can see their HP instead of clicking them individually, or add an option to display unit HP without selecting them. This could be a game option similar to SQ/MQ.
- Add an option to remove score: Or modify how it’s calculated. Many pro players agree that having a score in the game isn’t really good. Not only can it be misleading, but it can also be an artificial source of information (score dropping when clicking up, higher score with single tc = huge army somewhere, etc). A lot of players will disagree with this, but it would be good to have an option (again, similar to SQ/MQ) for people who want to get information by playing, not reading the score.
- Add a “range radius” circle when placing towers, castles, etc. It is currently very hard to judge when something has enough range to reach a certain spot. This is already a thing in at least one other eSport title (League of Legends) and it doesn't have a negative impact.
- Prevent gates from automatically open when villagers finish building them.
- Add an optional overlay to display the percentage or amount of resources left in dead animals, chopped trees, gold piles etc.
- Add an optional overlay to display the progress of a foundation.
- Add an optional overlay to display the kill feed.
- Improve the map generation parameters: We’re in 2019 and so far it’s been impossible to make a balanced arabia version. The delta between a good map and a bad map is still too large. Randomization is great, but there is no way right now to be tighter in terms of fairness of this randomness.
- Don’t remove the ability to play P2P: While a server-based model is great, p2p should still be available as an option for players who are too far away and future-proofing.
- Balance broken strats: Opening up korean's tech tree a bit more and nerfing their towers a bit would make it more viable for them to play something other than towers without knowing they're most likely to die if they fail.
- Find a way to prevent quick walling abuse: Suggestion to make foundations walkable during their first stages by cr10question
- Option to have visible hotkeys, by BloodyDay33. Also suggests automatic scouting.
- Automatic scouting could be done in a circular growing pattern, as suggested by zuihao
- Enable the patrol option when siege units are selected inside an army, by zuihao
- Fix the landing mechanic from transport ships, by theHand
- Scoring system and leaderboards (with attached recorded game files) for Campaigns, by Bigbossbro08
- Grades for single player campaigns, higher population limits and more historically accurate campaigns, by Bigbossbro08
- Remove or tighten RNG for boar and deer reset, make it so that trade carts don't collide against one another, change gaia bird LoS so that maps don't need to be edited for tournaments by Ptee92
- Making laming harder or impossible, by Ptee92
- Personal thought on this: it can be borderline impossible to stop a decent lamer from taking a boar. Because of the scout speed, the boar will never catch up to it as long as the lamer pays attention. Even while trying to block the boar with our own scouts, all they have to do is stop moving theirs. Trying to attack their scout is also very slow currently, as you need to catch up to their scout on their way back home. Making it so that a scout dies to 3 hits of a boar makes the strategy a lot higher risk. I'm not against laming, but I do believe it shouldn't be unstoppable.
- Make saracens viable, by notnorther
- Change the selected units interface from something like this to something readable like this, by Chrisisteas
- Blend tower and castles visuals when they're part of a wall, by AttackPenguin666
- Make siege towers shoot arrows when archers are inside, speed up by garrisoned infantry unit. Make it passive stance by default, by Bigbossbro08
- Make it so that patrolling units prioritize units we have vision for, instead of buildings near to them, by 909hat
- Personal note: this sounds very good. Very handy for when we have a raid back at home and we patrol some pikemen back, only to find out the stopped to attack some random forward outpost on their way
- As an alternative fix to foundation scanning, Arclet suggests having to-be-placed foundations not turn red when there's enemy units or buildings in that area of the fog of war. Instead, you would find out by them not placing upon clicking (potentially accompanied with a sound cue or error message). This would force you to spend resources, instead of getting information for free.
- Fix tradecogs; buff infantry and; more information in the HUD (like CaptureAge); add army maneuvers, by MrCarbunco
- A lot of very good requests for RMS, by Henkdesupernerd
- Undo/redo in the editor; off grid placement; better trigger system; RNG function and more, the rest of the suggestions here
- Allow to add civs without having to replace existing ones. Similar to how it was possible to make Realms for the userpatch version. by WhiteMagick4
- Make feitoria not take population space, instead have it generate resources when villagers are garrisoned inside one, by Bigbossbro08
- Civ specific monk and trade cart skins; Janissary hats; feitoria with less population cost; improve british, italian and slavic wonders; improve ships sinking animations and make moving oars; remove skirm bonus damage against elephant archer or add battle elephants to indians; modding guide; different sizes of real world maps. By masiakasaurus
As a sidenote, many things included here might have been already confirmed to be featured in the game, but I am not aware of this (nor did I get into the beta). Some of the changes I talk about are unlikely to be delivered on day one, but I’m sure they could be added post-release. Also, as mentioned in the list, I think any significant changes should always be optional! Let’s please the community, not force anything down our throats.
Finally, I want to say that I like what I’ve seen so far from the details they released. Many of my original requests were deleted from the list due to them already being confirmed (such as zooming ability, scalable UI, vill count per resource, etc). But I think in order for this to be really the definitive edition, a lot of these requests, and hopefully yours, too, need to be considered and hopefully implemented.
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