Agreed best patch yet. Some small "non ideal" changes but many amazing ones.Can I just drop some positivity here? Instead of saying civs lost their identity and complaining about the nitty gritty. I really enjoy playing the game. I always get excited by new updates and I think the devs are constantly driving the game into a better competitive state.
Lets shed a light on the positive changes:
Wall nerf is great. I think the 1sec extra build time is the exact right amount of nerf to make full walling in dark/feudal age a bigger commitment. The removal of armor on palisade foundations means they take 3 instead of 1 damage from dark age scouts, 4 instead of 2 from militia, 5 instead or 3 from feudal scouts and 8 instead of 6 from man-at-arms. Sounds great to me.
We have been asking for a turks buff and we didnt get it last patch. This patch they came up with some bonus, you may like it or you may not but I think most of you would agree that they needed something and this is one approach to help their early weakness versus archers.
We have been asking for buffs for tatars, for bulgarians, for portuguese. And the devs delivered.
We have complained about aztecs' continuous domination at the top in 1v1 arabia. They finally receive a nerf.
We have been suprised by the enormous buffs to khmer and the devs keep toning their bonusses down, aiming to put this civ in a balanced position. It's still a very interesting civ and I like the gimmicks of easy age-up, of hopping in houses, and of making farms in the middle of nowhere. Elephants were nerfed again - a much welcome change when you have seen the horror of a boomed khmer pocket.
Then there are ongoing improvements in the UI, and quality of life improvements such as easier walling and dubble clicking.
Nobody ever talks about pathing issues anymore, who would have thought after a journey of promises and experimental overhauls it seems to be in a good state now. (Appart from the occasional diagonal attack that reaches through walls, and the occasional villager bumping or boar pathing)
No more insane units like 0 frame delay >9000 dps kipchacks or steppelancer that could carry 1v4.
Maps keep getting updated and becoming more consistent with every update (with some pickups for example when all resources would spawn in orthogonal position).
Random map pool offers a good variety of maps (which you can vote for) and random civ makes a comeback with this patch
And we finally get the new game mode battleroyale for those who care.
Such a great year for Age of Empires 2 (and then I'm not even talking about all the support from Microsoft for the esports scene)
And all we see in these kind of topics is "omg koreans lost their identity of being a cancerous trush civ, bring back the old mangudai, auto-scouting noobifies the game, and I hate the quirky khmer farmers". Meanwhile all of those haters are happily using the automatic matchmaking system, auto-scouting, auto reseeding, task-queueing, playing the new civs, and enjoying all the other improvements that the game experienced over the past year.
Thanks so much everyone who helped in making this game even better then it was before <3
PS. Yes, I do realise that I have a personality which cops well with changes (adaptability) and which likes to focus on the good things (positivity). But do realise that I had a fair bit of critisism and distrust in the development when DE first got released a year ago. I wish people would focus more on the bright side, eventhough it is easy to forget and instead they use internet forums like these to vent about their frustrations.
I'd like to add a little"negativity" here though -- pathing is still containing small teleportations very frequently. If you know what I'm talking about. However, people are ok-ish with it because it helps knights fight xbows better :P. Lemme say though I don't have any big issue with pathing anymore and that is a huge improvement by Microsoft.
Just for some more random thoughts, the walling mechanics being updated feels very crisp now which I love.
And yes the random map pool is lots of fun . I even found a new favorite map, socotra.
But did anyone else experience lag in this new patch? Felt quite laggy to me unfortunately