Great! Have Gamepass and a friend wants to buy the game on steam.
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Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition |OT| Castle Doctrine
- Thread starter GrrImAFridge
- Start date
Great! Have Gamepass and a friend wants to buy the game on steam.
I don't remember Saladin being exceptionally difficult outside the brutal last scenario, though it's been awhile and I don't know what they've changed.
But really, play whatever order you want. Attila is a fun one.
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I mean I want to play them anyway. It just lacks a bit of direction because all the campaigns are unlocked from the beginning and there is narrative or whatever order in them as far as I can see. I will just stick with the release order then like in the link I posted until someone comes with a better recommendation.
They're crossplay, except they're not at this moment lol.
The steam and microsoft games are on different versions (steam has a newer update) and they're out of sync, preventing cross play. Until they update the Microsoft version to match the Steam version, you wont be able to play with your Steam friend. From what I gather, its been like this since the game launched, I think they're aware of the issue and just waiting for the update to go through certification through windows store.
Well, that's a shame. Funny that Steam gets the newer update first
Personally, I'm doing them chronologically, based on events they depict. I have a list I follow for that. I'll need to update it for the revamped Forgotten campaigns, most likely.
But the release order is a good "thematic" approach, too.
Btw, I just finished the reworked Alaric campaign and its clear that it goes before the Atila campaing even though thats not the original release order.
After finishing the last map, the narrator says "the huns are coming, and they will stop at nothing". I thought that meant there was an extra map as a defense vs the huns, but no, that was actually the last map.
Someone made a rough compilation of the chronological order for the campaigns, I am trying to following it.
Personally i would try to play the by release group because the design of the campaings gets better in later releases, the original campaings can be super awkard to play with the 75 pop cap and the conquerors generally have 125 which is enough to not feel constrained. Later campaings can have from 125 to 200 pop which make them the most fun imo.
Wait. Did they rebalance the original campaings? I actually dont know if they still have the 75 pop cap.
I completed the first three scenarios in the Joan of Arc campaign, I think I could cross above 75 population cap in one of them. But I am not sure, because I was playing in Standard difficulty and never needed to increase the population cap much.
I don't recall the original Saladin pop cap but some of these missions that I'm doing now have 100 pop cap.
Some of them have pop caps. Saladin Mission 3 was a bit annoying with its 75 pop cap because you had 3 enemies and two bases and you couldn't even build towers or fortresses lel
So far only change I noticed to the original campaigns is that when Attila is attacking the Eastern Roman Empire, all the enemy settlements are actually Byzantine civ, instead of a random assortment of civs in AoC. Functionally, this has no impact on the game (because they all have token armies and exist to be raided and pillaged quickly), but it gives the scenario more consistency.
Gods that mission sucked. I have only beaten it once lol. Into China is another bear of a mission.
I'm almost through the Tamerlane campaign. It's been quite good. I do like it when they have multiple factions that can be allies/enemies with you. That seems to be a theme with many of the new campaigns.
I'm glad Tamerlane got a campaign because I knew very little about him. I ended up spending an hour last night reading about his real life campaigns. What a ruthlessly efficient military commander, and an even more ruthless person.
Yeah, running down villagers fleeing a burning town center just to have them flop down and die in stoic silence just wasn't satisfying.
The only ones not afraid to scream were the dying horses.
You take that back, "Into China" is one of the highlights of the original AoK!
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Yeah some of the old campaigns have different civs and pop caps now. and a couple missions you no longer instant lose if your Hero unit is killed.
Soph's AoE Chronicles
So Barbarossa is campaign number three for me to tackle. I'll get back to the proper release order afterwards.I just have to do this one first, Barbarossa was always my favourite campaign due to the Teutonic Knights being such beefy swag soldiers winning against pretty much any other melee unit. I followed your advice and put the difficulty on Hard. Let's wreck some vassal princes first in the first scenario of the campaign called "Holy Roman Emperor".
The mongols are gone and are now shown to be Cumans. I'm betting on more changes like this, they never really intended them to be mongols after all. it was just the closest to the Cumans they had. Bohemia are slavs now instead of Teutons? Swabia is also called Lorraine which fits better looking at the map itself. Maybe call it Lothringen/Lothringia though, the Teutons living there really wouldn't refer to it by their French name after all.
As a cowardly child I used to wall up in this scenario.. so lets try a different strategy and not actually wall up. I could vaguely remember the northern neighbour to be quite weak so stormed in there with the starting army, the hints tell me to clean up an enemy or two early right? They had more of a defense than I thought.. and well I lost the army. Woops. After a bit of booming I got swarmed by units from all sides and had to resign.
Let's try again shall we? How about some tower defense. The old cowardly child strategy with a twist.. seal of three entrances and let the units all flood in through one side straight past my castle if they want to hit my eco. Ofcourse I'd build some extra towers and another castle as well to seal the deal. With this impregnable defense I could focus on wrecking princes, they all died fairly fast since you're in imp.. and they are not. All of them except Austria who had two longswordsmen remain somewhere on the map. I finished the game with grabbing the relics. Small mistake, there's an achievement for annihilating all opposition. Oh well, gives me a reason to return once more later!
So Barbarossa is campaign number three for me to tackle. I'll get back to the proper release order afterwards.I just have to do this one first, Barbarossa was always my favourite campaign due to the Teutonic Knights being such beefy swag soldiers winning against pretty much any other melee unit. I followed your advice and put the difficulty on Hard. Let's wreck some vassal princes first in the first scenario of the campaign called "Holy Roman Emperor".
The mongols are gone and are now shown to be Cumans. I'm betting on more changes like this, they never really intended them to be mongols after all. it was just the closest to the Cumans they had. Bohemia are slavs now instead of Teutons? Swabia is also called Lorraine which fits better looking at the map itself. Maybe call it Lothringen/Lothringia though, the Teutons living there really wouldn't refer to it by their French name after all.
As a cowardly child I used to wall up in this scenario.. so lets try a different strategy and not actually wall up. I could vaguely remember the northern neighbour to be quite weak so stormed in there with the starting army, the hints tell me to clean up an enemy or two early right? They had more of a defense than I thought.. and well I lost the army. Woops. After a bit of booming I got swarmed by units from all sides and had to resign.
Let's try again shall we? How about some tower defense. The old cowardly child strategy with a twist.. seal of three entrances and let the units all flood in through one side straight past my castle if they want to hit my eco. Ofcourse I'd build some extra towers and another castle as well to seal the deal. With this impregnable defense I could focus on wrecking princes, they all died fairly fast since you're in imp.. and they are not. All of them except Austria who had two longswordsmen remain somewhere on the map. I finished the game with grabbing the relics. Small mistake, there's an achievement for annihilating all opposition. Oh well, gives me a reason to return once more later!
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It's absolutely a bear, which isn't to say it's not good. It's very good, one of those I'll probably replay for its own sake.
Finally, crossplay. I was starting to get a little perturbed. Ruined my weekend with my husband!
Looking forward to finally playing with him online.
(But I'll strongly consider buying any future games I want to play with him on Steam instead of gamepass)
Looking forward to finally playing with him online.
(But I'll strongly consider buying any future games I want to play with him on Steam instead of gamepass)
Does anyone have a good set of general campaign tips? I don't care about multiplayer, and I don't want walkthroughs. I just want a bullet point list of all the things that people who have played this game for 1000 hours know instinctively. Like the basic rock-paper-scissors of different unit types, how many workers you typically should dedicate to each resource, general info about build order, what units or strategies just aren't ever worth it, what works best against the AI, basic reasons why you might be losing all your units during a big attack, etc.
Best way to cheese AI is to wall (you can use houses for that as well) to create chokepoints.
Also mine stone and build castles at choke points.
Hunting is the fastest way to gather food, so ALWAYS take your boars/elephants/hippos- the big, aggressive food source.
Every unit has a counter. Study the tech tree and know who's weak against what (really basic- keep your cavalry (including camels and elephants) away from spears and your ranged units away from skirmishers- these units don't cost Gold, but they have strong bonuses against the more expensive units.
The build order's gonna depende on what units you need- generally it's either Knight's (food and gold) or archers/crossbowmen (wood and gold). For the Knights, you need less wood-only enough to keep your Farms seeing, and more farmers and lumberjack.
Once you reach Castle Age, you want to have multiple Town Centres producing villagers- your villager count needs to be about half your population (though this gets difficult on original Age of Kings campaigns with the pop limit of 75, it's a rule of thumb on later stuff). AoE II is fundamentally won by whomever has better economy- this is true both in single- and multi- player.
Play the art of war tutorials, the booming tutorial can be applied to most campaigns maps. The Tutorials recomend 60% of your pop as villagers, the distribution depends on the civ and army you are using. Always read the tips and scouts section on the objective window, they tell you of ways you could aproach the map for example the last Alaric mission where it tells you to take out a specific enemy first, and if you dont then the game gets harder than it should be.
Edit
This is relevant even if you are not playing random maps, just being efficient in general helps a lot in the campaings
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Fortunately DE has raised the pop cap on the original campaigns.
By "original" I mean AoK base game, where every scenario stopped at 75.
As someone who played a lot of Age of Empires 3 in the past and has never played Age of Empires 2...me no like. It just doesn't feel as good to me.
gotcha. Weird that they wouldn't fix the Conquerors, but they did Aok....
tried playing some ranked multiplayer. it's not great
the servers give me the "you lost connection" message when my internet is fine. matchmaking for team games is bad. wait times with all the options selected are really long. 1v1 is just a bunch of boring maps where people mostly turtle up and abuse massed ranged units. arabia might be the most open map in the pool, and even that one is dominated by turtling
water maps are still abysmal. it might actually be worse than it was in conquerors, but it's hard to say. there's no option not to avoid water maps for ranked matchmaking
i used to play this more seriously in the past, but i kind of wish the multiplayer lobby system was better suited for just finding teamgames on a specific map. but there's no way to see people's skill rating so it's kind of impossible to make fair teams
the servers give me the "you lost connection" message when my internet is fine. matchmaking for team games is bad. wait times with all the options selected are really long. 1v1 is just a bunch of boring maps where people mostly turtle up and abuse massed ranged units. arabia might be the most open map in the pool, and even that one is dominated by turtling
water maps are still abysmal. it might actually be worse than it was in conquerors, but it's hard to say. there's no option not to avoid water maps for ranked matchmaking
i used to play this more seriously in the past, but i kind of wish the multiplayer lobby system was better suited for just finding teamgames on a specific map. but there's no way to see people's skill rating so it's kind of impossible to make fair teams
In case anyone is already looking for fresh content, go to Mod Manager and check out the Campaigns tab.
One of the top designers for HD who got recruited onto he Forgotten Empires team and did some of the campaigns for the 3 expansions released 7 campaign-length scenarios already.
One of the top designers for HD who got recruited onto he Forgotten Empires team and did some of the campaigns for the 3 expansions released 7 campaign-length scenarios already.
I just beat Into China for the first time (my PC back in the day would chug and slow down with it).
I actually didn't find it all that difficult and I don't consider myself a particularly good player. But granted I didn't play blind (and used F3 a lot to help with multitasking!). Boom with three TCs (build some additional villagers before you Castle) + a bit of early fishing. Lots of early skirms, some knights in Castle Age, eventually transition to Mangudai + Hussars with rams and trebs.
If you can replace the enemy gate with your own by the starting island that gives you enough breathing room to get established. For the wonder, you can sneak a forward base onto the north of yellow's island and mix some camels into your force to deal with the cavs. You also need to push through the wall in a reasonable amount of time so you don't run out of gold, and the map was strip mined or close to it by the end!
I actually didn't find it all that difficult and I don't consider myself a particularly good player. But granted I didn't play blind (and used F3 a lot to help with multitasking!). Boom with three TCs (build some additional villagers before you Castle) + a bit of early fishing. Lots of early skirms, some knights in Castle Age, eventually transition to Mangudai + Hussars with rams and trebs.
If you can replace the enemy gate with your own by the starting island that gives you enough breathing room to get established. For the wonder, you can sneak a forward base onto the north of yellow's island and mix some camels into your force to deal with the cavs. You also need to push through the wall in a reasonable amount of time so you don't run out of gold, and the map was strip mined or close to it by the end!
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A
According to some reddit thread I read last week, the ELO scores are still there, just hidden in some setting.
now windows store is telling me to install the UHD pack, so i click "install" and it takes 2 seconds. Windows tells me it's installed, windows store tells me it isn't. I can't even delete the fucking thing. Doesn't matter if i access the folder as admin, give myself complete 100% rights and control over the folder, it will not let me delete it. Wishing i never bothered with gamepass and just spunked the money for the steam version.
Yeah, the multiple TCs is something I only got back into the habit of doing after I beat the scenario lol. Was booming far too slowly!
Soph's AoE Chronicles
We're on scenario 2 "Henry the Lion" of the Barbarossa campaign. I remember this one being rather easy all things considered. The Poles got changed into the Slavs (they were Goths before) which might make it slightly harder. The editors of the campaign didn't think of adding some walls though, now that Poles aren't Goths anymore. Anyway, we get resources from our lovely vassals while protecting them against raids from Blue. Our best friend and Narrator is also with us in orange as Henry the Lion.
Henry attacked one of the Polish castles while I protected the vassals. Of course this caused him to switch sides, he is the rightful emperor after all. He also threw a bunch of our villagers into his jail. Thanks Henry. Good thing I already amassed about 20 crossbows and just started wrecking his infantry, with a few rams included we wiped out the rest of his town. Nice try I guess.
That just leaves the Poles. They didn't really put up much of a fight. I think by this time their starting resources are running out and you just need to destroy a castle or two more at their side of the river. Get to imp and use a few trebuchets to mop up our business. It's time to enjoy some time with the Pope next!
We're on scenario 2 "Henry the Lion" of the Barbarossa campaign. I remember this one being rather easy all things considered. The Poles got changed into the Slavs (they were Goths before) which might make it slightly harder. The editors of the campaign didn't think of adding some walls though, now that Poles aren't Goths anymore. Anyway, we get resources from our lovely vassals while protecting them against raids from Blue. Our best friend and Narrator is also with us in orange as Henry the Lion.
Henry attacked one of the Polish castles while I protected the vassals. Of course this caused him to switch sides, he is the rightful emperor after all. He also threw a bunch of our villagers into his jail. Thanks Henry. Good thing I already amassed about 20 crossbows and just started wrecking his infantry, with a few rams included we wiped out the rest of his town. Nice try I guess.
That just leaves the Poles. They didn't really put up much of a fight. I think by this time their starting resources are running out and you just need to destroy a castle or two more at their side of the river. Get to imp and use a few trebuchets to mop up our business. It's time to enjoy some time with the Pope next!
This game is pretty shitty if you want to play online for 2v2/3v3/4v4. For the past two hours I've been trying to get a game going
-- joining lobbies is complete shit since I join and 95% of the time it says there are no slots, or some connection failed. Then I try to start my own lobby but noone joins
-- I do ranked, but my first 2v2 game had my ally leave. I attack my opponent in castle age and wreck him, but then his ally comes ... so whats the point with 1v2 here so I quit
-- I do another ranked 3v3 and again one of my allies leaves 5-10m into the game. Again I attack in castle, kill their main town center, but ally to the rescue. No point continuing 2v3 here.
Why the fuck do people join ranked and quit. That'd be super shitty in a game 30-40m into it. If i want a proper experience I can do 4v4 with all AI, which is pretty fun, but AI even on hard can be dumb sometimes and leave their massive army in their base while I attack.
hope aoe4 fixes all these issues
edit: just played another 4v4 ranked. ally disconnected 5m in. good lord
-- joining lobbies is complete shit since I join and 95% of the time it says there are no slots, or some connection failed. Then I try to start my own lobby but noone joins
-- I do ranked, but my first 2v2 game had my ally leave. I attack my opponent in castle age and wreck him, but then his ally comes ... so whats the point with 1v2 here so I quit
-- I do another ranked 3v3 and again one of my allies leaves 5-10m into the game. Again I attack in castle, kill their main town center, but ally to the rescue. No point continuing 2v3 here.
Why the fuck do people join ranked and quit. That'd be super shitty in a game 30-40m into it. If i want a proper experience I can do 4v4 with all AI, which is pretty fun, but AI even on hard can be dumb sometimes and leave their massive army in their base while I attack.
hope aoe4 fixes all these issues
edit: just played another 4v4 ranked. ally disconnected 5m in. good lord
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It'll get better once your ranking is more pronounced. Try and make a friend online to do two vs two with and get with him on discord. He won't just randomly leave after five minutes like that to leave you hanging.
Are there any good new singleplayer campaigns from HD forward? I played a couple of Vlad Dracula's missions and it seems just as boring as I remember the other AOE2 campaigns being.
I wish there was an Age of Mythology update to make it look as good as this and be on Game Pass. That's the only age of empires game with a good single player campaign, having completed every AOE campaign up to HD.
I loved AOE2 multiplayer, but I don't know if I have it in me to get back into competitive RTS.
I wish there was an Age of Mythology update to make it look as good as this and be on Game Pass. That's the only age of empires game with a good single player campaign, having completed every AOE campaign up to HD.
I loved AOE2 multiplayer, but I don't know if I have it in me to get back into competitive RTS.
Depends on what you're looking for.
The Portuguese and Burmese campaigns are pretty are both pretty varied.
Battles of the Forgotten are massive B&D scenarios with a ton of side objectives in most of them.
But at its core, it's still AoE. To go really off the rails you need to look at some of the custom content, and I dunno how much of it can be converted to be playable on DE.
I'll have to try Battles of The Forgotten for sure then.
I think my main problem with AOE2 single player is the lack of economy management and that all the combat situations are extremely similar to each other and poorly paced. And it's a little hard to tell what the designers think acceptable losses are for each fight, so you can easily be screwed and not know it since you can't ever build additional units.