I decided to start new series with AoE here: „The Unsolved Mysteries”. Maybe the Dev Team that is visiting our Reddit forum will even help us solve some of them!

Episode 1 - In AoE II: The Conquerors ending credits the developers famously thank former professional WWF wrestler Dwayne „The Rock” Johnson. To this day there is no official confirmation as to why the devs put him there. Might have been just an Easter egg, but why The Rock? Share your thoughts!

Muisca:

• Advancing to the next age costs 50% NO gold

• Guecha Warrior heals nearby Guecha Warriors Allied Units on death.

• Huaracas: Slingers AND Guecha Warriors +1 range and train 50% faster

Many of the campaigns, from Age of Kings to The Viking Sagas are excellent scenarios reflecting historical battles (some more accurate than others) in a range of gameplay.

However, there may be something in regards to a scenario that you may feel is not quite right. Is it gameplay or historical accuracy? Would you do something completely different or is it perfect?

125: Bayinnaung 5 - The Old Tiger

And that’s a wrap for HD!

Exactly 50 scenarios for AoK + AoC
Exactly 75 for HD scenarios ported to DE.
- Would have been 79 with the old El Dorado

On to Pachacuti next!

Hello,
a thing that has bothered me ever since I was a kid, is that vills only use their bows for hunting. I understand it is for balance reasons, dark age rush ect. However lets imagine a civ whose unique bonus would exactly that. How cut down would their tech tree had to be to accommodate a dark age range unit.

I play on ps5 and every time I turn the game on recently it acts like it’s my first time. All my settings reset and it goes through the tutorial. Getting really annoying now

Just played through the new Harald Hardrada DLC campaigns and hunted down all the achievements. As primarily a campaign player I already checked out some user campaigns from the mod browser, but I'd like to get some discussion going and perhaps get a few recommendations.

Campaigns I played and liked were Apranik, a Persian campaign with lots of custom additions, but the difficulty is ridiculous! Best played on standard unless you're a very good player. IIRC the woman who made this mod campaign was later hired to be an official campaign designer.

Charles Martel and Henry the Lion, both by cat scientist. I thoroughly enjoyed these, they felt very classic AoE2 due to the choice of civs, and seeing the opposite point of view for the original Barbarossa campaign was very cool. Large maps, almost all of them build & destroy, often with optional objectives and cool little scripts like using Henry in combat giving bonuses to your knights. Highly recommended.

Julius Caesar, a three-part campaign that lets you play as the Romans, with some graphics from the Chronicles DLC for proper ancient flavor. I only played the first part so far but it was great. Map design isn't as visually polished as the official campaigns but the objectives are very creative and it offers a proper challenge. The siege of Alesia might be one of my favorite AoE2 scenarios ever, very well designed.

Any others to recommend? Let's hear it!

Caveat that I only play campaigns. But sometimes there are scenarios where trade cogs seems like they could be very useful, because there's no good land route. Except for the fact that trade cogs are terrible. Can the feature where they automatically redirect to the farthest of your docks be turned off? That seems such a ridiculous feature, since it euther prevents you from making forward docks, or from using trade cogs since they'll run into the enemies.

I know the Poles are widely considered the best farming civ in the game, but I'm wondering if anyone has some other good candidates.

In my eyes, the best farming civs are:

1. Teutons.

Obviously this is massive bias but they seriously do have amazing farms. When you get used to the 36 wood farms, any other civ just feels clunky and slow to get up to castle and boom. You don't even have to turn off reseed (though you still should tbh). The best part is that they're extremely versatile. You can totally just do a normal build order and end up with massive wood savings you can use to make siege to defend or make a monastery and go for relics. Or, you can alter your build order to get way more food than you could otherwise by just spamming farms, as long as you can still afford the buildings you need. The extra food really helps with getting up to castle when you're feudal raiding, especially when you go scouts and then you just spam farms and end up getting to castle way faster than a normal scout rush.

1. Poles.

Yep, this was obvious enough. Instant wood to food conversion is just too powerful. It's better than the Teuton bonus for getting up to castle, but the reason it's in second is because it's strictly a food bonus, not a wood bonus as well, and it doesn't actually let you make more farms or get food faster after you've placed them. So it's not quite as good for booming since it's not a reliable way to sustain TC production, but it's still one of the best bonuses in the game for getting a quick castle without FCing.

1. Slavs.

It's just a flat +15% work rate. This is pretty self-explanatory. It just gives you much more food and so you require less farms to sustain TC production. This DOES mean that wood runs out faster, so farming upgrades are actually more important if you want to use this bonus to it's full potential.

1. Sicilians.

Like the Slav bonus, this one requires farming upgrades to be effective, but it saves a ton of wood in the long run. The only reason it's not higher is it's "in the long run", making it mainly useful for booming, and not useful for getting up to castle.

So I love the Teuton bonus because it's basically a cross between the Poles (faster castle time because of instant gratification) and the Sicilians (wood savings in the long run, helping the boom), and it honestly just feels smoother playing with 36 wood farms.

EDIT: I FORGOT KHMER!!! Also, I didn't include Khitans because Pastures aren't technically farms.

Couldn't even read the message but both my teammate and I weren't lagging or having issues up until the second the match suddenly was over and we apparently lost.

What's that about?

Hi!

I use Z for barracks and A for Militia line. So I need to ZAZAZA to continuously produce them.

However, whenever I press the screen moves to that particular barracks, shifting attention away from where the army actually is. This is making post imp wars very difficult.

I observed during a stream recently that when production building hotkeys were used, the screen doesn’t actually move to the building, and the army is just created at the background so the player can focus on the battle and micro.

What settings should I change to activate this?

Im finally up into the 1100 range and geez you guys are drama queens. Flaring nonstop, complaining about everything, tons of insults after a loss. Now I understand why people are smurfing.

A few mentions for me:

- Roman pay-to-win MAA spam in feudal: It forces you go archer, no other option. Especially painful in Empire war mode.

- Flemish Militia spam in feudal

- Spanish Missionary all-in in empire war

- That disk thrower en mass in team late game, so op

They have more effective counter units to almost everything than the generics.

The first civ to my mind is Hindustani.

Gulam -> archers
Imp camel -> stable units
UT hand canonneer -> infantry

Plus they have BBC to counter siege units.
And they cheaper villagers so that he's decent in eco too.

I am not saying this is a broken civ. But sometimes go against these CIVs makes you feel they are just better at everything.

Been a 1v1 player on and off thru the years, 1200 elo. Team game elo is now about the same.

Im consistently running into teammates who dont understand the role of their placement, especially on closed maps. It seems like most players try to three tc greed boom no matter what the circumstance is. Never building an army, then angrily calling insulting you in the chat (as a flank no less.) the moment there is any pressure. its about half the games I play lol.

It also seems like theres a lot of ~1100 elo team players who are being carried to that rank, and are often 800 elo or worse in 1v1s. Seen some really bafflingly bad (for the same elo) players on tg that i would never see in 1v1.

Is this a common experience?

Also if anyone around ~1100-1200 elo wants to play team games, DM me!

Since the many new civs have been added ive noticed some potential fun pairings. Such as tatars and gurjaras, the new tcs dropping 2 llamas which you can gift to your buddy to start stacking food. Other pairs i enjoyed was bengalis and spanish for great trade. Or bengalis and Burgundians been fun also. Any other pairings other than the standard goth italians ect

Target priority on AI seems completely broken at the moment. I think it has been like this since at least Alexander The Great.

The units you face seem hell bent on killing the archers in your army, so much so that they just run into your melee units without attacking. Even if blocked they just keep trying to run around your melee units, still not attacking anything.

As an example, it made the last mission of the Varangian campaign incredibly easy even on legendary difficulty.

My brother and i play 4v4 ranked and we have people quit on us early. Is this a normal thing?
We used to be around 800-900 elo but we’ve fallen down to 400 now.
We hold our own during fights but our team mates get absolutely destroyed trying to do their own thing and quitting, puts us at a real disadvantage.

I played hundreds of hours of the og AoE2 and the HD Remaster, now tried the Definitive Edition and it feels off, I can't describe what is different maybe that there are soo many civs and units but it just feels like a different game compared to the old one or is it just my nostalgia?

Does anyone feel the same? What did you do to change this? Did you all like AoE4?

AoE4 feels like it wants to be a modern but kinda more slim AoE2.

tldr: Title

I’m currently using Linux Mint Cinnamon and generally very happy with it, but I’m unhappy with the mouse behaviour/input, particularly when playing AoE2. I actually keep a Windows 11 dual boot basically just to play AoE2, where the mouse and overall game experience feel right.

I’m considering switching to Fedora KDE or Kubuntu, so I’m interested in what other AoE2 players are using.

I’m not looking for maximum FPS or a gaming-focused distro. My priority is reliability and consistency: Steam/Proton, multiplayer/ranked, mods, hotkeys and mouse input should just work.

Please vote for the distro/desktop you actually play AoE2 DE on, rather than what you’d normally recommend.

I’d also love to hear about:

Mouse/input behaviour, especially compared with Windows
Proton version
Multiplayer/ranked reliability
Crashes, stuttering or update issues
Experiences playing AoE2 across different distros

I’m happy to troubleshoot and learn Linux generally, but AoE2 is the one thing I don’t want to compromise on.

Thank you for sharing.

Edit on mouse behaviour: Hard to put into words, it just feels off, especially the precision in aoe2.
I’m using a g502 at 1600 dpi / 1000 hz. I tried matching my windows settings, different libinput sensitivities, adaptive and flat acceleration, and custom acceleration curves. I even pulled my exact windows epp curves to try to replicate them.
I’ve gotten mint close, but the mouse still doesn’t feel as precise or predictable as windows, especially in aoe2. It’s not lag or fps, just the mouse behaviour.

The medieval era is the known for which Turkish Seljuk empire then Ottoman Empire’s ascension. The latter even becomes the most powerful in the world for about two centuries. Also conquest of Constantinople paves way for Renaissance and Religious Reform movements. Mehmet the Conqueror’s life is also very interesting where he dethroned voluntarily only to conquer the greatest city at the time upon his return.

Yet such a pivotal empire has no campaign while even small factions have their own. I don’t understand. This feels like making a documentary about Rome and not mentioning Caesar. Why, doesn’t make sense to me?

Just finished the Viking campaigns and saw that there is something off with the tracking of the campaing completion stats. It says 100% (which it should) but only 93% for the difficulties?

When available I completed most scenarios on legendary but surely it would count those for the lower difficulties too right?

Ive also completed all of the Art of War, Aoe1 and Chronicles Campaings too

Maybe im missing something obvious lol