Age of Empires 2 is my favorite game ever!

Some people are playing ranked with on xbox with controllers (LMAO!)

play custom games
I got into CBA and it's basically footman frenzy from WC3. Shit's pretty fun except pub lobbies are somehow sweatier than normal aoe. I don't know why people don't just play to have fun in online games anymore.

that’s what killed the RTS genre lmao. Nobody wants to play against minmaxxing sweaty nerds who know every meta strat of the current patch.

Watching 2 nerds having a showdown. My money is on blue.

Gentlemen what do we think of the 3 kingdoms incident?

For sure, even this 750 elo game is already sweaty as fuck. They are meta'ing the shit out of it.

"knowing meta strats" is the entire core of RTS gameplay. If you want a game that you can just flail around with no knowledge and still win, I'd recommend smash bros

red will now spear skirms with forward castle drop how original

It sucks niggerdick. The campaigns and civs don't interest me so I didn't buy it, simple as

Blue will win!

I want to have fun, my dude.

They are so predictable because of that, but yeah, it gets pretty stale and boring when they want to copycat their favorite cancer streamer so hard.

ugh thinking and playing well are not fun, I just wanna have fuuuunn duuuude

sounds like minecraft is more your speed, zoomiezoom

The Han Shu incident...

There's no real "copycat streamer" gameplay in AoE 2. Even at the tippy top 0.5% of players, there's a wide variety of strategies, build orders, etc. that are used. It's why the game is still played 25 years later. There's no one "winning strategy", there's dozens.

You don't have to. New players are thrown in around 1,000 Elo so you'll be matched against other players figuring things out. It's only when you get to like 1,500 Elo will basically all opponents know the "meta" and best build orders from watching tournaments, reading forums, etc.

this
go watch some Low Elo Legends videos on T90's channel and you'll see that there's plenty of people playing today that are really fucking shit at the game. This idea that every single player is some 20+ year veteran grandmaster is laughably wrong.

It's really incredible how mirror matched it gets sometimes.

It appears unfortunately red has won despite blue having enough resources to pump out some serious armies. It was a psychological defeat.

kinda mid, especially when u realize (us) best players use cheats 100% undetected

Hinudstani's are my #1 boo. They have everything they need to match anyone. Inf -> dope hand cannons, Cav -> Imp camels, Archer -> ghulams

There’s a difference between playing well and playing like picrel.

Always preferred this over Starcraft and C&C.

how do you feel about hero units being introduced for regular play thanks to the latest china wank dlc

Ok, what's the difference.

bad

i dislike the multiplayer because its basically like chess where you lose unless you memorised the optimal play at every point. there's very little creativity to it

Fun, Mr Basement Dweller. I want to relax. Not write a dissertation on the latest Saracen strat.

only own MacBook, no windows

cannot play AoE even though I paid for it on steam

its over

see:

FUCK this DLC. Khitans and Jurchens did not deserve to be released with no campaigns. Also FUCK them for merging Khitans with Tanguts and not giving us any Tibet civ.

what a stupid ass thing to say
if it really was a solved game like chess as you put it then nothing stops the devs from adding an AI that stomps every player
i can give you that Dark Age build orders are solved but anything starting from Feudal depends entirely on how you and your opponent read eachother

30 minutes no rush

Then have fun with people at your level?
Not everyone is a sweaty korean boogeyman, researching and practicing meta build orders.

Honestly, most people that cry about tryhards are fucking 500 elo scrubs that don't want to get better even naturally so just have casual 5 hour games going full city sim until there are no trees left.

500 elo is the new 1000 elo

The heros are pretty bad, but it has set a precedence.
We will see things like Joan of Arc and Charlemagne eventually

Don't care. They're not even that good; it's just faggots crying and whining about something new being implemented.

I wouldn't mind as much if they were just as strong but only recruitable once and didn't have any aura effects.

Charlemagne

The black guy from that Breakfast club podcast?

I outright asked over on aoe2 reddit why hero units are bad and couldn't get any real answer other than "they don't fit with the game"
It really is just faggots crying about new thing existing and they don't want to adapt to it.

18min before something happens

that's why AoE2 sucks. Don't get me wrong I love AoE but you know 8 out of 10 games play by a cookbook and the final decider is effectively 1min of actual free decision making.

Somehow people complain about AoE1 because it lacks QoL and then you add something like autofarm to 2 and people start whining that it's too much QoL

That's 18 minutes ingame time, or approximately 9 minutes real time.

What makes AoE not die after 30 years unlike the rest of RTS?

you know 8 out of 10 games play by a cookbook and the final decider is effectively 1min of actual free decision making

this isn't true even at the top levels of tournament play. Genuinely where are people getting this idea that every single game plays exactly the same?

add completely new mechanics to a 25 year old game

how exactly is that a wrong sentiment? Just make a new game

Worst maps are Michi and Amazon
Also sea because some sea civs break the balance and sea gameplay suck

this:

same

Ancestral resonance through the collective unconscious.

make an entire new game just to add 1 mechanic

sea civs break the balance

Meaning you're not comfortable on water and the "balance" you are talking about is some civs that you consider bad are actually good in situations you don't like.

Hero units aren't even "completely new", we already have units ingame that buff other nearby units, the Roman centurions that buff legionaries.

Yes, except for the civilization bloat. They've added or split existing factions apart way, way too much and it results in a lot of shitty, uninteresting, and samey ones that don't need to exist. But besides that, it's an incredible upgrade on the existing game in terms of graphics and quality of life.

Or that cavalry unique unit that gains extra attack the more of them are together in a group

What sexual image could you possibly use for AoE2?

FUCK IT I AM GOING TO PLAY A ONE VERSUS ONE

Use a ram penetrating a castle.

How is it for someone who doesn't want to ever touch the multiplayer outside of co op

and another and another
you just explained sequels

That is the comfiest version.

Will take you a damn long ass time to get through the campaign and playing against bots isn't that bad.

But I am, I main Spaniards, get cannons on sea and the game is done, worst civ to counter in sea are Dravs, just because cheap boats, but not impossible with suicide boats and taking out docks, the problem is that the strategy in sea is always the same and simple. New Chinese boats are kinda good I guess.

The tutorial in youtube to learn the basics of each civilization is 30 hours.
So this game has a lot of content.

Now that they stopped updating AoE3 where are they going to take ideas for AoE2's new shit??

It IS pretty good anon, trvthnvke!

See, you're just contradicting yourself now.
You're saying it's easy but crying about water battles yet still saying the strategy in sea is always the same and simple
What the fuck

my favorite map?

nomad

There's legitimately like 200+ hours of single player campaign content, and that's just the official stuff.

why yes, I do play Black Forest only, how did you know?

what the FUCK is this bitch castle placement? Even 500 ELO do better.

make a game so good that every sequel afterwards feels kinda lame and pointless

damn

Contradicting what? Crying? I said sea gameplay sucks and some civs break the balance, prove me wrong.

Japan/Teuton/Italian masterrace!

My wife used to play this shit all the time when she was a teenager

Being the dorky girl she was, she'd make custom battles and try to just develop her civilization and have everyone be friends

Eventually the CPUs would band together and destroy her

Kept doing it anyway

I love that woman and I like AoE2 because it reminds me of her.

Starcraft was much better.

Why isn't aoe4 placed in ww1 again?

What do the Japanese even bring to the table beyond cheaper camps and faster halbs?

not every single castle needs to be an aggressive face-drop, nonny

kataparuto trebs
also samurai are kinda nutty after infantry buffs

Playing against people is too hard

???

spoiler

I agree

The color of this screenshot looks very extreme and I don't know how to describe it

Pretty good. 2500H (much of it idling or watching replays) All I do is co op campaigns and single player I havent even touched any of the custom campaign type content yet which is a whole nother rabbit hole for me. I've been trying to play some Xbox games too

Starcraft was great if you liked futuristic alien dystopia bullshit I like comfy medieval battles with horses and trebuchets and beautiful handcrafted medieval architecture also blizzard became a bunch of turbofaggots so it shows what they were all about

33% infantry attack speed bonus? Counter UU UU? Fish bonus, decent archer/cav archers.

Then build it at home. Going half-way like that is pointless.

Calm down Spirit of the Law.
Samurai are overrated.

controlling the middle of the map is pointless

hardstuck 500 elo shitter detected

I think Microsoft needs to stop sucking off the Chinese it's gotten old

some autists don't like it

"incident"

Even the chinese didn't like the half-assed pandering in this DLC

Ok I'll make a defensive castle, boom to imperial then take your castle for free with trebs. There is zero reason to build a castle there when you can put it on the wall and range a ton of his buildings instead. Either apply pressure or boom.

I'm a Persiaboo, how's Persia in this game?

same. now they just need to buff handcannoneers to make it even better.

did you win

One of the best civs, very flavorful.

I don't know what were they thinking, nobody ever suggested they wanted the 3 kingdoms as civs (also that setting is already overdone as fuck)

"they don't fit with the game"

How is this a bad argument? Should aoe2 accept home City card bullshit like aoe3 has then?

AoEIV is superior to 2 in literally EVERY single way possible and I'm tired of pretending it's not.

that's why everyone plays 2 and not 4? weird!

turning aoe2 into aoe3

That would be too based

No I lost :( I was slavs vs japs i early castle aged and tried to 3 tc boom but i didn't have enough food villies to properly do it, i had an earler castle that dropped right by my tcs and acyually ended up building like 5 castles because of that stone for wood tech, he just had a smorgeshborg army of every single type of unit i froze up didn't know how to deal with i had some boyars and spears but he ended up going imp first and trebbing my castles while i couldn't really get in to takte them out with my cav, if I had actually fought a battle earlier when i raided instead of running i would've won I think or have been close. in the game you think the enemy has a lot more units but when you go back to a replay you'll see that that's basically all the units he has.

I also thought I was hindustanis until 25 minutes in and that kinda threw me off too when I found out because i was prepping for ghulams but their samuari would've rekt me

Do AOE3 and 4 have good campaigns? I don't care about online at all.

I always pick my civ. I main burgundians. I don't do anything special with them, I just like double bit axe, simple as.

Hell yeah

Needs lots of farms to make vils.

I'm going to finish the roach and have a shot of cointreau? and try again.

Good luck.

he just had a smorgeshborg army of every single type of unit

When in doubt, scorpion it out.

That would've been a good idea

MBL style stronk

I lost again but i the guy i was against went trash combo again so i went scorp and had him on the back foot for a bit but i glomped and didn't spend more money on trash units but rather gold units and spun out a bit selling food for gold instead of just building 30 stables cav

tranny game

Well at least you learn from mistakes.
Protect gold units like investments, if you are losing them don't sell other resources to fund replacing them (unless you're saracens)

I thought the spoiler was gonna be 'she died of cancer' of 'cheated on me with my best friend'. But yes, Starcraft is clearly superior, as a goal oriented game at the very least. AoE is more comfy and a cute girl making miniature civilizations sounds absolutely adorable.

I wish Starwars Galatic Battlegrounds got the same treatment. I prefer it over AoE. Guns are cooler than swords.

Apparently the Gurjaras civ was inspired by Galactic Battlegrounds with being able to garrison livestock in mills

I didn't want to say it but them sheep look pretty soft...

AoE did die but then rose from the ashes. Starcraft's popularity was wayning at the time HD came out and the DLCs for HD prove to be both cheap and of quality. SC is a shell of it's former self while DE keepa actually adding content and improving the game. Honestly SC banked so hard on not actually doing anything pretty almost killed it. They really should have just said fuck it and either add new factions or go the halo wars rout with commanders that can change the entire faction.

3s vanilla ones are decent and the DE ones are good. 4 in general isn't a bad game I enjoyed it and finished it but have little desire to go back.

I think that's just to be expected. StarCraft is a pure strategy game, and unless your chess or poker, every strategy game will be surpassed. Just a matter of time.

AoE is a comfy game that you can take seriously if you want, but it has a broad base of nostalgia and vibes motivated players to keep it popular over the lifetime of the people who grew up with it, and maybe beyond.

Retard answer: Multiplayer kept it alive/saved it
Real answer: They made a really good DE on top of an already great base game and added tons and tons of good singleplayer content

I finally won one and it was against an Xbox player lmao he actually almost had me too because he build some sneaky bases in different parts of the map i didn't check but he was actually decent. Also the game went 57 minutes and he didn't go imp he was just a castle age enjoyer gujaras chad. Glades is a chill map tho I'm glad he fought and struggled for awhile though that was fun. We switched things up a few times I did ghulam pike for his camel xbow and then was short on gold a bit later so went hussar spam and mopped him up.

This.
Even if the remastered voice acting and slideshows of the original AoK and AoC are pretty poor in comparison, the only single player content that I'd say is *bad* is the Rise of the Rajas Campaigns (which were introduced in HD edition, not DE) and the Victors and Vanquished campaigns. The AoE I remastered campaigns aren't very fun either but that's a completely different game so I'll give it a pass.

Post RTS games that were slept on. Ill start with Settlers 2 10th anniversary. I think it is a great game and for anyone who is bored and wants to try out a RTS.

bfme2

It's a bad argument because it explains nothing

"it doesn't fit with the game because it doesn't fit with the game"

That's a valid reason to dislike them though. AoE2 is not a game that was designed around heroes in skirmish. The campaigns are different, those are stories about certain sections in history, and the ca bpaign heroes are mostly slightly better regular units, but the civs can also be slotted into other campaigns, see the Byzantines in Attila and Sicilian campaigns. Adding heroes locks that civ into that time period, which doesn't match the design philosophy of AoE2 since the beginning, being the vague rise of civs from the dark ages to just before the age of exploration. It's also an all or nothing thing, if you give one civ heroes you need to give all civs heroes.
There are a couple sprite gifs that i've seen only twice, subtle enough thay most probably wouldn't realize unless they checked the gif itself.

they made the best rts so there was no reason to make any more games

if you give one civ heroes you need to give all civs heroes

no you don't lmao

Autismo, AoE2fags are like meleefags

heroes are for faggots. go play warcraft 3.

fix the jank

NOOO YOU CAN'T PLAY OLD GAME, YOU MUST CONSOOOOOOM NEW GAME AND ONLY NEW GAME

shalom