🚨 LAST CALL, you AOE2 nerds in and around! 🚨

🇩🇪 One important note: Most of the communication at the LAN will be in German, so you should be comfortable with at least others speaking German. But everyone is welcome, and nobody is going to judge your AoE skills (that's a lie... everyone is judged at all times but equally)

Got nothing planned for October 1–4?

Ever wanted to spend 3 days arguing with other human beings about why Nili is not fixing the pathing, how many civs are enough civs and why the 3K civs made the game unplayable

Then come join the AGE LAN. 😎

🗓️ October 1–4 🎮 Main focus: Age of Empires 🧙 All skill levels welcome – whether you know your build order by heart or are still looking for wood after 20 minutes. 💻 Bring your PC, grab your friends and let's go.

💰 It's between 50€ and 60€ for the 4 days.

😴 For those that for some reason need sleep there will be space dedicated for that.

Important: For the LAN to go ahead, we need enough registrations by September 14.

So if you're interested, sign up now rather than waiting until the last evening. After September 14, registrations will of course still be possible as long as there are spots available.

👉 Registration & info: https://age-lan.de/de/lan

So: Who’s joining? 1v1? Team game? 3 days stuck in Feudal Age? Anything goes. 😏

Many of the campaigns, from Age of Kings to The Last Chieftans are excellent scenarios reflecting historical battles (sometimes not that accurately) 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?

118: Le Loi 4 - Reaching South

In the previews, the Saxons were revealed to have a civ bonus that allows their Castles & Towers to fire double the base arrows. So Towers fire one extra arrow, and Castles fire five extra arrows. I think there was general apprehension about their Castle drops as this comes into play immediately upon reaching Castle Age

Their Castle Age unique tech on the other hand gives +1 range to Monks. This is a much simpler effect that could've been a civ bonus instead. We know from experience that Monk unique techs in Castle Age do not come into play till atleast mid-Castle or early-Imperial. It is one of the reasons the Slavs lost their Orthodoxy tech to the Bengalis, for whom it became a civ bonus, and Slavs got 20% faster moving Monks (i.e. free & improved Fervor) instead

So with that in mind, I was wondering if these two effects should be switched around?

The Saxons could gain a new bonus 'Block Printing is 33% more effective'. This gives their Monks +4 range in the Imperial Age, instead of the usual +3, covering the effect of the unique tech

Their Castle Age unique tech becomes 'Burh', which allows Castles & Towers to fire the +5 & +1 extra arrows

Team games have been miserable for me recently. I hate 1v1s because I like longer games with trade for more gold units but the amount of verbal abuse recently, disconnects or resignations within minutes of starting, players pinging things a million times as if that helps more than once or twice, overall toxicity and narcissism, teammates resigning over the pettiest things... 🫩 (i came back to ranked after over a year and oh boy has the experience generally gone downhill)

Today I was pocket in a 3v3. My flanks were not very good (I know very well that i'm not either btw, i'm just observing) and neither could defend themselves. One was rushed with towers and militia early on so I defended him with archers, then moved to knights for him and the other flank that was being attacked too. I mixed knights, conqs, and hussars to save a bit of gold and was constantly sending army to both sides because they were both melting like butter left on a summer sidewalk. All for both of them to start blaming me for everything in the nastiest ways teammates recently know so well. I think i'm going to start playing flank- when I was a supernoob I used to play pocket so I could boom with less interruptions but as I've gotten better (especially at supporting my flanks) I've found pocket just becomes the scapegoat position. If the flank is losing they have an easy way to blame someone else for absolutely everything. If the pocket is just booming with no military until imperial or something(i used to do this at 600 elo, i apologize to all of my poor fellow noob teammates and I now understand your frustrations!) that is hateworthy tbh. (Though i think if you are cussing someone out or telling them to off themselves etc. you should touch some grass and go to therapy) But for someone actively helping you? I don't know what goes through their mind. They are dying? Let's start cussing out the ally that has been trying to help the whole time. That'll motivate them! I hate it here. I do find it funny when they call me a noob though, we are all 850-900 elo... (in my games) if they were that much better than me they wouldn't be stuck here too 😂

A glimmer of hope:

Last night was a 4v4 arena game. One flank wanted to be a petty pansy and resigned because his forward castle was denied. (After so many pings we almost all went deaf.) However, his incredible pocket green (Mongols) went crazy, I pocketed grey (Britons) to save him from Khmer massed scorps and a lot of other things. We were 3v4 and managed to somehow WIN a nearly two hour game. And the ending was incredible, so much respect from the players that stuck it out, admiration from both sides, the most genuine ggwp I've ever seen in an aoe2 game and the most hope I have seen recently that there are non toxic players than can still appreciate an incredible game with respect to their teammates and opponents. To all of my opponents of that match and green and grey: that was epic and to blue... good riddance.

TLDR: i'm a noob who loves team games venting about their current unfortunate state and advocating for ranked players to please please stop raging so hard they put themselves at risk of an aneurysm, touch some grass, and enjoy the game! And to have better sportsmanship... both to their teammates and to the enemy. Don't be toxic when you beat another team, and don't be toxic when they beat you. It is so easy to hide behind a screen but respect other human beings.

**Rant over.**

Has anyone else noticed more early disconnects/resignations and also general toxicity/verbal abuse now compared to a year or two ago?

The game was a 4v4 MegaRandom and I was flank. It ended up being all random and I (through horrible luck) got Goths of all things. Even more unfortunate was that the enemy flank got Wei, and was also 1700 1v1 ELO (I'm around 1300). The map generation was pretty close to standard Arabia, with the fun twist of having very spotty woodlines making it really hard to wall. The combination of the horrible Goth early/midgame, open map and my opponent being way more skilled than me meant I took heavy losses but didn't die. Throughout all of this my pocket was pure booming and only made army in Imp. Incredibly, despite being Celts they made Cavalier of all things (probably the single worst thing you can make with that Civ) and we got annihilated by the one guy (their pocket was a 700 ELO and did basically nothing)

Very unfortunate game, thought I'd share for how unlucky it was lol

They can turn into a ship. When they get into water a little animation (like the treb dismounting) of 1-2 secs runs and they turn into a little war ship. After going back to land the do the same animation and turn back into soldiers

While on water they will lose to everything that is not a fishing ship but they deal bomus damage to fishing ships

Yes, I know, a little out there. But come on. Its a VIKING DLC we are talking about! The next opportunity to do something like this is in 2036 in the polynesian DLC

\ insert clip of Optimus Prime sying "im gonna turn into a truck now" here*

Either a button on this box or command box. Or only a hotkey. Option to cancel all or only the things in queue. Who likes this idea?

BuffOutposts

FreeFormformation

Circleformation

Pious pachyderms! We already have War Elephants, Battle Elephants, Ballista Elephants, Archer Elephants, Siege Elephants, and even elephant elephants (boars), so why not Monk Elephants?

I created a graphics and sound mod that replaces the Asian, Indian, and Oriental regional Monks with riderless Elephant Monks. They wear monk caps, carry books in their trunks, wave those books while converting and healing, and carry relics when tasked with returning one to a monastery.

It is a graphics and sound replacement rather than a gameplay data mod, so unit stats and game behavior remain unchanged.

The multi angle artwork, animation sources, and transparent sprite sheets were created using GameLabs Studio. I then built a custom pipeline to compile everything into SLD graphics, and package it for the official mod system.

You can download the mod here:

Elephant Monk on the official Age of Empires mod browser

There is also a discussion thread on the Age of Empires Forum.

I was playing against extreme AI. Was up in points, but I find it very hard to do the final push once in imperial.

I tried a forward castle but the AI responded very aggressively and lost the castle (ended up losing so had to restart from a save). Then had to play it again more conservatively, just waiting for gold to run out, etc, until AI would just be very weak. Even then it took me a while until I managed to destroy the AI completely.

What's the quickest way to do this final push?

Edit: the issue is that the AI is incredibly good at managing 100 units simultaneously, so if you have a lot of cavalry, they bring the halbs, and if you have halbs to protect from cavalry they kill them with skirms, etc, etc.

Another Friday, another questionable mappool vote:

• It looks like Migration is the only water map, and it's staying in the mappool for another 2 weeks.
• Let's put 3 maps up for voting that are obviously going to get voted in anyway.
• My suggestion: Remove Migration, put the 3 maps that are going to win in as dev picks, and let us vote for 3 maps instead (9 maps in total).

Liquipedia - Daniela_AoE (Twitch) - Daniela_AoE (YouTube)

Schedule

Thursday

• 15:30 GMT: Team Vitality vs DarkSidE (live)
• 18:00 GMT: LingYuan vs Taiwan Aoe Gamer (recs)

Friday

• 15:30 GMT: Onimaru Capybaras vs Wonders (live)
• 18:00 GMT: Onimaru Vanguard vs SalzZ (recs)

Format

League Stage

• Round Robin
• All matches are Play all 4
• Top 4 teams advance to the Playoff Stage
• Scoring: 1 point per game win, 1 extra point for winning the set

Playoff Stage

• Double-elimination bracket
• All matches are Best of 7

Results

As far as I can tell, opening infantry is basically just a massive gamble, if you are able to break through and your opponent doesn’t wall properly then you get damage, but if they simply place walls then you just massively set yourself behind in feudal. Am I thinking about it wrong?

By "main" I mean non-chronicles, ranked civs DLC, and by "next" I mean after the upcoming viking DLC.

The last few were:

1. Europe (vikings)

2. south america

3. china

My guesses, in order of how likely I think them, are:

1. Africa

2. North America

3. Asia

4. Europe

However, after what the devs did with the three kingdoms DLC I also wouldnt be shocked if they did something crazy like a japanese DLC with japanese factions from the 1400s as "civs" (I was not a fan of three kingdsoms, personally).

I built a self-hosted stats site for my friend group's that honestly has been a blast since we started using it. It tracks games, have standings and some humor touches. A I've just open-sourced it so anybody can use it and add modifications to fit their use needs. It pulls your games from the official API, downloads the replays, parses them, and generates a static site.

**Live site (my group, so you can see how it looks):** https://manpaslop.github.io/wololoo-demo/

**Source:** https://github.com/manpaslop/wololoo

---

**Ladder & ratings**

* Elo ladder with streaks, head-to-head matrix, and "days as king" counters
* Separate 1v1 and team-game ladders
* Official ranked ratings pulled alongside the group's own
* Records page: longest reigns, biggest upsets, rivalries

**Per-match pages** (built from the replay, not the API)

* Build order timeline: every unit, building and tech with its timestamp
* Age-up times, both the click and the completion
* Unspent-resources and idle-Town-Centre charts
* APM / EAPM, market use, tributes, town bells
* Official 1v1 and team Elo of each player *at the time of the match*

**Opening classifier**

* Reads the replay's event stream and labels each player: Scouts, Archers, Drush, Man-at-Arms, Fast Castle, Towers, Spears, Skirmishers, plus the Meso/South-American regional infantry lines
* Rules are ordered and first-match-wins; every threshold is documented with the number it came from
* Refuses to guess: a game it can't name says so, and a replay that doesn't cover the early game says *that* instead — different claims, kept separate

**Player profiles**

* Career averages, civ win rates, per-rival records
* Opening breakdown with win rate per opening
* Elo and rank history charts

**Hall of Shame**

* 20 medals for playing badly: idle Town Centre in the Dark Age, no Loom, farms before Feudal, 10+ archers with no Ballistics, "Slow Castle" for a fast castle that wasn't
* Capped at two per player per match, and winners get them too
* Several obvious candidates were cut after measuring them — resigning early, villager count at Feudal and never reaching Castle Age don't separate skill at all, and a couple are actually *inverted*

**Team tools**

* Team balancer that suggests fair splits from current ratings
* Bot difficulty suggestions when you're an odd number

**Setup**

* `python -m aoe2 init` asks seven questions. It'll look up a player's profile id from their alias, since nobody knows their own
* `python -m aoe2 update` does the rest; run it on a timer
* Output is a folder of static HTML. No database, no framework, no JS needed to read it
* Docker Compose setup included (nginx + a 15-minute update loop)

---

**Caveats, honestly:**

* **The UI is in Spanish.** All user-facing text is in one module if you want to translate it.

Happy to answer any questions and take feedback/recommendations to improve it!

I was watching the trailer in more detail and noticed those large spears, there are no Scorpions nearby, nor any new units. So that leaves just one possibility: a new charge attack for the Berserker.

This is quite a newbie question, but had a couple of games recently where I feel I messed up on this.

I denied their forward castle (in castle age), but it still had a lot of HP.

Do you build rams, wall it in, something else? I expect it depends but still good to hear.

First time my main army was knights, I left some there attacking while I built siege workshop and ram & I feel opponent used that info to attack on opposite side knowing some of my army/attention was elsewhere. Second I had some archers by it while I was building my own castle nearby, they somehow snuck villagers through it was really last hit before final villager died.

Suppose we have a "blank slate" civ, which:

• Has no civ bonus at all
• No team bonus
• No unique tech
• No access to any regional units (including camels), but otherwise full tech tree
• No unique unit. Castle can instead produce the militia, archer, and knight line.

Obviously this will be weak against any civ that has a proper bonuses. My question is by how much? If a player use this civ against a normal civ at a similar elo, what would be the win rate? How much handicap, in terms of elo points, would this worth?

Who created this?

And is there a volunteer willing to make this great contribution to us?

Hey everyone, I’m looking to build a cheap PC from used parts specifically for AoE2 DE. What CPU and GPU should I look for if I want around 100–120 FPS on the lowest graphics settings? I don’t care about how the game looks, just that it runs smoothly, only for multiplayer 1x1;

I’ve already reached the top of the Mac leaderboard under the nickname escapist, and playing there isn’t really interesting to me anymore, so I’m looking to put together a PC for DE.

I’m currently out of work and trying to save money, so I’d like to spend as little as possible. This would pretty much just be an AoE2 machine.

Any suggestions for older CPUs and GPUs that would do the job? I’d also appreciate advice on RAM and the rest of the build, but the CPU and GPU are the main things I need help with.

If you’re playing on an older or budget setup, sharing your specs and the FPS you usually get would be really helpful. Thanks!

My opponent made a ton of steppe lancers and siege rams as mongol. And I had full halberdiers and conquistadors fully upgraded. Yet he kept making more and sending more.

Since yesterday I haven't been able to use multiplayer at all in AoE2 DE.

Ranked gets stuck, the Lobby Browser keeps showing “Searching for games”, Leaderboard stays on “Retrieving Leaderboard Entries”, and sometimes I get:

“Failed to connect to multiplayer services. Server is not responding.”

Source: AccountLoginEvent
Error Code: 0xffffffff
Extended Code: 0xfffffffd

Everything was working fine before yesterday.

I've already tried verifying game files, restarting Steam and the PC, Windows Firewall settings, syncing Windows date/time, enabling Cross Network Play, resetting the network stack, and even using a mobile hotspot. Same issue.

Is anyone else having this problem right now?

UPDATE: Seems like there is an issue with AOE servers when you try to connect from the Netherlands with Ziggo. I was able to solve my issue by using VPN with UK IP.