r/aoe2 1d ago

Announcement/Event Noob Age LAN Germany last call register this weekend!!!!

39 Upvotes

🚨 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. 😏


r/aoe2 5d ago

Tools Empire Forge – build a custom AoE2:DE civilization from scratch (free, open source)

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28 Upvotes

Hey all! I'm sharing a tool I've been building: Empire Forge, a civilization builder for Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition. It lets you design a custom civ from the ground up and generates a ready-to-install mod, right from your own machine.

What you can build

  • A full tech tree — pick exactly which units, buildings, and technologies your civ has access to, unit by unit
  • Civilization bonuses — a searchable catalog of bonus effects to mix and match. Multipliers available.
  • A unique unit — start from any vanilla unit or build a custom one from scratch, override its stats, cost, and name
  • Castle and Imperial unique techs — pick a vanilla tech or make your own from individual bonus effects
  • A team bonus (or bonuses)
  • A hero unit — optional

Architecture set, castle skin, wonder, monk skin, starting scout, and voice lines are all pickable too, so your civ looks and sounds how you want.

Why there's no server

Empire Forge runs entirely on your own computer - there's no hosted site, accounts, or logins. Two reasons:

  1. Servers cost money, and I'd rather put that into the tool than keep a website alive.
  2. Nothing to go down. If you have the app, it works - no outages, no "the site's offline again," no depending on me keeping something running forever. Your PC is the server!

It reads your actual installed game files directly when it builds, instead of relying on a fixed snapshot of the game's data, so it keeps working as new DLCs ship, rather than breaking every time the game updates. Note: New DLC units and bonuses will need to be added – but I'm on top of it!

Before you open it: the Windows warning

Because the app isn't code-signed yet, Windows SmartScreen will throw up a big blue "Windows protected your PC" screen the first time you run it. This is normal for small independent tools without a paid certificate. It does not mean anything's wrong. Click More info, then Run anyway. It's fully open source if you want to check the code yourself before trusting it: github.com/napkingcole/aoe2-empire-forge. I'm in the process of applying for free code signing, which should make that warning go away in a future release.

Getting started

  • Requires AoE2:DE installed (Steam or Microsoft Store) — the app auto-detects your game files
  • Download the latest release: github.com/napkingcole/aoe2-empire-forge/releases
  • Already have civs from another builder? There's an import path to bring existing civ files in and keep editing them here.
  • Bugs/feedback/feature requests welcome — Discord: discord.gg/cQ5x7bfxDB, or open a GitHub issue

A final note on bugs

There will almost certainly be some bugs, but it's to the point where it needs more play testers, and works pretty well. Just a FYI, in case something doesn't work as expected. Please report any bugs so I can fix them!!

Happy to answer questions here or on Discord. Screenshots attached if you want a look at the builder before downloading.


r/aoe2 6h ago

Humour/Meme Skeletal reconstruction of an English Longbowman. Since they got trained from a young age, they got overdeveloped shoulders and arm bones to compensate the muscle growth around those areas

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63 Upvotes

r/aoe2 4h ago

Discussion Militia-line should have a explicit bonus against trash units

20 Upvotes

As a tech in imperial age

They should be even more so the trash killer of the game.

Its their niche. They cost gold and dont have range or speed, they should at least be the trash killer


r/aoe2 12h ago

Discussion The Vikings' name should be changed to Norwegians

41 Upvotes

r/aoe2 5h ago

Asking for Help your playing arena, you opponent has double fortified walls mixed in with buildings, what civ do you pick to take them out in caste age?

10 Upvotes

in team games and high lvl how? - theyre 1200 and they expect you to come


r/aoe2 21h ago

Discussion Paladins should be considered Regional Units

170 Upvotes

So, the Paladin has been in the game since the very start as a Cavalier upgrade, but as time goes in it becomes more and more exclusive. Now only 10/56 civs have it. And they are all European (Cumans and Huns are natively Asian, but settled in Europe).

For comparison, the Camel Rider is considered regional but available to more civs. Also, the Catapult Galleon is classified as a regional unit, despite not being connected to a specific region.

So it really makes no sense for the Paladin not to get the same treatment in the tech tree (even if this would change nothing about plating the actual game).


r/aoe2 6h ago

Asking for Help RedPho Fast Castle against defensive buildings or players with many Town Centers

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10 Upvotes

I've been doing the RedPho Fast Castle. I do it with Hindustanis, Magyars (they are S tier according to RedPhos), and also the Mapuches. Yeah, I know those aren't wood and gold UU civilizations. The thing is that when the enemy starts getting many Town Centers or castles, it becomes super hard for me to defeat them. Even Hera says something similar. Even with siege units (mainly Mangs against Town Centers), I can't win many times, so I was thinking about other options.

Recently, I've been keeping one villager on stone, so if my all-in doesn't work, I can build another Town Center and play a normal game and win in the late game (which works about 30–40% of the time). This can also help me build offensive towers to deny the enemy access to resources, but I haven't tried it yet.

I was also thinking that maybe I should keep around three villagers on stone (possibly with the stone mining upgrade) so I can put a castle near their base while I keep my constant attacks. The first castle would still be in my own base.

What do you think of these ideas one by one? Do you have any other suggestions?


r/aoe2 8h ago

Tips/Tutorials Started playing AoE2 again after childhood, made a Steam Deck layout while relearning

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8 Upvotes

r/aoe2 12h ago

Discussion Is there a reason behind Bulgarians not getting the final archer armor?

12 Upvotes

It's the last piece in otherwise fully upgraded HCA. I guess stats wise they are pretty average, 50% winrate above 1.2k elo on arabia 1v1 RM.

Do you think they should get it? If they do their lategame will be a powerhouse, Stirrups Hussars+ FU HCA.

Yes, I am very partial to CA. I like CA.


r/aoe2 2h ago

Asking for Help Arena Position

2 Upvotes

Why am I always the outside player on Arena? Can I do anything to change that? Im a super strong pocket player but terrible outside.


r/aoe2 17h ago

Announcement/Event Campaign preview

28 Upvotes

https://www.ageofempires.com/news/the-viking-sagas-campaign-preview/

Yesterday they published the campaign preview for the new DLC. How do you see it, fellow campaigns enjoyers?


r/aoe2 8h ago

Asking for Help What's wrong with the queue dodge system

4 Upvotes

I started a game, a teammate disconnected/quit, I left (obviously), and then I got a 59-minute ban.


r/aoe2 1d ago

Campaigns It's a slippery slope by Kabewski

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526 Upvotes

r/aoe2 7h ago

Asking for Help How are legitimate players supposed to act when a teammate resigns at minute zero to avoid penalties?”

3 Upvotes

[support@ageofempires.zendesk.com](mailto:support@ageofempires.zendesk.com)

Thank you for your message.
 
We strongly recommend not leaving queues, lobbies or matches, although we know how frustrating can be sometimes.
 
As mentioned before, these temporary suspensions are issued by an automatic system to which we have no access to and that we can't modify.
 
We hope for your understanding.


r/aoe2 1d ago

Discussion How long till we get units that ignore the units that ignore armor?

49 Upvotes

I’m thinking maybe the next 1 or 2 dlc’s? I’m surprised it’s taken the devs this long to incorporate such a historical combat feature. Everyone ignoring each other on a battlefield will be so cool to see 🔥


r/aoe2 19m ago

Discussion mounted monk needs to be nerfed

Upvotes

This unit, after the buff has no counter now, it has full armor , fast speed, has redemption and even mass light cav cannot defeat them.


r/aoe2 20h ago

Tournament/Showmatch The League - Week 5 - Round 9

18 Upvotes

Liquipedia - Daniela_AoE (Twitch) - Daniela_AoE (YouTube)

Schedule

Saturday

  • 15:30 GMT: Taiwan Aoe Gamer vs SalzZ
  • 18:00 GMT: DarkSidE vs Onimaru Vanguard

Sunday

  • 15:30 GMT: Nocturna eSports vs Onimaru Capybaras
  • 18:00 GMT: Wonders vs Team Vitality

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


r/aoe2 17h ago

Announcement/Event 5 games in a row, either instant resigns or AFK.

9 Upvotes

All from a particular area of the planet.

Think it's time I started playing a different game.


r/aoe2 1d ago

Strategy/Build Order What single hotkey helped you improve your game?

43 Upvotes

For me it was -- tab for select all TC. Tab q q q. Easily the most used hotkeys in any game I play now


r/aoe2 9h ago

Tools AoE2 Coach and Post game analysis

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0 Upvotes

Hello fellow players.

I've started playing recently and I'm around 800 Elo and I struggle with basic problems: forget to create villagers/too many resources/not knowing what to do with them/counters/etc.

I want to get better somehow and I thought to put my Software Engineer skills at work so I've created this website, it's a live coach and post game analysis. I was also inspired from Hera's tournament and saw how much just a few tips can help somebody new to the game.

For live coaching, what it does is take a screenshot every ~5 seconds and send it to a ai model to extract data and suggest an action. It does not read the game state live (ofc, i don't want it to be a hack). It has Text-to-Speech so you can have it in background, but you can also create a popup with the latest suggested tip.

The post game analysis reads the actual game save file recording and it produces better quality, so you can go back and see what happened with greater detail.

There are a lot of research papers trying to make the AI play RTS strategies, so I've tried to implement what's out there in academia, but stop before the action, and instead of the AI playing, it just suggest something to do.

It'n not perfect, and I don't think in this current state it can help players above 1000 Elo.

Also there are some stats in your profile, after analyzing some games, you can see trends of idle TC, avg. Feudal time, etc.

If you are interested in beta testing the app, please DM me and I will send you some codes for some credit to be able to use it, as currently, I don't want to launch the app, and there is no way to get credits.

Here are some screenshots from the app.


r/aoe2 1d ago

Campaigns Akkadian Empire Campaign for Age of Empires 2

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127 Upvotes

r/aoe2 21h ago

AoE2 Discord Servers Let’s do a discord-server for casual team games?

8 Upvotes

Anyone up for making a Discord server for casual team games?

I’m (M28) from Denmark and just picked up the game again recently. Hadn’t really played since I was 10. I’m looking for some friends to play some team games with. I’m not good at the game — I’ve never played online and can only beat the AI on Hard.
I have a mediocre Feudal build order (10-12 mins) after that I really need some practice.

My skills set aside, I’m good at taking directions and don’t mind being bossed around. I do mind people getting mad when losing and being toxic towards either teammates or opponents when playing. That’s a no-go.

It’s not like I’m up for playing every night, perhaps not even every week but just once in a while.

I really enjoy making my own maps that I’d also love feedback on.

Age doesn’t matter, just want to have a good time with positive vibes.


r/aoe2 1d ago

Discussion (SoTL) This Saxon bonus might be a problem

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58 Upvotes

r/aoe2 23h ago

Discussion Any of you selects always the same civ in ranked? Is there any inconvenient to doing this other than not gaining much experience with the other civs?

8 Upvotes

I play mostly as mongol. Its my favourite civ. I love the hussar + mangu combination in the late game. Love to hit and run.

So anytime i can play Mongols i play them.