Confusing title I know. When I join a ranked 2v2 or 3v3 as a solo player, I expect to play against other random solos, not formed teams. Too often I come up against a team that has 500 games together and it's a big advantage for them. No doubt they are also on voice chat, which I can't do with my random team mate. Throw a bit of smurfing in the mix and you're gonna have a bad time.

My solution is simple, solo players only play against other solos (make teams properly random), and teamups only play against teamups.

We got 3 arabia type maps, arena, nomad.

Megarandom my love, come back please.

As the title says, the Arabian desert should be permanent. IMO, it is the better version of Arabia, and more importantly, fast castle uu garbage won't work there, so you can play the proper, less walls, military eco game there.

Not like someone walls the map, puts everyone on 3 resources, and goes up and spams one unit. My experience has been good so far.

This is just humorous to me. I’m 1200 on Mac and in the top 250 with just 25 games 😅. Yet on pc I can’t pass 1000 elo. So in case you were wondering that is a realistic conversion.

I had this discussion with a friend of mine and I'm curious what folks think. Not that this is necessarily a good idea.

If you made it 1,000 food, 800 gold then no one would get it, because they'd simply research imp instead. This indicates the right balance location is somewhere beneath that. Perhaps 800f 500g? That's my pitch. What is yours?

Of course I left him alone, his name is Jerry and he got to watch the fall of his civilisation from his DIY hillfort.

Have you ever had a dream about this game?

Lately I keep dreaming of quick walling and exploring with my sheep.

I don't know if it's normal, maybe I need to stop playing before sleeping time.

Does it apply agains chakram throwers also;

Agains kamayuk?

Thanks in advance

I have finally gotten accused of being a smurf which means I'm getting better 11 Thank you Hera for all the great tips on your stream!

But honestly, I think the smurfing happens much less often than people like to admit. I've only played 30 1v1 games and have only matched with one clear smurf which is a pretty good rate.

Hi all,

Whenever I get douched, by Persians or other civs, I get an easy win. I can't remember the last time I lost to a douche.

I'm in the 1000s elo bracket, so maybe the douche I face are not that skilled, I get destroyed by a lot of other strategies but I can understand the point of douching.

Can anyone recommend me some (preferably blind) aoe2 playthrough on yt? I don't want pro players breezing through the campaign on legendary

Like I find it really annoying to multitask eco and military, and often forget to place barracks, archery range stables etc

Like any build order tips I can follow to help? I'm pretty confident at microing with ranged units. I like using defensive civs with good towers/castles to back my army whilst I attack for defence and offence and to lock down gold and stone, but the issue is that I can only really do that on standard, on moderate I don't even get to that stage.

And I often end up being rushed in castle age, and all my previous mistakes add up and now I'm out of resources or don't have enough buildings/fast enough production of units to keep up with the flood of rams and then bombard cannon in imp if I hold out long enough

Civs I feel confident with:

• Bohemians (UU + Hand canoneer or Arbalest depends on enemy + monks)
• Teutons (UU + Paladins + Monks for healing)
• Saxons (UU + Varangian Guard + Arbalesters)
• Spanish (UU + something to get rid of skirms)

If I'm playing any of these civs wrong, what am I supposed to do instead?

Reposted because I made a mistake and mixed up the tech name for the poison damage which made the original post confusing.

Curare (Poison Damage Tupi UT) when made available in custom scenarios appears to apply to unique unit foot archers. So it works for:

Genoese Crossbowman, Plum Archers, Longbowman, Composite Bowman, Fire Archers, Rattan Archers as well as editor units such as Amazon Archers and Heavy Crossbowman

It works on Chronicle units such as Bactrian Archers, Paddiyodha Longbowman, Mercenary Peltasts, Cretan Archers, and Rhodian Slingers.

It does apply to Donjons, Kreposts, Fortified Outposts, Special Towers such as the Accursed tower in editor mode.

It does not work for the New Mounted Crossbowman nor for any other mounted archer or mounted skirmisher type unit. It also doesn't work for Arambai.

Anyone know why the tech works for non-archers such as Mercenary Peltasts and Rhodian Slingers but not Skirmishers or Slingers? Is it just an oversight with Chronicles interactions.

Knowing it works for Fire Archers, Composite Bowman, Longbowman and any unique foot archer unit would be very fun for custom scenarios.

One of my issues on this one despite save scumming to a ridiculous degree is that I can't seem to get rid of the Fortified towers at all, and if I can't do that, how do I destroy the bases that keep producing all the ships?

The equivalent of the Cannon Galleon for the Chinese civ is being outranged by towers, which all ships seem to be weak to.

So far I was only able to save two of the Transports.

They’re significantly more expensive than Champions, and their anti-cavalry performance seems to fall behind in the post-Imperial Age (except for Vikings and Varangians).

Thank you to Reddit and the players on here, all the AOE2 youtubers, and discord communities as well! Have learned alot since coming back after not playing for nearly 25 years.

So, recently have I been facing more issues than normal with multiplayer. Matches stuck in loading screen. Teammates crashing upon loading it etc. And bassicly every other match has a delay upon loading in leaving you unable to play the first 10ish seconds of the match.

Those issues existed in the past too but were quite rare, and has now become alot more common. Are you people having the same experience?

Hey everyone,

It’s been over two months since my last post about the severe multiplayer performance issues with Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition running on Mac through CrossOver.

Unfortunately, I’m still unable to play the game properly, and I wanted to check whether anyone in the community has made any progress since then.

For context, my issue was (and still is) pretty specific:

• Single-player runs perfectly smoothly.
• The main menus work fine.
• As soon as I enter the multiplayer menu, everything becomes extremely laggy.
• Creating or joining a lobby is painfully slow.
• Multiplayer matches are essentially unplayable due to massive stuttering.

I tried pretty much everything back then: fresh CrossOver bottle, reinstalling Steam and AoE2 DE, DXVK, D3DMetal, MSync, disabling overlays, clearing caches, different network connections, etc. Nothing worked.

I also contacted CodeWeavers support directly.

They confirmed that they were actively investigating a regression introduced somewhere between Wine 10.0-rc1 and Wine 10.3, and were bisecting nightly builds to identify the root cause.

They also mentioned that a fix would likely be included in a future minor CrossOver update (possibly 26.4), but couldn’t provide an ETA.

That was over two months ago, and I haven’t received any further updates.

So, before I start experimenting with different CrossOver versions and settings all over again, I wanted to ask:

Has anyone managed to get AoE2 DE multiplayer working properly on Mac since then?

I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who have tried newer CrossOver versions, Preview builds, alternative Wine configurations, or any other workaround that actually works.

If you’ve found a solution, I’d really appreciate knowing your CrossOver version, graphics backend, and any specific settings or tweaks you used.

I’ve been playing AoE2 for over 25 years, and after more than 5,000 hours, it’s genuinely frustrating to be unable to return to a game that used to run perfectly well on my Mac.

I’m not particularly interested in buying a Windows PC just for one game, so I’m still hoping there’s a way back.

Any good news from fellow Mac players?

Thanks!

First time posting on Reddit. Wanted to share my joy, after a week trying to defeat Extreme AI without cheese, I did it! I'm trying to get my macro in a good spot, learning a couple of openings and overall strategies to jump in to ranked. That's it hahaha

Hello there!

My first post to the community, stay frosty folks!

I just saw SotL's video about the new balance. Byzantines, despite their recent buffs, are number 53 on the rank ladder. That's almost a bottom 3 spot! And on the pro's players the stats arent any better, they're 46 or something, which isnt terrible, but not great. So, what went wrong?

First, lets address the buffs. The cataphract got the logistica bonus damage without the logistica, also in castle age. Which is good, but it reinforced something that the cataphract is already very good at.

Second, they got varangian guards. Great addition, both balance wise and historically wise, as they need a meatshield. They feel great in castle age but they dont have any bonus, and in imperial theyre the worst ones of the new civs, even with trample damage.

So, what do we do? Personally, i suggest giving blast furnace to the civ. They long needed it, and it will make varangian guards better than at least generic ones. The elite cataphract can lose 2 damage, but better, lose 2 bonus damage versus infantry, so it does not two shoot a halberdier, but is better overall.

Staying on cataphracts, i think they need to be better against archers. Right now, they have two counters, heavy cavalry, and archers. They are only good against infantry. They are too specialised for their cost. I already suggested giving blast furnace to them, so they would be better against both. But a small hp increase to the elite, like 10, would be greatly appreciated, just to absorb a couple extra arb shots before they go down. Before suggesting blast furnace i was thinking about +1 pierce armour, but that would be too much with bf.

Also that blast furnace would make the paladin more viable, which is a solution to archers. But lets be realistic, pala + cata is too expensive of a comb to play in a game. So that +10 hp i think would be suitable. Byzantines need an elite cavalry unit and the catas should be it.

Now, Logistica. As is, it is too expensive and has little effect. VGs are the worst in the game, and for catas, you dont pick it up, as you would pick it primarily for the additional infantry bonus damage. My suggestion is, either lower its cost, or bump up its effect to +8.

Also i could play with the thought of giving them siege engineers for they bombard cannons, but i dont know.

Anyways, thoughts?

I don't understand their gold generation. And I think they are meant to be used for raiding, but I don't know if that includes buildings or just villagers/siege units.