Age of Empires 2 DE Released Today

AOE 2 DE comes out in 30 minutes. Who all is getting one of the most iconic strategy games of all time?



List of big changes:

Ability to queue up techs with units. Before, you had to wait until unit production stopped before being able to queue up technologies

Ability to command queue units. For example, you can tell a villager to build a house and then go back to cutting trees immediately after.

4k graphics

Subtle Behavior Changes:

Units can no longer path through diagonal gates while they are being built.

Villagers no longer drop resources immediately when tasked to a new resource. They only lose the res when they start collecting a new resource. Misclicks are punished less.

Unit selection max was bumped up from 40 to 60.

Where you used to have to shoot boars twice to lure, boars typically will not run back if only hit once now (includes laming) but in this case they will aggressively retarget villagers other than the primary hunter when being killed at the TC.

Gate foundations now have no armor, which makes quick gating less invincible.

You can now hold alt while commanding units to go to a location to have units all clump together in that spot (previously to get vils to go directly to a spot instead of spread out you had to build a palisade wall, etc... (useful for forwards)).

Birds no longer get stuck in the corner of the map.

Fishing ships can now gather from fish at the edge of the map.

Gate rotation is available as a customizable hotkey. Default is ctrl+mouse wheel to avoid conflict with zoom.

New Features:

Team positions is a new option for team games that allows players to choose map position (e.g. flank, pocket, flank) based on their selected color/player number.

Server based networking means players aren't penalized for other people's network latency, though if people’s computers can’t run the simulation at 30FPS+, the game will still lag.

Hotkeys can now be assigned to select all idle military units or villagers.

Hotkeys can be assigned to select all buildings of certain types (e.g. ctrl+shift+s to select all of your stables at once).

Team shared exploration is available as an option in lobby settings (i.e. Cartography starting in Dark Age).

You can now see ally/opponent civs without needing to open a separate menu (visible where the player scores are).

You can see vils per resource, and total villagers at a glance next to your pop/res indicators.

Optional health bars for boars/sheep are available and useful for eco micro early game.

You can now send crazy taunts to AI allies (like 103: use an onager to cut down a tree at the flared location).

Deleting multiple buildings at the same time is now possible (shift+delete) and safe delete warnings will let you know before deleting TCs, Castles, or large groups of units.