Age of Empires II HD: Rise of the Rajas DLC

[Infinitron]

The third new DLC for a 17 year old game. And you thought Siege of Dragonspear was bizarre.

https://www.ageofempires.com/news/2016/12/13/announcing-age-of-empires-ii-hd-rise-of-the-rajas-dlc/

Announcing Age of Empires II HD: Rise of the Rajas DLC!

Age of Empires II HD fans rejoice!

We’ve been working hard with our partners at Forgotten Empires and Skybox Labs to bring this secret project to you, and we’re FINALLY ready to tell you about it:

Age of Empires II HD: Rise of the Rajas releases December 19, but you can pre-order today!
That’s only six days away, but we’re not going to make you wait that long to get a taste of the new greatness in store; we’re celebrating RIGHT NOW, and you can join in! Here’s a breakdown of this week-long party:

• ZeroEmpires and the rest of the crew at Escape Gaming are putting on the Battle for Angkor tournament on December 17–18! This tournament, featuring some of the world’s top Age of Empires II players, will be streamed live for all to see right here on the brand-new Escape Twitch channel! More details available on that channel, but you can check out the trailer right here:
• The devs at Forgotten Empires will be publishing a new sneak peek each day until release. There are four new civs, a new map type, and much, much more to discover, so head over to their blog each day to get the inside scoop straight from the developers!
• We’ll have our own countdown-to-launch stream featuring special guests, including devs from Skybox Labs and Forgotten Empires, on our official Twitch and Beam channels on December 19. More details coming soon!

Performance Upgrades and Balance Fixes!
This awesome expansion is set in southeast Asia, and brings tons of new content as well as some serious upgrades to the quality of life for our Age of Empires II HD. We’ve had an open beta over the past few months to identify and correct a few performance issues, and with your help we’ve managed to reduce desyncs by 90%! With today’s announcement of Rise of the Rajas, we’re also pushing these performance upgrades live to all of our players for free. Among other things, this makes multiplayer matches much more stable, AND we’ve added multiplayer restore back in, so if you ever DO lose a match in progress to a desync, you can get it back and pick up where you left off!



We’ll release more details about the new content gradually over the next few days, but a few things are out there already. Some of our eagle-eyed fans noticed the Easter eggs in this meme we shared last week, featuring some strangely equipped elephant units:


We couldn’t help ourselves!


More details coming soon; keep an eye on the links above, and follow us on Facebook and Twitter for the latest! We’re super thrilled to be able to share this with you, and we want to thank our fans from the bottom of our hearts for their passion and support.

 

[thesheeep]

Performance upgrades?

 

[Zboj Lamignat]

Well, the game used to run like shit in multilayer, so...

From what I remember the previous addon (the sand people one) broke the game for a couple of months with issues like idle villager function not working for whatever reason so I'm sure the community is shaking in their boots. With excitement.

 

[MediantSamuel]

Performance upgrades?

I've been playing on and off for the past few weeks and the game definitely feels smoother and less choppy after the update, so there's that.

 

[Endemic]

Indian and Indonesian civs confirmed then?

 

[MilesBeyond]

They really, really need to focus on patches at this point, rather than new DLC. I've heard that this isn't up to Skybox, and that Microsoft is forcing them to devote almost all of their staff to new content, but the fact of the matter is that the game still has brutal lag online. Apparently they've fixed some of the desync issues, so there's that at least.

I was a huge fan of African Kingdoms in theory. The addition of Fire Rafts, Demo Rafts, and Arson were absolutely huge for me, and IMHO really rounded out the game and fixed some of AoC's major issues (specifically, infantry being underpowered and naval combat being completely broken). But until they fix the lag issues, HD probably still isn't going to see as much gameplay as the original.

HD still seems to be boosting the AoE 2 scene, though, as people buy it, get frustrated with the lag, and then learn they can just play the original on Voobly.

 

[Endemic]

On Gameranger there are some HD matches, but most of the AOE2 players are running the original.

 

[Whisky]

Indian and Indonesian civs confirmed then?

India was already added in The Forgotten

 

[Infinitron]

http://store.steampowered.com/app/488060/

 

[JarlFrank]

So I bought this because why not, and played my first AoE2 multiplayer match in months.
It was a 1v1 nomad map; the guy had a slightly higher ELO than me (I had around 1720 while he was around 1740), and since I hadn't played in months, I expected to lose. Hard.
Random civs, he was Saracen I was Brits.
I started the game by saying "glhf; I'm a little rusty btw"

Then, built my TC next to a large stone deposit and three boars. Also managed to steal 4 of his sheep by pure chance (one of my villagers stumbled upon them when he walked over to where my other vils built the TC).
Looked like a good start for me. Immediately harvested sheep, then wood. Researched loom at about 13 vils, then got the boars. Sent a few vils to stone, too.
The big problem: I didn't have any gold nearby. At least I hadn't found any gold. That would become an issue rather quickly.

I did manage to age up to Feudal much earlier than the other guy, about two minutes or so. Built barracks and archery range; no gold, so I built spearmen and skirmishers. Trash units that are useless against anything but the stuff they directly counter, but eh.
I had to find gold, and quickly.
I found his TC, it wasn't far away from mine. Tried building a tower in its vicinity, but he spotted it and garrisoned his vils. Broke off the tower construction and built it a little further behind. Thanks to the stone mine next to my TC I had mined enough stone to be able to build a fuckload of towers.
Then, he reached Feudal too, at just about the same moment as I found a large amount of gold next to his TC.
Yep, I built two towers there. And when he later used men at arms to attack my small squad of spearmen and skirms, he was stupid enough to follow them to the towers, which made short work of them.
Meanwhile, I built a stable a little bit behind his lines where he wouldn't check, so I could safely build some cavalry. I built about 5 scouts while he concentrated on skirmishers and archers to harass my villagers.

I finally found some gold and started mining it immediately. Between this gold and his TC was his woodline, so I built two towers to defend my gold and disrupt his wood gathering at the same time. I really trolled the guy with aggressive towering in this game, kek.
Mined enough gold to go to Castle Age. Reached castle age, built a knight or two. He sent his skirmishers and archers to attack my villagers - and I sent in the scouts and knights, wiping the floor with them.
And I built a castle right next to his town center, only far enough so his TC couldn't hit my builders, but was in range of the castle.

He reached Castle Age too and tried to build a counter-castle. I sent in my remaining skirmishers and my cavalry to kill the villagers there. He doesn't manage to finish that castle.
My castle goes up. A few seconds later, a ram finishes building at my siege workshop.

That was the moment I won the game. Ram killed his TC, castle killed anything that got too close.

He said, "Right. A little rusty." and surrendered.

I love this game.
(watched the replay afterwards and saw that he actually had a much better position than I did... he just never exploited it properly; my game was far from optimal and there were many moments when I thought I was probably finished, especially at the beginning)

 

[Endemic]

Patch 5.3 is in beta, mostly bug fixes: https://www.ageofempires.com/news/2017/03/17/age-of-empires-ii-hd-patch-5-3-open-beta-available-now/