I used to play Age of Empires 2 a lot a long time ago. Then I switched to SC2.
Now I have bought the Age of Empires 2 Definitive addition. And the game has been improved a lot! With the enhanced graphics pack it looks beautiful! The number of civs, the balance, the interface, the hotkey configuration everything is much improved.
I really recommend it if you look for another RTS instead of just SC2.
I see the following advantages:
The game is more popular then ever and is the most popular RTS game on steam.
Resource collection is much more interesting and fun compared to SC2.
The game is a bit slower and more strategical and rewards being intelligent instead of just clicking faster than your opponent. Being fast is till an advantage though.
The game is much better supported with new consent, balance patches and active devs. You can not even compare this to Blizzard who does not care at all about SC2 any more.
Everything feels fair. There are nothing like mass Carrier, blink DTs, void rays proxies etc. There are cheese, but the balance between defending cheese and executing the cheese is much better.
Games are decided by 100 of small decisions instead of a single mistake that makes you lose the game in half a second. In SC2 if you dodge a mine drop half a second too late the game is over. Nothing like this in Age of Empires.
Age of Empires II is actually a better RTS than SC2. It is more fun, better balanced and the level of unfair and frustrating stuff is minimal compared to SC2. I do not think I have had this much fun with a computer game in a very long time.
No player plays perfectly, so no player loses just by one single mistake. If you die to a single mine drop it means you were basically AFK and already commit more mistakes such as bad scouting and bad reaction time, no mine drop magically does game ending damage.
The game has been supported 10 damn years.
As I said on another thread, a game being slower does not mean its more strategical.
Chopping wood for 20 minutes and then gathering resources withing your walls its not fun.
The starter is a bit insane (build houses, search for sheeps/boars, scout with 2 sheeps + scout, pull boars, deny the others, etc…), and the micro potential is insane too (you can dodge most projectiles, a lot of hit and run micro).
I think the fun comes that as a SC2 player you have a lot of skills already so you destroy the newcomers, but the game is really punishing, and the APM requirement is really high. There are also a toons of units and races so you need so much knowledge.
This is what happens when you make a game not around sports-style gameplay, but around strategic decision making.
AoE2 is a good example of this, but far from the only one.
SC2 Esportsy, fast-click, stressful gameplay is the exception, not the rule, for successful RTS games.
This is one of the reasons why I am glad SC2 lost it’s “most played” title, as the world could use more games like AoE2, not like SC2.
Enough with the toxic micro-fests!
I for one used to love aoe2, but once I got into sc2, and particularly when LOTV came out I find every other rts to be slow and clunky. I can’t really come back from that, and AOE2 is just too slow for my particular taste (I feel the same way about warcraft 3).
On top of that I value my time more than anything right now, so having the ability to play 10 min games vs 20 min game is awesome.
Besides, I loath mirror matchups, so having a game with no real asymmetry is a big no for me atm (this is also the real reason things feel fair btw).
My biggest hope in the future is frost giant as long as they do not slow the game down too much.
Bigger and more competitive than ever. The ranked 1v1 ladder is actually remarkably good at matching you with opponents close in skill until you are in about the world top 3% (which I don’t think you’ll have to worry about for some time). There are over 42k active players on the 1v1 ladder, so queue times are usually under 2 minutes.
https://aoe2.net/#aoe2de-leaderboard-rm-1v1
Ladder have 45k 1v1 players/accounts and 71k team accounts/players
Sc2 shows 408k 1v1 players/accounts and 90k 2v2… https://www.rankedftw.com/stats/leagues/1v1/#v=2&r=-2&sx=a
Even if half of the sc2 accounts are smurfs, its a huge difference .
How is that bad news?
Starcraft 2 is dead, it got the Reforged treatment. It does not even have any replayability, and 3 campaigns is weak-sauce for a RTS game these days.
It is safe to say that unless you are a Korean pro with twitchy and speed light reflexes, Aoe2 is a better all around RTS.
We don’t have Protoss and defending cheese is much more fair on Aoe2. Defending cheese in SC2 is almost always a nightmare to the defender and easy to execute to the person applying it.
I played civ 6 all day yesterday does that count? Cant say I left sc tho cuz I rarely play it just bored forum hopping. Civ> AoE single player > multiplayer for those kinds of games.