Age of Empires II HD – Dev Blog #8 – Hotfixes & Balance changes

It’s been two weeks since the release of Age of Empires II HD: The African Kingdoms but we haven’t taken a break since! We’re keeping a keen eye out for bug reports and your feedback. The good and the bad of course 🙂

Hotfixes

In the past week, we had no less than 5 hotfixes so far. Each addressing a good bunch of issues that were reported by our passionate community. You can read up on all the fixes in their respective posts:

Hotfix 1: http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/496880503067996386/

Hotfix 2: http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/496880503079143583/

Hotfix 3: http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/496880503083171332/

Hotfix 4: http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/496881136904807796/

Hotfix 5 (patch 4.5): http://steamcommunity.com/app/221380/discussions/1/492378265877924119/

If you experienced crashes on release day or any persistent issues that impeded you to fully enjoy the game, feel free to give it another whirl as quite a bit of critical bugs have been resolved already.

If you’re still experiencing crashes, hop over to this support topic on the Steam forums where morness, the lead programmer on the project (on behalf of Skybox Labs) is working hard to make sure all reports are being dealt with.

Balance

Many players already noticed that the new civilizations are a “bit on the stronger side”. This is a very fair assessment and a conscious design decision. When we worked on The Forgotten, we tried our utmost best to make sure the new civilizations would not overpower the older ones. But this lead to the unfortunate situation where people had to play with new build orders, units & technologies against strategies that were practiced for over a decade. This lead to the not always incorrect perception that these civs were a bit underpowered.

So this time we went for the opposite approach, where we’d make sure the civilizations would all have their share of strong traits. Which invites everyone to try out new tactics and unit combinations, without being mercilessly punished when something goes wrong. We are constantly looking out for feedback posted on various community forums and are keeping track of your suggestions.

It goes without saying that a lot of the feedback so far was anticipated. Bonuses like the 20% cheaper cavalry for the Berbers, has been widely considered a very (even too) strong bonus and we are very likely to turn that into a 15% reduction (or a staggered one per age even) when the first balance patch comes around (TBA).

Feedback

As usual, let us know if you’re liking the game and if you have any issues. We’d love to hear. If you have the time, maybe even leave a review on Steam!