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Comment by the__alchemist | Hacker News Reader

Age of Empires 2 Definitive edition is thriving. I play regularly with a group of friends, and found out this week that several of my colleagues play it too. DE really is AOE2 in its finest form: Fixed netcode, responsiveness, matchmaking, and continuous patches and balance tweaks.

It's a 20-year old game that gets monthly patches, and is active enough to match you to opponent[s] in minutes.

Compared to SC2, I miss the asymmetry among Civs, and ability to pull off surprising strategies effectively. (eg Thor rushes, and going straight planetary fortress+Raven etc). AOE is more predictable by comparison.

Thoughts on if AOE2 DE players are mostly people who played the original, or if there are newer players? The pros seem to be a mix.

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It's worth noting that the game never really died. After the "golden age" of the early 2000's the player base organized and formed voobly, which had it's own competitive scene and even game patches for the original game (a group of developers reverse engineered it and fixed stuff like pathfinding)

And I think the game is hands down played mostly by casual players. As of today there are over 40k people that have played at least a rated multiplayer match (how many more that never hit the multiplayer button?), and from those more than 75% have an ELO lower than 1200 which is on the lower end of the spectrum (best player of the world has 2500 ELO and one starts with 1000)

The game is still pretty challenging for newcomers, my 12 year old nephew loves watching me play, but whenever I offer him a chance to play he is "scared" because it looks to difficult, and says he prefers to just watch. When I was 12 (or even younger) I loved playing. Nowadays it seems games are designed intentionally to not being too difficult to play/learn

AoE 2 DE is a lot of fun, but I do wish they'd allow for 16 players. Comp stomps with a group of friends are limited to 4-5 right now, but there's probably no intrinsic reason they couldn't be higher.

> but there's probably no intrinsic reason they couldn't be higher.

The client (from the original version through DE) runs a single-threaded simulation. That is a big barrier to getting more players or even larger maps (it used to be that ludakris size was unplayable before DE/UserPatch optimizations). Given how many players can't even clear the multiplayer performance benchmark without dramatically reducing quality settings, I'm not sure they'll bump up the player cap unless they decide to re-architect a good part of the engine internals.

The original simulation ran fine on a Pentium 2, and that was a single core that also handled rendering, animation and audio.

Considering a single core can be dedicated to it these days we're approaching two orders of magnitude more performance available.

If it's become a bottleneck it's likely that there is very low hanging fruit to fix it.

The original version also had a smaller pop cap, less demanding graphics+audio, much smaller maps and less simulation (particles, animated water, fog, etc). Some other engine functionality like pathfinding has also been reworked in the Definitive Edition, so it's far from an apples-apples comparison.

> If it's become a bottleneck it's likely that there is very low hanging fruit to fix it. This was true for the previous "remaster" of AOE2 (HD edition). That had persistent performance issues and was poorly optimized despite maintaining the same graphics style. If you read through a couple of the dev blogs for the DE release, I think it's pretty clear that there's little if any low-hanging fruit left before pretty major architectural improvements are necessary.

Popcap and map sizes are unchanged since AOE2: The Forgotten, though, and the other items are not in the deterministic simulation.

AOE2 HD wasn't multithreaded, so we should still have an order of magnitude more CPU performance at our disposal these days.

The pathfinding has been reworked, yeah. It shouldn't have made the game 10x slower.

In any case, if it already supports 8 player with 500 pop, 16 with 250 is not really any different.

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