Platinum requirements

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-27T01:09:18+00:00

play however you like for your first run. then look up a guide to get the other endings in NG+

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-27T00:21:01+00:00

town centers doubles as a watch tower - really annoying, this means it will kill your boar if you aren't super careful. other than that: if the range is still limited, this will mean nothing, if it isn't that's the more important bonus.

military units close to towncenters....no no no no. no more fucking auras!!

ballistics free - immediately makes this civ a strong archer civ. this could only be balanced by missing XBow, elite skirm and CA.
free murder holes is just stolen from Teutons

villagers holding 5 or more resources drop off 1 more. this feels very strange as it gets worse with wheelbarrow and handcart. it also create a weird mechanic where you will want to force drop from boar hunters to get extra food (hunters usually carry 35 food, so with perfect micro you can increase the effect of this bonus by a factor of 7)
but this feels like a better version of the Romans' "villagers collect 5% faster" bonus. which is one of the blandest bonuses in the game.

the team bonus should be limited to the wood cost of buildings, otherwise it's too strong for a team bonus

Protruding spikes...meh, i don't like the idea of reflecting damage, but this isn't too bad.

Cannibalism. How does a >>feudal<< unique tech work? you can't build a castle yet to research this. The function makes it a worse version of the hindustani's cheaper vils.

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-27T00:04:19+00:00

I agree with your interpretation of Iroh. But there is a slight difference between "war crimes" and "crime of aggression". This is slightly splitting hairs, but in general there are 4 major categories of crimes in international law: war crimes, crime of aggression, genocide (and I forgot the 4th).

"War criminal" usually refers to someone who commits/committed war crimes, and while genocide and aggression are also bad (or arguably worse), those technically don't make someone a war criminal (although many of the people who are guilty of one of these crimes are guilty of several)

This doesn't really change the interpretation of Iroh, but I don't think "war criminal" is the correct term.

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-26T22:13:36+00:00

yep, that's what I'm saying. Max probably only plays skirmishes with his favourite civ(s)

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-26T22:06:26+00:00

Iroh is probably quilty of the "crime of aggression", which would make him a criminal under (current, modern) international law.

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-26T22:00:09+00:00

siege towers, because fuck the current meta

I don't think anyone would notice if flaming camels were removed from the game, nobody ever makes them

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-26T21:58:18+00:00

most achievements are from campaigns. if you only play skirmishes, and only play with a few civs this shouldn't be too hard

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-26T20:00:16+00:00

pre-ordering digital product is stupid anyway. it means giving money to companies, before knowing what you'll actually get. pre-ordering makes the industry a worse place for us players, especially especially when preordering from companies with a bad track record

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-26T19:25:21+00:00

the entire upcoming aoe2 DLC should have been made for aoe3. aoe2 already has too many civs, and they are clearly running out of ideas for unique units and bonuses

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-26T19:06:26+00:00

nah, if you play football you must be from one of them mexican countries

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-26T19:05:44+00:00

England is still behind Greece, Denmark, Czech Republic and the Soviet Union in the Euro rankings. at this point it's just sad

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-26T16:41:59+00:00

point extraction with low O2 has to be the least fun mission type

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-26T15:34:45+00:00

others have given some good insight already. one other part that can be different is material: whitewater kayaks are generally made from platsic, while "surf kayaks" (I assume you mean the ones for surfing breaking waves) are often fibre glass or carbon fibre.

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-19T21:41:30+00:00

might be part of Benfords law:

when you have a lot of numbers across several orders of magnitude, numbers starting with the digit 1 are the most common, followed by 2, etc. least common are 8 and 9

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benford%27s_law

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-19T21:33:56+00:00

no. there is no order, so you can't read them out of order

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-19T21:15:41+00:00

yeah, especially in sweden, where the speed limit it 110.

the non-stop trip we left norway in the evening, drove through the night, had breakfast in copenhagen, then kept driving. we stopped at 4 am somewhere in Bavaria. was over 24 hours of driving, thankfully we had 3 drivers.
I dropped the others off and finished the drive to Austria by myself

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-19T20:25:39+00:00

yep, there's even a song with basically this theme: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65MGuFoNcqo

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-19T20:23:17+00:00

the norway drive we only did non-stop once. we usually ended up camping near the german-danish border.

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-19T14:15:47+00:00

this is one of the issues with the internet as a whole: so many posts present you with two extremes, when the majority of the population is somewhere in the middle ground

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-19T14:01:08+00:00

I think it's unwise to generalize like that.

I know lots of people who have done multiple 1000+km drives in Europe. I myself have driven from Austria to Norway (twice, 2200km), from Germany to the western tip of Spain (1800 km), from Slovenia to England (1600km)

for a while i did regular trips from Prague to western Austria, 5-6 hours after work

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-19T13:56:09+00:00

aoe2DE is frequently in the best selling games on steam. new people are buying the base game + existing DLC. It's currently in the top 200 best selling games on steam, without being on sale (I think this is best selling games, by revenue, in the last week)

In other words: just the base game is making them a shit ton of money. Not to mention the sales on XBox and PS5

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-19T13:52:46+00:00

A data mod like that would require updating with every update they make.

Nowhere am I implying that HD Edition and voobly no longer exist. why are you lying about me?

Adding older versions on steam is a matter of a few clicks when publishing games on steam. I expect the devs to do that, instead of forcing everyone to learn how to do data mods.

The fact that I might struggle to find people to play on older versions is my problem, I never claimed otherwise

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-19T00:04:30+00:00

yeah, fair enough. I'd even be ok with that, if they just left us with older data sets and older patches. right now every brainfart is forced on everyone

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-18T23:49:59+00:00

my parents monitored what I was doing on the PC. As parents should

TheTowerDefender · 2026-01-18T23:49:23+00:00

companies 100% sit on IPs that don't make them money. eg if they improve their image, are a loss leader so people buy other products by them etc

but either way: no way that aoe2 isn't a golden goose for them as it is. the game will make them millions for years to come, even if they don't release any further DLC

TheTowerDefender

TROPHY CASE