Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition – Update 185872

Welcome fellow Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition players! This time we are sailing the seas, raiding the shores and earning our place in Valhalla with a Viking-themed content update. Seek shelter under the new Scandinavian architecture set, raid and plunder enemy shores with the new Varangian Guard infantry, and revolutionize medieval warfare with the addition of the Mounted Crossbowman regional unit available to 12 existing European civilizations!

The newest DLC, The Viking Sagas, is available now! But changes aren’t only coming from the north! We are charting a course through a boatload of new content, bringing down the hammer on bugs, and making quality of life improvements– including an AI and pathfinding rework!



Here are some of the big highlights coming with this month’s update:

• New Varangian Guards and Mounted Crossbowmen Regional Units.
• Longboats are renamed Longships and are now available for Vikings, Danes, Saxons and Varangians.
• New architecture set for Danes, Varangians, and Vikings.
• New ship animations, regional wildlife and terrain elements.
• New voice lines for Byzantines.
• Core pathfinding mechanics updates and AI enhancements.
• New Arabian Desert map.
• Improved Multiplayer Lobbies file transfer speeds.

Be sure to dig down into the post below to get all of the smaller details before hopping in-game and checking them out firsthand. See you all on the battlefield, Til bardaga!

This is just a small taste of what is coming in the latest update. For a more complete list, please visit our site and check out our blog. Happy Gaming!

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Thank you again to our amazing community members, all of whom have helped to make Age of Empires what it is today!

—The Age of Empires Team

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        ◆ Update 185872 ◆

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Game

Stability & Performance

• Fixed a bug forcing the Player’s PC to occasionally use the integrated GPU rather than the dedicated GPU.
• Fixed a bug preventing The Mountain Royals and Victors and Vanquished campaign progress from being stored in the Cloud.
• Fixed a bug on the Windows Store version hiding campaign progress and medals on startup until any campaign scenario was played and completed by the player.
• Fixed a crash happening on the Windows Store version related to DLC ownership and Campaign Scenarios.
• Fixed a crash happening occasionally when switching through tabs in the Options menu.
• Fixed a crash happening on the post-game Statistics screen.
• Fixed a crash happening upon attempting to close the game when in the Player Profile screen.
• Fixed a crash happening when subscribing or refreshing certain Mods.
• Fixed an issue that prevented Players on the Microsoft Store from accessing certain Campaigns despite owning the related DLC.
• Fixed a crash happening occasionally on PlayStation when hovering with the mouse cursor over the “Select Civilization” text in the Multiplayer lobby.
• Fixed a crash happening occasionally when advancing to scenario 3 of Chronicles: Battle for Greece.

Graphics

• Added sail animations for (Elite) Longships.
• Added oars animation for Fire Galleys.
• Updated Pineapple Bush graphic textures to be more saturated.
• Fixed the texture blurriness on Chinese Castle graphics.
• Replaced a corrupted frame in Siege Tower destruction animation.

Audio

• Added new Greek language unit voice lines for the Byzantine civilization.
• Adjusted the Narration accessibility option’s timing to better focus on the most important piece of information on screen.
• Fixed a bug causing the Microphone selected for Voice Chat to stop working after leaving the Settings tab.
• Fixed a bug causing the Narration accessibility option to loop upon some features in the Clan menu.
• Fixed a bug causing the Narration accessibility option to read Multiplayer Custom Lobbies’ Player count as a date or a fraction.
• Fixed a bug causing the Narration accessibility option not to read button inputs during Campaign Slideshow Cinematics.
• Fixed a bug causing the Narration accessibility option not to read button inputs in The Last Chieftains Campaign Menu.
• Fixed Market’s Buy/Sell sound effects being inverted.
• Fixed a bug causing the Narration to repeat a tooltip description when hovering over ‘Change Image’ in the Clan Settings.

UI

• Added new icons for Andean Fortified Towers and Wooden Forts.
• Improved text spacing in the Decision panels for The Three Kingdoms and The Last Chieftains campaign menus.
• Fishing Ships tooltips now properly mention Whales among the gatherable resources.
• Fixed a bug affecting Spectators interface showing [Custom] label on every type of message during gameplay.
• Fixed a bug causing Archery Range to appear as unlockable via an upgrade on the Technology Tree page after switching between civilizations using the dropdown menu.
• Fixed a bug causing Flares not to appear on Economy and Combat Mini-Map.
• Fixed a bug causing incorrect Medals appearing when fully completing a Campaign.
• Fixed a bug causing wrong Civilizations to show up when using the Search Bar in the Civilization Selection Menu.
• Fixed a bug having Chinese Technology Tree Preview displaying wrong items at the Dock.
• Fixed a bug having Huns Technology Tree incorrectly displaying Fast Fire ship as available at the Dock.
• Fixed a bug having Khitans Technology Tree incorrectly displaying Siphons and Incendiaries technologies as available at the University.
• Fixed a bug having Mapuche Technology Tree incorrectly displaying Architecture technology as unavailable at the University
• Fixed a bug preventing players from alphabetically filtering Civilizations by typing the initial letter in the Civilization Selection Menu’s Search Bar.
• Fixed a bug where Arrowslits technology was missing from the future items display at the University for Tupi.
• Fixed an issue where the amount of powered up units was displayed incorrectly if more than one effect was applied to the same unit.
• Fixed Spectators interface showing the wrong recipient for direct chat messages (Colored dots for direct messages, asterisk for messages to “All” players).
• Fixed the map selection excluding some Nomad-style maps upon selecting the “Nomad” filter in the Map Pool menu.
• Fixed a bug preventing some tooltips to not display after entering More Content menu
• Fixed a bug showing an incorrect tooltip when hovering in the Chronicles campaign dropdown.
• Fixed a bug that showed an incorrect error message when trying to join a Chronicles game lobby.
• Fixed a bug that prevented the selected civilization to be highlighted when the corresponding letter was pressed on the keyboard.
• Fixed a bug in all Chronicles campaign screens that occasionally led to additional scrolling when selecting a scenario.
• Added missing icons of unique units in the tech tree of Chronicles: Alexander The Great.
• Fixed a bug causing additional upgrade information being displayed in the unit tooltips of the Tech Tree Preview of Chronicles: Battle For Greece.
• Fixed a bug preventing automatic scrolling in the Chronicles campaign screen when holding down a control stick direction or d-pad button.
• Fixed a bug in the Chronicles campaign screen that truncated the timeline date and location tooltip when using the Border Safe Margin option.
• Fixed a bug that prevented AI player icons to show within a lobby or when loading into a game or on the results page.
• Fixed a bug that prevented to switch between Chronicles campaign only using the keyboard.
• Fixed a bug that showed The Levy line upgrade for Paragon with a red mark indicating it was not available for the civilization even if it was available for the selected civilization.
• Removed the mention of Infantry increasing movement speed from the Siege Tower’s tooltip to reflect a previous balance change.
• Technologies that affect other players in the game or have major one-time effects (Atheism, Butalmapu, Cuman Mercenaries, First Crusade, Flemish Revolution, Kasbah) now display notifications in Display Instructions trigger style (top center of the screen and with an icon).
• Trade Cogs in 100% wood trading mode no longer display 0 carried gold when returning the resources.
• Updated icons of several random maps to be more accurate.
• Updated Technology Tree legend color palette.
• Updated Tips for several Civilizations to reflect balance and Technology Tree changes.
• Villagers gathering Oysters will now show up under a dedicated villager category when toggling the Economy map.
• Villagers with a bonus to gather a secondary resource now display the second resource on the UI
• Fixed an issue where the scroll bar image on the Help Index screen would become cut off on consoles if scrolled to the bottom of the page.

Settings

• Improved ‘Right Click Garrison’ under Game Settings: replaced the checkbox with a dropdown menu which includes ‘Off’, ‘Alt Click Garrison’ and ‘On’ settings.

Hotkeys

• Added a “Set Gather Point” hotkey for Settlements.
• Fixed a bug making the “Select All Idle Military Units” hotkey to also select non-idle units.
• Fixed a bug making the Spearman Line upgrade hotkey at the Donjon to overlap with the Spearman Line creation hotkey.
• Fixed a bug preventing Armenian players to train Warrior Priests via hotkey when at least one Villager was garrisoned inside a Fortified Church.
• Fixed ALT+Right Click behavior for Villagers when “Right Click Garrison” is active: the Villager will now try to repair the target building only if it is not at full HP.
• “Go to Outpost” default hotkey changed to CTRL + J to avoid the overlap with the Go to Castle default hotkey.
• Added a “Create Cow” hotkey at the mill in scenario 04 of Chronicles: Alexander The Great.

Multiplayer

• Fixed a bug making Players’ Block Lists to reset if the Players turned crossplay off and back on again.
• Fixed a bug where Players couldn’t send invites if the Host left while they were joining a lobby.
• Fixed an issue causing chat logs to behave inconsistently between different platforms during Crossplay games.
• Redesigned the lobby file transfer indicator to appear as a spinner next to the player names instead of a progress bar.
• Lobby file transfer statuses are now shown for all players.
• Significantly improved download/upload speeds of lobby file transfers in restored or custom game lobbies.
• Spectators who start observing a game before it has started will no longer be kicked at game start if the game mode is a custom map and the host changes the custom map after the spectator has joined.

Xbox

• Added a tooltip to the Gamercard button in the Player search menu.
• Added Map Seed visibility in the Objectives tab during Skirmishes.
• Dravidian Unique Ship Thirisadai can now be selected by tapping the Naval Quick Find button.
• Fixed a bug causing AI players icons to appear black during the Loading Screen and Results Page.
• Fixed a bug causing the yellow cursor on the Technology Tree to behave inconsistently upon hovering over certain tiles.
• Fixed a bug causing multiple identical chat messages sent in Ranked and Quick Play pre-game lobbies to appear only once.
• Fixed a bug where a single stuck Villager would cause all other Villagers assigned to the same task to stop working when using the Villager Priority System.
• Fixed a crash related to Player Colored Range indicators’ rendering.
• Fixed a text formatting issue in Return of Rome Campaign scenarios’ names.
• Fixed an issue preventing Kreposts from appearing in the Quick Find radial menu.
• Fixed Sicilian Donjons not having an option to assign Spearmen to the quick creation shortcut button (Y)
• Fixed a bug causing Randomize Settings to select a Battle Royale map for Console users.
• Improved the Recent Players list filtering when Crossplay is enabled and disabled.
• Mitigated a crash happening when trying to start Skirmish matches.
• Mitigated missing sprites when playing large games.
• Now exiting a Campaign cinematic correctly brings the Player back on the last selected Scenario instead of defaulting to the last available scenario of the campaign.
• Prevented chats from previous games from being displayed when a new Multiplayer match is found.
• Removed incorrect descriptions from the Villager Priorities Help Index Documentation.
• Removed unnecessary UI Button callouts from Multiplayer Lobbies.

PlayStation

• Added Map Seed visibility in the Objectives tab during Skirmishes.
• Dravidian Unique Ship Thirisadai can now be selected by tapping the Naval Quick Find button.
• Fixed a bug causing AI players icons to appear black during the Loading Screen and Results Page.
• Fixed a bug causing multiple identical chat messages sent in Ranked and Quick Play pre-game lobbies to appear only once.
• Fixed a bug causing an error message to appear when navigating the Store page for The Last Chieftains via the Civilization Selection Menu.
• Fixed a bug causing the yellow cursor on the Technology Tree to behave inconsistently upon hovering over certain tiles.
• Fixed a bug where a single stuck Villager would cause all other Villagers assigned to the same task to stop working when using the Villager Priority System.
• Fixed a crash happening when playing with Mouse and Keyboard and hovering around the top area of the Civilization Selection Menu in Multiplayer lobbies.
• Fixed a crash related to Player Colored Range indicators’ rendering.
• Fixed a text formatting issue in Return of Rome Campaign scenarios’ names.
• Fixed an issue preventing Kreposts from appearing in the Quick Find radial menu.
• Fixed Sicilian Donjons not having an option to assign Spearmen to the quick creation shortcut button (Triangle).
• Fixed some performance-related crashes.
• Fixed some elements of the Multiplayer Lobby UI going out of their intended boundaries.
• Fixed a bug causing Randomize Settings to select a Battle Royale map for Console users.
• Fixed a bug causing some mods not to download.
• Improved the Recent Players list filtering when Crossplay is enabled and disabled.
• Improved visibility in the Options menu.
• Now exiting a Campaign cinematic correctly brings the Player back on the last selected Scenario instead of defaulting to the last available scenario of the campaign.
• Prevented chats from previous games from being displayed when a new Multiplayer match is found.
• Removed incorrect descriptions from the Villager Priorities Help Index Documentation.
• Removed unnecessary UI Button callouts from Multiplayer Lobbies.

This is just a small taste of what is coming in the latest update. For a more complete list, please visit our site and check out our blog. Happy Gaming!

:alertalert: DISCLAIMER

This list is subject to change and should not be considered a comprehensive list of all the known issues we’re tracking. The above is to inform you of the team’s current priorities, which will change as other issues arise or take precedence.

For the latest updates and announcements, please visit our social channels.