Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition – Update 177723

Welcome to a new update for Age of Empires II: Definitive Edition! With today’s Update we’re delivering a rather massive list of bug fixes, changes, and new features to help keep your experience vibrant! This patch delivers a set of stability improvements and bug fixes, addressing crashes, performance issues, and inconsistencies across both PC and consoles.

Gameplay has been refined with fixes to unit behavior, technologies, and civilization bonuses to ensure mechanics work as intended. Pathfinding and economic interactions, such as Mule Cart positioning, have also been improved for smoother play.

Bugfixing pass for UI, audio, and multiplayer systems, chat, lobbies, civilization selection, and Bluetooth audio quality. Smaller AI behavior changes for campaigns and co-op missions have also been implemented for better reliability.

Additional balance changes adjust unit costs, training times, and civilization bonuses to support a more consistent gameplay experience.

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. Enjoy the update!

Developer Note: We did want to follow up on information we shared in previous patch notes, however, and talk a bit more about Console bugs and the problems some of you have been having with your experience.

We’ve seen that you’ve been scanning PUP information and looking for specifics around some of the problems you’ve been reporting to us, such as crashes, invisible units, and general instability of various kinds as you get further into Console matches. There aren’t bullets highlighting those specific issues because their shared root cause has been less of a bug fix and more of a significant engineering refactor of a few things under the hood, but we’re happy to say that today’s Update should resolve many of these problems for you!

We’ll be monitoring your feedback and looking for anything we need to continue to work on as it comes up. This particular set of problems has been a tricky one for us, as there hasn’t been any kind of quick fix we could make happen, but much heavier low-level engineering work that wound up being needed to address some of the problems you’ve been reporting. This has taken us some time and we know that’s been frustrating for many, and we appreciate both your patience as well as your continued support! As we mentioned in our previous patch notes, we’ve got an increased focus on Console going into the next year and more work we intend to do to further uplift your experience, so this really just kicks off that focus and we’ll be back with an increased set of Console-specific bug fixes and attention in future Updates.

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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Game

Stability & Performance

• Fixed a crash while viewing a Player Profile if the game was force stopped using the Steam client.
  
• Fixed a crash happening on 4v4 skirmish games with 8 AI players.
  
• Fixed a crash on consoles that would occur when pressing Left Bumper on the gamepad while in the Villager radial Build Menu.
  
• Fixed a crash related to Lou Chuans attacking after the Thunderclap Bombs Unique Technology was researched.
  
• Fixed a rare crash that would occur when canceling the creation of a Villager at the Town Center.
  
• Fixed a rare crash where siege units in groups could affect movement speed.
  
• Fixed a rare crash that could appear if a player tries to click the “Block Player” button while also leaving the post-game statistics screen.
  
• Fixed performance degradation spikes that occurred whenever a terrain tile was modified.
  
• Improved game performance when the Building and Aura Range indicator appears for many units and buildings.
  
• Improved the stability of File Transfers in Custom Games lobbies and prevented players from being kicked upon transfer failures.
  
• Fixed a crash that reduced the memory usage during map generation.

Achievements

• Fixed the “Can I be Frank with you?” achievement being granted regardless if the “Tours (732)” Co-op Historical Battle has been completed or not.

Graphics

• Fixed Hulk Ships for Byzantines, Italians, Spanish, Portuguese, Armenians, and Georgian civilizations appearing with African ship sails while attacking.
  
• Reduced the size of some graphics assets (saving ~2GB with EGP installed).

Audio

• Fixed low-quality audio when using Bluetooth devices.

UI

• A new ‘More Content’ section can be accessed from the Main Menu, listing all available owned and not owned content DLCs. DLC that is not owned will also be displayed on the Main Menu screen.
  
• Fixed an issue where changing lobbies between the Base Game and Return of Rome variant would cause a Civilization to become automatically selected when entering the lobby.
  
• Fixed an issue where using Mouse and Keyboard on consoles would cause the Search Bar on the Civilization Select screen to be unresponsive.
  
• Fixed an issue that locked “Women’s History Month Icons” for players that had them unlocked.
  
• Fixed Civilization Emblem background images found in the Civilization Selection menu appearing blurry and low resolution.
  
• Fixed Civilization Shield icon not appearing in Ranked and Quickplay lobbies when Civilization is set to Random.
  
• Fixed Match Settings not appearing on the loading screen for games that used the Time Limit Victory Condition.
  
• Fixed typo in lobby chat notification after being locked from sending messages. Fixed text: “You cannot send any more chat messages at the moment. Please wait a few seconds and try again.”
  
• In the Tech Tree menu, Trade Cart icons now appear with regional Civilization icons.

Hotkeys

• Fixed an issue that, when the game is set to Windowed, using an ALT + hotkey combination would produce a Windows beep sound.
  
• “Select all Town Centers” hotkey now correctly includes Town Centers’ foundations.

PC

• Improved memory usage on PCs.

Xbox

• Improved memory usage on Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles.
  
• Fixed an issue on Xbox consoles that would allow profiles that do not own the game to launch the title and enter a game match, which would result in a crash.
  
• Fixed an issue showing player slots as “Ready” (green text) when players set themselves as Ready and then left the lobby.
  
• Fixed the Map Pool Menu to display the map list on parity with all the other platforms.
  
• Fixed a crash that would occur after multiple games were played in succession on Xbox One and Xbox Series consoles.

PlayStation

• Fixed an issue showing player slots as “Ready” (green text) when players set themselves as Ready and then left the lobby.

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.