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I love this game. People still play it on voobly. It took me a while to get used to this game coming from bw and sc2, but I think I can explain it better to this community than the Age of Kings community. I'm generalizing, but they have a bias against build orders which makes learning the game extremely hard.
Voobly is kind of like iccup where even noob players know build orders and are decent compared to other games where noob players don't really know anything. There's one and maybe two GM players that have tried switching over to voobly, but they quit when they got around the 1750 level. The highest rated players are around 2000 to 2400.
I started out in new player lobby summer of 2014, and I finally hit 17xx level recently. I thought it'd only take me a few months to get 1750. It ended up taking me about 15 months. I can kind of give a run down of my path if people are interested. I peaked at top 500 masters in sc2, but I quit when hots beta came out and the units were godawful. I've barely watched again sc2 games since, but I've been playing a lot of age of kings (they call it aoc on voobly). It doesn't really matter so much if you're low rated at sc2 because the mechanics in aoc are different. There's a lot of slow players with bad macro that are pretty high rated on voobly.
I'd have to do it in video format since typing everything out would literally be multiple books. My video editing skills suck, but I'd try to make them as short and sweet as possible and at least lay down the framework to get to 16xx+ on voobly. I'm positive people at this game would be smarter and have better mechanics than me, and it wouldn't take some people long to start dominating at this game. More importantly though, it's the most fun rts game to play!
Anyway, let me know if you're interested.
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United Kingdom10443 Posts
yeh I like watching it but I have no ideas of the strategy or build orders.
I know some guy used to stream it but I forgot the link and hence haven't watched in ages.
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I would be interested actually. I know about Voobly and the aoe community, but I think i would prefer playing on the hd version on steam. Is the game very different balancewise to the standard version on Voobly?
I know that the Forgotten Addon/DLC for aoc makes the game different to the conquerors, but is the base game of aoe2 HD much different to the classic one ?
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HD is the exact same game as the one on Voobly. The one on Voobly is where you want to go once you get better. It uses the same original game files which work better than HD, which has more bugs and problems despite being newer. Patch 1.0c that came out with the conquerors game is the same patch that everyone still uses today balance wise.
Despite the bugs and stuff, HD kind of only goes up to lower platinum for skill level, but high plat to gm players are all on voobly. I played most my games on HD when I was still in new player lobby on voobly. It felt better to be top 500 on HD than ranked number 25000 or whatever it was on voobly. It's really easy to go from 1250 voobly / 1650 hd to 1550 voobly / 1950 HD just by following a build order.
No one plays the forgotten addon competively. They only made some minor changes to balance and added 5 new civs. One nice thing about age of kings is that it's so easy to play many different civs and game types and not have it hurt you for your main civ / game type. So it won't hurt you at all if you want to mess around on the forgotten and then play without the forgotten changes on HD or Voobly again.
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When you say Age of Kings do you mean that you are playing without the The Conquerors expansion? There used to be a community who didn't like the expansion so only played the original Age of Kings hence the AoK (Age of Kings) / AoC (Age of Conquerors) abbreviations and why people on voobly call it aoc.
I used to play a lot of death match as well, but that was more than 10 years ago now when you could still play Age of Empires on the MSN Gaming Zone. I think the death match community has been pretty much dead for a long time. I think you can still find a few games if you go on Steam or Voobly but the players are either completely clueless noobs who don't even realise they're playing DM or people who have been playing for like 10+ years so you get stomped if you haven't practised lol.
I had the same experience with the skill gap between Voobly and Steam. There's basically no serious players on the HD version, which is kind of a shame because it's more convenient to play than on Voobly.
Anyway I'd be interested in some AoC content. Actually I might play a few games sometime soon. I think it's my favourite RTS. It's slower paced than SC2 but I think it's way more deep and complex. Particularly the economy management. As someone who came from Age of Empires games to StarCraft; SC2's economy seemed like a bit of a joke at first.
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I just call it age of kings because aoc always sounded weird to me, but that's what everyone in the community calls it. Aoczone is great, it's like the teamliquid of aoc. Reddit is horrible and is worse than blizzard forums for strategy.
For players to watch, all the tyrant clan members are the best players. Viper is like flash in bw and is disgustingly good for both mechanics and decision making. He has a twitch and youtube channel. He's also a GM zerg on europe server.
http://www.twitch.tv/tyrant_theviper
https://www.youtube.com/user/TheViperAOC
I'd say it's more for entertainment purposes when starting out. It didn't help me improve much at the start.
Most people play hun wars on arabia map on voobly, so I'll start out focusing on that. It's the most polished matchup. You can get higher rated easier going random civ, but eventually you'll hit a rating point where people are playing optimally. It's easier to hit that point at a lower rating level with huns because it's easier to get a game, there's way more recs (saved game files) to watch, I like to focus on one matchup first, and because I think it gives you a better understanding of the game as a whole. Huns have the best eco bonus by not having to build houses. Because of this, it frees them up to have the most diverse strategies in 1vs1 on arabia.
The most popular build and the one I started out doing is 22 pop scouts. It's a dark age build order that kind of sucks to memorize, but it's really not that bad. I haven't seen anywhere else that had it listed out correctly, so I posted it on aoczone the other day:
http://aoczone.net/viewtopic.php?f=838&t=115838
It's probably what I'll focus on mostly in my first video. For people that like build orders, I play very build order oriented in this game compared to other people. I'm in the extreme super minority in the aoczone community. For people that hate build orders, they really don't matter that much in aoc. They matter the most in dark age, but in castle age there's not a build order anymore. It's the easiest starting point for someone new to the game since you can get to a decent ranking just with rough build orders and good mechanics. On the other hand, you quickly hit a wall with just build orders and mechanics, and that's where I was having a trouble getting to 17xx.
Macro doesn't matter that much, either. This game is highly micro intensive (I hate micro) and about reading the map (I really suck at this). For those two reasons I think a lot of people would have an easier time picking up the game than I did, but I had a fun time learning. And it's even more fun now that the game is less frustrating to play, and knowing more I lost.
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EPT
