Aetas 0.4: six distinct peoples, a real fort and a smarter computer opponent

A big one. Most of this came from your feedback and from a long look at what players of other strategy games miss most.

Six peoples that really play differently

You told us the peoples felt too much alike, and you were right: for the first quarter of an hour everyone had the same buildings and the same troops. Now every people starts in its own way, misses something the others have, and has two technologies of its own.

The Franks start with a watchtower by their town center and can build their fort in the Bronze Age, but they never get gunmen. The Norse start with three spearmen and pay half for a barracks, but never build a fort. Greek farms last three times as long, and their cavalry stops at the knight. The Mongols start with two extra scouts and never build walls, towers or a university. The Arabs open their market in the Stone Age, and their infantry stops at the pikeman. The Chinese start with two extra workers, and their cavalry stops at the cataphract.

Then there are twelve new technologies, two per people: from Feudalism and the Order of Knights of the Franks to the Berserkergang of the Norse, which heals your infantry with every kill, the Caravanserai of the Arabs, which brings in gold, and the Gunpowder of the Chinese, which gives them the cannon an age early. The Civilizations screen shows it all.

A real fort

Until now the fort was a big, expensive wall. Now it fires a volley of arrows at several enemies at once and a heavy bolt at the toughest one nearby, and every unit you put inside adds more arrows. Without siege engines you will hardly scratch it, and siege does less to it than to other buildings.

In return forts are rare: each one costs 75% more than the one before, and two of your own must stand at least 20 tiles apart. The fort has two upgrades of its own: Crenellations (Middle Ages) for more arrows and a longer reach, and Bastions (Imperial Age), which turns the bolt into a cannon that also hits the enemies next to its target.

A smarter computer opponent

The computer now sees its attacks through. Its armies no longer march back and forth without doing anything: they follow up a won battle and go for your town centers and barracks. Against towers and forts it waits out of range until its siege engines have knocked them down, and it knocks down towers you build next to its base while they are still going up.

It also builds its walls where they count. Instead of always putting a square ring around its town center, it first looks at the land and closes off the narrow places between water, forest and rock: a short wall across a land bridge instead of a long one along the shore. Its watchtowers stand just behind its gates.

Its economy no longer leaves dozens of workers standing around, so it reaches the later ages several minutes sooner. And once it has lost, it offers to surrender instead of fighting on to the last building. Accept, or play on and finish it yourself.

New to strategy games? Beginner and Easy now give you time to settle in: Easy won't attack before minute 13, Beginner not before minute 16, and both send small groups instead of their whole army. Normal is a little gentler, so the step up to Hard is clearer. The campaign missions follow suit.

Save a multiplayer match

A match with eight players can take all evening, and sometimes the evening ends first. Now you save it like any other game. Another day the host opens a new lobby, clicks Saved game and picks it. Teams, colours and peoples stay as they were, and everyone who joins gets their old seat back. Is someone missing? Then the computer plays for them.

On the battlefield

• Artillery now outranges towers and forts, as it should: the catapult shoots 8 tiles, the trebuchet 9.5, the cannon 10, the howitzer 10.5 and the field gun 11.
• Cavalry is now strong against siege weapons: riders are the answer to a ram, catapult or cannon without an escort.
• The Mongol horse archer now counts as cavalry, with the Mongol speed and training bonuses.
• Melee soldiers spread out over the enemies in front of them instead of crowding around one. Order them onto a single target and they still all go for it.
• The fog of war clears a little further around your units, and siege engines and ranged units see at least as far as they shoot, so you no longer attack things you cannot see.

Ten new technologies

Your town center can now research too: Leather Aprons make your workers tougher, Baskets and a Handcart let them carry more per trip, and Drill speeds up all training. The hospital learns to heal faster and further, siege engines get sturdier, and Ballistics gives your archers and gunmen a longer reach. Rangefinding at the workshop adds a tile to every siege engine that fires.

An interface that grows with your screen

On a 1440p screen Aetas now uses a 125% interface, on 4K 200%, and the text stays sharp. Prefer something else? Settings > Interface > Interface size. Training, upgrading and building now show a picture of the unit or building with its name underneath, so names are no longer cut in two in German or Russian.

See what everyone else is doing

Click a building or unit of another player to see what it is, who owns it and how much health it has left; towers and forts also show their range. You see the moment another player starts advancing to a new age, with a progress bar on the scoreboard, and the scoreboard now shows everyone's people next to their name.

Leaderboard

The leaderboard has a Hall of fame with the top three of every past month, a button to show only your Steam friends, and a line with how many matches were played this week. Next to every name you see the people that player picks most.

Français et polski

Aetas now speaks French and Polish too, nine languages in all. These are first versions: if something reads oddly, tell us.

Report a player

Right-click a name and choose Report player: for chat, voice chat, their name, cheating or ruining the game. What that player said in chat goes along with the report. Muting and blocking were already there.

59 new achievements

There are now 100, as many as Steam allows a new game for now. Finish each campaign, win every historical battle, earn gold in the challenges, and beat missions in their own special way: bring every raider home from Lindisfarne, or let Alexander himself defeat Darius. Every people has one for its unique unit. Others are for building, fighting, trading and making allies, and for memorable moments, like a worker who brings down a knight. Some are secret. Campaigns and medals you already won count: they unlock the next time you start the game.

Missions that fight back

Nine missions were too easy; at Marathon, Leuctra and the Kalka you could even win by doing nothing. They now ask a bit more: Marathon, Leuctra, The Kalka, The Badger Mouth, Sphacteria, Songs of Chu, Ankara, Hastings and Roncevaux. At Gaugamela, Darius no longer waits for you forever, and at Over the Alps the Lombard fort fights back, so you start with four trebuchets. The Ring of the Avars went the other way: the raid comes later and is smaller.

More from the computer opponent

• Late in the game it brings more siege engines against a walled base and turns them on your walls, gates and towers.
• It defends its woodcutters and miners at the edge of its base, and keeps its workers out of reach of your towers.
• Destroy its town center and it fights on: it finishes its buildings, keeps sending attacks and no longer builds a wall right through its own base.
• It gets its workers out of buildings that are about to fall and protects them better when your army shows up.
• Its workers no longer sense armies hidden in the fog.
• Beginner and Easy now send out a scout, so they do find you in the end, late and with only a handful of soldiers.
• Two computer players of the same people no longer have the same name.

More for missions and challenges

• Objectives now match the briefing. At The Horns of Hattin you hold the springs with five soldiers for three minutes, with a timer on screen. Songs of Chu and Ain Jalut show their time limits. The Wooden Horse is won with the horse, The Yellow River with the dam.
• Hulao can no longer be won by waiting: after five minutes a reserve blocks the pass, so you have to charge.
• Every side fights with the units of its own people, and you can always train your own unique unit, also after reaching a new age.
• In several missions the enemy towns know where your base is and come for it.
• Your starting units no longer stand half hidden under trees, and enemy waves no longer get stuck in small clearings.
• Vienna gives you one more cannon, and the relief army fights with musketeers again. In To the West the Skrælings use ordinary bows and come in somewhat larger groups.
• Mission achievements that depend on how you played, such as a time limit, now survive saving and loading.
• Challenges: sheltering your army in the town center no longer fails Counters or Through the wall straight away, and in Hold off a rush the later waves always march on your town.

Multiplayer

• When the host changes the map or the rules, everyone presses Ready again, so a match never starts on settings you didn't agree to.
• Accepting a Steam invite always joins you as a player, not as a spectator.
• A ranked match can no longer be made unranked halfway through, and in ranked team games a result only counts once the other team confirms it.
• With locked teams nobody can switch sides, and spectators can no longer chat to the players (they can still talk to each other).
• In a resumed match every player gets their own army back, even under a different name.
• If your connection drops, you see why, in your own language. Rejoining a large, long match works, or you get a clear message.

Smaller things

• Trade faster at the market: Shift+click buys or sells 500 at once, Ctrl+click 1000.
• Click the mouse wheel on the map to ping it for your team.
• Push-to-talk is now Page Up for your team and Page Down for everyone (your own keys stay). Voice chat is louder, and you can set each player's volume from 25% to 300%.
• With a mixed group selected, the side panel shows a button for each kind of unit: click one to keep only that kind, shift-click to drop it.
• With several buildings of the same kind selected, research is spread over them, so two blacksmiths research two upgrades at the same time.
• Workers who finish a building look further for the next one, so a long row of stables gets finished without new orders. Repairing works the same way.
• Lost your last town center or barracks but still have workers? A clock now gives you three minutes to rebuild before you are out, so one hidden worker no longer drags out a lost match.
• Fairer random maps: a start with clearly less forest nearby now gets extra groves.
• Long chat messages wrap, a dragged formation starts as a square, a match starts further zoomed out, and the music is a little quieter by default.
• Colourblind mode now colours everything: units, buildings, the minimap, the score graph and the map preview.
• Key names follow your keyboard layout (AZERTY shows ZQSD).
• If a player falls far behind, the host gets a button to play on without them. They can rejoin later.
• With tooltips set to "Short" you still see what something costs.
• In multiplayer the line to where your units are going shows up right away.
• "Largest army" in the statistics no longer counts your workers.
• Push-to-talk can now be a letter key. While you type in the chat, it simply types.
• Shadows, tooltips and minimap zoom change at once from the in-game menu, and the theme (F6) and performance overlay (F3) are remembered.
• On the leaderboard, hover over a rating with a ~ to see how many placement matches are left.
• Alt+Tab out of fullscreen and changing the interface size are faster.

Fixes

• Saved games from the previous version open again. Settings, progress, saves and replays are now written safely, so a crash or a full disk can no longer wipe them, and the load screen shows all your saves, page by page, and lets you delete them.
• Multiplayer is steadier: you can rejoin a match you joined through the relay, joining no longer hangs on "connecting", a player who stops responding no longer freezes the match, and a burst of orders no longer disconnects everyone else.
• Tooltips and range rings show real values, with your upgrades and your people's bonuses, and small damage and gathering bonuses now do exactly what they promise.
• Armies no longer freeze in front of an enemy wall or a river, a mixed army stays together along a whole route, and a unit coming out of a garrison keeps its control group and can be healed again.
• Missions are fairer on every difficulty: sallies and raids no longer dry up on Brutal, allied computers no longer get stronger when you raise the difficulty, and once you have won you can no longer lose.
• Miners who run out of gold no longer make the game hitch, and long matches use less video memory.
• Replays play to the real end, seen through the eyes of whoever recorded them.
• Workers bring their load to the drop-off they can actually reach quickest, not the nearest one across water or a wall. Extra workers on a full resource carry on with what they were doing instead of standing idle.
• Units walk around someone else's gate instead of waiting in front of it. You can click a gate anywhere on its gatehouse, and gates no longer overlap.
• Fights, arrows and rubble in the fog are no longer visible, and you only know an enemy building once you have actually seen it.
• When a building falls or you demolish it, everything in its queue is refunded, including a paid age advance. Demolishing your own building lets the units inside walk out.
• Archers stay where they are after a kill instead of walking to where their victim stood, and units with a long range fire at anything within it.
• Chinese: with your population almost full, a group of five brings out as many soldiers as fit and refunds the rest.
• Arab players get their gold back when they cancel something.
• Windowed mode stays a window, and the map no longer scrolls when the mouse leaves the window.
• Ctrl+number with only a building selected no longer empties that control group, and hotkeys keep working while the mouse is over the tutorial or challenge panel.
• Smoother team games with shared vision, and smoother large games with several computer players.
• Many more, from a freeze when opening Hotkeys during a multiplayer match to arrows that hit your brand-new ally.

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All changes

New

• The six peoples now really play differently, from the first minute. Every people starts in its own way: the Franks with a watchtower by their town center, the Norse with three spearmen, the Mongols with two extra scouts, the Chinese with two extra workers but 100 less food. The Arabs can build their market in the Stone Age and the Franks their fort in the Bronze Age. A barracks costs the Norse half, a mill costs the Greeks 40% less, and Greek farms last three times as long.
• Every people also misses something the others have. The Franks never get gunmen (musketeer, line infantry, rifleman). The Norse never build a fort. Greek cavalry stops at the knight, Chinese cavalry at the cataphract. Arab infantry stops at the pikeman. The Mongols never build walls, gates, watchtowers or a university.
• And every people has two technologies only it can research. Franks: Feudalism (buildings 15% cheaper) and Order of Knights (cavalry +20% hit points, +10% damage). Norse: Strandhogg (plunder 20 points more, infantry 10% faster) and Berserkergang (infantry heals 30% of its hit points with every kill). Greeks: Olive Groves (+10% food, new farms last 50% longer) and Phalanx Drill (phalanx 10 points stronger, infantry +10% hit points). Mongols: Yam (cavalry 10% faster) and Mangudai (+10% damage for ranged units). Arabs: Caravanserai (your market brings in 60 gold a minute) and Siege Masters (siege +25% hit points, +20% damage). Chinese: Great Wall (walls, gates and forts +100% hit points) and Gunpowder (the cannon one age earlier).
• Balance: Norse infantry does 20% more damage (was 15%), Arab cavalry 15% more (was 10%); the Chinese gather 5% more food (was 10%).
• The Civilizations screen and the tooltip on your people's name at the top show all of this: how you start, what you never get, and your own technologies.

• Nine new technologies. Town center: Leather Aprons (Stone Age, workers +15% hit points), Baskets (Bronze Age) and Handcart (Middle Ages), each letting workers carry 25% more per trip, and Drill (Renaissance, all units train 25% faster). Workshop: Iron Fittings and Armoured Frames, +15% hit points for siege engines each. Hospital: Herbal Medicine (heals 50% faster and 2 tiles further) and Surgery (twice as fast as without medicine). Archery range: Ballistics (Middle Ages), +1 tile range for archers and gunmen.
• Save a multiplayer match and continue it later. The host loads the save in a new lobby, everyone gets their old seat back, and the computer plays for anyone who is missing.
• The fort is now a real stronghold. It fires a volley of arrows at several enemies at once, plus a heavy bolt at the toughest enemy nearby, and units inside add more arrows. Without siege you will hardly dent it, and siege does less to it than to other buildings. In return each fort costs 75% more than the one before (was 25%), and two of your forts must be at least 20 tiles apart.
• New fort upgrades: Crenellations (Middle Ages: more arrows, longer reach) and Bastions (Imperial Age: the heavy bolt becomes a cannon that also hits enemies next to its target). The tower upgrades now make the fort's arrows hit harder too.
• 59 new achievements (100 in all, as many as Steam allows a new game for now), for the campaigns and the historical battles, gold medals in the challenges, special ways to beat missions, your civilisation's unique unit, building, fighting, trading and allies, memorable moments and a handful of secret ones. Campaigns and medals you already won count: they unlock the next time you start the game.
• New languages: French and Polish.
• The French and Polish translations have been read through and improved.
• The interface scales with your screen. On 1440p it is 125%, on 4K 200%, and the text stays sharp. Choose a size yourself under Settings > Interface > Interface size.
• Training, upgrading and building now show a picture of the unit or building with its name underneath, instead of a name that was cut in two in some languages.
• With a mixed group selected, the side panel shows a button for each kind of unit, with how many you have. Click one to keep only your workers or only your musketeers, for example; shift-click to drop that kind from the selection.
• Report a player for chat, voice chat, their name, cheating or ruining the game. Right-click their name. What they said in chat is sent along.
• Lost your last town center, barracks and every other building that trains units, but you still have workers? After a minute everyone can see them, as before, and a clock in the top bar now gives you three more minutes to finish a new one. If you don't, you are out. One hidden worker no longer keeps a lost match going.
• In a new match the computer now offers to surrender when it has lost, instead of fighting on to the last building. Accept it, or play on and finish it yourself. You can change this in the lobby under "Computer resigns". Missions and challenges are unchanged.
• Chat messages that are too long now wrap onto the next line instead of running off the screen, in the match and in the lobby.
• In the event log you now see when another player advances to a new age.
• Voice chat is louder and no longer quieter when you turn the game volume down. Right-click a player to make their voice louder or softer, from 25% to 300%.
• Dragging a formation with the right mouse button now starts as a square block and only gets wider when you drag further.
• Push-to-talk is now Page Up for your team and Page Down for everyone. Chose your own keys? Those stay.
• Click the mouse wheel on the map to ping it for your team (Alt+click still works too).
• The music is quieter by default.
• Sharper text when the interface is scaled up (for example 125% on a 1440p screen): thin letters no longer lose a stroke.
• Changing the interface size or style is faster.
• A match now starts further zoomed out.
• With several buildings of the same kind selected, research is spread over them, so two blacksmiths research two upgrades at the same time.
• Alt+Tab out of fullscreen and back is faster.
• Campaigns and battles: siege does full damage to forts again, so the missions with an enemy fort play as intended now that forts shoot back. Vienna gives you one more cannon.
• The fog of war clears a little further around your units, and siege engines and ranged units see further than they shoot, so you no longer attack things you cannot see.
• "Largest army" in the statistics no longer counts your workers.
• In multiplayer the dotted line to where your units are going shows up right away, and for groups of up to 60 units.
• With tooltips set to "Short" you now also see what something costs, not only its name.
• Colourblind mode now also colours units, buildings, the minimap, the score graph and the map preview.
• Leaderboard: a Hall of fame with the top three of every past month and the highest rating, a button to show only your Steam friends, and a line showing how many matches were played this week. Hover over a rating with a ~ to see how many placement matches are left. The Left column now shows a percentage, and only for players who ever left a match. Next to each name you see the civilization that player picks most.
• Click a building or unit of another player to see what it is, who owns it and how many hit points it has left. Towers and forts also show their range.
• You now see when other players start advancing to a new age, not only when they get there: a message appears the moment they begin, and the scoreboard shows "II → III" with a progress bar for everyone, just like for yourself.
• Workers who finish a building now look up to 20 tiles away for the next one to build (was 8), so a spread-out row of stables gets finished without re-assigning them. The same goes for repairing: they move on to the next damaged building up to 20 tiles away.
• Artillery now outranges towers and forts, as it should: catapult 8 tiles, trebuchet 9.5, cannon 10, howitzer 10.5, field gun 11, and they see as far as they shoot. New research at the workshop (Age 5): Rangefinding, +1 tile range for siege engines that fire.
• Fairer random maps: a start with clearly less forest nearby than the richest one now gets extra groves, up to about 70% of the richest. No forest is ever removed, and the new trees never block a path, a mine or a base. Desert maps were already fair and stay the same.
• Cavalry is now strong against siege weapons (double damage), so riders are the answer to an unescorted ram, catapult or cannon.
• Mongols: the Horse Archer now also gets the cavalry bonuses. It moves 15% faster (plus 10% with Yam) and trains 25% faster.
• Melee soldiers now spread out over nearby enemies: at most four attack the same target, and the rest pick another enemy right next to them. Ordering units to attack one target still sends them all at it.

• Trade faster at the market: Shift+click buys or sells 500 at once, Ctrl+click 1000. The price still moves with every 100, just as with separate clicks.

• The scoreboard at the bottom left now shows each player's civilisation after the name, for example "Dennis - Chinese".

Computer players

• Computer players build their walls where they count. Instead of always putting a square ring around their town center, they first look at the land and close off the narrow places between water, forest and rock: a short wall across a land bridge instead of a long one along the shore. On open land the wall is now round and shorter. Their watchtowers stand just behind their gates.
• Beginner and Easy computer opponents now give you time to settle in. Easy won't attack before minute 13, Beginner not before minute 16, and both send small groups instead of their whole army.
• Beginner keeps a much smaller army (at most 8 soldiers). It now also scouts in the Stone Age, so it will eventually come for you even if you never advance, but late and with only a handful of soldiers.
• Normal is a little gentler, so the step from Normal to Hard is clearer.
• Campaign missions with a computer opponent are noticeably calmer on Beginner and Easy.
• Computer players now see their attacks through. An army that had destroyed its target and stood still counted as "half gone" and walked home, and the order to move on was overwritten by the order to return to base in the same moment. An army could also be called back the instant it set out, over and over. That is why armies marched back and forth without doing anything. In our test games between two Hard computers, 20 of 32 matches now end before the time limit, against 12 before.
• If you destroy a computer's town center, it no longer starts a new wall ring straight through its own base, and its workers keep gathering while it rebuilds.
• The computer no longer builds gates on top of or right next to each other.
• Late in the game the computer now follows up a won battle: instead of pulling back, it sends the rest of its army after the first wave and goes for your town centers and barracks.
• Against a walled base the computer now brings more siege engines late in the game and turns them on your walls, gates and towers.
• Computer armies no longer stand idle for the rest of a match once their scouts are gone.
• The computer now knocks down enemy towers while they are still being built, keeps its workers out of tower range, and brings rams against a finished tower instead of sending soldiers in one by one.
• The computer's attacks now wait outside the range of towers and forts until its siege engines have broken them, and move on to the next building instead of turning back.
• The computer now also defends its woodcutters and miners at the edge of its base, instead of turning back halfway.
• The computer builds fewer lumber camps.
• Two computer players of the same civilisation no longer have the same name.
• Computer opponents no longer leave dozens of workers standing idle. When the wood nearby runs out they move on to gold, stone and iron, skip mines that are already full and go further for wood if they must, and building a wall ring no longer pulls almost all of them off the job.
• The computer saves for the next age much earlier and no longer gets stuck at the population cap with an age advance waiting behind a worker. It reaches the later ages several minutes sooner, so expect a tougher fight.
• At the population cap the computer still builds towers and a siege workshop, and it keeps to the population it shares with its teammates.
• A computer player that lost its town center finishes its abandoned buildings and keeps sending attack waves. After offering to surrender, it keeps playing until you accept.
• The computer no longer hides workers in a town center that is about to fall, gets them out of buildings that are about to collapse, and protects them better when an enemy army shows up.
• Computer workers no longer sense armies hidden in the fog.
• Computer players no longer shuffle soldiers in and out of a badly damaged tower.

Missions

• Harder: Marathon, Leuctra, The Kalka, The Badger Mouth, Sphacteria, Songs of Chu, Ankara, Hastings and Roncevaux. Easier: in The Ring of the Avars the raid comes later and is smaller.
• Over the Alps (Franks 3): the Lombard fort now fights back, so you start with four trebuchets instead of two.
• Your starting units in missions no longer stand half hidden under trees.
• Campaign saves from an older version load without crashing.
• Sallies and raids from enemy towns now happen on every difficulty; on Brutal they used to stop entirely in some missions.
• In several missions the enemy towns now know where your base is and attack it. In missions with a final age the computer no longer saves for an age it can never reach, so it trains and researches again. Some missions will feel harder.
• Hulao can no longer be won by waiting: after five minutes a reserve blocks the pass, so you have to charge it.
• Allied computer players no longer get stronger when you raise the difficulty.
• Once a mission says you have won, you can no longer lose it in the seconds before the victory screen.
• Every side in the missions and battles now uses units of its own civilization (for example crusaders instead of knights for the West), and you can always train your own unique unit, also after advancing an age.
• Objectives now match the briefing. The Horns of Hattin: hold the springs with five soldiers for three minutes in a row (workers don't count, and the timer is shown). Songs of Chu and Ain Jalut show their hidden time limits. The Wooden Horse can only be won with the horse and The Yellow River only with the dam. In the Arab missions a market anywhere counts.
• In The Varangians "one fort left" appears when one fort is left, and "one city left" no longer appears when the last city falls. Borte and Alfred no longer appear twice on Brutal.
• Enemy waves no longer appear trapped in small clearings in the forest, and a mission no longer crashes when there is no room for a building it places.
• In missions the fort tooltip no longer mentions the siege protection and steep price increase that only apply in regular games.
• Mission achievements that depend on what happened during the mission (for example Marathon, Hastings or a time limit) now survive saving and loading.
• Tutorial: with minimap zoom switched off, the minimap step now explains where to switch it on and moves on by itself, so the tutorial achievement can still be earned. The "train two scouts" step no longer completes by itself if you trained scouts earlier.
• Challenges: garrisoning your army in the town center no longer fails Counters or Siege straight away, clicking Menu or Diplomacy no longer counts as using the mouse in the Hotkeys challenge, and in the Rush challenge the later attack waves now always march on your town.
• "Same map" no longer appears after a mission, battle, the tutorial or a challenge; replaying a mission from there used to leave it stuck in your skirmish setup.
• Gaugamela: Darius no longer waits for you forever. From the fourth minute a new Persian division marches on your army every two and a half minutes, each one larger than the last.
• Vienna: the relief army and the city garrison fight with musketeers again.
• To the West: the Skrælings now use ordinary bows instead of repeating crossbows, and come in somewhat larger groups.
• The Varangians: the sallies from Syracuse have one more camel rider.

Multiplayer

• Points and ratings are better protected, and a ranked match can no longer be made unranked halfway through. Lobbies whose host has gone leave the list sooner.
• Rejoining or watching a large, long match now works, or you get a clear message.
• When a connection drops, the reason is shown in your own language.
• Messages with a number (team balance, observer wait, not enough points) show the number.
• Fixed: rejoining a match with computer players could fall out of sync with the host.
• Fixed: joining a lobby through the relay server (hosts without an open port) could fail when host and guest connected at the same moment.
• Fixed: opening Hotkeys or Privacy during a match no longer freezes the game, including for the other players in multiplayer. Back takes you straight into the match again.
• Reconnecting works better. If you joined through the lobby server's relay, you can now get back into the match after losing the connection. Pressing Back while connecting no longer leaves a ghost player behind, and joining no longer hangs on "connecting": after 40 seconds without an answer from the host you get a message.
• If your game is too large to be sent to you when rejoining, you see why straight away instead of the match freezing every few seconds. If you are removed because your game went out of sync, you see that message instead of trying to reconnect for 15 minutes.
• Desyncs are noticed sooner.
• Cancelling a unit in the training queue or ejecting a unit from a tower now hits what you clicked, even if the queue moved on in the meantime. Before, this could cancel your age advance.
• Resumed games: every Steam player gets their own army back, even under a different name, and typing someone else's name no longer gets you their army. Avatars and names are right, and muting or reporting hits the right player. A resumed game now counts once it is finished, and a ranked save resumed in a normal lobby no longer counts as ranked.
• The host can kick players in a lobby with a resumed game too, and a kicked player can't rejoin that lobby. A computer player that takes the seat of a kicked player no longer shows that player's rating.
• When the host changes the map or rules, everyone has to press Ready again, so a game can no longer start on settings you never agreed to.
• Accepting a Steam invite now always joins you as a player, not as a spectator.
• In ranked team games, a result only counts right away once a player from the other team confirms it.
• The host now checks team and civilization choices: with locked teams nobody can switch, and a civilization that doesn't exist becomes random. Players can no longer switch on a computer co-pilot for themselves.
• Spectators can no longer chat to the players during a match; they can still talk to each other.
• If a player stays connected but falls behind for 15 seconds, the host gets a "Continue without <name>" button. That player is treated as disconnected (the computer can take over, and they can rejoin later); everyone sees a message.
• Reconnecting no longer gives up when the host hasn't noticed you dropped yet: your new connection takes over your seat right away. Only a final refusal (kicked, different version, world too large) stops the retries.

Fixes and speed

• The tooltip of siege weapons now says "fortifications" in your language instead of an untranslated word.
• The privacy summary in the main menu now also mentions your rating, the short record kept of each online match, reports, and that the lobby server can pass traffic along.
• A gate is drawn three tiles wide. Clicking anywhere on the gatehouse now selects the gate, and the outline covers the whole gatehouse. Two gates must be at least 3 tiles apart, so gatehouses no longer overlap.
• The progress bar above a building now matches the real training time. For the Chinese, whose soldiers come out in groups of five, it used to fill up long before the group was done.
• Miners who run out of gold no longer make the game hitch while every one of them searches the map. The same goes for lumberjacks looking for the next tree, and for several computer opponents thinking at the same moment.
• Easy and Beginner now send out a scout, so they can find you and attack. They still do not raid, wall or micromanage their army.
• If a player stays connected but sends nothing, the match no longer waits forever. After a short silence the others play on, the same way as when someone drops.
• A burst of orders, such as cancelling a large group at once, no longer disconnects the other players. The extra orders go out on the next moments.
• Stone tower and Boiling oil no longer give the town center the extra hit points meant for towers. Watchtowers still get them. A town center that already had the extra hit points in a saved game keeps them.
• Saved games from the previous version open again.
• If a save cannot be written, the match keeps going and you get a message, instead of the game ending.
• Silhouettes and see-through trees in Settings > Video no longer crash the game when you change them from the main menu. If drawing fails for another reason, you return to the menu instead of a crash on every frame.
• Fixed: after loading a save or rejoining a match, the game could crash when workers left a building they had been sheltering in.
• Fixed: the health bar of the selected unit or building no longer runs through the numbers.
• Fixed: if you send more workers to a resource than fit on it, the ones that can't join now carry on with what they were doing instead of standing idle.
• Fixed: workers now bring their load to the drop-off they can reach in the fewest steps, not the one that is closest as the crow flies across water or a wall. When a tree runs out they pick the next one that gets them back to a drop-off fastest.
• Fixed: a locked gate, or one still being built, now counts as a wall. Workers no longer walk up to it to reach trees on the other side.
• Units now walk around someone else's gate that won't open for them, instead of waiting in front of it. Only when the gate is the only way through do they go to it, and wait for it to open or break it down.
• Fixed: fights, arrows, corpses and rubble in the fog or in unexplored land are no longer visible.
• Fixed: Arab players who cancel something they paid for partly in gold now get that gold back, instead of free food, wood or stone.
• Fixed: "Call workers" sometimes summoned a worker from the other side of the map.
• Fixed: changing stance or upgrading units wiped their planned route and formation.
• A mixed army now keeps to the pace of its slowest unit along a whole shift-queued route and after a skirmish on attack-move, instead of falling apart at the first waypoint or fight. If that slowest unit falls, the rest no longer keep crawling.
• Fixed: arrows already in the air hurt a player who had just become your ally.
• Achievement progress is now kept when you load a save or rejoin a match.
• The tribute achievement only counts gifts to an ally, and you can no longer send resources to an empty seat. The tutorial no longer awards regular achievements, also not when you keep playing, save and load it, or replay the map. The tutorial achievement itself still works.
• Numbers use the decimal sign of your chosen language. Resources, stances, formations, map types and missions work again on Turkish Windows.
• German: resource names keep their capital letter. Dutch: consistent words throughout. Computer players, leaderboard playtime and mission errors are shown in your language.
• The load and replay screens respond faster, and only the 50 newest replays are kept.
• The score graph stops at the moment you were eliminated.
• A missing music track no longer makes the menu stutter.
• Switching to Chinese or Russian during a match no longer stutters when new characters first appear.
• Mission and challenge clocks always use regular digits, and a player without a name is called "Player" in your own language.
• Unit portraits and icons load faster and use less video memory.
• Long matches use less video memory: units that have left the battlefield are unloaded.
• Chinese: if your population is almost full, a group of five now brings out as many units as fit and refunds the rest. Before, the bar stayed full until there was room for all five.
• Settings and progress (achievements, campaign, tutorial), saves, autosaves and replays are now written safely: a crash or a full disk while saving can no longer wipe them or leave a broken file behind. A damaged or incompatible save or replay shows a message instead of crashing the game.
• The load and replay screens show all your files, 8 per page, and you can delete files there (click Delete twice). Multiplayer saves are sorted by the moment they were saved, also after Steam Cloud moved them to another PC.
• Replays: older ones no longer report "out of sync" (you get a heads-up when a replay was recorded with another version of the game). Replays are shown from the point of view of the player who recorded them, and play to the actual end of the match instead of stopping 10 seconds after the last order.
• Small damage bonuses now actually work. Weapon upgrades of +10% used to do nothing for spearmen, archers, scouts and chariots, and civilization damage bonuses were often lost too; every hit now averages exactly the promised amount (a spearman with the first weapons upgrade deals 7.7 on average instead of 7). The stone tower upgrade now gives the full +70%.
• Gathering bonuses match their descriptions: Foraging is +15% (it was +23%), food bonuses of civilizations count again after all farming upgrades, and Baskets give +25% (it was +20%).
• Tooltips and the selection panel show a unit's real hit points, damage, range and speed, including upgrades and civilization bonuses. Range rings and building tooltips show real values too: towers with their upgrades and the Frankish bonus, hospitals with medicine, the fort with its upgrades, the market with the Arab selling bonus. The town center tooltip now says it only shoots with units inside.
• Armies no longer freeze in front of an enemy wall or a river when their target is on the other side: they let it go, and on attack-move they break the wall open. Units on attack-move no longer chase a fleeing enemy into the fog.
• Aggressive units, archers in particular, stay where they are after a kill instead of walking to where their victim stood. Ranged units with a range longer than their sight (riflemen, line infantry, anything with range upgrades) now engage enemies anywhere within their range.
• When a tower fires on your units, defensive neighbours only join in if they can reach it, and then no longer turn around just in front of it. Workers set to defensive or aggressive fight back when attacked while working; under tower fire they flee.
• Units whose formation spot lands in water or forest no longer keep shoving each other around the destination, so queued orders carry on.
• A unit leaving a garrison is the same unit again: it keeps its control group, stance and kill count, and a wounded unit can be healed and upgraded normally afterwards.
• When a building is destroyed or you demolish it yourself, everything still in its queue is refunded, including a paid age advance. Demolishing your own building lets the garrison step out instead of killing it.
• A worker sheltering in a tower now keeps you in the game: the rebuild countdown starts instead of an instant defeat.
• Repairing costs the same, no matter how many buildings of that type you own. Mongol nomad camps repair for free.
• A farmer with nowhere to drop off food no longer keeps his farm blocked forever, and a worker ordered into a garrison a second time on his way no longer forgets his old job. Workers no longer stand next to their tree for minutes without chopping.
• Fog of war: an enemy building is only known once you have actually seen it. Towers built after your last look no longer show up, and the "Explored" map setting no longer shows every enemy building live. An ally's extra sight (such as the Greek bonus) now also counts in your shared vision.
• In Nomad games you are no longer revealed to everyone after a minute while you look for a place to settle. In score games the "revealed" message no longer says you will be knocked out.
• Units that die inside a destroyed building now count as kills for the attacker. Fixed a rare case where a tower could pick a target that had already died and remove an unrelated unit by mistake.
• Achievements: winning with a handicap above 100% no longer earns win or difficulty achievements, and if you are knocked out but your team still wins, the win now counts fully. On a PC with several Steam accounts, progress from before account folders existed now goes to one account only.
• Hotkeys keep working while the mouse is over the tutorial or challenge panel, and releasing a selection box or a drag order over a panel no longer leaves a stuck box behind: the selection or order goes through.
• Ctrl+number with only a building selected no longer empties that control group, and the idle-worker key no longer skips workers when you put one to work in between.
• With several buildings of one type selected, the buttons now look at all of them: a building still under construction or a full queue in the first one no longer greys out everything. The age-up button is greyed out when the queue is full, and the tooltip says why; before, clicking it did nothing.
• Key names on buttons and in the tutorial now follow your keyboard layout (AZERTY shows ZQSD instead of WASD).
• Push-to-talk can be set to a letter key. While you type in a chat or text field it types instead of transmitting (in the lobby, where the chat is always open, use Page Up/Down or a mouse side button to talk). A hotkey that lost its key to another slot no longer gets it back after a restart.
• From 200 manual saves, the load screen and the save message warn that Steam Cloud keeps at most 500 files, so you can delete old saves. Nothing is deleted automatically.
• The setting "Remember minimap zoom" is now called "Zoom the minimap with the scroll wheel", which is what it does.
• Replays of games where the computer offered surrender no longer go out of sync.
• Windowed mode stays a window again instead of becoming as large as the screen. Edge scrolling stops when the mouse leaves the window or the game loses focus, and "Sound in background off" now also works after Alt+Tab from full screen.
• Shadows, tooltips and minimap zoom change immediately when you change them in the in-game menu. The theme (F6) and the performance overlay (F3) are remembered when you close the game, and if you set the music to 100% yourself, an update no longer turns it back down.
• Escape no longer sometimes needs two presses to open the menu. Home without a town center jumps to one of your own buildings or units instead of the middle of the map.
• In very long matches, newly made units keep their selection ring and facing. In resumed very old saves, players can pause again. If your account folder can't be created on startup, the game tries again next time to move your saves and progress into it.
• Better performance in team games with shared vision, around busy lumber camps and with several computer players in large games.
• Text fixes: the upgrade button (one step is cheaper than training a new unit; several steps at once can cost more), the victory conditions, the tower ban, the population tooltip and the farm step in the tutorial.