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Aztec monks with 1/55 HP no longer die when picking up or dropping a relic
- honey54 4y ago[dead]
- system2 4y agoI was stopping myself from buying Definitive Edition but I guess I am buying it today...
- dragontamer 4y agoNote that the April 2023 patch is live, and perhaps one of the biggest changes to the meta ever. I don't think anyone really knows how the new meta will shake out. Build orders will absolutely change this patch. Though I guess that only matters if you were hoping to get to a competitive level. Definitive Edition does have a very good tutorial mode for people interested in online combat, and "Extreme" AI is 100% legitimate (AoE2 Extreme does NOT cheat, you're fighting it fair-and-square, but Extreme does a proper build order so it just "feels" quick if you haven't studied build orders yet)
- fauxpause_ 4y agoWhat’s new? Seems kind of crazy to introduce a meta changing past to an old game like this that has managed to stay popular.
- dayjaby 4y agoSeveral infantry civs like inka, sicilians, slavs, vikings, celts and dravidians got many huge buffs. Main change to like 50% of the civs is called gambesons, which adds 1 pierce armor to the militia line, basically reducing the damage they get from skirmisher by 50%.
- CorrectHorseBat 4y agoMore buffs to infantry. Players got better and infantry was barely used.
- arbitrandomuser 4y agoThere has been drastic meta changes before too but over the years the units that have been made has remained the same. The earlier meta mostly used to be around archers or cavalry , infantry was simply not viable except with certain civilization(goths) and that too only once you had the whole economy set up to spam their cheap infantry continuosly. Theve been trying to push infantry with small buffs , and this is patch has seen some more buffs to infantry and infantry civs.
- dragontamer 4y agoPre-patch, the meta was growing a bit stale and settling upon Crossbows play, or Knights play. (Or sometimes: Crossbows + Knights). An odd greedy defender might go Mangonel (aka: Anti XBow) + Monks (aka: anti-knights), but the game pretty much revolved around Archers (for civs like Britons) or Knights (for civs like Franks), and their closely related counter-units. EDIT: case in point. Vikings, a civilization with numerous infantry buffs, was played as an Archer civ in practice because even with all their infantry buffs, XBow / Arbalest was considered stronger. The biggest change this patch is a new tech for +1 pierce armor to the Longswords line, which can be researched in Castle Age. Furthermore, the entire line of infantry can upgrade faster, and cheaper. Finally, most infantry civs (Malians, Goths, etc. etc.) have gotten significant economy buffs to make them even stronger. Whether or not its enough for infantry to shine is to be seen.
- fauxpause_ 4y agoI played aok a bunch and aom a lot more. As a dumb kid a decade ago. It seems like a design failure that the game does not obey the intended rock paper scissors, no?
- dragontamer 4y agoThe rock-paper-scissors design of Age of Empires 2 (aka: Age of Kings) is more nuanced than what I described above. So the meta pre-patch is that XBows are weak to Skirmishers. (10 E. Skirms can often win vs 20 XBows). Knights are weak to Monks (100 gold to convert a 60-food+75Gold unit is effectively a 120-food + 150-gold swing, so the Monk can die afterwards and you still got an effective conversion. Furthermore, Knights are the same speed as all other knights and have a ton of armor+HP, so the converted knight can likely escape). If the monk survives for a 2nd or 3rd conversion, even worse. The monk already paid for itself after just one conversion. The "intended" rock-paper-scissors was that Infantry (ie: Longswords) were countered by XBows. But... You see, its more important to "force" your opponent into making otherwise worthless units. Skirmishers may counter XBows, but they're nearly useless against all other units in the game. So by "forcing" your opponent into a counter-unit, you've more effectively controlled the game. So Longswords are countered by XBows. But guess what? XBows were the meta-play to begin with, so you just "forced" the opponent into making good units, what he should have been doing from the start! ----------- That being said, XBows only counter Infantry when micro comes into play: effectively knowing the XBow move-and-attack cooldowns. Its not a thing beginners do. If you just patrol-move into a pile of infantry, the Longswords kinda do okay. So its only a counter much like how monks "counter" knights, I assume perfectly play on the part of the XBows (who have nearly the same movement speed, so they can perform a "retreating" kiting maneuver against enemy Longswords). If you are unable to micro like this however, its not really a true counter.
- pomber 4y agoTo be fair, it may be the "biggest change ever", but it doesn't change too much. It buff some units that were bad, nerf some units and techs that were too good. But the general meta remains the same. The devs are really good at introducing changes.
- qwytw 4y ago> old game They have been releasing expansion adding new civilizations every ~6 months or so together with a bunch of balance changes. > stay popular It didn't. Not too such an extent as it is now. For years it had only community support and a fairly small player base. Microsoft resurrected it not so long ago.
- the__alchemist 4y agoIn addition to the infantry gradual bufs, full-walling in Feudal using a mix of palisades and houses became ubiquitous. Pallisades, buildings-as-walls etc were gradually nerfed. Still popular, but now there's a higher associated cost. I wonder if they're done with those nerfs, or if there's another coming. (Since this technique is still very strong... Or maybe it's that scout rushes are strong!)
- fauxpause_ 4y agoHow was walling with housing nerfed? I remember doing that a lot.
- the__alchemist 4y agoIn-progress buildings are easier to destroy IIRC. Palisades cost more and are slower to build.
- vippy 4y agoWhat's up with all of these 18 feudal builds?? And to Hell with the Portuguese fast castle, organ gun OP on arena.
- dragontamer 4y agoIt was always possible to do 18 pop feudal, but today's focus on luring deer is perhaps the biggest change to the meta? There wasn't any real balance patch. Just people who have gotten much better at luring deer to improve early build orders. Like 3 years ago, you'd just assume 2x Boar + 8x sheep as your early food source. But today, people are adding 2x or even 3x deer to that. As deer + boars collect food at the fastest rate, you can more consistently go up at lower villager counts. There's also much more precision: killing boars / deer / sheep under the town center more consistently today than before. -------- TL;DR: Skill improved, people can do 18 pop today even though its always been possible. So people are just getting faster and more optimized.
- dayjaby 4y agoHera made a video about this recently and attributes it more to all the QoL updates like shift queueing. Sheep actually spawn next to your TC now. Before DE you had to find your first 4 as well.
- dragontamer 4y agoOh, one more thing. April patch changed Portuguese Organ Guns. The goal of the April patch was to make organ guns more of an anti-unit shotgun, and less of a wall destroyer. So you'll see fewer organ guns on Arena (one of the few maps that start off fully stone walled).
- mcraiha 4y agoFrom the comments: "This was caused by a floating point rounding error. A unit switching jobs internally becomes a different unit (i.e. a monk with a relic becomes a monk without a relic), and when doing that, HP is scaled proportionally based on the old and new max HP using 32-bit floating point maths." And there are YouTube videos about this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MytWNbpnAVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MytWNbpnAVY
- ReactiveJelly 4y ago> The formula was probably `return new_maxhp * (old_hp / old_maxhp);` ... > Due to floating point rounding errors, convert_hp(1, 55, 55) equals 0.999999940395355224609375, which is less than 1, which means the unit dies. Ahh. The old "Multiplying and dividing is associative... for the set of reals, not for the subset that you can actually afford to compute with." So it should have been `(new_maxhp * old_hp) / old_maxhp`. ffmpeg has a whole AVRational class for the same type of problem when converting timestamps accurately between 2 timebases. Reminds me of the TF2 ammo boxes that give 40 metal on Linux and 41 on Windows https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzZoo1yAQag&pp=ygUfdGYyIGhlYWx0aCBwYWNrIDQxIGhlYWx0aCBsaW51eA%3D%3D https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzZoo1yAQag&pp=ygUfdGYyIGhlY... Apparently the compiler used on Linux chose a less-accurate multiply instruction for 0.2 * 200. Two wrongs make a right - After being less accurate but rounding up where you don't need to, the Linux binary correctly arrives at 40, and the Windows binary arrives at 41. For percents (and dollars) I always do everything in cents and divide by 100 at the very end. "20 * 200 / 100" can be done with pure ints, and f32 can represent i16 exactly.
- zelphirkalt 4y agoSeems all that could have been avoided by using rationals in general and the condition for living being >0 instead of dying <1. Not sure in what case it makes sense to have dying at smaller than 1. To the user all the numbers are integers, so why not use rationals instead of floats? The more I write code, the more I notice how rarely one truly should want floats in most kinds of programs and how they almost always carry a whole bag of problems with them.
- riffraff 4y agoThis is a fantastic out of context change log. For even more abstract ones I cannot recommend enough the Dwarf Fortress Bugs Twitter account[0] The last of which is > Flying creatures keep exploding into pieces and dying: Are they crashing into trees? [0]sadly no Mastodon, https://twitter.com/DwarfFortBugs https://twitter.com/DwarfFortBugs
- a_e_k 4y agoParadox Interactive games, especially the Crusader Kings series also have some pretty entertaining change logs. E.g., from Crusader Kings II, Patch 2.4 [0]: - Handsome and lustful men now also populate the cabins in the wild for the pleasures of people who find them attractive. - Characters who love their spouses very much are now less likely to join holy orders. - Paranoid parents should no longer worry about potential plots against dead children. - Fixed that bedtime stories can no longer be told to dead children - You no longer punish yourself when a prisoner tries to flee from your prison by charming the guard. - The Orthodox Patriarch is now concerned if Orthodox rulers have heathens in their court. - Discovering two vassals of the same sex engaging in carnal activities during pagan feasts no longer let's the liege join in on the fun. - Ambitious claimant adventurers now move out of the realm if they are targetting their liege - No longer possible to banish your spouse or concubine - Decreased monthly decadence gain. [0]: https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/patch-2-4-changelog.868815/ https://forum.paradoxplaza.com/forum/threads/patch-2-4-chang...
- m463 4y agoWow, the logic to model these kinds of social structures makes my head hurt. But you would have to do it. And I wonder about dead children. I remember one game where there could be no dead children.
- mcv 4y agoIf you don't want to see terrible things happening to children, I'm afraid CK is not the game for you. The game goes out of its way to model the worst aspects of medieval life.
- vippy 4y agook, but who but TheViper or DauT has this issue? ಠ_ಠ (As a Japanese main, nerf Aztecs.)
- arendtio 4y agoThe T-West video talks about a match between Mr. Yo and Valas ;-)
- moneywoes 4y agoWow this comment had me reminiscing of watching AocZone tournaments replays of them in my youth Sigh
- spaceman_2020 4y agoAlways a little surreal to see the Viper still around. He used to be a legend in the forums 20 years back.
- olalonde 4y agoFun fact: The competitive AoE2 scene remains very much alive and thriving. Several top players are able to make a living from it, thanks to streaming revenue and tournament prize money. There are even some streamers, such as T90 and MembTV, that have managed to create successful careers despite not being competitive players themselves.
- dragontamer 4y agoNote that T90 is like 2300 Elo. Which isn't "top level pro", but I'm pretty sure he'd kick most of our asses. T90 is probably the strongest dedicated commentator / announcer / caster in this community.
- justrealist 4y agotbh I credit ZeroEmpires with keeping the community alive through the slower times though.
- xuki 4y agoI credit that random UAE dude that was bankrolling TyranT and kept the game going. Without real money the game would not reach the critical level for Microsoft to pay attention again.
- arendtio 4y agoAnd some players have come a long way. One of my highlights was, when DauT won the Red Bull Wololo 3 tournament as someone who is playing the game 20+ years. And some fans are doing great stuff too, like this video that was released shortly after (DauT is back): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u-SisO8ers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_u-SisO8ers
- lippihom 4y agoI've never seen this video. Hilarious / awesome.
- Sniffnoy 4y agoRather than linking to this Reddit thread, wouldn't it make more sense to either link to: * The linked-to patch notes? https://www.ageofempires.com/news/age-of-empires-ii-definitive-edition-update-81058/ https://www.ageofempires.com/news/age-of-empires-ii-definiti... * The particular comment explaining this bug fix? https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/12jbb9d/age_of_empires_ii_de_major_update_81058/jfy2mqq/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Games/comments/12jbb9d/age_of_empir...
- danso 4y agoI tried to and thought I had linked to the comment. I did wonder if the link went only to the thread, but the Reddit mobile web interface is so broken that I couldn't tell where the link was going to, though I figured the Aztec monk bug would stay at the top either way so people would figure it out. (the official patch notes don't explain the bug)
- vishnugupta 4y agoWhat’s the best way to play AoE on a MacBook? I can’t afford a dedicated game rig so any pointers would be of great help.
- Sakos 4y agoThis is what I found for the M1 https://old.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/ms8081/age_of_empires_ii_definitive_edition_on_m1_with/ https://old.reddit.com/r/macgaming/comments/ms8081/age_of_em... Seems to work fine with Wine and Crossover.
- steivan 4y agoI use a small machine at Paperspace (P4000 with 100GB) and play it remotely with Parsec. The experience is very good and costs me about 10-15$ a month.
- moffkalast 4y agoHow is it that a modern laptop manages to be worse at gaming than the average PC 20 years ago? Surely you one can at least run it in an emulator of some kind?
- qwytw 4y agoYou can just run with Wine, it seems to work mostly fine. Also you could probably just install ARM Windows in a VM, not sure how good is the Windows translation thing compared to Rosetta though you might end up with a worse experience than just by using Wine.
- rwalle 4y agoProbably not the answer you were expecting, but you may want to consider getting an Xbox Series S (that is often on sale at $250 or even $200), plugin your mouse and keyboard and you'll have a great experience. Yes that is a "dedicated game rig" but much more affordable than a usable gaming PC. Of course, only if you also play other games on that xbox and can live with no disc. This is what I would do in your situation.
- Reason077 4y agoIt’s great that Microsoft are still actively maintaining a ~24 year old game! Blizzard ought to take note. A few years back they announced “Warcraft 3 reforged” with great fanfare: a remastered version of the classic Warcraft 3, updated for modern systems with improved graphics etc. It looked/sounded fantastic! But despite it being a paid upgrade, what they released was a buggy mess that did little justice to the classic original. Then they immediately abandoned it and have released no updates or fixes since.
- potemkinhr 4y agoIt's actually worse, they pulled the legacy version from the users and forced the (effectively) downgraded version to everyone. Even the owners of the legacy version were shafted as they forced a update which removed much of the functionality of the legacy version. To this date still the best version was the pre-patch one for everyone who has the original installers and the latest pre-upgrade patch
- zelphirkalt 4y agoAnd the AoE2 DE has way higher system requirements while only looking marginally better in some aspects, but looks worse than 2 decades old 2d art in some other aspects. Just because it "has to be 3D" these days, while there is nothing truly requiring any 3D in the game. This is subjective, but I liked some of the old unit designs more than the new ones. For example Teutonic Knights and Cataphracts looked better in my opinion. The Teutonic Knight looked leaner and taller, while it now looks a bit like a walking barrel. OK, somewhere they need to carry all that armor ... but still I liked the old ones better. Also I would have been completely fine with units having only 8 or whatever directions in which they can look. I don't need 360° all-around rendering of units. It even substracts a little from AoE2's abstract character. What I do like is, that they added more civs.
- VoodooJuJu 4y agoI think DE actually looks worse. Old graphics hold up great - just look at this: https://imgur.com/hWSZBpb https://imgur.com/hWSZBpb. The new ones lost the soul. They have a weird glow/fuzziness. Nonetheless, DE has better multiplayer performance and cool new civs, so it's the one I play.
- shilgapira 4y agoWhat a weird coincidence. I thought at first this would be about the Guild Wars game, but turns out they both have something to do with monks and 55: https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/55_Monk https://wiki.guildwars.com/wiki/55_Monk
- voz_ 4y agoAhh nostalgia. I thought so too. This was such a fun build. I miss GW1 a lot, GW2 missed the mark, and is no true successor.
- Sakos 4y agoMan, I miss GW1. That skill/class system was amazing and still goes unmatched in its flexibility and depth today.
- dimgl 4y agoI want to create a spiritual successor to this but I'm only a dev, and not an artist. It's really killing me. I want to make a game like this before I die, but it's looking unlikely.
- morjom 4y agoThe servers are still running and it has had some QoL and even added some new Elite Skills and weapons.
- zeeZ 4y agoDepends on what you're after. In terms of mechanics it's a completely different game, but lore wise a phenomenal amount is tied in to GW1. It's almost fan service: the game.
- hobofan 4y agoYeah, really the only word out of place in the headline was "Aztec". All the rest could have applied to GW. Fun fact: In the early days (I think the first 6 months or so) of GW there were some item attribute modifiers that I think allowed for going as low as 5 hp, making the character basically invincible, as all damage was rounded down.
- winrid 4y agoImmediately noticed how the font on the MS's site is very readable. "noto-sans", evidently
- userbinator 4y agoMy metrication extension turned the title into "Aztec monks with 13.37 W no longer die when picking up or dropping a relic".
- Taywee 4y agoThat's not a lot of power for a monk. What's the typical monk's TDP?
- sprain 4y agoNot knowing it was about a game, that was one of the strangest headlines ever to read on here.
- 0xpgm 4y agoLikewise, I thought it was something to do with blood pressure :)
- neom 4y agoConversely, I didn't even have to even click in to understand it hah. Been playing AoE for around 20 years.
- alternatetwo 4y agoI was confused as well, because I just had chatted with someone about whether the aoe2 monk conversion ability on certain buildings was hardcoded or not (they can't convert i.e. Town Centers, Monasteries) ... turns out it at least used to be, no idea about now.
- celeritascelery 4y agoI don’t understand why they didn’t just use an integer. You can’t have half a HP in AoE and nothing has HP so high that it would overflow a 32 bit integer. Seems like it would avoid a lot of problems.
- mqus 4y agoAfaiu there are compounding factors like 1.5 here and 1.5 there should result in 2.25 and so on
- adameasterling 4y agoI had a really fascinating conversation with the lead architect at Frost Giant the other day. They're making the next StarCraft, basically. They don't use floating points. He didn't mention (IIRC) the possibility of rounding bugs; the reason he cited was something a bit more interesting: Floating points are not deterministic, which makes multiplayer challenging, as they simulate game state on each client's computers and only send commands across the wire. One wonders if the "out of sync" errors that plagued Age of Empires in my youth were partially explained by FP determinism issues!
- account42 4y agoFloating point numbers are deterministic, they just depend on thread-global state which has different defaults on differen platforms and can be changed by third-party libraries (including injected ones) at any point.
- qprofyeh 4y agoGuess that’s what those Epsilon checks are for.
- devjab 4y agoThe thing I like the most about this is how the game actually switches out a unit with a different unit depending on the task the unit needs to do. It's not exactly in the reddit post, but rather in the video https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MytWNbpnAVY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MytWNbpnAVY where the error is outlined. What a brilliant way to keep complexity down.
- agumonkey 4y agoWhen read with a history bias, that title makes for a long and deep source of confusion.
- dragontamer 4y agoI mean, Age of Empires 2 is a very historical game. Everyone knows that the Halberdiers of the Inca are pretty good especially when paired up with Inca's famous archers: their Crossbows and Arbalesters. /s These historical games have two ways of doing things. Staying historically correct (which is unbalanced... such as Hearts of Iron where Soviets + Germany will likely crush Poland in the first move every game), or you balance the game so that everyone has a fair chance like AoE2. But balancing the game naturally introduces significant ahistorical aspects. -------- AOE2's historical campaigns are pretty good though, and somewhat representative of famous battles throughout history.
- syspec 4y agoThis game is still amazing. I never played it as a kid, but bought the Definitive Edition last year on steam. Already have > 600 hours on it. Beat RTS ever in my opinion. Check out big tournament to get an idea of the current scene: https://youtu.be/6krbA4jTUqE https://youtu.be/6krbA4jTUqE Also I didn't play multiplayer until last month, most of that 600 hours was spent in the many many excellent single player campaigns
- raldi 4y agoI would consider banning implicit casting of floats to ints from the codebase: Nobody would have intentionally truncated in this HP conversion; they would’ve rounded.
- elnatro 4y agoIs Age of Empires playable in MacOS? I’d like to remember my childhood years but going back to windows after 15 years of Ubuntu and MacOS gives me headaches.
- alternatetwo 4y agoYou're a decade too late, there was a ppc port for MacOS back then ...
- ummonk 4y agoSuppose someone with 1 hitpoint actually transformed into a unit with less hitpoints - should they then die? Seems to me the fix should be to represent hitpoints as integer values, and round up during conversion.
- 1024core 4y agoI had no clue what the headline was all about. I imagined some Aztec monks with a 1/55 HP motor trying to do something and just dying for no reason.
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- boosteri 4y agoWell, once it's out it's out. O can just imagine fixing this would break some clever mod/campaign featuring deadly relics that monks are forbidden to touch.
- account42 4y agoWhat kind of monster would write this as `new_maxhp * (old_hp / old_maxhp)` instead of `(old_hp / old_maxhp) * new_maxhp`.