How does Age of Empires 2 still have such a large playerbase? It hits 20...

How does Age of Empires 2 still have such a large playerbase? It hits 20,000 players daily making it by far the most active RTS.

Is PVP actually fun / high skill?

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Its also the longest running RTS that still gets (content) updates.
A year ago they started to include coop campaigns and this year dropped an expansion
AoE 3 and IV still do quite well too. A big portion of IV players are probably on Game Pass.
Even AoE 1 is still very popular in Vietnam

AoE PvP is high skill
it isn't fun and it's boring to watch

Because it's really fun, has a great definitive edition and new content/great competitions.

Time tested and proven. Age 3 changed too much and turned AoE 2 fans off. Age 4 is a watered down 2 that looks like shit. Pretty sure T90's wandering warriors cup on facebook fucking gaming brought in more viewers than any of the big aoe4 tournaments.

It is fun to watch if you know what's happening

It's honestly really fun to watch. The comp scene has such variety too in maps and few enough players that you get to recognize playstyle quirks and varieties.

SC2 supposedly has ~50k daily players, which is probably around 30k peaks
AoE2 is the better game though. It's amazing how much variety they can have in maps and match setups without the game turning into a broken mess. SC2 breaks in half if you make a ramp one pixel too wide or too narrow. AoE2 has literal randomly generated maps.

>this it it, we're at the finals of the world championship, the best pla-
I sleep
>this is THE lowest elo game going on right now in the entire world
Pic related

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Does t90 get that many views on FB? I dropped him after he moved.

SC2 is usually completely asymmetrical unlike AoE2 which is obviously going to lead it to biased maps more easily.
Terrans would prefer a narrow entrance while Zerg would be best with a open plain from base to base. You can only balance that by normalizing races (AoE2) or normalizing maps (SC2). Broodwar is somewhere in the middle with looser map restrictions but a stronger defenders advantage regardless of race.

The civs in AoE 2 aren't actually that normalized and there are some matchups or maps that some civs are absolutely trash or great at.
I mean, it's way more normalized than SC2, but there are very meaningful differences and situations where you can strictly say that "X is absolutely fucked in a map like Y".

Black Forest never gets old, prove me wrong

Carried again by my English longbows~

It's the only good game in the Empire series.

I prefer AoE 3

I'll tell you the truth:
it looks beautiful.
It's one of the most gorgeous games ever made.
In screenshots, in motion.
Beauty, beauty, beauty.

It's the perfect blend of turbo autism and casual simcity simulator.
Something like 18k of those 20k players will never touch online but the people that do play do it so religiously that it never feels dead.

AoE2 has gotten more and more asymmetrical over the years. Some civs have diverged so much by now that they play almost as differently in practice as the Starcraft factions.

It's a balanced and deep game. 1v1 is interesting but requires considerable autism. There are also a lot of people playing team games and FFA, which tends to be more casual. I also find it really fun to watch.

Based, low ELO games are far more entertaining to watch if you've been playing a given RTS for a long period, or heck even if you haven't. I've been playing Age of Empires and its progeny since 1997 and man is it fun to watch the shitfest of normal matches. It's fun to play in the autism tiers, but watching normies play is far more kino.

They're funny but also frustrating
matches below 800 elo are almost never about who plays best, but who manages to do the least retarded throws
Hhow many times can you click you entire army at a treb and then watch all your units die before you realize that it isn't going to work?