World’s Edge and Xbox Game Studios have announced a new massive patch for Age of Empires: Definitive Edition! The upcoming patch brings a variety of goodies, as well as hopefully helping to bust a few more cheaters than usual.
If you keep up with Age of Empires, you’re likely aware of the rampant cheating that plagues the online play of multiple titles. Exploiters use these tactics to research upgrades before mathematically possible, as well as a variety of other unfair edges.
The developers didn’t give specifics on what exactly was being implemented, likely to not give away exactly what new features cheaters should attempt to avoid. The only description given was the following remark:
“Implemented several new anti-cheat measures to keep things honest and fair!”
Beating cheaters is far from the only thing the developers are adding with this new patch, though! Some quality-of-live additions are coming with new hotkeys, a new legacy setting, and a new way to pick your civilization.
The first of these changes is the Solid Farms setting, an option to make farms behave as they did in the original Age of Empires. With the Solid Farms setting, farms will act as solid buildings that block movement until destroyed rather than being traversable terrain as they currently are.
Next, the following hotkeys have been added to help make things a bit easier to handle:
- Ctrl+Shift+key: Select all buildings of the same type
- Ctrl+Shift+.: Select all idle villagers
- Ctrl+Shift+,: Select all military units
- Shift+Delete: Delete all selected units (Careful!)
- Ctrl+Alt+0: Reset zoom to default
A new mirror civilization option has now been added in multiplayer lobbies as well. This option allows you to match the civilization of your opponent to create a mirror-match. This likely becomes a bit more complicated outside of a 1v1 situation, so it’s unclear how it behaves in a match with more players.
New unit stances have also been added! These stances make the title a bit more similar to Age of Empires 2: Definitive Edition, as well as adding a good bit of variety.
The stances are each rather self-explanatory. Aggressive will be the default, which causes units to chase enemies as long as they’re within the appropriate range. Defensive will cause units to chase opponents a short distance before returning, while stand ground will cause a unit to remain immobile no matter who comes by. Stand Ground is significantly more useful for ranged units.
With all these changes, Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is getting a bit more user friendly with so many fantastic quality-of-life additions! It likely won’t be much longer before the developers return with a few more improvements.