AOE2 on Xbox (First Impressions + Gameplay) 

I am literally playing it right now. And I'm already enjoying it. It's not going to be on the same level as the PC version. But for a console guy like myself, this is already amazing. I'm definitely going to be playing this so much in the coming weeks. And I may look back at the civ guides on this channel for advice and learning how to play each civ in the game.

If you hold LT and press RS you can leave marks anywhere on the map so when you hold LT and Swipe with RS you will immediately go to the place/s you have marked example I marked my enemies base where my units where fighting then a marked my wood line and I instantly changed view from each

I think some of the inefficiencies in the automated options are probably intentional. If it ran the economy like the extreme AI it would be a huge advantage to new console vs new PC players.

i think devs actually made a great job with this version :)

I’m pumped for all the new players. Hope they enjoy it as much as I do on pc

Watching you play this just makes me appreciate the genius ES put into the first Halo Wars. No villagers to micro manage but you still had build orders whether you wanted to boom or rush or do timing attacks and everything. Research was also smart. Everything was based around the circle menu but it was broken up into 8ths with a recurring theme: Left side units, right side upgrades that correspond to the same unit on the other side. I HIGHLY recommend SotL, now that you played some console RTS with microing villagers, placing buildings, selecting and fighting units, go try the first Halo Wars, since it was built from the ground up with only a controller in mind. Even if just to make a comparison video of what AoE2 on Xbox could adapt or try. (Though I'm sure microsoft has already done that, given a circular menu here as well.)

LB is how you use control groups. If you Hold Y you can change the units (or buildings for villagers) to build with the quick select. You can set waypoints for your camera by pressing RB then moving the cursor along the minimap then pressing R3 (click down on the Right Stick) If there is something you can do on PC, you can do it on console (though it might be more difficult let's be honest) There are 2 different UIs for Controller, Standard and Advanced. I personally prefer Advanced. There is a lot of stuff that is not instructed and it is quite sad for a new player. Then again there is a lot not told for PC players too.

Under interface and down the options you can select if the UI is "Standard" or "Advanced". Advanced UI will allow more control over unit groups and villager automation through a +/- weight system. Though it is still best to have automation off for the first 5 minutes minimum. You'll have likely tweaks settings and check help section; I recommend try turning off reticle snap as example.

Reminds me of Halo Wars, but that game's economy is basically automated; letting you focus on building and army management

IMO that this has gotten so doable on console is commendable. You'll have to learn a bunch of esoteric controller combinations, but... Coming from a PC keyboard, it's just another Tuesday.

The hun no house bonus was so OP for me back in the early days for exactly this reason of having to do less things while I played the Easy AI.

I actually like the bigger HP bars of sheep and vills. Wish there was an option to enable that in DE on PC. There are some things that would be cool anyway. Like the dotted lines towards the waypoints or small age icons in the corner of the buildings to know which age they unlock when they are not unlocked :D

Thanks Spirit we always enjoy your gameplay

I think would be a really good idea to do a whole series to help new players on the Xbox version

honestly, I love the idea of the auto economy. Sure, maybe not for competitive play, but I think it would be a default setting on a lot of community games. It allows lower level players and non competitive players to focus more on the combat that usually happens from late feudal onwards. Also, The lines connecting the unit and their next destination/target is awesome. It makes it so much better to know what your villagers are tasked to do by just clicking them or even hovering over them. I wish these two features were available in the PC version. The second one could be a mod

I use to play this game on pc about 20 yrs ago. Glad it’s back again

1:24 I love being able to see the unique units up close

Been loving this adaptation of the game. Haven't had many issues especially after some changing of the settings a bit. Great video! Hope everyone also has fun and good luck out there!

“I’m not gonna lie, this is a lot harder than it looks.” Proceeds to get housed. Looks some things still carry over from the PC version and that getting housed will still be an issue 😂😂 Thanks for the video!

There are control groups, you need to activate "advanced interface" in order to enable it. You can also select units by type.

In advanced UI you could fine tune automated villagers distribution by percentage.

Overall, they're doing well so far with this. As long as they'll do more patches and improvements so to lessen initial problems and increase content, it'll become a far cry from StarCraft 64 and Battlezone '98: The Rise of the Black Dogs.

The video we’ve all been waiting for

Thanks for the video - you’re definitely approaching from going PC to console, there will be a lot who can now experience the game for the first time.

I like the idea of the contextual menu for building structures. Maybe it could work for the traditional KB+Mouse controls as an accessibility option, perhaps as some kind of "hold right mouse button to open" feature. Auto-economy could also be implemented, but only for non-ranked matches, as it can be game derailing.

This helped me a lot dude thx‼️

You need an online subscription to play online on Xbox Live that's why it prompted you to buy gamepass which contains an Xbox live gold subscription

This is an impressive port of the game. I like all these QoL and shortcuts that the devs added to make all the commands and controls simple to do on a controller. But it looks like it still has room to improve.

This takes me back, my first experience of Age of Empires 2 was on PS2

This was a good effort. Maybe a good next thing for the Xbox version would be to customize the AI to each person preferences.

Some of your UI difficulties can be solved with the advanced controller scheme. You can select units to add to a quick select menu, so you can control individual units more effectively. You can also manually select the auto economy, you don't have to use the presets.

How about a video about how different the two most different civilizations are from each other? In other RTS the playable races are very different while in the AOE they only change some units and graphics between each civ, so it would be interesting to see to what extent we can observe that in AOE.

Since I don’t have a pc anymore I brought this straight away, it makes me feel like a kid again when I had the conquerors expansion, aside from map/scenario editor the other thing I want back is the skeletons from dead units for the immersion 😂😂 but great video as always Spirit!

This reminds me when I used to play Starcraft 64 even I had it also on the PC, but I loved the split screen to play with my friends.

Need to go into the advanced interface and you can adjust your economy to a finer point. Instead of the default setting they have. You can change it through the game to which resource you are needing.

Amazing stuff 😀

I actually played Age of Kings back in the day in the PS2 port version released by Konami, so this new iteration for modern consoles brought back many memories for me!

Try using the automated “advanced” controls. You can, for example have 2 or 10 at wood or on food. I prefer the advance mode in the options menu for eco.

18:41 On console you require Xbox Live Gold (which is a separate subscription, or included as part of Game Pass Ultimate) to play online multiplayer.

I think this is the best adaptation of an RTS game to a console that I've ever seen.

I think it would be pretty cool if you could have pre-builds for your auto villager placements. Before the game starts you can select a order up to the first 20 villagers on what to go on

To make groups you have to go to the options and turn the interface to advanced. Then select the group of units you want, hold left bumper and assign it to a shortcut

(As a Casual, not multiplayer type player)This is hands-down the best port I have ever played in my life. The amount of thought and attention to detail that went into this for Console players, I've never seen anything like it before. I am absolutely loving it so far!

Will you be checking what the mouse and keyboard compatibility is like? I'd really like to buy a mouse and keyboard for my Xbox

After my third ranked game dropped might as well watch spirit

An important thing to note about the automated villager priority is that the villagers will not build the gather points for you, so the reason why none of them were gathering stone is probably because the AI did not deem any mining camps to be close enough to any stone.

The UI looks super shiny. I'd actually like for them to take some of those elements back to the PC.

Nice video man, am wondering if it’s possible to use these controls on Steam

17:08 "Yeah, I'm not gonna lie this is a lot harder than just regular playing" ... *housed sound*.... "Oh and I'm housed..." -Spirit of the Law 2023

Go to Interface in Options and enable Advanced Interface. It's a different control scheme that let's you make control groups with LB and also fine-tune your automated economy (Instead of "Basic/Food/Balanced/etc.)

You can select specific military unit types by holding LT+d pad. And you can change in the configurations if you want to hold of just press to select units in your screen or globally, it's pretty flexible. The only thing I really didn't like is that I don't think you can see units damage bonuses in the game, at least I couldn't find it. I think they did a great job with the controls, even without auto economy the game feels very playable, It's probably gonna take some practice to get good, granted, I'm bad even on m/kb. Can't wait to see how AoEIV is gonna turn out.

I hope they'll make this (or something like it) available on the Steam Deck.

the auto eco thing, its not a overly OP in dark age, but I can see it beeing pretty dam op in castle age onwards. Not having to pay atention to eco is huge, and at that time u kinda want an evenish split anyway

I just started getting into this game after I learned it was coming to Xbox. I’ve always been interested in playing it but I was primarily a console player so I never got around to getting my chance to try it out. Super glad the developers decided to bring it to Xbox and hopefully more PC games decide to do the same. Still learning basic strategies and the benefits of each empire, but so far it’s extremely fun and just as good as I thought it was going to be. Funny thing is that while I was playing it my dad of 54 years walked by and stopped and was like “hey I remember playing that game on the PC so long ago” 😂. I have no clue how, when, or why he was playing the game when he doesn’t even play video games but I thought it was kind of funny.

To look at the military units use the left Dpad. A lot easier to keep track of them

It looks like you might be able to change the percentages of villages to resources with the right stick?

I'm very curious to see, and I think it'll be a fun challenge, what is the highest elo a console controller only player can achieve.

I appreciate how it placed perfect farms

Looks great! i hope xbox fellas have a lot of fun and can find the youtube resources we usually use to improve at the game, go easy on them in ffas and diplos!

If you hold LT you can quick select all cavalry, ranged, melee or siege by using the d-pad

oh my god this IS AMAZING

I've been looking forward for this to come to xbox

This is just a guess, but I noticed that eco pie chart at the top with the RS button prompt, so maybe you can adjust your eco balance there.

Tbh, wouldn't mind this version coming to PC for when you wanna relax on the couch.

Do you think there will be any chance of setting HEALTH BARS LESS THICK, because right now for me its impossible to see the units with those heath bars. Greetings.

Finally, a game we can get behind. I genuinely enjoy the consol, would like DLCs or update to mod the negatives

Loving the xbox version, feels a more casual experience and it’s great to get the nostalgia trip from years gone by! A things which bug me though: 1. Market garrisoning doesn’t exist for some reason? 2. The absence of a halo wars style ‘zoom explore’ button, a bit of a pain sticking to one scan speed all the time. 3. The auto economy is a bit off early game, easier to micromanage early game and switch to auto to quickly build farms and keep villages busy when the battling starts. Guess that’s the point of it? 4. As previously playing on PC, missing the score board is a pain! Always good to see how you’re doing compared to your team/enemies during the game. Overall though, can’t get enough of it. Even though I would avoid playing a PC player at all costs 😂

This plays amazingly well I was shocked at how good the controls work

auto deidling villagers is really op though. Even 1400-1500 elo players end up having a lot of idle villagers in mid feudal age, so even if these villagers are not going to the best resource they could, they are still not idle, wich is huge

HI, you probably konw that but you can be more granular with the AI if you activate the advanced controllers. You can even adjust the percentages of workers

It has full mouse and keyboard support :) Will be playing it today

Actually there is a manual mode for the automated resources gathering, or you can define the %.. the only bad thing is when then migrate from wood to farm, if you dont have enough wood ir will result in idle time for some villagers that will move and try to build farms… but in general they did a rly good job, its playable in a mid competitive level

I believe that groupings of troops is in tutorial. Flirkir. I forgot the name of campaign. But its in the beginning section

As someone who plays exclusively deathmatch, do you think this might make that game mode more popular on console since managing eco is not the main focus of deathmatch early on and console player prefer games that don’t last as long per match?

It would be nice if the ui was smart enough that when you select for instance a forager, it makes creating a mill the first option in the build menu. Or if it was a lumberjack same idea

One way to improve the economy priority wheel would be to let you adjust the split between food/wood/gold/stone. Let's say you select the 75/25 food/wood split as you did in the beginning but then had a button which allowed you to tune the values. You could then make it a 100/0 split to get 6 villagers on food and afterwards bump up the number of woodcutters. The tuned wheel should probably not overwrite the existing presets but either be it's own "custom" preset or have a reset button to always give the player an "undo" button in the form of a decent, although not perfect, preset. There's probably as many ways to implement this as there are game designers but I would probably make it so that you can quickly select the resource you want to increase/decrease in priority with the d-pad and then press up/down to adjust the value. I believe increasing or decreasing the amount of villagers you have on one resource should affect all other resources proportionally so that if you for example have only a couple villagers on gold, increasing the amount of wood you want won't instantly kill your gold production but will instead make more woodcutters from villagers on other resources that have more people on them.

I just got back to AOE games but how do u make it so it shows the score in the boytom right corner since I can't find it

What about the mouse and keyboard option? did you try that? Is it the same experience as PC?

I'm curious, are the economy automation options available for PC keyboard and mouse players?

I appreciated their efforts for continually diving into AOE2 , and I enjoyed the menu, the icons, the UI parts. But have to say AOE2 is a too complicated game which may requires so much efforts of instant move and micros, which cant be done with XBOX controller. Even on pc with keyboard and mouse, its a difficult game. Cant think out any way to sovle the micro part problem.

You need to activate the advanced interface to get access to control groups

How do you get your scout to explore different points on the map at a time?

Which pair of buttons did you have to hit for deleting? This seems decent for a more casual experience. Not bad, but I wouldn't really want this if I'm playing seriously with my friends.

Looks interesting. I won't play like this (I don't even have an Xbox), but very interesting to see. Thnx! :)

I remember when AoE was released on PS2 in about 2002…

More videos of age on console please!

great video! And, not to throw shade to AOE4, But the UI design in this version I think it's everything the devs should have done in AOE4 if They wanted a "modern" look.

You know, having ability to automate villagers would be great to port over to PC as well, especially if they allow really granular fine tuned automation with percentages to be assigned and minimas and maximums on tasks so you can set it perfectly for your tactic

is there a step by step replayable tutorial to learn the button controls and with voiced instructions?

This is nostalgia for me I swear

Great port.. even an amazing port! I’ve been playing a few skirmish and micro-manage everything, I’ve not figured out auto-economy or whatever but as an old ass that has been playing on and off on PC since ‘99 this is great, casual AoE2

This is kind of funny to watch a more casual and unstructured Spirit of the Law.

The reason it wasn’t sending your bills to stone was because their wasn’t a drop off point mining camp or tc close enough to the stone, if you build a mine camp near the stone they will send villa over for some reason

Can you actually plug a Keyboard and Mouse into the Xbox' USB Port and Play with the PC Interface?

Great game just downloaded yesterday

It bugs me so much that when you activate the villager automation they all run off to new jobs and don't drop off the resource they have before starting their next job. I want to use the feature once I hit castle age.. but I lose a lot of resources when I first hit the button

I’ve already hooked up a keyboard and mouse to my Xbox lol. Also control groups with a controller are LB then a direction + X

Spirit of the law you should make a video where you make a fast win gameplay!

If don’t like the auto economy thing switch to the advanced Interface you can make you own percentages instead of selecting preset ones.

Yo how do you get the score in the bottom on Xbox? Can’t find the setting can’t find a button lollll