In the final five to ten minutes, it’s often clear who’s going to win a match, but perhaps we could do better than this as well?Īnd so, an idea for a fun weekend data science project was born. Although the community (and pro-players especially) are very good at “feeling” whether they have the upper hand, I wanted to see if this could be quantified a bit more in terms of a predictive model, as well as figuring out how long an average game needs to run before such model would be sure about the outcome. Hence the reason why broadcasters prefer to overlay the screen with additional statistics as provided by Voobly plugins, as the screenshot above shows. During matches, viewers will happily chat away about who they think is winning incorporating things such as number of units, resources available, who advances through research and ages quicker, map control, kill/death ratio, civilizations chosen by the players, the players respective ranking and history, and the score per player the game provides (which is calculated based on various inputs and generally goes up for both as the game progresses): With this background knowledge in mind, and after having spend various Saturday evenings watching tournaments live, I was wondering whether it would be feasible to set up a predictive model that would be able to predict who’d win a match up. Together with WololoKingdoms, another community project, one can even bring in the AOE2 HD expansion packs (if you own them, of course) to Voobly.
Age of empires ii hd edition validating install#
The additional benefits the platform offers go quite far, including proper ELO rankings for players, support to install additional mods and patches for the game, including the incredible community built UserPatch, which extends the game with lots of balancing fixes, bug fixes, and additional features. Instead, serious players will opt to utilize Voobly, a multiplayer platform and social network which supports a bunch of older games, though AOEII is by far the most popular one, even to a degree that it’s the main focus game for Voobly today. It is important to note, however, that most of this newfound attention does not take place on the Steam version of the game, which is solid enough but is widely regarded as not being the most optimal way to play the game competitively online, with the version being relatively prone to lag, desyncs, and without solid spectator plugins that would allow streamers to display statistics and overlays whilst watching games.
Dota or League of Legends, it’s by far one of the most enjoyable traditional RTS’ games to watch these days, with big tournaments appearing every so often between high-ranking players, with Battle of Africa being one of the more recent ones.
As such, the AOE2 e-sports scene is relatively healthy today, and whereas the game is by no means as popular as e.g. I have fond childhood memories of the game, and although I don’t commonly find the time or focus anymore to play it myself, it’s fun to see how the game has found a new community and attention anno 2018, driven by streamers on Twitch such as Nili, T90Official, and MembTv, as well as YouTube personalities such as Spirit of the Law and ZeroEmpires, driving new players to the game. In fact, it is this game which pushed me to write a custom tool to prevent DirectDraw palette issues more than eight years ago, before custom community patches (and the “ HD version” of the game was available).
I think that Age of Empires II is probably the game I’ve been playing on or off for the longest amount of time.
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