I downloaded: huge trees, extra plants and stumps, hidden fish, smaller less eye catching relics, snow Arabia, 10x embers; and turned off the grid. Looking forward to my first ranked experience.
This is the content I live for. One time I analyzed replay videos from you and TheViper to min/max my zoom settings. I had to pause your replay videos and count the number of tiles available on the screen and figure out your desktop resolution.
1.5k elo here, not exactly the target audience but I thought, "It can't hurt to brush up." I ended up learning like 3 things in this video. Worth it, thanks Hera!
I must make a comment here. Man Hera, thank sou so much for all the great content here and also the sharp play in recent tournaments! I really like your positive energy for the community and the game. Keep rollin'! Greetings from Germany
The visual animator who designed alle types of trees, realistic terrain and mystic animations is gonna hate you 11 From a eSports perspective absolutely true and good video! Only learned those tricks over time, so this really helps new players to stay focused. however some cosmetics i still left enabled.
I also think we have a different idea of a "great experience" lol. I like pretty graphics. I'm willing to sacrifice 100 elo to have my animated fog and plants and treestumps. If all you want to do is win may as well just play with cube mod. I want to feel like I'm immersed in a medieval battle. (to some extent. Obviously xbows splitting out the way of mangonel shots kinda breaks that immersion a little bit lol)
I must be the only person who loves big trees. I get it they are bad for ranked, but big trees make the game feel more alive and immersive. I wish there was a better way to control trees and buildings around it.
Bro you aren’t alone out there. I also like the big trees and unnecessary plants everywhere 😅 what’s the point playing a version of AOE which don’t even look like the first age in the 90s?
Hera you don't use selection modifier hotkeys? When drag box selecting, ALT will only select villagers, CTRL for only military which is really helpful on maps like on Ring of Reeds with heavy early villager and army fights (congrats on winning Grand Melee, insane micro on that map!)
Hi, super helpful stuff; it's pretty hard to start the game so this really helps a lot! ( I grew up playing aoe 3, and just found out about how different it is from the rest of the series so i'm still adapting )
but at the same time he uses ''green arabia map'' mod which clearly gives him some kind of ''unfair'' advantage since it's literally a different representation of the the actual map he is playing. Where the logic in this?
I would love if you did a video on how to set and use control groups properly. For example, when to have buildings vs military. And what military do you assign. Do you end up using all the control groups? Etc
I used "Select all Barracks/..." in the past, but in team games your battlefield and production location changes so often that control groups are more versatile and better, even if it is more complex. Nothing worse than queuing rams on the other side of the map from your defensive siege workshop.
Thank you Hera for your contribution to the community. Is there an opportunity to make a video about openings? If u scout that the opponent is going for scouts or M@A for example. What u most likely have to do. I know it depends most of the time but this is the thing i feel i make wrong decisions.
I feel like this might actually put some people off. If you now think that in order to play in ranked you need to do all these things and learn your hotkeys. The most important thing is to just start. Play the game. 95% of people don't have all these things. And for a completely new player, being able to find a hole in the wall is just not that important. As a 1400 though I did find these useful to know about.
I’ve just hit a hotstreak on ranked… (console) 7 wins in a row, up to 1000 Elo now. I’m excited to see to figure out which of these mods are available on console so I can quit getting such a lag!
Any tips for someone with an ultra wide monitor? Should I try and find a 1080p or can I still play with the bigger screen (3440xx1440) and still be okay?
Typically you want to play on your monitor's native resolution, but experimentation with different can be worth it. Play a few games against AI or do the campaign. Change your resolution and try again. Good Luck!
As someone with a 5120x1440 49 inch monitor, I've never had any issues. If anything it can give you an awesome overview of the battlefield when zoomed out for example
right of the bat, since i never mod my games. i did not look up anything but man small tree mod might help me not die of a heart attack. especially when your villager randomly starts chopping a tree as it is hard to click behind it.
Hi Hera thanks for the video, really helpfull. I would like to ask you (and other players) about the scroll speed of the mouse, I can´t find the perfect spot for me and don´t know what is important to have in mind. I see you have yours at 38%, do you mind say why is that number for you? thanks a lot
Also very important to go into Windows settings, go to Mouse settings, then turn off Enhance Pointer Precision (untick the box). Also known as Mouse Acceleration, this setting will change mouse DPI if you don't turn it off, so you're micro will suffer a lot if you leave it on the default setting.
How do u guys switch screens in the minimap ( as in moving from one place to another) without using your mouse? Which hotkey? It takes me a lot of time to move around with my mouse but I can't figure out how to switch screens with my hotkeys properly?
I don't understand what the issue is with range indicators. They give crucial info in order to give the player the means to optimize their decision making. Why should accurately guessing the range of structures be a skill that you should be good at in a game about strategy and decision making?
How you use sapce to go to the selected control group? mine dont work, i have to hit the number twice, for example 1+1, not 1+ space, i want like yours, help!
First of all,congratulations on Argentinian winning the World Cup🥳 I really enjoy your ultimate guide series👍🏻 I would love to see what you would recommend for the Bengali, since it’s so awkward to play😅
@@naveendennis Actually Jorge “Hera” Alvarez is a professional Aoe2 player from Cordoba, Argentina who plays for the South American team Angels of Medellin (AM). Many mistake him as Canadian due to his non-controversial personality and excessive politeness. He credits his mods aoebae94 and ProjectFlanders for making sure he never gets involved in any drama.
hey Hera, what u do to get such small life bars for your units in game? is it because u have a 1920 x 1080 resolution? I play in a small resolution (about 1378) and the life bars are bigger and make it a little more difficult to see when I have a bunch of military units selected. I would like to have smaller health bars.
HERA HELP!!! What key do i press to turn off team colours?! I accidently made every opposition team red. Also turned off health bars for boars and enemies. Help! Lol
The zoom! I played again after long time and felt like the TC fills all my screen. I wondered if it's the resolution, Laptop-Screensize or whatever and finally accepted my fate. I totally overlooked the Zoom-Settings!
Hi Hera, I have a few mods installed already, thanks for the tips for other ones. But each time I start up the game and jump into a ranked game... not all the mods are active (like small tree), any idea why this is happening?
Not completely sure, but probably this is your case: after some patches (game update) are applied the mods got disabled you've got to go to Installed Mod and enable back.
when you select a unit (or a group of units), you can press Ctrl+(any number) and then, if you press just that number, you will select that group of units. it's useful if you have, for example, archers and melee units. i usually put archers in 3 and melee in 2. you can also put buildings in a control group.
What Bunga said, and if you double tap the control group number (once you have it setup) it will jump to the screen where the group is located. So in early game I set my scout to Ctrl+1 and my GoToTC hotkey is H, so I can double tap 1 to jump to where my scout is on the map and move them around, before jumping back to my TC to make vills. You'll also find that some hot keys "jump" you to the screen where they're located, these ones are "GoTo" vs "Select All TC" which selects all the building without moving your screen. "Select all TC" is good to queue up vills in all your TCs while doing other things.
HOTKEYS: I would definetely use the default q-w-e a-s-d z-x-c Setup, which assures that your hotkeys are always close at hand and translates easily from selecting it randomly to knowing it is a couple keys in. I changed to this, when I started playing the DE version since I wasn't using too many hotkeys back then anyway. This is a great transition from not using them too much to knowing exactly what hotkeys does what and slowly getting into the habit of using them.
Menu Narration was on by default when I installed the game and I thought it was a windows setting I needed to turn off, took me a while to find it while I had to hear it say every word my curser landed on 😂
Wait- how do you have a principle that says the building range is not good for the game- but perfectly okay with Small Trees when the devs didn’t design the trees that way? Anyone not using small trees is also, apparently, at a disadvantage, no?
The correct DPI software setting depends largely on your screen resolution, and also on your mouse's hardware DPI capability, the size of your mousepad, your desk setup and the range of motion it permits, and on you and your fine motor skills. For FPS games the general advice is to set it so that moving your mouse cursor from the far left of your screen to the far right of your screen requires you to move your mouse over ~80% of your mousepad. This lets you be more accurate while still having a little bit of wiggle room. For RTS there is no general advice and the differences between pro players are large. However, in general, accuracy and precision are marginally less important that speed. Because you aren't trying to headshot someone you're just trying to select a vil. And, furthermore, in most FPS games you get your kills by pre-aiming, so the cursor doesn't really need to move much most of the time, while in RTS you might hop between the far left and right of the screen quite often. So you might aim for ~60% instead. The way that I get my mouse set up on a new system is this: (1) go to mouseaccuracy website (just google it), and set the difficulty so that you have about 80% accuracy. Then move the sensitivity up and down and see whether you can get your accuracy any higher by doing so. Always play at least 2 rounds on each sensitivity so that you can get used to it a bit. Once you've found the setting that gives you the best accuracy, add a bit to that, somewhere between 50 and 200 more dpi. Then go play the game. If you notice you're misclicking a lot, decrease the dpi. If you notice you're struggling to keep up, or if you just notice that you aren't misclicking and want to see if you can increase your apm, then try put it a bit higher. Keep messing around until you're happy.
I downloaded: huge trees, extra plants and stumps, hidden fish, smaller less eye catching relics, snow Arabia, 10x embers; and turned off the grid. Looking forward to my first ranked experience.
Fr
😅😂😂😂😂
reddit gold
Huge trees 💀
really? snow arabia! @@G33KST4R
This is the content I live for. One time I analyzed replay videos from you and TheViper to min/max my zoom settings. I had to pause your replay videos and count the number of tiles available on the screen and figure out your desktop resolution.
yo Guanfranco, your content was OP & i look forward with hope to a day a new video/interview comes out.
Always set a main menu mod so if the standard menu shows up you know mods are reset and you don't queue up into huge trees
I use a "no intro" mod or something like that
this 100%
Wait really?
I haven't seen this issue happen lately. is it fixed?
Luckily, they've FINALLY addressed that lol and it doesn't happen anymore
1.5k elo here, not exactly the target audience but I thought, "It can't hurt to brush up."
I ended up learning like 3 things in this video. Worth it, thanks Hera!
Congratulations on your win and thanks for all the informative helpful videos for the community!
"...if you want some blood on the field if you are a lil crazy like that..." cracked me up
Lol during the sound voices part all I heard was a Celtic woad going “Ho goooo ho goooo!!!!”
I must make a comment here.
Man Hera, thank sou so much for all the great content here and also the sharp play in recent tournaments! I really like your positive energy for the community and the game. Keep rollin'!
Greetings from Germany
The visual animator who designed alle types of trees, realistic terrain and mystic animations is gonna hate you 11
From a eSports perspective absolutely true and good video! Only learned those tricks over time, so this really helps new players to stay focused. however some cosmetics i still left enabled.
Congrats on the win in Hanover! Thanks for posting this!
I just realised I can change double click behaviour for villagers.... Watershed moment in my online experience... 🤘❤🤘❤🤘❤.... Thanks Hera... 👍👍❤❤
The absolute content im looking for to see.. great Hera!... success!
I also think we have a different idea of a "great experience" lol. I like pretty graphics. I'm willing to sacrifice 100 elo to have my animated fog and plants and treestumps. If all you want to do is win may as well just play with cube mod. I want to feel like I'm immersed in a medieval battle. (to some extent. Obviously xbows splitting out the way of mangonel shots kinda breaks that immersion a little bit lol)
Ditto
Nr. 1 Fav Aoe youtuber
I must be the only person who loves big trees. I get it they are bad for ranked, but big trees make the game feel more alive and immersive. I wish there was a better way to control trees and buildings around it.
Bro you aren’t alone out there. I also like the big trees and unnecessary plants everywhere 😅 what’s the point playing a version of AOE which don’t even look like the first age in the 90s?
Perfect timing, is just was thinking about change some settings, thanks for the video !
U got it bro
Hera you don't use selection modifier hotkeys? When drag box selecting, ALT will only select villagers, CTRL for only military which is really helpful on maps like on Ring of Reeds with heavy early villager and army fights (congrats on winning Grand Melee, insane micro on that map!)
Hi, super helpful stuff; it's pretty hard to start the game so this really helps a lot!
( I grew up playing aoe 3, and just found out about how different it is from the rest of the series so i'm still adapting )
mad respect for not using range indicators.
Same here, I believe even the pros used that.
but at the same time he uses ''green arabia map'' mod which clearly gives him some kind of ''unfair'' advantage since it's literally a different representation of the the actual map he is playing. Where the logic in this?
I would love if you did a video on how to set and use control groups properly. For example, when to have buildings vs military. And what military do you assign. Do you end up using all the control groups? Etc
U have 20 control groups
@@yasuo2g775 I have 20 control groups, you have 19
@@Calihan 19 control groups and 1 placebo group
Hey dude, congratulations on that finals win. Happy holidays cheers! Thinkin about giving aoe2 a chance again
Very useful video hera! Thank you
was about to go into a ranked game, good thing this was posted 5min ago
love u hera, no suprise your hard work pays off. Stay blessed
Hera, because of all these helping videos for free, you deserve success and a prosperous life.
Can someone please tell me the name of the mod where converting monks show the opponent with a line?
I used "Select all Barracks/..." in the past, but in team games your battlefield and production location changes so often that control groups are more versatile and better, even if it is more complex. Nothing worse than queuing rams on the other side of the map from your defensive siege workshop.
Congrats on your TGM 1st place trophy!
perfection thank you!
super helpful and fast video, thank you
Thank you Hera for your contribution to the community. Is there an opportunity to make a video about openings? If u scout that the opponent is going for scouts or M@A for example. What u most likely have to do. I know it depends most of the time but this is the thing i feel i make wrong decisions.
I feel like this might actually put some people off. If you now think that in order to play in ranked you need to do all these things and learn your hotkeys. The most important thing is to just start. Play the game. 95% of people don't have all these things. And for a completely new player, being able to find a hole in the wall is just not that important. As a 1400 though I did find these useful to know about.
Starting to play the game and starting to play ranked are 2 different things in my mind, u feel me?
I’ve just hit a hotstreak on ranked… (console) 7 wins in a row, up to 1000 Elo now. I’m excited to see to figure out which of these mods are available on console so I can quit getting such a lag!
@@HeraAgeofEmpires2absolutely agree with you Hera!!! This was a super helpful video for those wanting to start playing ranked. Thank you!!!!!
How can you not want to hear the Celtic "WOO WOO" at full volume when you are crushing your enemy?
Any tips for someone with an ultra wide monitor? Should I try and find a 1080p or can I still play with the bigger screen (3440xx1440) and still be okay?
Typically you want to play on your monitor's native resolution, but experimentation with different can be worth it. Play a few games against AI or do the campaign. Change your resolution and try again. Good Luck!
As someone with a 5120x1440 49 inch monitor, I've never had any issues. If anything it can give you an awesome overview of the battlefield when zoomed out for example
3:08 Nice subtle flex 😉
900 ELO here - absolutely target group 😀. 100% useful content 👌- settings up those same things right now. Thank you Hamza!!!
I love the enhanced resources panel.
Is there a mod for the diplo panel (top right)? The icons are really hard to see and make no sense imo
right of the bat, since i never mod my games. i did not look up anything but man small tree mod might help me not die of a heart attack. especially when your villager randomly starts chopping a tree as it is hard to click behind it.
Hi Hera thanks for the video, really helpfull. I would like to ask you (and other players) about the scroll speed of the mouse, I can´t find the perfect spot for me and don´t know what is important to have in mind. I see you have yours at 38%, do you mind say why is that number for you? thanks a lot
shout out to our saviour, Anne HK
Is that moder a girl?
What mod do you use to make palisades at 5% built look like they're at 90% built?
Thank god this video exists!!!
Sorry Hera, I only trust players that have accomplished training 40 wheeled units
Also very important to go into Windows settings, go to Mouse settings, then turn off Enhance Pointer Precision (untick the box). Also known as Mouse Acceleration, this setting will change mouse DPI if you don't turn it off, so you're micro will suffer a lot if you leave it on the default setting.
Genius! Big views incoming
big video man, i see you in finals some day
How do u guys switch screens in the minimap ( as in moving from one place to another) without using your mouse? Which hotkey? It takes me a lot of time to move around with my mouse but I can't figure out how to switch screens with my hotkeys properly?
I don't understand what the issue is with range indicators. They give crucial info in order to give the player the means to optimize their decision making. Why should accurately guessing the range of structures be a skill that you should be good at in a game about strategy and decision making?
This is so useful!
What size monitor do you use?
24inch
How you use sapce to go to the selected control group? mine dont work, i have to hit the number twice, for example 1+1, not 1+ space, i want like yours, help!
Hera, what is reason not to play with bigger screen? Are you more sharp with micro, because of smaller screen dimensions?
Interesting question. Maybe hera do zoom out on imperial??
First of all,congratulations on Argentinian winning the World Cup🥳 I really enjoy your ultimate guide series👍🏻 I would love to see what you would recommend for the Bengali, since it’s so awkward to play😅
Hera is Canadian 😅
@@naveendennis I know bro 😁but he supports Argentinian
@@naveendennis Actually Jorge “Hera” Alvarez is a professional Aoe2 player from Cordoba, Argentina who plays for the South American team Angels of Medellin (AM). Many mistake him as Canadian due to his non-controversial personality and excessive politeness. He credits his mods aoebae94 and ProjectFlanders for making sure he never gets involved in any drama.
4:04 No Embers mod is super important for people that struggle with crashes during loading screens!
Anyone know where I can find the Jedi Knight mod, that lets your Swordsmen have lightsabers?
in the middle of the bar we can see hera has this timer ,normal(standard) how can i activete that in settings i dont have it
Thanks so much these are so helpful I'm surprised you don't have no flying animals
i have turned on the always show range indicator, but with the rest of your settings, it seems not to work. Any tips?
hey Hera, what u do to get such small life bars for your units in game? is it because u have a 1920 x 1080 resolution?
I play in a small resolution (about 1378) and the life bars are bigger and make it a little more difficult to see when I have a bunch of military units selected. I would like to have smaller health bars.
thanks for the tips hera
What the name of the mod where show you in the minimap where night be the enemy town center
Is there a way to disable the intro screens when you start the game?
Why in the control section you have shift group appending and selection modifier hotkeys disabled? They are super useful
I know the small trees mod is available on console, but are the other mods as well?
Grand Melee Map Pack mod if you are someone who wants to win a 100k LAN event.
How do you get the lines on how far your towers and Tc reach?
Muchas gracias Hera!!
I can't even see any of these mods on xbox 😫
How does the mods work just subscribe and then they apply to your next game ?
Why do you need to remove plants if you have identical pine trees?
HERA HELP!!! What key do i press to turn off team colours?! I accidently made every opposition team red. Also turned off health bars for boars and enemies. Help! Lol
The zoom! I played again after long time and felt like the TC fills all my screen. I wondered if it's the resolution, Laptop-Screensize or whatever and finally accepted my fate. I totally overlooked the Zoom-Settings!
Buen vídeo, Hera! How many DPI you use?
Hi Hera, I have a few mods installed already, thanks for the tips for other ones. But each time I start up the game and jump into a ranked game... not all the mods are active (like small tree), any idea why this is happening?
Not completely sure, but probably this is your case: after some patches (game update) are applied the mods got disabled you've got to go to Installed Mod and enable back.
Will this mode work in single story campaign?
I’m new to the game what are the control groups?
when you select a unit (or a group of units), you can press Ctrl+(any number) and then, if you press just that number, you will select that group of units. it's useful if you have, for example, archers and melee units. i usually put archers in 3 and melee in 2. you can also put buildings in a control group.
What Bunga said, and if you double tap the control group number (once you have it setup) it will jump to the screen where the group is located.
So in early game I set my scout to Ctrl+1 and my GoToTC hotkey is H, so I can double tap 1 to jump to where my scout is on the map and move them around, before jumping back to my TC to make vills.
You'll also find that some hot keys "jump" you to the screen where they're located, these ones are "GoTo" vs "Select All TC" which selects all the building without moving your screen. "Select all TC" is good to queue up vills in all your TCs while doing other things.
Thanks both of you! Helps a lot
Glad to see new players have been approaching.
Hera you the man!
What's the reason you don't auto rebuild farms?
How come you didn"t mention the Mbl VULULU mod ? IMO, it's an absolutly mandatory one to perform at high level.
I play same resolution with 100 zoom out. But i can’t micro or quick wall properly a lot of mis click
HOTKEYS:
I would definetely use the default
q-w-e
a-s-d
z-x-c
Setup, which assures that your hotkeys are always close at hand and translates easily from selecting it randomly to knowing it is a couple keys in. I changed to this, when I started playing the DE version since I wasn't using too many hotkeys back then anyway. This is a great transition from not using them too much to knowing exactly what hotkeys does what and slowly getting into the habit of using them.
thank you very much for this video Hera, how is your spanish doing? cheers from Chile
Very handy for a new player, tyty.
Please guide how to play with online players, my multiplayer option not working
Would you preffer a 4k screen vs 2k or a normal 1920x1060 ?
yes
Very helpful!
Great video, thank you
Menu Narration was on by default when I installed the game and I thought it was a windows setting I needed to turn off, took me a while to find it while I had to hear it say every word my curser landed on 😂
I have a serious problem with hotkeys, i need someone tell me the most basic hotkeys
I downloaded the extra blood mod, keeps dead bodies and broken down siege around longer too.
Wait- how do you have a principle that says the building range is not good for the game- but perfectly okay with Small Trees when the devs didn’t design the trees that way? Anyone not using small trees is also, apparently, at a disadvantage, no?
hera love from pakistan.😍🥰
I was wondering why I never got a green Arabia. I tried like 20 different ai games and was like damn… I should go play the lottery
ANYTIME I PLAY RANKED I GET FUCKED UP.... SHITS ANNOYING LOL
So cool! Also what's your mouse dpi setting and how much do you think it factors?
The correct DPI software setting depends largely on your screen resolution, and also on your mouse's hardware DPI capability, the size of your mousepad, your desk setup and the range of motion it permits, and on you and your fine motor skills. For FPS games the general advice is to set it so that moving your mouse cursor from the far left of your screen to the far right of your screen requires you to move your mouse over ~80% of your mousepad. This lets you be more accurate while still having a little bit of wiggle room. For RTS there is no general advice and the differences between pro players are large. However, in general, accuracy and precision are marginally less important that speed. Because you aren't trying to headshot someone you're just trying to select a vil. And, furthermore, in most FPS games you get your kills by pre-aiming, so the cursor doesn't really need to move much most of the time, while in RTS you might hop between the far left and right of the screen quite often. So you might aim for ~60% instead. The way that I get my mouse set up on a new system is this: (1) go to mouseaccuracy website (just google it), and set the difficulty so that you have about 80% accuracy. Then move the sensitivity up and down and see whether you can get your accuracy any higher by doing so. Always play at least 2 rounds on each sensitivity so that you can get used to it a bit. Once you've found the setting that gives you the best accuracy, add a bit to that, somewhere between 50 and 200 more dpi. Then go play the game. If you notice you're misclicking a lot, decrease the dpi. If you notice you're struggling to keep up, or if you just notice that you aren't misclicking and want to see if you can increase your apm, then try put it a bit higher. Keep messing around until you're happy.
@@neildutoit5177 Well dang, that was a very complete answer - thanks
I made a mod that puts the queue and resources at the bottom. Also removes the top and bottom bars. Much easier for me
5:10 I leave the video at that point. I´ll come back later
you forgot the most important mod: vululu
No range mods? I forgot the name... it shows the TC/castle/... range
Ah got it... morals :)
Hi Hera. Is there/ could you do an idle TC mod?
I don't think Hera has done any mod, even though that is a great recomnendation. Hopefully a moder thinks about it.
Hi, please update this video because now we have a lot more options in menu