WELCOME BACK TO HISTORY!
The wait is over! Age of Empires: Definitive Edition is available now at the Microsoft Store on Windows 10. We are so excited for you to experience all the new features that we’ve brought to this classic RTS.
Beyond the upscaled 4k visuals and remastered soundtrack, we’ve found that these quality-of-life gameplay improvements sometimes feel like such a core part of Age that people can forget that they weren’t in the original! Here are a few highlights that you might not realize got added:
Fantastic New Features and Where to Find Them
- Attack Move: One of the community’s most-requested improvements is now in the game! Hold A and right-click to send your army to a location and attack any opponents on the way!
- Fast farm reseeding: With a villager selected, right-click on an exhausted farm to reseed it!
- Customizeable UI: Change the size of font and UI panels in the Settings menu!
- Full screen toggle: Switch between full screen and windowed mode by hitting Alt + Enter.
- Higher population cap: Change population cap in the game creation lobby. You can go up to 250 population per player… 5 times higher than the original cap of 50!
- Rally Points: With any unit production building selected, right-click at any point on the ground to have all units produced at that building gather there.
- Villager Rally Points: With the Town Center selected, right-click on anything you could send a villager to gather or build. New villagers created at that TC will head straight to that resource, without you needing to assign them! (For example, right-click on a nearby tree. The next villager will walk straight to the tree and begin chopping wood, instead of going idle and waiting for commands.)
- Select Idle Villagers: Can you believe this one wasn’t in the original game?? Hit hotkey . to immediately select the next idle villager and get them back to work!
- Select Idle Military: You didn’t build those chariot archers so they could sit there and look pretty (although, with the new graphics, they certainly do). Hit hotkey , to find your idle military units and send them to destroy your opponent!
- Unit queueing: Okay, seriously? You couldn’t queue units in buildings before now? Well now you can! Just keep clicking the unit portrait for whatever you’d like to build! Or, to take it to the next level, Shift + click to queue 5 at a time. Efficiency!
- Multi-building queue: For when you need a ton of archers, NOW. Select several of the same production building (e.g. barracks) by holding Ctrl + left-click. Then click the unit portrait as normal (or use the hotkey) to distribute the queue evenly among all selected buildings. You can even shift + click to distribute five units at a time into the queue. Hope you have plenty of resources!
- Right-click mouse scroll: Zoom around the map like never before! With no unit selected, right-click and drag to exactly the area you want to see!
- Mouse zoom: Speaking of zooming, you can now zoom in and out dynamically using your mouse scroll wheel.
- Go to Event Hotkey: Nothing is worse than hearing the attack horn and not knowing where the action is happening! Hit hotkey backspace to cycle the camera through the most recent events on the map.
- Walkable farms: No more farm walls! You can walk right over farmland and destroy your opponent. (If you need some defenses of your own, research ACTUAL walls at the granary starting in the Tool Age.)
- New default key layout: Building hotkeys are now mapped to the UI grid by default, making it easy to remember which key to hit to build your dock! (hint: it’s T.)
- And MORE!
Again, these are only our favorites among the many quality-of-life upgrades present in Age of Empires: Definitive Edition. Which are your favorites? Drop a comment below or head to our forums for more discussion!