Update 14825 is a patch in Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition, released on February 2, 2021.
Game[]
Stability and performance[]
- Implemented fixes for two memory leaks.
- Fixed corruption issues that could stealthily emerge when tabbed out of the game.
- Fixed a potential hang and memory leak when launching the game.
- Fixed an uncommon hang related to cloud saves on certain machines.
- Fixed a crash on the scenario Bring Down the Mountain (Act II: Ice), when issuing an attack move order to Ká:nien.
- Improved the performance when searching for active squads.
Graphics[]
- Fixed a legacy bug where the Town Center could vanish entirely when upgrading to a new Age while a certain animation was playing.
- Terrain now responds properly to the texture quality setting.
- Fixed occludee shader for hardware that only supports DirectX 11.
Audio[]
- Updated the civilization jingles for all civilizations.
UI[]
- The Torp and Porcelain Tower will now properly display all their gathering rates in the UI.
- Added a new Display Resource Gauge on Harvest setting to the options menu. This setting is enabled by default, and displays the remaining resources as a health bar for trees, mines, livestock, and hunted animals with tasked Villagers. When Villagers are re-tasked, the gauge will automatically disappear after one second.
- Command panels will now display hotkey overlays when enabled in the UI Options settings.
- Added safeguards to prevent resource bars from showing up above the fog of war layer.
- Fixed an issue where the health bars of trees and animals were being displayed at all times.
Gameplay[]
General[]
- Implemented additional improvements to prevent Settlers from getting trapped when building Trading Posts.
- Fixed an issue where hotkeys could not be used by Villagers and Explorers when using the Default keybind settings.
- Fixed an issue which prevented the "Enable ALT+Right Click Attack Move" from being disabled in the Hotkeys settings menu.
Exploit fixes[]
- Experience will no longer be awarded for games that end in less than two minutes.
Campaign[]
- Last City of the Inca (Act III: Steel): Improved the enemy AI to present more of a threat, and encouraged the green computer ally to be less "try-hard" so the player can play a meaningful role in the scenario.
Civilization balance[]
General[]
- Big Jerome the Pet Polar Bear now shares the same multipliers as Honcho the Pet Grizzly Bear. Their damage to Heroes has been reduced from 1x > 0.5x, and damage to Guardians from 3x > 1.2x.
- Peruvian Legion: Reduced the damage of their Grenade attack from 24 > 21.
- Adjusted the availability of the Extensive Fortifications card for some civilizations. This is to help counter a concerning rise in the effectiveness of "camping" strategies in the Treaty game mode.
- Stonemasons: Now properly improves the build speed of all Wagons, Rickshaws, and Travois.
Chinese[]
- Village: Reduced cost from 190 > 180 wood. XP bounties and build time have been adjusted accordingly.
- Summer Palace: Reduced the amount of time before the Territorial Army is granted for free from 210 > 195 seconds.
- Forbidden Army: Decreased training time from 33 > 29 seconds.
- 9 Keshiks (III) card > 10 Keshiks (III)
- 24 Rattan Shields (IV) card > 26 Rattan Shields (IV)
- Standard Army Hit Points (II) card: Increased the attack and hit point bonus for Steppe Riders and Chu Ko Nu from +15% > +20%.
- Beiyang Army (III) card: Reduced the food cost of the card—which delivers 8 Keshik, 8 Steppe Riders, and activates their Disciplined upgrades—from 1000 > 750 food.
- New Army (III) card: Moved from Age 3 > Age 2. Cost increased from 200 > 500 food. Arquebusiers and Changdao Swordsmen do not reach their more powerful, Disciplined status until the Fortress Age.
French[]
- Removed 50 food from their starting resources.
Swedes[]
- Can now train Crossbowmen.
- Torp: Somewhat relaxed the Torp's placement restrictions and improved the accuracy of the visible ring indicating the collection radius. These changes will comfortably allow up to 6 Torps to gather from a single Mine — which was possible before the previous game update, but is now much easier.
- Increased the amount of food in spawned Berry Bushes from 125 > 200 food.
- Increased the build limit of Berry Bushes from 30 > 60.
- Can now collect Blueberries while simultaneously collecting other types of berries.
- Blackberries are now properly collected by Torps.
- Blueberries (I) card: Newly-constructed Torps will now, once again, spawn a Blueberry Bush containing 200 food. Any Torp Berry Bush currently present on the map will be upgraded into a Blueberry Bush AND will gain +200 food (in addition to the food already in the bush).
- Blackberries (III) card: Can now be sent twice. Fixed a bug that sometimes prevented Torps from collecting from Berry Bushes spawned by the Blackberries card.
- German Mercenary Contracts (IV): Increased the attack and hit point bonus granted to Mercenaries from +20% > +25%.
- A new 4 Prospector Wagons (IV) card has been added to the Home City.
- Upon reaching the Imperial Age, Prospector Wagon shipments can now be sent again, similar to other unit shipments.
Random maps[]
Adjusted the rewards, guardians, and spawn frequency of 83 different treasures in the Standard Maps set. This will manifest itself in two noteworthy ways:
- Guardians will now protect loot piles respective to their strength and difficulty.
- Large Wood Treasures will spawn less frequently on all Asian maps.
Lobbies and matchmaking[]
- Players can now play a Scenario file from the Skirmish screen. Note that while the civilization can be changed on the setup screen, it will not be applied when loading the scenario — similar to Multiplayer Scenarios.
- The Treaty Maps pool will now be used for all Ranked Treaty games, not just the 40 minute ones.
- The option to invite players to a lobby via the friends list will now only display users on the primary platform (Steam or Xbox Live). This is to prevent cases where the game offered the ability to send an invite that the platform couldn't facilitate.
AI[]
- Fixed an issue which would cause AI-controlled players to misallocate their Villagers on the wrong resources.
Modding[]
- Updated the mod manager to not require a restart when unsubscribing from a mod that was already disabled.
- Preparing the groundwork for a change which will remove the restart requirement when subscribing to new mods.
- Fixed an issue which would result in mods getting stuck re-downloading each time the game was launched, thus preventing users from accessing multiplayer.
- Fixed an issue which caused mods with a higher priority to be prioritized lower in the file system.
- Fixed an issue which could result in mods sharing the same priority number with another mod in the list.
- Fixed several crashes when navigating to the Mods screen.
- Implemented a system for proto unit overrides so that a mod doesn't have to make a copy of protoy.xml to apply the changes to that file.
- Winter Wonderland [Mod]: Updated the mod to use protomods.xml rather than overriding protoy.xml.
