Rise of Nations: Extended Edition Review (MHLoppy2)
The Extended Edition fails to correctly calculate the damage which units and buildings are supposed to deal. While it does not affect literally every matchup, it does affect every unit or building in some way and causes the damage in roughly 30,000 (THIRTY. THOUSAND.) specific matchups to be incorrectly calculated. Game balance suffers significantly as a result, and unit compositions during the first 4-5 ages become especially boring because certain unit groups are far stronger or weaker than they were ever intended to be, and as such players are forced to use the buffed-by-incompetence units very heavily.
Even people who don't play multiplayer are affected. For example, anyone trying to get through the singleplayer Alexander the Great campaign will run into a significant challenge: the opponent's unique elephant units take only a fraction of the damage which they're supposed to from Foot Archers, making them many times more resilient than the campaign was balanced for.
That such a wide-reaching and consequential bug remains unaddressed almost nine years after the Extended Edition's release is to me an unacceptable outcome. It should not fall on the community to fix such fundamental issues in a paid product.
Additionally there are many other small-medium issues which are also not resolved: other gameplay bugs, tooltip errors, poor networking (issues in multiplayer are common), no UI scaling, scripting bugs, sound bugs, graphics bugs, etc. Many of these are inherited from the old school versions of the game, but a few are exclusive to the Extended Edition.
Despite adding Steam Workshop support, the Extended Edition fails to competently implement mod support. Mods that are instructed to be unloaded will not always unload, so-called "dropdown mods" which can be selected in game lobbies will almost always cause multiplayer games to fail to load regardless of the mod's contents, and custom scenarios / custom scripts are difficult to make use of in multiplayer games because support for them has been eroded compared to the older versions of the game.
Such a lack of improvement in so many areas leaves the benefits of the Extended Edition over previous versions of the game to be a very short list, whilst the list of downsides is -- at minimum by quantity -- substantially larger.