Age of Mythology: Retold just received an update that adds fresh AI challenges, refines gameplay balance, and improves overall stability. If you’ve been wondering how your units perform or if you want to try out new AI strategies, this patch offers quite a bit to check out.
Let’s start with something I found pretty neat: you can now see detailed combat stats for your units in the Mouse and Keyboard UI. Ever curious which unit is carrying your army and which one’s just loafing? Now you can spot those champs and slackers easily. For example, a UFO unit was shown to have defeated 50 enemies and dealt nearly 15,000 damage. That’s some serious firepower!
Two new AI personalities have been introduced: the Sieger and the Builder. The Sieger focuses on siege weapons and myth units that excel at tearing down buildings, preparing to hit the Heroic Age quickly before launching attacks. Interestingly, it won’t attack early unless it has at least two siege-able units, making its first strike thematically satisfying. The Builder, in contrast, constructs sprawling bases with many buildings and tends to attack less often. It may even build additional Village Centers. These new AI types should add variety and test different player strategies.
Performance and stability improvements include optimizations for the minimap, unit attachments, and the Villager Priority System. A few annoying bugs were squashed, like crashes when interacting with chat on PS5 during loading screens, and issues with loading saved games. There are also fixes for multiplayer temp files on PS5 and stronger error logging for online sign-in problems on consoles. The devs are still investigating those sign-in issues, so if you’re affected, they ask you to file a ticket with Customer Support.
Graphics got a touch-up too. New icons for current Fortifications and the Bifröst’s Watchtowers blessing were added. The Baolei building now has a custom Burning Oil visual effect instead of borrowing from the Greek Fortress. Plus, Photo Mode VFX now update properly as the camera moves, making your screenshots look better.
Audio options got a new setting for output format, letting you choose between Stereo and Surround sound. This might help players with specific headsets or Bluetooth devices get clearer audio. Also, the Speech volume slider now controls unit selection and acknowledgement sounds, separating it from other sound effects. Minor but helpful tweaks.
There are plenty of UI improvements, like fixing the AI difficulty dropdown in the Skirmish lobby for new profiles and adding new options to hide Community Event Objectives or World Twists in the UI. The Game Speed control is now usable in single-player Arena of the Gods and Daily Celestial Challenge modes. Plus, chat messages now have icons to show if they’re sent to everyone, allies, or direct messages.
Controller users aren’t left out either. Repair and resource drop-off actions have been improved to behave more like a keyboard and a mouse. Button mappings for repair, garrison, and drop-off were adjusted for clarity and ease. Some UI glitches in replay mode and minimap scaling were fixed. The combined radial production menu no longer breaks when selecting two identical buildings in a row. You can now also use “Gather at Location” and “Lure” commands via the controller menus.
Balance changes are pretty extensive. Villagers lost their 1.5x damage multiplier against siege weapons but got a boost versus towers, increasing from 2.5x to 4x damage. Siege weapons received a boost in crush armor, making them more challenging in siege battles. Town Centers have slightly reduced attack range, and buildings now get less damage bonus per garrisoned unit to avoid excessively high defense damage. Fortress-type buildings take longer to build to balance their increased power.
Technologies saw adjustments too. For example, the Crenellations damage bonus against cavalry was halved, and current Fortifications now boosts fortress building damage more significantly. Watch Tower costs were increased to keep investment balanced across cultures.
Relics also changed: the Arrows of Alfar building damage bonus was lowered, and the Five Colored Stone of Nuwa was removed from the normal relic pool because it felt underwhelming compared to others.
Each pantheon got tweaks, including unit train times, costs, and abilities. For instance, the Norse fortress soldiers now train faster to balance resource drain rates, and several myth units like the Chimera and Scarab had their costs adjusted. The Pharaoh’s empowerment attack interval was increased, making it a bit less frequent. The Siege Tower’s attack interval was reduced for more consistent damage but with slightly lower damage per hit. Some hero units also had train times and damage changed.
Favor generation rates were rebalanced to slightly reduce early game favor but increase it later on, encouraging expansion. Several god powers and technologies had their durations, costs, or effects tweaked to balance gameplay, like Lightning Weapons now applying to friendly heroes and Sinister Defiance aura becoming stronger and applying to flying units.
Modders will find some new and changed Knowledge Base (KB) functions to work with, including better support for dead units and new AI functions. The dev team is considering converting the simdata.simjson file to XML in a future update to improve modding compatibility.
Oh, and a quick note: custom mods might not work perfectly with this update. If you have trouble launching or playing, try disabling your mods first. For ongoing issues, the support site is your friend.
This update is the last planned before the release of Age of Mythology: Retold – Heavenly Spear coming in late September. The devs are focusing on polishing and bug-fixing while also preparing some content to keep the community engaged. Meanwhile, there’s a Pantheon Pin-Up community event going on, so you have some fun activities while you wait.
