Gameplays

The Best Controller Settings for AoE2 on Xbox

Learn the best controller settings to play faster and gain the biggest competitive advantage over your opponents in Age of Empires …

The very best controller settings for Age of Empires 2 on Xbox you’re watching console Empires in this video I’ll be sharing the settings that I use in my games and talking about why I like or dislike each option some of these are of course personal preference so I’m not saying

This is the only way to play just the way that I like to play and why you’re wrong if you play another way just kidding sort of alright so first up we’ll talk about the interface settings and then I’m just going to kind of go down the list here skipping over some

Less important choices and sharing some demos of the more important settings so that you can see what each option does in-game and I’ll share some controller tips and shortcuts along the way where they’re relevant to each setting PC players get a hotkey for this next option with friend or faux colors but as

Far as I know this can only be toggled in the menu for Xbox what it does is make you always blue your allies yellow and the enemy Red which can be useful situationally but I don’t like it being always on for terrain grid I like 37 black it’s

Subtle enough to not look like ass while being visible enough to be helpful the grid makes it easier to see Hills which also helps you spot holes in your walls it also helps with building placement and making it easier to estimate range Advanced interface gives you access to additional features like control groups

And selection filters both of which are hugely useful in pretty much every match if you’re new to the game control groups let you quickly select and command user-defined sets of units and selection filters help you sort your troops in useful ways like by health or unit type

For HUD skill I think the default covers the screen just a little bit too much but this is going to depend on your display and how far you sit from it I like 89 but I’m playing from a recliner with a wall mounted TV so if you’re in a

Desk chair and using a gaming monitor you might prefer a smaller value here and if you make poor life decisions and hung your TV above the fireplace well you might need to crank this one up border safe is for people with older TVs where you’ve got an overscan issue and

The game is clipping outside of your visible area all right so rollover info is super helpful this is one of my favorite settings I don’t think PC has this one but I love it with this on you can see unit stats just by hovering the cursor over them without having to click

Tooltip scale I’ve got turned down to the smallest size that I can comfortably read which for my setup is 75 percent control group icons on not sure why you turn this off maybe just to clean the screen up but it’s really useful to know how many units you have at a glance

Especially when you’re producing in the groups I like safe delete some players don’t up to you future items shows things that you’ll be able to make later which can be helpful to know what your options are going to be if you haven’t memorized all 43 Tech

Trees or are just playing a sip you don’t know as well Global queue is helpful to understand your production at a glance I would even expand this to another row if I could but for small screens it might be better to go with just one I actually turned my health bar scale

Down a bit while making this video knocking it down to around 75 felt better the default size is kind of clunky in big fights where the health bars are blocking so much of the battle I like playing with most of the graphics options on but turned down a bit a lot

Of players just disable everything to maximize performance and that might be worth it if you prefer team games as even on series X late game performance is not great so you might want to disable anti-alacing and like 3D water effects because they don’t make a huge difference the anti-aliasing for one is

Just giving your edges a little bit of a smoother less Jagged or pixelated look the vignette is one of the ones that I find distracting and the map lighting I like the idea but it’s too dramatic Arabia looks like red on my TV when this is turned on but that’s going to vary

Significantly based on your display and how it’s set up the Xbox has a pretty decent calibration tool built in so if you haven’t tried that out it’s worth doing both the display and HDR calibration Bloom is similarly just too intense for me on the default but I

Think 67 looks pretty good gamma affects the value of your mid-tones and if you feel like you need to change this I’d probably go back and calibrate your display first for fog I’ve got the animated border off and the fog itself turned down to 70 for all you I actually

Really like the in-game music but making videos it’s just easier to edit if the music isn’t baked into the footage and YouTube can be difficult regarding copyright so I’ve just got the slider all the way off on that one I wish that there was separate sliders for the alerts because I would

Turn the dock belt way down if I could which is actually another reason why I love the rollover stats feature so much because then you can see what’s going on in each dock just by hovering okay so the cross play setting is a big one and it can be kind of confusing so

There’s two different settings for this one here and one in the ranked queue and they’re weird it’s easy to misunderstand what these settings are actually doing turning crossplay off is going to give you poor matchmaking with longer queue times so you’ll want this on even if you’re only trying to play other Xbox

Players for whatever reason the matchmaking queue is split into Xbox with crossplay on and Xbox with cross play off they’re still just the one Xbox ladder but if you turn off cross play you won’t match with other controller players who have it turned on even though you’re both playing on Xbox and

Both playing with a controller weird right in the ranked Q screen there’s another setting for cross input and that’s what determines if you can face players on keyboard and mouse so the best setting for new controller players is going to be cross play on Cross input off

This will give you the largest pool of controller players to play against giving you shorter queue times and better match quality and you still won’t be matched with keyboard and mouse even with cross play on I like default aggressive stance if you turn this off it’ll set new units

Defensive when they’re created while I do use stand ground and defensive and feudal in every game I still prefer to have this option on aggressive for control groups eight is going to make them a bit easier to select since the slices are bigger but having 12 is

Just more flexible I tend to group my production buildings and also cue units into groups so in most games I’m using a minimum of six control groups just to do that having main production trash and castles each in a group and then the production from each in their own so

That only leaves two open to do other things for auto Farm it’s really up to you you can toggle these in-game too if you’re tight on wood and just want to microwave for a little bit automatic placement is set in the auto Eco wheel and reseeding is in the mill

Range indicators are bad for the game and you should turn them off I have them on show when selected as that feels similar to clicking on a unit but persistent range indicators are just getting too close to spreadsheet simulator and I don’t like how their inclusion as a setting makes players

Feel pressured into using them to stay competitive even if they otherwise dislike them I do like the resource health bars they’re unobtrusive and they can help you know when you’re going to over chop and are also useful for timing during your Dark Age build object highlights can help with microwaving your

Lumberjacks or targeting specific enemies but the effect is visually just too strong for me so I’ve got it turned off if there was some additional settings here to customize how the Highlight looked I might use this one select unit portrait is visually pretty subtle but useful it’s that little

Circle beside the cursor reminding you what you have selected so small trees are fine I actually do prefer the look of the standard trees but it’s just so much harder to play when you’ve got the big trees on especially if you’ve got a southern Woodline idle pointers look like in my

Opinion and I’m kind of skeptical that they’re actually even a competitive Advantage as visually scanning around the screen looking for indicators manually is going to be a whole lot slower than staying on top of your Idols in other ways so navigation waypoints let you quickly snap the camera to

Different places around the map by holding left trigger and moving the right stick the settings here let you customize where the game is going to automatically place those waypoints for you for most of mine I’ve got them set on player with just castles being set to all because Relic and wonder Victory

Doesn’t matter in ranked and so many Town centers are going to be built over the course of the game that it’s less useful to have so many waypoints if you have this set to everyone you can also add waypoints whenever you want in the game by clicking in your right stick

While holding LT or RB next we’re going to look at the controller settings I like vibration as it provides useful feedback like warning you when you’re deleting a unit taunt combo images are the button shortcuts that you see in place of the taunt numbers I like using taunts so leaving

These on makes it easier to learn them but there’s no real benefit from doing this so feel free to disable them if you find those distracting to send taunts in game you hold the left trigger and press the view button I prefer a fairly slow pan speed at just

Nine percent going much faster makes it hard to select things for me and oddly if you set this to zero you actually can’t move inertia is bugged and randomly activates even when the camera isn’t moving so I have this off even though I would prefer to use a little

Bit like two to three percent so I max out the Marquee size and would even make it bigger if I could to be able to quickly select groups by swiping over them this makes it faster to Garrison units in the TC for example the next setting affects how fast the Marquee

Expands when you hold a this amount is scales relative to where you’ve got your size set so well I’ve got mine on 60 here if you don’t like the massive 200 Marquee size then you’re probably going to also want to change your speed I really hope that they add some more

Detailed settings for these and for the camera in general as far as easing dead zones and separate controls for pan and zoom with the default minimap setting you can move the cursor around without moving the camera pressing y will snap you to it while holding y lets you fast man

With the fast pan setting enabled you can just hold RB for the mini-map without having to also press y so minimap reticle speed changes how fast you can fast pan I’ve been on 50 but I think I’m going to try bumping this up a little bit faster default Zoom

Sets your camera height at the start of the game but the slider goes backwards 100 Zoom to me it sounds like that should be the closest making everything biggest on the screen all the way zoomed in but 100 is all the way out and zero

Is all the way in I like 74 maximum Zoom affects how far you can zoom it’s not a huge change either way though despite what the tooltip says magnetism is another area where I really wish we had some more parameters to play with the current behavior is kinda useful but it

Snapped to the wrong thing all the time I would love if there was a modifier button that you could hold in-game to temporarily disable magnetism as it can be really hard to select a lumber camp or repair a gate when the cursor keeps jumping to nearby units but I do feel

Like it’s generally helpful enough in selecting things that I keep it on I have been gradually lowering the amount though over time currently I’m down to 11 weird to me that small vertical is a toggle and not a slider loose reticle lets you move the cursor around independently from the camera like in

The PC version of the game I’ve got my reticle opacity on 64 Holt menus is faster as it eliminates the second action needed to close the menu but I do have the B button set to just exit build mode leaving the Villager selected I don’t understand what the building

Placement snap is trying to accomplish but it feels awful and even with this turned off building placement still snaps really awkwardly compared to what you get on the PC version and just like hold menus hold wall lets you eliminate taking a confirm action you just hold drag and release without

Needing to press the button again to build this makes one tile quick Walling feel a lot better too split send is another one where I just don’t get the intended effect what this does is makes a select and X move but X normally gives you the option to attack move

So I don’t think you can do that with this setting so I don’t know why you’d ever use that it’s also bugged so sometimes you randomly see an expanding Marquee animation when you have the setting enabled the friendly unit selected options are pretty helpful with these set to select

You can then select other units or buildings without needing to First deselect this can be somewhat counter-intuitive in certain situations like setting a rally point on your allies Market but to do that you hold LT and press X and that’ll let you set a Rally Point without changing your selected building

So I don’t like easy select military I’d prefer actually if this could do the opposite and make dragging over military and villagers only select the villagers if you’re on Advanced UI though you can hold B and press left on the d-pad to filter between military and economic units within your selection

Easy select villager is pretty nice though as it’ll make the selection ignore your herdables when dragging a selection under the TC for quick finding Behavior there’s a couple of good options in here but I like Presta cycle single units and hold for select all globally I prefer Global over local so

That it’s possible to send your whole Army somewhere quickly or assign all of your idol to a resource at once you’re going to want to turn off quick find snap especially if you like monks but even if you hate monks this will make it easier to macro during a fight as you

Can continue queuing things up without looking away when you do want to snap to the selection just click in your left stick I’ve got my quick find villager setting set to idle so that I can just hold up to grab all my Idols at once but for

Quick find military I prefer having that one set to all quick find naval units lets you use the d-pad to select different types of ships for find Menu Pages you’re probably going to want this one on too one gives you a simplified menu with fewer options

In it which might be cool if you could customize it and just put your favorites on the one wheel but oh my God I hate how the build wheel and the find wheel aren’t the same so like see how the market is bottom left here on the build

Wheel but in the find menu it’s top right so I end up getting confused and having trouble finding it all the time I’ve got villager double press on since quick find is set to idle this provides a fast way to do either action so I can select everyone with a double click or

Just select the idols by holding up villager job role limits double-click selections to workers on the same task I don’t like this but I can see how other players might prefer it with flick selection enabled you can just hold lb and move your left stick towards the group you want to select and

Then let go to select it direct control group shortcuts are awesome though it gives you d-pad shortcuts for managing your control groups you can tap to select double tap to snap and hold to create a new group it’d be cool though if there was a subordinate setting here to

Determine whether holding would merge or overwrite when you’re targeting an existing group all right that’s all of them thanks for playing menu simulator with me today if you’ve changed your settings after watching this video don’t forget to like And subscribe and if you think I’m a

Noob and my settings are trash be sure to let me know in the comments

aoe2 xbox

GregStein

Meet GregStein, a dedicated Age of Empires 2 fan and part-time developer. With years of experience in multiplayer gaming, GregStein has acquired a wealth of technical knowledge.

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