[Outdated] Avoid losing time by changing game speed during levels loading (William Wallace)

NOTE: WILLIAM WALLACE IS NOW LOCKED AT THE SPEED 1.5, THIS GUIDE IS NO LONGER VALID.
Step 1: Start the level.
Step 2: As soon as the beginning wallpaper appears/first bgm starts playing, spamming the button "+" on the numpad.
Step 3: Done, you will get 2.0 game speed before the objective appears on the level.
This trick allows you to avoid losing time for having to press "+" and execute at the same time on WW campaigns.
Note: This trick is considered outdated, due to the fact that it's only viable for real time and not in-game time.

Change the difficulty of The Art of War Campaign

You can't select the difficulty in this campaign menu, however there exists a method to change it. If you doubt my words, please press F11 to check the timer/difficulty.
The game actually keeps and uses the difficulty of the last scenario you played in the official campaign section, so what you need to do is simply play a scenario in the campaign with the difficulty you desired and finish/quit the level, then you can play the AoW missions with the difficulty you wanted.
For example: You want to play "Destroying a Castle" on Moderate, then you need to play a scenario in the official campaign (e.g. "Marching and Fighting") on Moderate first so the game will remember that data. Now when you play "Destroying a Castle" it will always put you on Moderate. If you want Hard or Standard, just do the same.

Downgrading game versions

https://youtu.be/izI0OjphSos

PLEASE BACK UP YOUR PLAYER DATA BEFORE DOING THIS (e.g. campaign progress).

Patching campaign to its original state

As you all already knew, due to the changes to the campaign through the patches some of the levels are impossible to improve due to these issues. However we can use the backup files to patch the campaign to its original state.
1. Download the file "Campaign backup before 34699" in the Resources section.
2. Extract the file.
3. Overwrite all of the files at "SteamLibrary\steamapps\common\AoE2DE\resources\_common\campaign" using the files in the backup folder you just extracted. (REMEMBER TO BACK UP THE FILES BEFORE OVERWRITING)
4. Feel good.

Some of the levels to test out: "Razzia", "The Lombard League", "Ruins of Empires".
Currently this is allowed to make things fair for everyone.

Settings for speedruning (60 fps)

https://prnt.sc/pz7wnw

Reduce your screen resolution to increase performance (not entirely, but to get optimal performance)

Tactics for recording :
-if you are on Windows 10 : use Windows recorder Alt + G (best option in my opinion)

-You can use OBS for streaming (reduce the bitrate of your stream or non-stream if the lag appears in the level)

If you play individual campaign - full campaign use SSD hard drive for reducing load time

For York, a strong GPU is requiered for optimal performances as the size of the map is super giant it slows the game horribly especially if the settings are to the max or activating 4k setting (example GeForce GTX 1080)

The Forgotten HD Campaigns

https://www.ageofempires.com/mods/details/16234/

William Wallace - Training the Troops

Below is the second-by-second breakdown of the run. The excess time is for the unskippable dialogue. You want to ensure you do not get housed to avoid additional unskippable dialogue. You should hover over the initial barracks location to place, then queue a vil.

For this run, I re-bound the select all barracks hotkey to shift+b so I could hold shift + press delete -> b -> q in order to queue in all barracks without getting housed as quickly as possible. 

Notable points are:

11 & 12: sending two vils to work on the new barracks. I also shift-queue the remaining vils to the new barracks around here

34: trying to kill the 5th vil as late as possible, but without any delay on queuing the militia

35: I shift-queue the militia to ensure the second is placed, but you don't need to obviously.

55: the del->b->q banana needs to happen quickly. One barracks might be built before the other, but that doesn't matter because the timing of the *last* militia is the only thing that matters. If done correctly, the last two barracks should be in sync up with the first one. 



In theory, this could be 1m30 based on my spreadsheet, but not by my hands. If I divided up the seconds, maybe there's even more juice to squeeze, but I can't confirm. 

![](/static/blob/5ngd2d4n.png)

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Name	Author
[Outdated] Avoid losing time by changing game speed during levels loading (William Wallace)	Tei 4 years ago
Change the difficulty of The Art of War Campaign	Tei 5 years ago
Downgrading game versions	Tei 3 years ago
Patching campaign to its original state	Tei 4 years ago
Settings for speedruning (60 fps)	BellumZeldaDS 5 years ago
The Forgotten HD Campaigns	BellumZeldaDS 4 years ago
William Wallace - Training the Troops	pandookrb 1 year ago