• Simplified Chinese: Is now an officially supported language.

• Achievements: Some achievements could fail to trigger if they were triggered while playing in offline mode. This should be behaving better now.

• Text: Modders could crash the game by creating recursive text replacement entries. Fixed.

• New Event: The Winter Wonderland Celebration!
  
• Seven New Profile Icons!
  
• Improvements to the Game Stability and Performance
  
• Significantly improved the aggression of AI players in Team games
  
• Fixed certain instances where units would auto-garrison after constructing a building
  
• Numerous multiplayer lobby and matchmaking fixes
  
• Bug fixes, crash fixes, exploit fixes, and more!

💬 DISCUSS: Age of Empires III: Definitive Edition Forum
🗣 JOIN: The Age of Empires Official Discord

“During these festive times, players find themselves in a beautiful snow valley surrounding a frozen lake. A single circular trade route runs around the map. This map is filled with presents, decorated Christmas trees, and with reindeer and moose to fit the occasion.”

• Play a Skirmish or Multiplayer game as the Japanese.
  
• Win a Skirmish or Multiplayer game with Trade Monopoly.
  
• Win a 2v2 Skirmish with India on Hard.
  
• Win Christopher Da Gama’s Expedition in Historical Battles.
  
• Complete Blood, Ice and Steel Campaign: Act 1 with bronze medals.
  
• Complete Blood, Ice and Steel Campaign: Act 2 with bronze medals.
  
• Complete Blood, Ice and Steel Campaign: Act 3 with bronze medals.

• Fixed a crash when setting a rally point for the second time after having played a previous scenario. (The waypoint flag was referencing unloaded animations.)
  
• Fixed bone errors in tree_yellow_river that could cause a crash, and which prevented the tree type from visually falling when felled.
  
• Fixed potential memory corruption in some unusual paths through the UI.
  
• Fixed a potential crash in AI combat comparison.

• Corrected the thumbnails and tooltips of the color customization options for the Portuguese and Spanish Cathedrals to display the correct color variants unlocked for the building.

• Added a new prompt when starting a special event challenge. This dialogue will ask whether you want to play in single- or multiplayer to complete the challenge, then will send you to the respective lobby.
  
• Steam users are now able to send invites to ranked parties even if they’ve disabled the Steam overlay.
  
• Improved the readability of the UI number representing the total currently-selected or -garrisoned units.
  
• Russians: Added the (previously missing) Veteran Grenadier to the technology tree.
  
• Swedes: Corrected the technology tree name of the Heavy Cannon, which was previously listed as “Frontier Blockhouse”.
  
• Each color customization option for the Maltese cathedral will now unlock the correct color rather than one of the other colors.
  
• Updated the contrast of the campaign completion percentage to display more visibly against the campaign artwork.
  
• The French Explorer’s ‘Heal Injured Units’ ability now displays the ability name on its tooltip.
  
• Fixed several incorrect tooltips in the Clan Description and Join Policy menus.
  
• Implemented various text updates in all languages.

• Changed the default hotkey for “Attack Move” from CTRL+SHIFT+Z to Spacebar to address an issue with issuing the command to moving units. As a result, the “Find Selected” action has been moved to CTRL+Spacebar.
  
• Added safeguards to prevent players from Aging-Up or researching technologies from any building. Buildings will now check to ensure that they have the permissions to research the given technology.
  
• The “sooo good” cheat is now properly disabled between different matches.
  
• Units can no longer be ordered to garrison in a buildings while it is under construction. This is to prevent the accidental “auto-garrison” of builders by SHIFT+queueing the order while it is being built.
  
• Chasqui will no longer auto-garrison inside a Tambo they were recently tasked to build.
  
• Fixed an issue which could result in Town Centers activating stealth mode (i.e. disappearing) on Malaysian-themed maps.
  
• Fixed an issue where quickly double-clicking different “Find Unit” hotkeys would fail to perform the latter commands.

• Added the victory conditions of each scenario to the Art of War menu so players understand the objectives before entering the challenge.
  
• Algiers: Renamed the Home City to Cherchell.

• Chuvash Cape: Fixed an issue which prevented the scenario from ending in defeat until the starting Flat Boats were destroyed, even if all land military units were lost.

• Strange Alliances (Blood, Ice, and Steel – Act II): Stuart Black is no longer listed as an enemy, as he is, in fact, an ally.
  
• Colonel Washington (Blood, Ice, and Steel – Act II): Removed an errant response offered by Ká:nien to John Black that did not belong in the scene.
  
• Saratoga (Fire and Shadow – Act I): The AI players will now construct forts on any difficulty, and will no longer play as passively or defensively during the scenario.

• Fixed an issue which could prevent the Town Center Rickshaw from spawning when playing Nomad on the Baja California or Central Plain maps.
  
• Fixed an issue where, on occasion, the AI could trigger two different revolutions.

• Player tooltips are now visible in Ranked party matchmaking.
  
• Fixed the display of player names when loading into a ranked match.
  
• The 20 Minute Treaty game mode is no longer checked by default when queuing for a ranked match.
  
• The previous game Mode and Rules will now be preserved across matches.
  
• Team colors will now match the player colors when there’s only one player per team. For games with more than two players, team colors will be assigned at random.
  
• Improved the color randomization in Ranked matches to prevent duplicate assignments from breaking the game.
  
• The multiplayer lobby browser can now (properly) be sorted by games with/without a password, or by server region.
  
• The ‘Reset All Filters’ button now refreshes all fields in the multiplayer lobby, whereas previously missing the ‘Region’ setting.
  
• The leaderboard is now auto-refreshed when opened to avoid the display of outdated results. Note that there may still be a short delay between the end of a match and leaderboard update.
  
• Overlays such as the multiplayer leaderboard will no longer “stick” if the game loses focus (e.g. ALT+Tab) while it is open.
  
• Fixed instances where the ‘View Profile’ button could not be clicked, such as in the friends list and chat window.

• Significantly improved the aggression of computer players in team games.
  
• Fixed an issue which prevented the AI from constructing Trading Posts along trade routes.
  
• Military units will no longer swap to melee mode when it is only the *slightly* better option than the default ranged mode.
  
• Added new Age-up strategies for each civilization.
  
• AI-controlled players will now construct additional military buildings when needed.
  
• AI-controlled players will no longer send Fort Wagons unless playing defensively.
  
• Swapped out certain underutilized Home City cards from AI player decks.

• The cvPlayerToAttack variable can now be used to prioritize which players this AI will attack.

• German (DE): Adjusted the width of text in the Ranked Game Search menu to avoid truncation.

• Custom maps can now be played via an installed mod.
  
• When browsing the lobby browser, a new popup will alert players running mods that they will need matching mods to join a match with mods enabled.
  
• A warning message will now appear when joining a multiplayer match with mods enabled.

• Additional investigation into issues with Attack-Move: We’ve read your reports and want to continue working on improving the behavior of and fixing issues related to the Attack-Move command.
  
• Stuck Units: Though we hope to have had a significant impact on the number of areas where this happens, we will be keeping a close eye on your reports to see if, when, and where it still occurs. If you catch this occurring in your games, please create or add to a thread on the official forum with a note of the name of the map, the area and/or object, and a screenshot highlighting exactly where the unit got stuck. (Thank you!)

:alertalert: DISCLAIMER

This list is subject to change and should not be considered a comprehensive list of all the known issues we’re tracking. The above is to inform you of the team’s current priorities, which will change as other issues arise or take precedence.

For the latest updates and announcements, please visit our social channels.

Please note that custom mods may not be compatible with the latest game update. If you are experiencing issues launching or playing the game after downloading the new build, try disabling your installed mods before trying again.

Still having trouble? Visit our support page!

• The Seekers description in the update menu wasn’t centered.
  
• The in-game settings background was darkened.
  
• The Clone Squares cloning effect was reduced: It could cause the game running slow on lower end machines.
  
• Rarely, the game could be showing zero heath, but you were still alive.
  
• Added a prevention for getting stuck in a wall.

• 20 new secondary events have been added. These events set up 4 new secondary storylines.
  
• 3 new weapons have been added.
  
• 4 new secondary event items have been added.
  
  • RG-210 Repeating Cannon
    
  • RG-420 Repeating Cannon
    
  • RG-840 Repeating Cannon
• Repair kits have been added that allow the ship to be repaired without returning to the stations. Kits can be purchased from system shops or found as a reward on enemies.
  
• A system has been added to show the damage done. This system can be disabled and configured in Settings > Game.
  
• Hard difficulty mode has been added. In this mode, ships have 50% more health and shields, dice rolls are more difficult, enemies in dice battles are more dangerous, there is less loot, and interceptions are more frequent.
  
• An additional step has been added at the start of the campaign, where you can select the basic settings of the game.
  
• Illustrations have been added to the events in Xeah, The Living Bay and Sharp Hill.
  
• Now you can abandon the contracts that are obtained in the stations.
  
• Now weapon groups can be activated or deactivated using keys 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 in the weapon group activation menu.
  
• Now when a weapon is dragged from the store, the inventory will automatically show the weapon section.
  
• Now when an object is dragged from the store, the inventory will automatically show the object section.
  
  
• A system has been created to adjust the difficulty of dice rolls in side missions.
  
• A system has been created to adjust the difficulty of dice battles in side missions.
  
• The amount of credits that are obtained in loot has been increased.
  
• Now you get more credits when selling weapons.
  
• The projectile speed of Plasma cannons has been increased to have the same projectile speed of the Cannons of the Republic.
  
  
• A large update has been made to the save system.
  
• Now all game data is saved in a single file.
  
• When the new version is run for the first time, it will back up the game and go through the process to transfer all data to the new save system.
  
• The new save system avoids the corruption errors that occasionally occurred to some players.
  
• The bug reporting system has been improved, now they are sent much faster.
  
• A bug that did not allow to deactivate the VI weapon group has been fixed.
  
• The lighting in the reverse engines of the Genesis has been fixed.
  
• A bug in the systems ability WS-100 Energy Converter that bugged the shields when used at when they were full has been resolved.

• All gameplay levels are experiencing snowfall, with the most dramatic accumulation being in killhouse.
  
• The killhouse map pool has been completely replaced with new killhouses for this event. We will drop more winterized killhouses later during the event along with other maps. These maps will only be here for a limited time so play them while you can!
  
• As per ARGUS HR request, Killhouses made 241% more festive. This is the mathematically most festive we've achieved, and well surpasses quarterly goals.
  
• All planning rooms have been decorated, as 2 in 5 residents of Alpha City decorate for the holidays. Statistically, somebody (or multiple somebodies) on your team are the culprit.

• Players should no longer spawn on top of each other in the back of the truck or on top of the table and instead spawn at intended player spawn points.
  
• Defenders now have weapons in lockers instead of on racks.
  
• The standard defender room lighting has been polished and optimized. Neither the truck or the defender room will allow moon or sunlight to shine through solid ceilings.
  
• Attacker truck lighting and doors are now animated and include buzzers as well as changing light colors to signify the start of staging (T minus 15 seconds) and execution. The execution buzzer is loud enough to be heard by defenders.
  
• Weapon positions on the defender shotgun locker have been tweaked to reduce overlaps that caused picking up a secondary shotgun when loading a primary shotgun, and barbed wire has been rotated for better readability. Gear positions in the attacker truck have also been polished.
  
• Defender room collision has been hardened - defenders should no longer get lazed by the UAV when platforming in the defender room.

• Ping System: Callouts can now be made using a "ping" to mark points of interest to teammates on the fly, both in the map and in first-person.
  
• Visibility improvements to the "move here" waypoint marker were made to better highlight it in first-person view. Now accompanied by text that displays the player's distance from the waypoint in addition to a proximity check that disables the waypoint when reached.
  
• Player map name cards have been updated to take up less space on the map. A "vision cone" visual has been added to players in the map view to better gauge at a glance which direction players are facing.
  
• Player map name card info and vision cone for you (the player) is now distinct from your teammates by being colored yellow to better help with orienting and locating yourself on the map.
  
• Updated barbed wire icon.