News

Hello there Celeste players! The Halloween Event is finally upon us!. (Well, ALMOST!)

Once the Event starts (00:01 UTC 2025/10/20), go to your Empire Store in your Capital City and find all the exclusive quests for the event.

You can find every detail regarding what's new in the event in the attached graphics! We hope that you all have lots of fun playing with friends during the event.

Hello there Celeste players! Here you can find the details of the upcoming Summer Event for this year, going live on July 21st, 00:01 UTC!

Just like last year, you will receive...

Hello Everyone! We are pleased to announce that we are on track to be releasing an awful lot of new content in 2019. We hope to see a few new things within a week, and before we make any announcements, we think it is a good time to provide a summary of everything we have added to Age of Empires Online since Project Celeste began.

The most popular expansions have been our four new Quest Packs that include both regular and Legendary difficulties. Though the original Developers continued to add new Quests over time, players understandably are always looking for new ones to do:

• The Athens Quest Pack:
  • Fight battles on Athenian battlegrounds, freeing Athenian cities one-by-one
  • New Legendary Gear
  • More than 10 new Quests, available for solo and co-op play.

• The...

Hello everyone!

It's time. After what feels like an eternity, we are finally ready to announce that the Indian civilization now has a planned release date!

The Indians will be released on the 26th of October, 2024 (assuming everything goes to plan, of course). There are, however, a few things happening before and after their release that are explained below:
Stage 1: Closed Beta Playtest (Sep. 29 - Oct. 12):

• During this stage, we will be inviting a limited number of people to playtest the Indians and provide feedback and report any potential bugs. To keep it fair for everyone, these players' progress will be fully reset when the playtest phase is over.
• You can sign up for the closed playtest group here, but please be aware that we have very limited spots available for...

Hello there Celeste players! Here you can find the details of the upcoming Summer Event for this year, going live on July 22th, 00:01 UTC!

It's the middle of summer, the sun is hot, the Summer Event is late, the Romans are slow, the blog is overdue, COVID is in full bloom, and everyone's a little edgy. PF2K is taking a much deserved vacation of indeterminate length, so I have appointed myself this week’s messenger. Rather than pretend to fake PF2K's graphics, we are going to do an old fashioned mailbag episode. I asked players on discord, the forum, and in the game to submit questions. Then I answered a bunch and spread a few of them around the horn to get some other Devs out of their shells. (I took some editorial liberties to revise some of their quotes, so apologies in advance.)

Also, I am super jammed up in real life this week and flat-out in the Romans (I still don't have my Quest Giver lines finalized). To cut corners and time, I didn't send all questions to all Devs. So Devs, please add more answers below!

How much do you hope and expect the player count will rise after the Rome release?...

It is a new year, and with that we have also made some progress on the new and redesigned launcher. We received a lot of good feedback from the previous beta and much of it have made its way into the new launcher already. We have now finally reached a milestone in development where all of the planned UI components have received a fresh, new look. Therefore, we think it is time for another beta release where we invite the community to try out the new features in our new and improved launcher.

You can download the new launcher beta release here.

Again, we would want to emphasize this is not a final release of the launcher and it still represents work in progress. We highly appreciate any feedback you provide to us through either the forums, Discord, or on...

Hello there Celeste players! The Winter Event is finally upon us.

Once you update your game, go to your Empire Store in your Capital City and find all the new quests for the event. Alternatively, you can access the Event content by going to Sparta. More detailed instructions below.

You can find every detail regarding what's new in the event in the attached graphics! We hope that you all have lots of fun playing with friends during the event.

So let's break down the details of the event in a question-based list:

1. How do I access the special event content?

2. What are the new contents available in the event?

• 7 mini-game style Quests and 4 Legendary Quests, with awesome rewards.
  • Legendary: Ice King Mountain High Enough
  • Legendary: Winter Wonderland...

Hello there Celeste players! The Halloween Event is finally here.

Once you update your game, go to your Empire Store in your Capital City and find all the new quests for the event.

You can find every detail regarding what's new in the event in the attached graphics! We hope that you all have lots of fun playing with friends during the event.

So let's break down the details of the event in a question-based list:

1. How do I access the special event content?

2. What are the new contents available in the event?

• New mini-game style Quests and 3 very difficult Legendary Quests, with awesome rewards.
  • Legendary: The Dead of Night
  • Legendary: Fright Club
  • Legendary: Your Finest Horror
  • Don't Let Bahram Be Embalmed!
  • Tomb Sweet Tomb
  • On Your Gourd!
• New...

Hello there Celeste players!

As we approach the Halloween Event, I thought you would like to have a preview of what is coming with the next patch. So let's get into it, shall we?

Since this is one of the biggest content updates we have had in Celeste, I will break it down into question-based sections:

For the Halloween Event, we are adding 3 new Minigames and 3 new Legendary Quests. Available for a limited time only, these quests offer a unique visual setting for players and new units to play with and against! Find them in the graphics below:

Just like last year, we have new, event-exclusive pieces of Gear! Obtainable via both PvP or PvE, these pieces...

Hello there everyone! We are really excited to tell you that the Treasures of the Nile Quest Pack is finally upon us, available for everyone at Level 40!


Aimed at Level 40 players who are looking for a challenge, this Pack brings 8 all-new Quests. Available for solo and co-op play, these Quests offer brand new maps with an all new and refreshing look!

Help drive away the Valley Kings from the lands of Egypt. But who are these Valley Kings, you say?

• Nebkanra, the Legendary Camel Rider: Remember General Setredet from the Summer Event? This is his cousin. Young and ambitious, he has recently joined the Valley Kings and is desperately looking for a chance to prove himself worthy of his colleagues.

• Hamut, the Elephant Archer: Hiding in a golden-plated cabin atop his elephant, he lays waste to his opponent from...

Hello there Celeste players! The Summer Event is finally here.

Once you update your game, go to your Empire Store in your Capital City and find all the new quests for the event.

You can find every detail regarding what's new in the event in the attached graphics! We hope that you all have lots of fun playing with friends during the event.

So let's break down the details of the event in a question-based list:

1. How do I access the special event content?

2. What are the new contents available in the event?

• New mini-game style Quests and a very difficult Legendary Quest, with awesome rewards.
• New PvP Quests with HUGE rewards.
• All-new Gear, Vanity Gear and Capital City decoration: The Summer Vanity Set and The Temple of Apophis Capital City building, entirely new and exclusive...

Hello there Celeste players! We are back with another Roman reveal blog.

As we develop the Romans, each week we will be revealing the Romans to you building by building, unit by unit, and technology by technology. We are not just showing you what the Romans will be, but showing you how we are building them, who is building them, and also why we are building them the way that we are.

This week we are revealing two Common Buildings, the Age 1 Town Center and the Market. As discussed in more detail in our Building Design blog, these Buildings are 2 of the 13 buildings included in every Age of Empires Online civilization by default and that always appear in a specific age. These 13 Buildings are identical in every civ except if they are an Improved Building or Advanced Building.

If you would like to start with our first...

Hello there Celeste players! We are back with another Roman reveal blog.

As we develop the Romans, each week we will be revealing the Romans to you building by building, unit by unit, and technology by technology. We are not just showing you what the Romans will be, but showing you how we are building them, who is building them, and also why we are building them the way that we are.

This week we are not only revealing our first military building, which is called the Castellum, but we are also introducing one of the Romans’ most important units: the Legionary.

If you would like to start with our first post on Houses, you can find it HERE.

Though the Castellum appears in the Romans trailer, we have not yet explained it. As many of you deduced from its architecture, the Castellum is the...

Hello there Celeste players! We are back with another Roman reveal blog.

As we develop the Romans, each week we will be revealing the Romans to you building by building, unit by unit, and technology by technology. We are not just showing you what the Romans will be, but showing you how we are building them, who is building them, and also why we are building them the way that we are.

This week, we will be discussing Roman Farms and Storehouses.

If you would like to start with our first post on Houses, you can find it HERE.
You can also read more about our design philosophy regarding Buildings HERE.

For almost every Roman building, we take the same approach of comparing...

Before we could build even one Roman building or unit, we had to decide what buildings and units they had. So we need to back up a bit to get you into our frame of mind.

We started by analyzing what everyone could agree on: the designs of the Original 6 civs. This week, we are going to start with buildings. In later weeks, we will perform a similar analysis with units and technologies. But for now, we are looking at just buildings.

Every civilization in AoEO has 18 buildings except the Norse (16). Looking deeper, we can see that every building falls into one of five categories: Common Buildings, Improved Buildings, Advanced Buildings, Custom Buildings, and Unique Buildings.

Overall, this analysis of the five categories of buildings forms a touchstone for how we as Developers approach civ design. Since it helps explain the design of the Original 6 civs, it also helps us design new civs (and help you predict where we are heading). In other words, if our Romans follow these rules...

As we design the Romans this summer, will be revealing them to you building by building, unit by unit, technology by technology, and week by week. Our purpose is not to just show you what the Romans will be, but to show you how we are building them, who is building them, and also why we are building them the way that we are.

The original Developers have left us with a tremendous amount of invaluable resources, but there’s thousands of hours still ahead of us. We must make countless decisions that will leave our own mark on the civ. As we debate units, buildings, statistics, and what vegetables the farms should grow, we will explain our thought processes here every week.

It appears from our sources that the original Developers had never finalized the full set of Roman buildings and were heading towards having between 16 and 19 buildings. While we will discuss how we made all of these decisions in the weeks to come, we will...

Project Celeste proudly announces:

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend us your ears:

We are thrilled to tell you that the long wait is finally over and that later this year we will be bringing to our community the most anticipated and requested additional content of our game's history. At long last, the elusive Roman Civilization is on its way to Age of Empires Online and we are eager to give you as much information as possible. However, to avoid over-promising and under-delivering, we cannot show you everything at once. So we have put together this Frequently Asked Questions to help everyone get on the same page.

1. How long have you been working on the Romans?

We have been actively working on them in secret for about 6 months.

Over the years, PF2K and Andy P XIII scavenged the internet and the game files to piece together the original plans for the Romans...

Hello fellow AOEO players!

In the last couple of weeks we have been looking into how we could improve the connectivity between players. Given that all multiplayer games with the BANG Engine (AOM/AOE3/AOEO) are based on peer-to-peer the only way to currently play with each other is with the help of UPnP, port-forwarding or via a private VPN-System like Hamachi. Unfortunately UPnP doesn't always work and port-forwarding is a hassle to set up, especially for those who are not really tech-savvy.

We decided to look into how other platforms like Voobly, GameRanger or AOE3 work and deal with this issue. To give an understanding why those platform offer better connectivity than we do, we have to look what techniques/technologies are possible:

• Manual port-forwarding (Can be used with Celeste)
  
• UPnP (Can be used with Celeste)
  
• Relay-Server
  
• NAT-Punchthrough (Coming up!)

...

Hello there everyone! We are really excited to tell you that the Realms of the World Quest Pack is finally upon us!

As the biggest expansion pack ever to be added to Project Celeste, this update brings more than 15 new Quests, an entirely new region, 6 Legendary gear and an all-new Store, selling all-new gear and Celeste-exclusive Advisors!

Battle the servants of the Evil High Priest of Loder in over 15 new Quests. Available for solo and co-op play, these Quests offer brand new maps with an all new and refreshing look! Who are the servants of the Evil High Priest of Loder, you say? Well, there's a lot of them! But they wouldn't be called servants if they had no masters! Check them out here:

• Agnar, the Legendary Longbowman: With unmatched aim and precision, he lays waste to his opponents from a very long distance.

• Mannfall, the War Chief: Harnessing incredible strength, he boosts the health of...