The 2026 season, from the Royal Albert Hall to São Paulo — and what's still to come.
This is our running report on Age of Empires II competitive play in 2026: who won what, how big the prize pools got, and which events are worth blocking out in your calendar. Four S-Tier LANs, a new tier-one organisation, and the first esports event ever staged at the Royal Albert Hall — 2026 has already outgrown every season before it.
2026 didn't just add bigger prize pools — it changed the shape of the scene. A tier-one organisation walked out in January and another walked straight in two weeks later. Then came the biggest live audience the game has ever played in front of.
GamerLegion exits Age of Empires II after five years. Two weeks later, Team Vitality signs Hera, Liereyy and Hearttt.
Red Bull Wololo: Londinium. Sold-out Grand Final at the Royal Albert Hall with a 60-piece live orchestra.
Warlords V. Liereyy beats ACCM 5–3 online and ends Hera's grip on the top of the podium.
Brazilian Dynasty in São Paulo — the largest offline AoE2 event ever held in Latin America.
You are here. The League 3v3 main event is running now, with its offline final booked for Hamburg in November.
Every major title this year has gone to a Team Vitality player. Here's how each one played out.
Six days across three London venues, ending at the Royal Albert Hall — the first esports event the building has ever hosted. Three thousand fans watched the final games play out over a live 60-piece orchestra. Hera took $50,000 from the $170,000 AoE II side of the pool; Liereyy took $30,000. MarineLorD won the Age of Empires IV title, his third Wololo.
The one that broke the pattern. Hera went out in the round of 12 to Lewis, ending a run of consecutive S-Tier wins that had stretched back well into 2025. Liereyy came through the other side of the bracket and closed it out against ACCM for $14,000.
Twelve players, three days of Swiss at Team Liquid's Alienware facility, then playoffs in front of a crowd at the Espaço Center. Onimaru Esports and World's Edge built the whole map pool around Brazilian geography, Amazon rainforest to Sertão backlands. Every seed left with prize money.
T90's league remains the scene's most reliable structure — a long season of scheduled matches rather than a weekend sprint, which is exactly why it's become the standard reference for form going into the LANs. Season 6 qualifiers begin later this year.
Not an S-Tier event, and it isn't trying to be. Glitched is a festival LAN with a Scandinavian map pool, a dedicated tournament area and an open on-site qualifier — the kind of event that gets people to their first competitive weekend.
The scene's first serious attempt at a structured team competition, backed by World's Edge and run by Daniela, Rbase and sieste. Twenty-one teams came through a July qualifier; the grand final gets played on stage at The Garrison.
The back half of 2026 is built around one weekend in Hamburg. Everything below feeds into it.
Twenty-one qualified teams play out a full 3v3 season. The top of the table earns a seat at the offline final in Hamburg on 28 November.
Age of Mythology takes the stage at Greece's long-running gaming festival — worth watching if you follow the wider Age franchise.
The final route into Hamburg. Top four qualify for the main event; 5th–8th take $500 each and 9th–16th take $250.
The Age of Empires IV community event returns for a third edition.
Eight players, double elimination, at the CinemaxX Hamburg Dammtor — co-organised by BEING ESPORTS and Team Vitality. The League's 3v3 grand final is played live on 28 November. Tickets are on sale to the public.
First confirmed World's Edge-sponsored event of the new season.
The next full Titans season, and currently the largest confirmed event on the 2027 calendar.
The top of the field has consolidated. Team Vitality's three-player roster has taken every major title this year, which makes everyone chasing them the more interesting story going into Hamburg.
For five years GamerLegion was the closest thing AoE II had to a permanent tier-one org. They left the game on 2 January 2026. Thirteen days later, Team Vitality — a French organisation with rosters in Counter-Strike, League of Legends, Rocket League and VALORANT — announced its entry by signing Hera, Liereyy and Hearttt outright.
It has already paid off. Vitality took its first AoE II LAN trophy in April and is now co-organising a $50,000 LAN of its own. For a game that has historically run on volunteer organisers and community funding, having a top-tier org with an events budget is a genuine structural change.
Onimaru Esports brought the first large-scale AoE II LAN to Brazil. BEING ESPORTS runs The Garrison out of Hamburg and is now on its second edition. World's Edge, the Microsoft studio behind the game, is quietly underwriting most of the calendar — the Brazilian Dynasty, The League and The Garrison all carry its funding.
Below that sits a layer of long-running community organisers — T90Official, MembTV, Glitched, Rusaoc — who between them keep the game competitive fifty-two weeks a year rather than four.
| EventTournament | When & whereDetails | ResultOutcome |
|---|---|---|
| Red Bull Wololo: Londinium | 1–6 Apr · London, UK · LAN | Hera — 5–3 over Liereyy. $250,000 combined pool across AoE II and AoE IV. Sold out, 3,000 in attendance, 110,000+ peak viewers. |
| MembTV Warlords V | 7–24 May · Online · 16 players | Liereyy — 5–3 over ACCM for $14,000. $70,200 pool. |
| Glitched AoE2 Masters | 12–14 Jun · Sweden · LAN | Open community LAN at the Glitched festival. ≈$2,640 pool. |
| Brazilian Dynasty | 1–5 Jul · São Paulo · LAN | Hera — defeated Liereyy in the Bo7 final. $50,000 pool, paid across all twelve seeds. Peaked above 46,000 concurrent viewers. |
| The League — Season 1 | 10 Aug – 20 Sep · Online · 3v3 | In progress. 21 teams. $75,000 pool. Offline final 28 Nov in Hamburg. |
| The Garrison 2026 | 25–29 Nov · Hamburg · LAN | Upcoming. 8 players, double elimination. $50,000 pool. Qualifier runs 28 Sep – 4 Oct. |
The majors get the headlines, but the reason this scene holds together is the week-in, week-out circuit underneath them. Most of it is free to enter, and most of the current top eight came up through it.
Nearly every event above is broadcast free on Twitch and YouTube, usually with an English main stream plus community co-streams in Spanish, German, Portuguese, Chinese and Vietnamese. Liquipedia carries the schedules.
Most LANs seed one or two players directly and decide the rest through open online qualifiers — often ladder-based, then bracket. The Garrison's last-chance qualifier in late September is open, and four seats are still unclaimed.
Publisher funding, a tier-one org, a structured team league and a sold-out concert hall — all in one calendar year. The prize money is up, but the bigger shift is that the calendar now looks planned rather than improvised.
By results, Hera. He has won both of 2026's offline majors — Red Bull Wololo: Londinium and the Brazilian Dynasty — beating Liereyy in each grand final, and took the T90 Titans League 5 Platinum title in March. Liereyy is the clearest challenger; he won Warlords V in May, in a tournament where Hera went out early to Lewis. TheViper, ACCM and TaToH remain permanent fixtures in the deep rounds of every S-Tier bracket.
Red Bull Wololo: Londinium, held 1–6 April across three London venues. It carried a $250,000 combined prize pool across Age of Empires II and Age of Empires IV, with $170,000 on the AoE II side. The Grand Final sold out the Royal Albert Hall — the first esports event the venue has ever hosted — and was played in front of 3,000 fans with a 60-piece orchestra performing the game's soundtrack live. Peak viewership passed 110,000.
The measurable indicators all point up in 2026: larger prize pools, a first-ever tier-one org signing (Team Vitality), the game's largest live audience, a new $75,000 structured team league, and LANs in three countries. The counterweight is concentration — a small number of players take most of the prize money, and a lot of the calendar depends on World's Edge continuing to fund it. Both things are true at once.
The Garrison 2026, running 25–29 November at the CinemaxX Hamburg Dammtor in Germany. It's an eight-player, double-elimination 1v1 with a $50,000 prize pool, co-organised by BEING ESPORTS and Team Vitality, and it also hosts the offline grand final of The League's 3v3 season on 28 November. Public tickets are on sale.
It varies by organiser, but the usual pattern is a small number of direct invitations for top-ranked players, with the remaining seats decided through open online qualifiers. The Brazilian Dynasty seeded one player directly and filled the other eleven spots through international and regional qualifiers. The Garrison is running a last-chance qualifier from 28 September to 4 October, with the top four claiming main-event seats.
Team Vitality is currently the only tier-one organisation in the game, having signed Hera, Liereyy and Hearttt in January 2026 after GamerLegion left the scene at the start of the year. Beneath that, most competitive players are either independent or attached to community teams. Event organisation is handled by Onimaru Esports, BEING ESPORTS, MembTV, T90Official and Glitched, with much of the prize money underwritten by World's Edge.
Free on Twitch and YouTube. Each tournament runs an official English broadcast, and larger events add community co-streams in other languages. Liquipedia's Age of Empires wiki carries schedules, brackets and stream links for essentially every event on this page, and the World's Edge public esports calendar lists all publisher-sponsored tournaments up to twelve months ahead.
Fox AOE covers the competitive scene as it happens — results, brackets, upsets and the events worth staying up for. Follow us for the fast version, or browse the shop if you'd like to help keep the coverage running.
Terms and events that come up across our coverage of the 2026 season.
