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For the OP: if you haven't tried, you can turn off Depth of Field, Bloom and "Vignette" to make the picture clearer. If you want pixel-level clarity, you can also try turning off Anti-Aliasing and Sharpen together. Fog effects are up to your preference, but Map Lighting (color toning) will play a story role in some campaigns. Control-wise, I only have one suggestion: try setting the click-scrolling to "Legacy Behaviour" and see if you like it - it completely syncs map scroll to the mouse with no acceleration/deceleration. This is gonna be an epic LP. Tweak the visuals to make your eyes as comfortable as you like. /salute. Two nitpicks: Jossar posted:11 campaigns here just in Europe alone, though it is the most populated continent compared to the others. Example estimates: Europe: 38.5m in 1000, 73.5m in 1340, 50m in 1450 (source) South Asia: 85.2m in 1000, 105m in 1400, 125m in 1500 (source) China: 70~90m in 1200, 120~200m in 1600 (wikipedia & misc. online sources) Jossar posted:Herd animals... also fatten up over time if left alone OTOH in Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds, that non-AoE AoE game, you can garrison herdables in an Animal Nursery to generate a constant trickle of food. The same mechanic was independently invented in the Portuguese Civilization Mod for AoE2, whose author became a Forgotten Empires developer. It will eventually be adopted into AoE2DE in a future civ. ==== VostokProgram posted:Agreed that it is completely silly to have Muslim characters identify themselves or each other as "a Saracen" It would be both more sensible and more accurate to call the character "Egyptian Vizir", since that was the real ruler of Egypt at the time, to whom the caliph was a teenage puppet. ==== If y'all want to read more AoE rant, I wrote a little bit on behind-the-scenes situations in another thread. cuc fucked around with this message at 08:10 on Jun 8, 2023 |
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Apr 8, 2023 08:14
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Mazerunner posted:pretty sure OP was referring to the amount of campaigns, not the amount of people I blame too much time spent reading the Age communities, whose members tend to be evenly split between "balance-first" people who are like "game has too many civs to be balanced, delete some please?", and "history-first" people who can start complaining about history accuracy at the drop of a hat while demanding 100 more civs to properly cover the whole world. quote:also fattening livestock were in Age of Mythology Additionally, AoM is the only Age game to have Chickens as a unit, who are mechanically neither herdables nor hunts, but walking berry bushes. 
cuc fucked around with this message at 07:01 on Apr 9, 2023 |
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Apr 8, 2023 14:12
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Now that we've met Teutonic Knights, we can go back to this topic.NewMars posted:As a note: the Franks unit being throwing axemen, a type of combatant that stopped existing a century or two before this campaign is a remnant of how AOE2 was originally a migration-era/fall of Rome game. Which means that the latest expansion brings that whole idea full circle, I suppose. So AoE2 spans Late Antiquity to Late Medieval. It begins with "Rome has fallen, the world is up for grabs" and each player controlling a Great Migrations tribe, because that supports the mini-4X fantasy of building an empire from nothing, same reason Age 1 starts at the end of Ice Age in 9000 BCE, and Age 3 was about colonies. For Throwing Axeman, even though "Britons", "Franks" and "Teutons" were an archaic-sounding alienation technique to dress up England, France and Germany, the devs drew more inspiration from the names than one'd expect - the Welsh Longbowmen were Brythonic Celts, the Teuton gameplay design was 100% based on the Teutonic Order, and the Franks were really supposed to synthesize French knights, Charlemagne and francisca axes. It stayed into the final release, because it's good design to give the "best knights" civ a complementary unique unit, rather than "knight but better". The other two UUs we've played are also wonky. - Braveheart wasn't the only influence on Celts and their Woad Raiders; they were conceived as one of 3 "Raider" factions alongside Mongols and Vikings, who play by different rules from regular civs, more "Gauls fighting Rome" than medieval. Instead of Celts, you might expect the Goths in that role, but no, 'em Goths always law-biding citizens. - The Mamelukes are notorious: they ride double-humped Bactrian camels from the east side of Eurasia (to distinguish them from normal Camel Riders), and their thrown scimitars are as aerodynamic as the Franks' chest-sized double-edged axes. The most plausible origin: they have passed down Morgan Freeman's secret technique that sent a scimitar whirling through air to save Kevin Costner. - They expand on the anti-horse cavalry, "opposite of Europeans" role of Camels and Saracens, based on classical accounts of horses disturbed by camel smell. Their naming may be influenced by the Battle of Ain Jalut, where Egypt's Mamluk dynasty defeated Hulagu Khan and stopped the Mongol advance into the southwest. - Historically, the Mamluks were part of a trend started in the Abbasid Caliphate, where Islamic rulers relied on slave soldiers as their fighting forces, typically of Turkic nomad origins. The Mamluk dynasty is what happens when these soldiers overthrew their master (namely Saladin's Ayyubid dynasty), and not the only example. cuc fucked around with this message at 17:43 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 12, 2023 07:19
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We have more talking points!Jossar posted:You have a maximum population limit of 75, which isn't a lot, although apparently Dynasties of India raised this limit. The Ensemble rules - 75 pop, Wonder & Relic victory enabled - have never been popular. The earliest AoE2 tournaments were played at 150 pop; the competitive scene soon settled into 200 pop Conquest. One of the consequences of the game being originally balanced for 75 pop is the frequent "Trash Wars" - the situation where players have exhausted all gold mines on the map, and can only keep spamming non-gold trash units. The community have simply embraced this as part of a match's natural lifecycle. quote:Then I destroy a small part of the wall to let my army out. In every Age game since AoK, there has been an on-screen skull button for deleting. AoE2DE has enhanced the feature with multi-delete and "Safe Delete" confirmation before killing important units, but inexplicably removed the on-screen button itself. 
cuc fucked around with this message at 18:27 on Apr 12, 2023 |
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Apr 12, 2023 12:06
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Rody One Half posted:I thought this was the coolest poo poo in the world as a kid, I'd send whole suicide squads of priests against the AI just for converting whatever they ran into.  As addenum to my post, we also need to take into count the Great Pop Cap Schism between Ensemble & community. Low population makes both high-power units and the ability to turn them over a lot scarier (though unlike AoE2's Knights, gold Cavalry in AoE1 always sucked compared to the infantry or the non-gold Chariot Archer). Sacrificing your admittedly very powerful Priest to remove a maxed out enemy becomes a lot more attractive.
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Apr 12, 2023 16:50
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Yeah, here we have one of AoK's better levels. In this map, the role of Jerusalem is played by the Byzantine civ, giving them tougher buildings and Cataphracts. Due to AoE2DE changing our earlier run-in with the Jerusalem faction to be played by Franks, this is the first time we see the civ. Inside AoE2, which wants its civs divided neatly between geo-cultural groups, the Eastern Roman Empire sits in an awkward position: deserving its own group, but not urgently enough to get one. In original AoK, they used the same Middle Eastern architecture set as the 3 Islamic civs (Saracens, Persians, Turks). Building mosques as Byzantines had caused the community no end of ire. AoE2DE then shifted them and another disputed civ to a renovated Mediterranean building set. On top of that, AoE2DE at launch did not support changing a scenario player's architecture style (the feature was added in Lords of the West). For this map, that means we are looking at a Jerusalem encircled by the Walls of Constantinople, covered in Renaissance deco, sitting at its heart Barracks bearing the Red Cross shields of Genoa, and replicas of Florence's Santa Maria Novella church. Is the ME set a perfect depiction of the Middle East? A commenter has rightly summarized it as an Orientalist dream, imagining Middle East as a dark, dusty foreign land, the embodiment of both opulence and alien threat. Also, its castle model isn't even from there. What it had is being a very accomplished realization of this exoticizing vision, which has been lost in AoE2DE's flat, unthoughtful recreation of AoK buildings. Aside from the mosque, how good is the set for Byzantines? It has gentle Greek-looking roofs, but they are mixed in with Moorish merlons and horseshoe gates. That's one reason why a hope of the history-inclined players is for them to add Georgians and/or Armenians, and make a new Eastern Christian set they can share with Byzantines and Bulgarians. However, nothing is simple in AoE2's world of Serial Architectural Compromises... quote:The Archers of the Eyes are a set of hero Arbalests with 100% accuracy. They're useful to keep around, especially early on, but they're not essential. Arbalest: The Definitive Editions have updated some names of in-game items to avoid sensitive words, correct mistakes, and in rare cases, attempting to improve accuracy. One of the updates' goals is to ensure a non-siege engine unit's name refers to the person rather than the weapon. Thus "Camels" become "Camel Riders" (which also avoids confusion with the animal itself), "War Club" becomes "Club Warrior". However, this guideline is enforced as inconsistently as the others, and Arbalest is renamed Arbalester, despite the word also referring to crossbow users. Not to mention the many units that refer to the same historical troops, but are called different names across Age games. In short, don't bring an editor's work habits to the Age games. cuc fucked around with this message at 05:42 on Apr 14, 2023 |
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Apr 13, 2023 10:43
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A new patch exited public beta this week, the "largest balance update ever" to AoE2DE since launch, bringing a fresh round of features and glitches, including another pathfinding-fix-that-breaks-it-some-more. Hope they don't interfere with your enjoyment of this LP too much! As this patch turns 2 more QoL mods - exclamation marks  over Idle Villagers, and Small Trees - into built-in functions (following the earlier officiating of Tile Grid, and Building Range Indicators), let's talk about the tension between thematic flavor and competitive QoL.The Small Trees family of mods exist as a bandaid solution to a real problem: AoE2's main selling point, its massive buildings and vegetations that made the game felt "more realistic than any RTS", has rendered gaps in your defense perimeters harder to see. It does not help that most tree and building sprites protrude out of their tiles, appearing to cover more ground than their real footprints. Nor does the game have the Stronghold series' "flatten terrain" feature (if it did, surely you can imagine all competive games played with it on forever), or any convenient way to detect the gaps. In lieu of any systematic fix, shrinking the trees makes one half of the problem more tolerable.  The community lets you further tailor the experience by darkening the tiles & pruning shrunken trees into more uniform shapes...  ...or turn everything into cubes, even cliffs (the brown cubes), which are actually static objects in AoE1/2, unconnected from real terrain. (The above also shows Tech Preview, another popular mod family that serves as reminder to your civ's access to key techs. Devs would later add an official, but not necessarily better-looking Tech Preview that pops up when you mouse over your Civ Emblem/Tech Tree button in the upper right.) One focus of this flavor-QoL tension I find interesting is the need to unlock two diplomatic abilities in AoE1/2, two of a few vestigial remains of AoE1's origin as a real-time 4X/god game before they turned it into a Warcraft 2 clone. First, the player needs a Market before they can "Tribute" resources to another player, apparently conceived for 4X interactions with AI if the name's any indication, at the cost of losing a percentage of resources as taxes, which can be reduced with techs. While an AoE tradition, being able to transfer resources between players at all is rare in RTSes due to how it thoroughly warps player behavior. With the ability, the optimal way to play team games is to "Sling" - for team players to specialize into pure military and resources roles. Slinging is banned in all tournaments, but the Tribute ability itself has never been changed. The second is the need to research a tech before allied players can share their map vision - Writing at Bronze Age Government Center in AoE1, Cartography at Feudal Age Market in AoE2 - you can see how contrary to modern multiplayer RTS intuition this rule is. Like many legacy issues, the rule was dealt with in steps, steadily and slowly. The Forgotten - the mod-turned-first DLC of AoE2HD - used a stopgag solution, making the tech free and almost instantly researched. It became auto-researched when a Market is built in a 2018 patch. At the end of 2022, an AoE2DE update finally made vision sharing at match start an option that is "on" by default. ==== A final note while we are still on the Market specialist civ - the global resource market may be one of AoE2's most underrated innovations. It would become the inspiration for Offworld Trading Company, an entire RTS centered on battling with market fluctuations. Jossar posted:Saracen Soldier My Lord, this mole was made by Alexander the Great when he lay siege to Tyre in 332 BCE. Let us hope we are more successful. More seriously, to real medieval people, Alexander was only known through many garbled legends with little bearing on history - part of the Matter of Rome romance cycle and Nine Worthies to Europeans, King of Two Horns or Iskandar in Middle East. They wouldn't know a thing about who in which year besieged Tyre, so dating it with Hijri would be as ahistorical as with Anno Domino  . I don't mind this line as an edutainment touch.
cuc fucked around with this message at 09:51 on May 21, 2023 |
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Apr 14, 2023 09:07
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 Dark, bulky and imposing, Ensemble's original ME Castle sprite is a marvel to behold. However, the community had spent the longest time uncertain of its real world basis: Krak des Chevaliers (Crusader castle in Syria), Saladin or Ottoman-era forts in Cairo, or Sasanian empire citadels? Turns out it's neither, but based on the 15th century Castel Nuovo in Naples. Those characteristics that make it so unique and memorable - the thick round towers, the tooth-like "ravelins" at its base, were experimental designs intended to resist contemporary gunpowder. What's weirder is that the Ensemble artists apparently were so impressed by the "teeth ravelins", they also added similar slimmer-on-top "buttresses" to the base of the Western European Castle model. 
cuc fucked around with this message at 18:50 on Apr 14, 2023 |
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Apr 14, 2023 18:46
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Jossar posted:There's a Persian Outpost at the bottom of the map that's pretty much just a dock, but that's all you need as a trading partner. As the wiki notes, the ally and reinforcement may be based on a real Muslim fleet that broke through the Crusader blockade to supply Acre, but at this time, all of Saladin's Muslim neighbors were varying forms of remnants of the Abbasid Caliphate and Seljuk Empire, and the only dynasty that styled themselves Persian Shahs was in Khwarazm, Central Asia, some 3000 km away in the northeast. This improbable "elves reinforcing Helm's Deep" moment may be intentional foreshadowing, because we'll be seeing the Khwarazmian Empire soon enough. quote:Accursed Tower and the Tower of Flies. Highly effective super-towers that can mow down enemy troops with ease. Well, the Accursed Tower does at any rate. The Tower of Flies just sort of sits being useless in the bay. I make sure the Accursed Tower is fully garrisoned to max out its bonuses. Here's a thing: the first Assassin's Creed is the other major video game depiction of the Third Crusade, set immediately after Acre had fallen to Crusaders (the historical outcome we just averted). It features three cities: Damascus, Acre, and Jerusalem. As would become series tradition, the game recreates many architectural landmarks of Damascus and Jerusalem, including an (anachronistically) golden Dome of the Rock like we saw in this LP. For the sake of stylistic contrast, AC1 represents Crusader Acre as a tropey "plague & dung" medieval European city, complete with a towering cathedral half-built. Because this Acre is so heavily fictionalized, people always miss the historical structures it does contain: that includes the Accursed Tower and the Tower of Flies, based on their real ruins. The Accursed Tower would become the stage for an event of consequence in Assassin's Creed 2 - if you played AC2 or watched a cutscene compilation, you know what it is.  From Geop's LP: Overlooking the Tower of Flies from the impossible cathedral. (If I remember correctly. Haven't checked.) Meanwhile, the two towers in AoE2 reuse the old Western European tower sprite from the earliest days of AoK's development. It was the only tower model in this "thick" size, and had no counterpart in other building sets. AoE2DE would make up for that via adding cultural variations of a hero "Fortified Tower", although all the new tower models would be loads more luxurious than this one's raw masonry and crude roof tiles from being made as an ordinary WE Castle Age building. cuc fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 15, 2023 17:56
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Ah, the Mongol campaign. If the experience of revisiting other Ensemble Stuidos campaigns as a better historically informed adult can be summed up as "I see what you did there", then The Secret History of the Mongols: ES Edition is more like "WTF did I just watch!?"Cythereal posted:Chinese lose a lot in the hands of players who aren't very skilled, but correspondingly are extremely powerful in talented hands. Players who care more about your improvement would argue that Britons and Franks are too narrow and economically too strong to build good habits. A civ that helps beginners then needs to combine a wide tech tree (to teach the flexible use of all units) and limited economic bonus (to hone the macro fundamentals) without an easy crutch or being too unconventional. Some civs suggested using these criteria include Byzantines, Magyars, Italians, Vietnamese. Saracens are also often suggested, though their Market trading bonus is both a crutch at the beginning, and plays unconventionally at high level.
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Apr 16, 2023 18:41
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Crucible, Historical Outcome In a way this level is the strangest, because Secret History has a ready-tailored, court-sanctioned heroic narrative for Temujin's origin: born into exile, tough upbringing, childhood oath of brotherhood with Jamukha, working as mercenaries for Ong Khan - a proxy of the distant Jurchen Golden Empire, growing rivalry with Jamukka over who would be the future unifier of the steppes, the bitter end. The level could have had the same structure while keeping this traditional narrative, with a final showdown added at the end, instead of "you play remorseless monsters all the way". The "boiling alive" punishment was what Jamukha did to his prisoners of war after defeating Temujin, and his cruelty was what caused tribes to defect from the winning side and join Temujin. Kara-Khitai: So rather than letting Jamukha be the Level 1 boss, they felt they could introduce Kara-Khitan as an early threat to connect the first level to the next. Kereyids a.k.a. Keraites: this is the tribe led by Temujin's ex-boss Ong Khan, who later plotted against Temujin's growing power. Ong Khan was killed, and the tribe scattered and run away off the steppes. Naimans: Naimans were a major tribe that initially sided with Jamukha. The Kereids and Naimans were Christians - this is going to matter in the next chapter. Tayichi'uds: They were Temujin's bitter enemies, and were completely destroyed. Ungirrads: The tribe of Temujin's mother and first wife. Uighurs: They ruled the steppes once. Due to a series of events, they had left the steppes westward for the Central Asian part of Western China a few centuries ago. The AoE wiki thinks this faction may represent the Qocho Kingdom, an oasis civilization ruled by the arrived Uighurs. Ensemble must be dimly aware that they speak a Turkic language, which is why they mistakenly had the Kereids played by Turks in original AoK. DE corrected Kereids to Mongols, and let Uighurs be Tatars in DE (in that civ's secondary role as "basket for pre-Chinggis Khan Turkic speakers"). Also if you want to go down the rabbit hole: 1) The word "Tatar" or its equivalents have an extremely complicated usage history. We'll speak more on the chaos during the Tatar campaign. 2) To steppe nomads, their tribal families were more constant than the larger confederations and empires their tribes had allegiance to. In steppe history, you sometimes see the same tribe reemerge under the wings of different empires. And today you have Mongol Naimans, Kazakh Naimans, and Hazara Naimans in Afghanistan, speaking respectively Mongol, Turkic and Persian languages - the tribal family groups have stayed together as they spread out with the Mongol Empire, but their cultures and languages have assimilated into the local majority. cuc fucked around with this message at 12:20 on Apr 17, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 10:47
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A Life of Revenge, Historical Outcome Kara-Khitai: They really were heroes of their own epic. Amid the chaos of the fall of the Tang dynasty, a Mongolic people from Northeast China (Manchuria), the Khitans, seized much of Northern China and founded the Liao dynasty. They had an interesting government where they had four seasonal capital cities for a roaming court, and administered the Han Chinese and steppe territories by different systems. Their participation in international trade gave rise to the "Kithay" or "Cathay" family of names for China in many languages. 200 years later, the Liao was losing ground to another northeastern upstart, the Jurchens' Jin or Golden empire (unrelated to the Han Chinese "Jin" of 3rd to 5th century). A prince named Yelü Dashi, the last hope of the dynasty, took flight into Central Asia to re-establish a Chinese-style court there (which was definitely not a big tent), now known as Qara-Khitan or Western Liao. This put them on a collision course with the Seljuk Empire, masters of the entire Middle East east of Egypt, recently recovering from decades of instability. At the behest of Khwarazm, in the 1141 Battle of Qatwan, Yelü Dashi decisively defeated the Seljuks, and took over their overlordship of Central Asia, sending Seljuks back into a falling trajectory. It has been theorized that Crusader hearsay of this battle was the seed for the European legend of Prester John - a priest-king who presides over a marvelous Christian kingdom, a beacon of hope from outside the infidels surrounding Europe. Kushluk, or Kuchlug: If not for the pesky Temujin, he would have been the second coming of Yelü Dashi.  You can find a summary of his life on Wikipedia, which makes for a short and riveting read. To recap: - Son of the Naiman chief, he took refuge in the great empire of Qara-Khitan, where cracks were already showing in its foundation. - He managed to marry an imperial princess, and usurp his father-in-law with Khwarazm's help. - Remember that the Naimans were Nestorian Christians, and the Qara-Khitan royal family were Buddhists, ruling over a region that was being steadily assimilated into a Turko-Persianate Islam culture (both peacefully and violently). After converting to Buddhism, for who knows what reason, he revoked the empire's religious freedom policy, a cornerstone of its rule, and began persecuting Muslims and enjoying his newfound power in general, as if he'd completely forgotten about THAT GUY who beat his dad and made him run all the way here in the first place. - A city he was attacking called the Mongols to help. Time for BEHIND YOU.JPG Jossar posted:Mission 2 Ending Text And as we can see, the problem is that Ensemble designers figured "hey, Chapter 2! time to teach kids about Mongol terror and psychological warfare!", and because the actual story is so not that, they had to chop practically everything off to fit it into their box. This story by itself just happens to be perfect material for a different writer, someone who wants a more positive portrayal of Chinggis Khan, to contrast Kuchlug's petty tyranny (and the coercive conversion and defacing of religious art by the Qara-Khanids who ruled before Yelü Dashi) with the Khan's law of religious tolerance. "Sowing fields with salt" is of course, American nerds invoking lazy Classical tropes out of habit. ==== Filthydelphia, author of some of the best official campaigns you'll see in this LP, is also a prolific maker of custom campaigns on the side. If you want a reimagining of these two levels, try his single scenario Rise of Genghis Khan. It's not his best work, but shows off some modern gameplay design. This is also a question for the OP: after we've cleared most of the official campaigns, will you be interested to do custom ones? cuc fucked around with this message at 07:06 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 17, 2023 19:02
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C-Euro posted:This is the only thing that I know about competitive AoE2 (oh God it's almost a decade old) When you have thumbnails of AoE videos lined up, the originals will always stand out among the DEs for their crystal clear colors. Cythereal posted:True, but I'm doing these just as a general overview, not a strategy guide. You can look up a tech tree on a wiki if you want. 1) attach a link to an info site like this one 2) Give a quick, non-exhaustive look at the civ's most notable tech tree characteristics that either are the most responsible for shaping its playstyle, or fun trivia (like "Turks are the only civ that doesn't benefit from allying with Vietnamese"). That generally means attack and armor upgrades, max. levels of advantageous unit lines, impeding ("boo, an Archer civ without Thumb Ring!") or crippling upgrade absences (the Dravidian Stable), Monk techs if they make a Monk civ play differently from other Monk civs, econ techs if their interact with the military in a way worth highlighting. I also think you can bring in more trivia or memes that have become shared community lore - some even referenced in the DE achievements, like Daut Castle or Hoang. cuc fucked around with this message at 06:51 on Apr 18, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 06:15
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Personal thought: when AoK came out, this level's Great Wall was a true test to my computer hardware, singlehandedly responsible for making the framerate barely playable. ==== Into China, Historical Outcome From a designer's vantage point, this level's intentions are clear. The real conquest of China happened in stages over decades, from before taking Khwarazm, to basically the end of Mongol expansion. For a campaign of only 6 levels, they wanted to give the player a sense of forward momentum from east to the doorstep of familiar Europe, not traveling back and forth between battlefields thousands of miles away like general Subutai. quote:"Now all of Mongolia is in the grasp of Genghis Khan. Beyond are two vast empires: China to the east and Persia to the west." Following this logic, they assumed the Uighur and Qara-Khitan factions who appeared early in Mongol history as part of "Mongolia", not quite grasping that the Mongols had already ventured into Central Asia when dealing with them, and the Persian Khwarazm was this medium-sized country that was Qara-Khitan's neighbor and on-and-off vassal, while the actual vast Persian heartland was being occupied by remnants of the former superpower Seljuks. In fact, Persian history seems to be a genuine blindspot in Ensemble's knowledge, who had to design the civ after the pre-Medieval Sasanian Empire, and wrote its civ bio in the weasel words of a rushed homework.   (As of the writing, the left map has a major inaccuracy - the Yellow River had changed course in the period, joining the sea via the Huai River on the pictured Jin-Song border - the dividing line between Northern & Southern China. But it's enough for now.) You may have put this level beside a historical map, and wondered whether it bears the slightest relation to real geography. Fret not, there is in fact a logic to it! - The level broadly projects the real world's north to its top right, south to its bottom left; - Start by looking at the historical map's northwest, for the Yellow River's unmissable "n"-shaped bend; - A short northern river separates the "Engineers" camp from the rest, and the river represents the top horizontal stroke of the "n"; - Beyond the eastern wide waters is the walled city of Jin in Northern China, and the wide waters represent the right downward stroke of the "n"; - Across the southern river lies the land strip of Song in Southern China, and the narrow river represents the "w"-shaped course of the Yangtze River; - The highland at the center seats Hsi Hsia/Western Xia in Northwestern China, and the highland represents the Loess Plateau; - West of Xi Xia, protected by a square moat, is a faction called "Tanguts" in-game. Now, a "Tanguts" faction separate from Western Xia has always confounded AoE2 players, because the latter was founded and ruled by the Tangut people. ...Unless you know that the Mongol empire referred to Tibetans as Tanguts (they were culturally and linguistically very close). Was Ensemble intentionally using "Tanguts" to represent Tibetans? Then why is Xi Xia on high ground and "Tanguts" aren't? We can't be sure about the faction name, but here's a good guess at what this moated town itself stands for - the Song city of Xiangyang, which withstood Mongol siege for 6 years in the most decisive battle in the fall of Song. This is more likely coincidental than intended, but the south river may also be seen as a synthesis of the Yangtze and the Huai, and its convergence with the Yellow River would then fit the aforementioned course change. Factional Who's Who: Song: The Song dynasty marked an important transition point in the social history of China. Continuing transformations that begun in Tang, the technology of block printing had enabled more people to be literate than ever, and combined with the Imperial Examination system for selecting government officials, they created a society in which powerful aristocrats were a thing of the past, a person's status was no longer defined by birth, and everybody in theory had a chance at upward mobility. This most prosperous, most enlightened empire of the High Medieval world only had one problem: it wasn't actually that successful at achieving many of its strategic goals, like stopping the Yellow River's rampage, keeping the court from descending into catfights between overeducated mandarins, or militarily reclaiming the northern lands. In its first period, the Northern Song, they had to settle with signing a peace treaty with Liao. After the Jin empire had replaced Liao and weren't going to keep the status quo, a further series of Ignobel-worthy deft shenanigans left the Song hanging by in the south, their northern capital Kaifeng now belonging to the Jin. Except things were pretty snazzy down there in Southern Song's "temporary capital" Lin'an near the east coast: the climate was pleasant, and global trade with the Middle East had kept the cash rolling in. Life was good, especially when a new steppe nation had risen to be your ally in finally destroying the hated Jin. Xi Xia, or Western Xia: Of these coexisting empires, the Song was the only one ruled by Han Chinese. This wasn't a unique situation; what's unique is that advancing technology had enabled the other states, including Liao and Jin, to each create their own writing systems, and develop their own written culture. Surviving print books seem to show Xi Xia being fairly successful at that. They held the strategically crucial Hexi Corridor (Hexi = West of the Yellow River('s Bend)), a northwesterly stretch of plains between mountain ranges. Song sources recorded Xi Xia innovations in military tactics and technology, including "the best" iron swords, and some sort of camel-mounted catapult. Chinggis Khan himself died during the final siege on the Xi Xia capital in 1227. The nation was wiped out by the Mongols. The Great Wall: Xi Xia and Jin built their sections of the Great Wall. The majority of the Great Wall would always be unadorned earthen walls stretching over deserts, not those postcard photos you often see. Jin: The Golden empire, the Song's nemesis who took over the entire Northern China, they were latecomers to the game of sophisticated culture. There are interesting stories to be told about Jin and their metal lifestyle, though today one of the more popular internet talking points is the "Iron Pagoda" - their super-heavy cavalry. Being conquered by Mongols wasn't the end of Jin's Jurchens. 4 centuries later, they would rule the last dynasty of China using a new name - the Manchu. Tibetans: Tibet was fractured at the time. After conquering Khwarazm, Qara-Khitan, Xi Xia and Jin, the Mongol empire had virtually encircled the Tibetan Plateau. A few incursions later, the factions of Tibet submitted. The Mongol empire appointed the prodigy scholar Phagpa to be the region's nominal governor; Phagpa would create a writing system for the Mongol language. His script ended up not seeing much use, but became the inspiration for the Korean writing system Hangul. Dali: And here, in the subtropical southwestern corner of China, neighboring Vietnam, is another empire that's not mentioned enough - Dali. They were a civilization that's culturally fairly close to Han Chinese, but also having its own writing system and Buddhist sect. The Mongols conquered Dali by going through Tibet. Unfortunately, Ming, the dynasty following the Mongols' Yuan, would do too good a job at erasing Dali culture, shrouding the civilization in more mystery than it should. ==== If you want a mildly more accurate take on the conquest of China, play AoE4's The Mongol Empire campaign, consisting of a few "snapshot" battles in China and Eastern Europe. If you want to explore the forgotten civilization of Dali, it may surprise you that there's a custom campaign for that, about Dali's struggles with its Southeast Asian neighbors. Based on a pop history article where the writer took some significant dramatic licenses, from what I heard. The author of Dali also has an as yet untranslated campaign for Yue Fei, the greatest hero of Song, who might have had a chance at taking back Northern China. cuc fucked around with this message at 08:41 on Jun 8, 2023 |
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Apr 18, 2023 21:55
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Updated the Into China post with more geographical info, including a better guide on how to read AoE2's Campaign Map That Contoured the Largest Real World Area Into a Square.quote:
cuc fucked around with this message at 06:53 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 06:01
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The Horde Rides West: The AoE wiki has a detailed comparison of this level with history that you should read. I do have a few things to add:   The geography of this level is based on the area around Aral Sea - the world's largest salt lake that's today tragically dying due to the USSR's excessive use of its source waters to irrigate cotton farms. Two great rivers feed Aral Sea, the Syr Darya in the north and the Amu Darya in the south. The Amu is also known as the Oxus in Latin, giving the region east of it the name "Transoxiana" or land beyond the Oxus, and "Khwarazm" (or any spelling variant) refers to the part of Amu drainage directly south of Aral Sea, both regions populated by oasis cities profitting from the Silk Road trade. The name also shouldn't be confused with Khorasan, which is further south and mostly desert, or Greater Khorasan, which further covers Afghanistan. In the level map, you can see a sliver of the Caspian Sea on the left corner, and a stump of a river representing the Amu, cut short by the mountains inserted to segregate the players' two armies. The real-life arid region is also depicted as verdant and covered in forests, while our starting southern base is on brown earth - such greenery wouldn't be seen until the south bank of Caspian Sea, the food basket of Persia. They then squeezed far off Rus' onto the northwestern edge. Later, we'll discuss how these geographical deviations are culminated results of the campaign's narrative design. cuc posted:Personal thought: when AoK came out, this level's Great Wall was a true test to my computer hardware, singlehandedly responsible for making the framerate barely playable. While well-optimized (in the Ensemble days), the Age series is also known for its general audience appeal, and often ended up being played on family or school computers that are very old or cheap, or both. Do you have any story of Age games visibly exceeding your hardware capabilities? cuc fucked around with this message at 09:00 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 19, 2023 20:15
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For some light reading on Mongol anecdotes and events that AoE2 skipped over, there's this New Yorker piece on Middle Eastern perspectives on Mongols... and Americans. ==== Another thing of note from The Horde Rides West: Genghis Khan Campaign posted:Mission 4 Starting Text Whoever Ensemble's source is, they followed this logic: Subutai's ancestral clan was called the Uriankhai. Meanwhile, the Mongols famously used "Uriankhai" to refer to several closely affliated "not actually Mongol" groups, including the Tuvans, and certain Siberian forest peoples. Many Siberian forest tribes have been reindeer herders to this day. Ergo, Subutai was also a reindeer man. It's also most likely wrong. Wikipedia: quote:Rashid-al-Din Hamadani described the Forest Uriyankhai as extremely isolated Siberian forest people living in birch bark tents and hunting on skis. Despite the similarity in name to the famous Uriyankhan clan of the Mongols, Rashid states that they had no connection. And Subutai's dad and uncle had documented jobs that didn't involve sleeping in bark tents and thinking of herding sheep and "living in towns, cities or on the plains as great suffering": they were blacksmiths. Negostrike posted:When AOE 3 demo came out it ran badly on the flimsy PC I had back then. I still kept playing it a lot anyways. Cythereal posted:Voting A: Saladin. That campaign holds a bit of a special place in my heart, because it was the first time I'd ever seen a depiction of the Crusades that was sympathetic to the Muslims and portrayed the Crusaders as bad guys, hooray public schools in the Deep South of the US. I'm reminded of this article examining a similar experience with the campaign from an Irish Catholic background. cuc fucked around with this message at 08:57 on Apr 24, 2023 |
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Apr 20, 2023 19:57
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Today's reading: ACOUP is a blog by a Roman military history expert primarily focusing on the intersection of pop culture and foundational knowledge about history and historiography. It has an article series that introduces some basic facts of steppe life (with asides on Great Plains natives) through the lens of criticizing the poor worldbuilding of the Dothraki: That Dothraki Horde The blog also had a minor post on the simple fact that Age of Empires series' 4X-inspired, Dune 2-invented, Warcraft 2-derived RTS gameplay doesn't resemble real empires in history. Duh, the RTS gameplay model is based on founding and fighting for interplanetary resources extraction colonies, of course they have simplified away occupation of land and local populations - unless they specifically modeled these factors in, like Seven Kingdoms or Rise of Nations. Why Are There No Empires in Age of Empires? And somehow this post, the sociology equivalent of pointing out "the earth is round", is still the only thing many people know the blog for. I'd even seen somebody vehemently dislike it! cuc fucked around with this message at 19:12 on Apr 21, 2023 |
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Apr 21, 2023 19:03
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Another fun fact: in original AoK, Subotai would announce his arrival with a strange "I come!" DE has replaced the line with a soldier making the announcement, removing Subotai's only line of dialog from this campaign. No worry, the medieval world's most well-traveled general not only has a speaking role in DE, he'll speak a lot more. Also: quote:Subotai's second army built a pontoon to the east and crossed it to raze the Hungarian camp (represented by the ice crossing). There was no ice during the actual battle, which took place in the spring, and the bridge was not destroyed. ==== BlazetheInferno posted:This was the first map to have ice terrain. It didn't technically exist in Age of Kings. And you can tell because units walking across it would make splashy footsteps; the ice is actually repainted shallows. It was clearly an unfinished feature Ensemble were dissatisfied with, hidden from the scenario editor and not used in other scenarios. They'd formally introduce Ice and Snow with unit footprints in The Conquerors, and snow would cover buildings - which is achieved by pasting a few ugly snow pile and icicle sprites over the roofs, a feat of genius half-assery that's uniquely Ensemble. Houses also don't have snow-covered versions, except for a single icicle hanging from the centers of Dark Age Houses, looking like an abandoned job. Neither do the animated Mills. ("Genius half-assery" is I feel, the most accurate description of Ensemble's style.)  Left: Age of Kings Ice terrain; Right: The Conquerors Ice terrain Another nature object group AoC replaced is the rocks:  Left: The Conquerors Rocks; Right: Age of Kings Rocks See, Farm queueing, scenario unit renaming and hero traits (regeneration and conversion immunity) weren't the only general features The Conquerors added! OK, a lot more, but these are the ones off the top of my head. quote:Mission 6 Ending Text Meanwhile Secret History's account is more human (quote from a random online article): quote:One day, Genghis had been hunting in the mountains of his homeland. While resting in the shade of a tree, he was overcome by the beauty of the landscape: “What a beautiful view! Bury me here when I pass away.” cuc fucked around with this message at 21:17 on Apr 21, 2023 |
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Apr 21, 2023 20:10
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cncgnxcg posted:Cremona (formerly known as Carcano, no idea why this was changed) Carcano isn't a city, it's a sparsely populated rural area north of Milan, best known for the Battle of Carcano where Barbarossa lost to the Milanese. The level as designed had Carcano in the north, Crema in the east, the Adda River flowing from Lake Como, and you are converting Crema and attacking Milan. That's the extent of its semblance to real geography. It does seem like a net gain to rename the ally faction from "name of a battlefield" to the local ally Barbarossa actually had and helped take back Crema, even if the location is mildly askew.   The DE map slide removed all the context outside "Milan and a river".  
cuc fucked around with this message at 11:57 on Apr 25, 2023 |
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Apr 23, 2023 21:38
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Points of Interest: Holy Roman Emperor   This level represents the Empire of the Teutons' fractured state. The rivers are abstractions of the Rhein, Main, Danube and Elbe. Barbarossa's starting town in the center represents his home turf of Swabia and Franconia, surounded by, clockwise from 12 o'clock: Saxony, Bohemia, Cuman mercenaries in Hungary, Austria, Bavaria, Burgundy, and Lorraine. In original AoK, the 3-o'clock Cuman mercenaries were the anachronistic "Mongols", and Lorraine at 10 o'clock was "Swabia", which is weird, as Barbarossa started as the Duke of Swabia himself. However, even this vision of HRE is deceiving. A more truthful depiction of HRE's nature would be those maps that show it as a dizzying patchwork of hundreds of tiny fiefdoms. No lord had total power over their domain, and power must be constantly brokered between lord and vassals. This was Barbarossa's life when he succeeded the Duchy of Swabia; it would continue to be when he became Emperor of the Romans. quote:Mission 1 Ending Text Henry the Lion This level is an abstraction of expansion into Poland by German lords. The river in the level represents the Oder. quote:Mission 2 Ending Text In original AoK, these lines were an anachronistic riff on Lebensraum, because Deustchland plus Poland equals Blitzkrieg to American nerds who only knew Roman Empire and WW2 amirite. You can still catch a whiff of that in the DE rewrite. ==== Serial Architectural Compromiser Episode 4 Welcome back to our exploration of inconvenient architecture decisions in AoE2! When The Forgotten DLC added the Magyar and Slavic civilizations, an Eastern European civ group was naturally created, and people began calling the architecture set of Teutons and Goths (and Vikings) "Central European". This was not Ensemble's original intent, who called the set "EEurope", and would have used the set for Magyars or Slavs, if they had chosen either over Huns, "Habsburgs" or Swiss from the set's expansion candidates. One place you'll see this is the Feudal Age set, among AoE2's most unique.   In contrast to the Western European set's thatch, the roofings here are an ambiguous plant material, cut into irregular ribbons with rugged jutting ends, then haphazardly laid onto the roof, like few things you've seen in real life. The aesthetics of roughness are striking, but the practicality leaves one in doubt: whatever the material's properties, why wouldn't the builders do the best they can to trim the edges, and stack them in an efficient pattern that do not leave gaping seams for the elements? I believe the explanation may be found in a Moscow Film set for a mythical ancient Russia, aiming for visual impact over realism:  More of the set here. cuc fucked around with this message at 09:19 on Apr 25, 2023 |
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Apr 24, 2023 21:04
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quote:Technowolf posted:Rise of Rome was full of interesting decisions. Sure, Romans and Carthaginians, get them in, but Palmyra? And the Macedonians were pretty much already covered by the Greeks. And yet, no Celtic tribes of any flavor, even the more famous ones like the Gauls or the Britons, no Germanic tribes, not even a non-Roman Italic tribe. According to the civ's leader list, Palmyrans in RoR perform triple duty as Palmyrene Empire + Kingdom of Pontus (Mithridates VI) + Numidians, a "basket" for miscellaneous enemies of Rome, or from another perspective, African and Levantine interlopers between major powers of Classical to Late Antiquity. Their gameplay identity is defined by the more expensive & better Villagers. They play a few other minor roles in the campaigns. Jobbo_Fett posted:There's no way the old campaigns aren't getting ported - also guess I'm spending a weekend re-beating every AoE1 campaign For porting them: it's not that simple. This DLC has enlarged the tiles to AoE2's size, meaning all buildings are larger, and a tile accomodates more units, which necessitates changes to building HP, ranges and AOE sizes; AoE2's formation system also means unit behavior is completely different from AoE1. The entire balance has to be rejiggered for these changes, and porting campaigns practically requires them to all be remade from scratch. This is exceedingly unlikely. cuc fucked around with this message at 08:16 on Apr 26, 2023 |
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Apr 26, 2023 07:50
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Cooked Auto posted:This popped up on my YT recommendations and I think the thread might enjoy it: Or think Noclip has chosen its subjects poorly, resulting in a video of two halves: blatant lies about AoE1DE's development process, and poor talking heads promotion for AoE2 on Xbox LOL. For what really happened on AoE1DE, read this post by Rich Geldreich (the programmer most famous for calling Valve a high school clique hell - he's a bit of a character himself that I don't want to derail this thread for). For most of the community who are laser-focused on the chosen game they play, what they got out of this documentary is this one concept presentation slide showing Forgotten Empires' suggestion for cultural Monk and Monastery models during AoE2DE's development. They'd actually attempted this in the AoE2HD period, and made a batch of cultural Monk models, including a Buddhist monk and "Imam". Both times they were ultimately turned down, and these models became used only by heroes, or never saw the light of the day. When something like that happens in revival-period AoE, it's usually because of either or both of two factors: 1) the developers are concerned about backlash from the competitive playerbase, who are naturally conservative when it comes to drastic changes; 2) Microsoft being cautious about offending real-life political parties. Meanwhile, while the Xbox ports are of no interest to many, I care about UX design and would love to see good quality propaganda from MS for them: show the research and testing facility where the AoE2 for Xbox UI was created, interview the key personnel, discuss the trials and errors they faced in the process. Instead, we got empty words papering over every actual detail. But alas, the reality of modern AoE is it combines the best of indie and 3A development: the money-pinching of indies and the red tape and secrecy of a bureaucracy. Making good propaganda is way beyond the department's PR budget.
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May 3, 2023 19:23
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Obligatory image: Motifs of the battle would appear again when Ensemble made Age of Mythology's villain Gargarensis appear cool by reciting G.K. Chesterton's Lepanto, though stopping short of any anachronistic references. From the AoM LP: TheCog posted:https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/47917 ==== Meanwhile, if any German-speaking goon is entertained by my droning about behind the scenes stories, I may use some help translating a podcast interview with AoE2DE's Art Director. Contact me by DM if necessary.
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May 4, 2023 17:08
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Serial Architectural Compromiser Episode 5YaketySass posted:They've added so much content over the years that the absence of new models for monks (outside of American civs) keeps surprising me. I guess it could get a bit culturally dicey though, or represent a lot of work if you get sufficiently granular like this concept page does. ==== Now that the topic has been brought up, from a UX-oriented perspective, there's great value in giving unique Castles to each civ (only AoE2DE's DLC civs have unique Castles now). Castles have three interconnected traits: - They are where a civ's unique unit and techs are located, hence being visually unique is consistent with their purpose; - They are big and eye-catching; - They have a crucial role in every civ's game plan and appear in every normal match. All three are advantages that Monasteries and Monks don't have. Together they guarantee that unique Castles, if implemented, would become the most definitive signature of each civ, unlike Wonders which don't show up in ranked play. Still, it's hard to say when, or if, this is going to happen. When it does, I'd certainly prefer to see them more stylistically consistent and better-researched.  We've already seen the unique Castles of both Dawn of the Dukes civs, based on Karlstein and Bedzin. While no doubt important in medieval times (it used to house the Holy Roman Empire crown), the Karlstein sprite: 1) breaks AoE2 conventions by being too large and not oriented along the grid axes; 2) is based on the castle's modern look, which is from the end-of-19th century renovation that made it "more medieval, just like my fantasies !!1!" I don't have a problem with this second point, but yes, I've seen people complain "we have authentic Gothic castles in Czechia!"  Before: Karlstein's 15-19th century Renaissance style. After: the neo-Gothic flip added a tapering roof and decorative buttresses. ==== Repeating from last page: If any German-speaking goon is entertained by my droning about architecture, source research and behind the scenes stories, I may use some help translating a podcast interview with AoE2DE's Art Director. Contact me by DM if necessary. cuc fucked around with this message at 04:21 on May 5, 2023 |
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May 4, 2023 20:24
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Serial Architectural Compromiser Episode 6 The Spanish Wonder is Torre del Oro, the Tower of Gold. The main body of the tower was part of the Seville city wall built by the Moorish Almohad dynasty, 28 years before the city was reconquered by the Kingdom of Castille. The 2nd "cascade" was added in the 14th century; the 3rd tier was added in 1760 during repairs after the Lisbon earthquake. The traditional belief that the tower originally anchored a chain blocking the river, however, has no basis. The Torre del Oro sprite is the first to be explicitly out-of-scale with the rest of AoE2, and the second tallest Wonder sprite in The Conquerors. AoE2 players visiting Seville often find the real watchtower smaller than their in-game impression. In Age of Empires 3, Seville plays the role of the Spanish Home City, and Torre del Oro is its unique building, replacing the Military Academy.  The AoE3 Seville diorama does not put the tower anywhere near its riverbank location. cuc fucked around with this message at 14:13 on May 5, 2023 |
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May 5, 2023 12:27
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Map Room Honnō-ji Incident and Battle of Yamazaki (1582) The Honnō Temple, where Akechi Mitsuhide suddenly betrayed his lord Oda Nobunaga at the height of Nobunaga's power. One of the most iconic episodes of Sengoku, reenacted in hundreds of films, TV series and games, about which thousands of theories and alternate histories have been written, guessing at the true motivation of Akechi Mitsuhide, or the different routes Japanese history could have taken.  This map shows a decent view of what happened in the betrayal's wake. - The ochre area shows regions under Nobunaga control, and the oliver area is Tokugawa's domain. - Green text boxes are the notable vassals of Nobunaga. Purple boxes are notable non-Nobunaga factions. - The three cartoon portraits are from left to right, Hideyoshi, Akechi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu. At the time of the incident, Hideyoshi was in the west fighting the Mōri clan (uncolored region to the left, the level's Hyōgo faction). Hearing of his lord's demise, he immediately called a truce with the Mōri, and headed east for the claim on Akechi's head, while Tokugawa also dropped what was on his hands, by going home and securing his own turf. You can see that while Kyōto is near Lake Biwa - the largest freshwater lake in Japan, Hideyoshi did not have to cross water to reach it. And Akechi would be defeated in field battle, not a siege. As edutainment, the only historical nugget this level can teach you is that Hideyoshi built his Ōsaka Castle on the ruins of what he had torn down - the Hongan Temple of Ishiyama, main fortress of the Ikkō-ikki Buddhist rebels. LJN92 posted:Any idea why they decided to reduce Mitsuhide Akechi to some generic mob of rebels? MinistryofLard posted:What does Hyogo do in this mission? Are they just another player that rushes you? cuc fucked around with this message at 21:19 on May 5, 2023 |
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May 5, 2023 21:06
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  For the map in the outro cutscene, the original slide is thematically appropriate to the narration: it shows the state of Sengoku as the fractured lands that Nobunaga, Hideyoshi and Ieyasu sought to unify, from an earlier point in their career. Instead of providing a more accurate version of this map, the DE artist meaninglessly copied Kyoto's surroundings, and wrote the city names in a stereotypical "Oriental" style, somehow out-Orientalisting the original. Verdict: original wins.  The DE version of the final slide depicts the Barin Helmet, which has become synonymous with Hideyoshi himself. The barin or baren motif of radiating rays refers to the straight spread out blades of the Iris lactea plant, but Hideyoshi, ever the nouveau riche show-off, turned it into a golden halo. Verdict: DE wins.  Hideyoshi in the 2022 game Nobunaga's Ambition: Shinsei. cuc fucked around with this message at 05:56 on May 6, 2023 |
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May 5, 2023 21:41
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On the original campaign screen, it was also placed on its own map of Central America, separate from the others' Europe, tempting you to choose it first - at least that was my experience. EDIT: Changing my vote to A. El Cid. ==== Serial Architectural Compromiser Episode 7  There are more stories to tell about the relationship between Korea and Age series, but this episode focuses on one thing: The Korean Wonder, tallest thing in The Conquerors, is the worst Wonder from Ensemble, and a top contender for all-time worst in AoE2. Fans have long described this wonder as based on the pagoda of Hwangnyong-sa, the Temple of Imperial Dragon, burnt down during Mongol invasions. But the truth is - this is wishful thinking. Nothing indicates Ensemble knew anything about Korean architecture in 2000, and they certainly lacked picture references. That's because this model is loosely based on a "five-storey pagoda" of 17-19th century Japan, most likely the one in Tokyo's Sensō-ji, seen by millions of visitors every year. A five-storey pagoda is an unclimbable decorative structure. It is hollow inside, and each storey, with massive eaves, are actually loose "hoops" balanced on a central pillar, allowing them to weather Japan's earthquakes as their own dampers. ...All of that is in steep contrast with the Hwangnyong pagoda, which was a large wooden tower of nine stories (described as 68m or 80m high), built in the 7th century Kingdom of Silla.    Three-way comparison: - 1:10 scale model of Hwangnyong pagoda; - The tallest surviving wooden pagoda (Fogong Temple, China, 1065) at 67m; - The tallest five-storey pagoda (Tō-ji Temple, Kyoto, 1643) at 50m. Upon this foundation, Ensemble added baseless flourishes like octagonal walls, lions in 4 directions, and an open-air pavillion bottom floor - all things you never see in real buildings.  AoE1's Asian Iron Age Town Center has a similar pavillion bottom. Its smaller scale makes it less jarring. Two decades later, AoE2DE would advertise itself on better historical accuracy using a new British Wonder as poster boy (another long story, another time). No thought was spared on the Korean Wonder, which received more fantasy flourishes, including vertical banners with Sejong written in Hangul (Korean alphabet) at the 4-way Japanese-style portals.  I assure you that was not how banners, or King Sejong's name, or Hangul, or portals were used. cuc fucked around with this message at 19:59 on May 7, 2023 |
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May 6, 2023 21:38
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Jossar posted:Turtle Ships are comparatively the same cost as several Galleons... the game encourages you to be using them as a more "cost-efficient" equivalent to replace some of your Galleons with a single unit.
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May 7, 2023 19:38
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Hittites playing Huns is from the In This design choice seems to have little historical basis, unless you know about the "horse rider theory", which assumed that Japan was conquered by a steppe horse culture in 4th to 5th CE, based on excavated horse-related artifacts from that period. As Ensemble themselves acknowledged in their Yamato civ bio, the theory has been long outdated. Nonetheless, it was an important chapter in the annals of Japanese historiography, and the perfect excuse for Ensemble to lean into. In Return of Rome, the Yamato civ icon is 'shopped from the photo below, of just one such horse-related artifact, a haniwa earthen horse head from Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. Few civ icons in the DE franchise can boast a deeper connection to the civ identity than this.  See also: AoE1DE Steam trading card: Yamato Haniwa  cuc fucked around with this message at 08:01 on Jun 8, 2023 |
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May 13, 2023 20:56
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Meanwhile, in reaction to Return's 41% positive reviews on Steam (767+15 total reviews, including 334 English reviews at 56% positivity, 209 Simplified Chinese reviews at 16% positivity), they have relented and will port AoE1 campaigns over. But not all 10 campaigns, no. In a tremendous display of generosity, they will port 4 of them, two are Ascent of Egypt (because Return of Rome still lacks any tutorial) and The First Punic War (3-level campaign from the Rise of Rome demo), and the remaining 2 will be decided by a poll. This complicates things a bit for this LP - we don't know which campaigns will be ported, and we don't know when will they be gradually rolled out. But I guess we can handle it in stride, just as with the real AoE2 DLC later this year that they've dropped hints about. Asehujiko posted:It's the other way around, the Huns were Hittites originally before being replaced by Yamato. cuc fucked around with this message at 21:57 on May 19, 2023 |
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May 19, 2023 21:44
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Having no time to write more detailed reviews of each level, here's some trivia about AoK's most hardworking background extra, filling in for all the assorted Slavs and Anglo-Saxons until their own civs arrived... or not. CastleDallasia The Goths Wonder: Mausoleum of Theodoric.  Icon: based on an Ostrogothic brooch. UI Emblem: AoK: the King from Lewis chessmen; DE: Gallic helmet.  Campaign Symbol: The Forgotten: Gallic helmet; DE: Gallic helmet and Late Roman spatha.  Unique Unit: Huskarl - Infantry with high pierce armor, making them resistant to ranged attacks. As you probably already know, these are "housecarls" in English, literally "house men", a lord's personal retinue troopers. They were a Northern European institution that spread to England by the Danish conquest. While similar structures existed in many societies, it's still a medieval Norse/Anglo-Saxon concept transplanted to the Late Antiquity Goths. The unit itself is modeled on a Late Antiquity foederati warrior, wearing a Gallic helmet... bell-bottom trousers?... And a muscle cuirass? According to Sandy Petersen's "Age of Kings Super Units" video, Huskarls are conceived from the common pattern for designing AoK unique units, by inverting a basic unit's function: an infantry that counters its normal weakness, the archers. He didn't give an in-fiction explanation to its ability, though I'd like to think it's an abstraction of shield walls. Huskarls feature again in Age of Mythology as an advanced anti-archer infantry of the Norse. Bonus: +10 population limit If you remember the Great Population Schism, this bonus is obviously designed for Ensemble's intended 75 pop game, giving the Goths a maximum population of 85. It feels quaint in the 200 pop era. However, it's equally obvious that the bonus cannot be balanced by simply scaling it up with the pop limit (+26 or 27 for 200 pop), which is why it has never been changed. Castle Age Unique Tech: Anarchy - Huskarls can be produced in Barracks. Thematically a boring truism about pre-state societies lacking a central government, this was the only "silver crown" Age 3 UT when The Conquerors introduced the UT concept, and Goths were the only civ to have 2 UTs. When 200 pop games upped the army sizes, the expensive 650-stone Castles could not match wood-costing normal buildings in numbers, in addition to its essential duties of map control and lategame Trebuchet maker. These factors have kept all but the most overwhelmingly powerful UUs like the Mangudai out of an army staple role, if they are used at all. And as AoE2DE nerfed the Mangudai, even their prevalence has diminished a little. It's frequently suggested that for most civs, something like Anarchy that enables UUs in normal buildings can give their UUs more time to shine and still be a ways from being broken. cncgnxcg posted:It's quite possible that Perfusion doesn't work for the extra barracks you get, because AoEII has always been weird about units/buildings that are given to you after already being controlled by another player Imperial Age Unique Tech: Perfusion - Barracks work rate x2, halving production and research times. The Age 4 "golden crown" UT completes the Goth "infantry zerg" package, inspired by the traditional, highly inaccurate image of barbarians pouring into the Roman empire in the Great Migrations. A community member who had some early association with Forgotten Empires traced the image, of barbarians so numerous they are impossible to count, to a passage about a passage in Res Gestae, about Goths seeking refuge in the Roman empire from the threat of Huns: Ammianus Marcellinus posted:the ill-omened officials who ferried the barbarian hordes often tried to reckon their number, but gave up their vain attempt; as the most distinguished of poets says: Virgil posted:Who wishes to know this would wish to know FE had incorporated this "Numerous As the Grains of Sand" reference into their official Goths description. It is also the name for the "win by building only infantry" achievement of Alaric 2. (To be cont'd) cuc fucked around with this message at 17:34 on Jun 10, 2023 |
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May 20, 2023 15:19
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CastleDallasia The Goths cont'd Campaign: Alaric In the AoE2HD period, FE drew heavy inspiration from community writings of Sandy Petersen, sometimes almost like his words are a future roadmap. This campaign choice is likely based on a forum post by Sandy, who answered "Alaric" when asked about what figure he most wanted to make a campaign of. Since their formation, FE have never actively publicized their campaign authors. We know who made each commercial DLC campaign, but can't be sure about authors of the original The Forgotten ones without digging deep into old forum posts or campaign AI scripts. From DE campaign signatures, we know the DE version is remade by Freeman1302, who also worked on HD levels. His other known works include a scenario that was cut from The Forgotten, Kaesong (936) (HD version, DE version), a Historical Battle about Korean unification by Kingdom of Silla. In an alternate timeline, it would be the second official level to feature the Koreans. Tech Tree: missing Stone Wall The Cumans are the only other civ to share this trait. According to Ensemble's design document from a leaked early build, this trait was inspired by Totila tearing down Roman walls during the 6th century Gothic War, i.e. that time Justinian sent Belisarius to take back the Western Empire. I'll let the aforementioned community member speak: Battler posted:ES's justification is that the Goths didn't have have the manpower to defend cities with walls, which better explains why they can't build them.  Tech Tree: Dromon replaces Cannon Galleon The change introduced this week by Return of Rome. If designed today without AoE2's two decades of baggage, Dromons would most certainly be a Byzantine unique unit, and they would attack using siphons of Greek fire. (In original AoK, the Byzantine UI emblem is a manuscript Dromon drawing.) But a fact of life for the Definitive Editions, is that they have to paint inside the lines drawn by Ensemble and Big Huge Games. In Return of Rome, Dromons are armed with catapults, a non-gunpowder counterpart of Cannon Galleons, whose role in the meta is to smash through Castle-locked enemy beachheads in late-stage water games. Conceived as a unique Western Roman ship (evidenced by its UU tag at launch), it has been given to other Roman-adjacent civs: Byzantines, Goths and Huns, replacing existing Cannon Galleons in the former two's case. With Huns gaining the Dromon, the native Americans and Cumans are the only civs still lacking any coastal bombardment option. Cannon Galleons aside, the Goths have a good navy that's only missing Dry Dock, perhaps as a way to quietly lump in the Vandal conquest of North Africa. ====  This weekend's suggested reading is Rome Didn't Fall When You Think It Did. This is a decent pop introduction to the current academic consensus. That is to say, one of AoE2's basic premises (which FE has dutifully repeated in their new History entry for AoE2 Romans), that "Rome has fallen" in 476 CE, is propaganda fabricated by one of Justinian I's trustees, the historian Marcellinus Comes (not to be confused with Ammianus M. above), to add the Western Roman empire to a list of lost territories alongside North Africa, for his boss to gloriously reclaim in the future. It's laying groundwork for an Eastern invasion, detached from how the actual Western empire perceived themselves. The combined ambitions of Justinian and the Franks destroyed the Western empire, while the Ostrogoths tried to keep the system up and running. Notes not covered by the article: - Some historians tried to find Western empire sources for the 476 date. Apparently their arguments are unconvincing. - Justinian and his aides like Marcellinus and Belisarius were from Illyricum. They strongly identified with the Chalcedonian orthodox. The Ostrogoths' heretic Arianism was another reason they saw them as illegitimate. - The 476 fall idea lived on in Byzantine empire, and was introduced to the Western side by Paul the Deacon, a historian in Charlemagne's court. ==== cncgnxcg posted:I feel like pathfinding in general is worse than before, I've had lots of units getting stuck or pathing weirdly since the patch. cuc posted:"largest balance update ever" to AoE2DE since launch, bringing a fresh round of features and glitches, including another pathfinding-fix-that-breaks-it-some-more. cuc fucked around with this message at 13:28 on Jun 9, 2023 |
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May 20, 2023 15:58
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CastleDallasia The Incas Unique Unit: Kamayuk - Spear Infantry with +1 range and anti-Cavalry bonus (Eagle Warrior excluded). The Inka empire's subjects were organized into taxpayer groups. These groups function as units in both drafted labor and military service. In peace or in war, the units were led by the kamayoq (or any of a variety of spellings), non-hereditary civil servants. The concept and appearance of the in-game Kamayuk is directly based on an image that Wikipedia used to cite when the Forgotten Empires mod was being brainstormed on an AoE2 forum:  I've seen people question the historical Inka's need for long spears. They were very real:  ...though one source I found suggests they may have been adopted from the Chanka, another Quechua-speaking people whose conquest by Pachakuti we are now playing in this LP, since the Chanka had long spears "repeatedly contrasted with shorter Inca weapons". The main debateable thing is whether the Inka empire "deserved" a unit that embodies the advantage of multi-meter spears, considering the more lasting historical impact of pikes in the European Infantry Revolution. We all know the answer: deserving or not, expansion packs are always hungry for new mechanical gimmicks. Side Note: One interesting fact about the Age series is that despite reviving ancient weaponry like Trebuchet and Chu Ko Nu/Zhuge Nu and elevating them into pop culture stardom, the series has had less memetic luck with influencing game terminology. In AoE1 and 2, Ensemble referred to close-quarter combat as "hand-to-hand"; by AoE3, they had yielded to "melee", popularized by Blizzard, though said game still refers to melee units as Hand Infantry and Hand Cavalry. The serious military terminology, on the other hand, is "shock" or French choc ("ranged and melee" is "fire and shock", or feu et choc), in the word's original sense of "violent encounter". Another example is "Standard Game", The Conquerors' term for player vs. computer, which gave way to "Skirmish", an odd word choice from Red Alert 1. Unique Unit: Slinger - Foot Archer with high anti-Infantry bonus. The concept of this unit is extremely simple: it's the non-Gunpowder counterpart of the Hand Cannoneer, a predecessor to Return of Rome's Dromon. (This does make it the first UU that's a full replacement of an existing unit, a type of UU that's still rare in AoE2DE.) Mirroring firearms' simplicity of training in real history, if not their damage potential, the role of Hand Cannoneers in the AoE2 meta is to provide a quick power spike in the early Imperial Age. Lacking further upgrades or more useful bonuses, they will be eventually outstripped by the Knight and Archer lines, as these units' expensive upgrades come online. The Slinger is the same function, but available even faster due to not needing Chemistry to unlock.  In addition to unlocking Gunpowder units, Chemistry increases all ranged damage by +1, indicated by putting arrows on fire. The 2023 April upgrade has added fiery slings to show it has the same effect on Slingers. (To be cont'd...) cuc fucked around with this message at 06:01 on Jun 9, 2023 |
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Jun 5, 2023 21:37
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Meanwhile, a guide is already up for porting scenarios yourself. It's not hassle-free, the recent AoE2DE build has incidentally made loading old map formats very crash-prone, and there are basic mechanics that simply can't translate over, but it is a start. https://aoe.heavengames.com/siegeworkshop/porting-maps-to-return-of-rome/ quote:Glory of Greece and Voice of Babylon.  Technowolf posted:Could've also done the demo campaign with the Hittites cuc fucked around with this message at 14:37 on Jun 6, 2023 |
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Jun 6, 2023 06:02
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YaketySass posted:The Incas already look awkard enough with Mesoamerican buildings. AoE3DE has the opposite problem where they made tons of new assets for the African expansion, but reused American terrain, fauna and flora when it came to the Knights of the Mediterranean DLC. So their Europe looks exactly the same as their North America, which is already an aesthetic downgrade from the original AoE3. cuc fucked around with this message at 08:21 on Jun 8, 2023 |
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Jun 7, 2023 20:44
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quote:]Bayinnaung - Part 3: The Royal Peacock Popping in to say this level is an adaptation / reimagining of Chou Kung 1: The Mandate of Heaven, the first level in a classical AoE1 custom campaign, with a similar "the king is dead, escape the palace complex" premise. You can download it or its port to AoE1DE here.
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Nov 18, 2023 14:14
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