Game developers, I have a short and simple request for you:
Add to the Game Settings in Skirmish and Multiplayer mode the option to choose the landscape palette that the map will be painted with – let me choose a “biome” and a “season”.
I play with friends, I play recreationally, and I play for immersion. I don’t care about challenge, I don’t care about strategy and I don’t care about balance. I want to be able to play a closed map like the Black Forest while being able to choose if that forest lies in Africa / America / Asia / Eastern Europe / Western Europe / South Asia or the Caucasus. Also let me specify if it should be Spring / Summer / Autumn or Winter. I can’t imagine that the game code would fundamentally prevent such a choice. Landscape palettes in the map editor have been around for a long time and I’ve been waiting and wishing for such a customization for about a quarter of a century. Thanks.
It’s a nice idea. A few years ago I made a mod that did something like this, with a separate map script for each theme:
Description
Contains separate random map scripts for regional and seasonal variations of various map types. Includes the following maps: Alpine Lakes, Arabia, Archipelago, Arena, Baltic, Black Forest, Bogland, Coastal, Continental, Crater Lake, Fortress, Gold Rush, Golden Pit, Hideout, Highland, Islands, Land Nomad, Mediterranean, Migration, Mountain Ridge, Nomad, Oasis, Rivers, Salt Marsh, Seize the Mountain, Team Islands, Team Moats, Valley. The available regional and seasonal variations are: African, Alpine, Asian, Autumn, Desert, Frozen, Medisouth, Spring, Eastern Tropics, American Tropics. As in the standard map scripts, not all variations are available for all map types.
Obviously there are more official maps than that now, and Arabia has had an overhaul (in fact maybe two or three since then) – but I’m not inclined to update it since I ended up not really using it personally.
Random map scripts can take input from the game, e.g. if you select Empire Wars or Deathmatch or something, that changes what happens when the script is run. This could be implemented in a similar way, although it would require every map script to be partially rewritten to support it.
Not sure what you mean by this. AoE2 doesn’t have a built in concept of “landscape palette” – all terrain and object types are useable in the same map. In my view, this is a huge benefit over the restrictive “tilesets” that were present in other RTS games of the same era (e.g. StarCraft).
Yep, I also wish I could play Arabia style map with green terrain. I don’t play any map with sand or snow because the environments are mostly uninteresting to me, and/or usually too bright.
Having to use a “no snow” mod just to avoid snow maps, or “dark terrain” mod, is very not preferred.
I never, ever want to play snow maps, so as soon as one starts, I quit right away and try, try again.
Being able to 100% avoid Nomad maps would be nice, too, since I hate those unless and until I want to play one. Why do some maps force Nomad and temporary treaty upon us? Some maps auto-give us some buildings, too. I think I’ve played one where we get a mill at the start?
Would like to choose which main animals appear on map, too, as the water buffalo are annoying to listen to.
And why can’t we click a button in the SP lobby to force AI to “not” resign? You play 1,000 single-player games and don’t want the AI to quit at the drop of a hat? You have to remember for all 1,000 games to stop what you’re doing mid-match in all 1,000 games to do the 104 chat and hope it works (flip a coin)
That’s probably it, as I did play that on occasion for sure. I have a set way I like to play, so don’t like random surprises when I launch a map, or random surprises like that that make me rule out a bunch of maps because I don’t like such surprises