Age of Empires needs to return to its roots

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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There has been a lot of controversy around the recently announced Three Kingdoms DLC for AoE2, as well as to a lesser extent the Knights of the Cross and Rose DLC for AoE4. I feel like both are symptomatic of a drifting away from AoE’s core principles that’s been happening for a while but is rapidly worsening.

The fantasy of this franchise is to choose from a diverse roster of global civilizations and build them to greatness over centuries. That obviously gets heavily abstracted by gameplay, and campaigns tend to focus more on single individuals to more easily tell a coherent story, but that’s the core idea. Increasingly I feel like recent releases are losing sight of this.

Firstly, let’s talk about diversity of cultures. One of my favourite things about Age of Empires is learning about the rich histories and cultures from people all around the world, but increasingly it seems like the franchise is focused on only a few regions and is just splitting them into increasingly tiny and niche “civilizations” instead of exploring other areas.

Burgundians aren’t a civilization. Joan of Arc’s army isn’t a civilization. The Three Kingdoms aren’t civilizations. These are small factions that don’t fit the fantasy of leading an entire empire or cultural group. And it’s really frustrating because these niche and variant “civilizations” are cannabilizing design space that could be used for cultures that haven’t been explored.

AoE2 has as many civilizations from the Italian peninsula as it does from the entirety of the Americas. Come Three Kingdoms, it will have twice as many civilizations representing the Han Chinese than the entire continent of Africa. AoE4 has three different versions of the French but only one African civilization, zero American civilizations, and zero southeast Asian civilizations. That’s insane. I get that certain regions and periods of history are more marketable than others, but come on, this is ridiculous.

I get it’s a little harder for AoE4 to expand its roster because they set a higher standard for civ asymmetry and art design, but I’d rather cut some corners there if it meant exploring more of history than just keep redoing the same bits of history we’ve already done ad nauseam. Let other east Asian civs share some architecture with the Chinese like they do in AoE2 if it means we get Koreans and Vietnamese instead of French Variant #42.

I think the gameplay design is also starting to lose sight of the simplicity and readability that has made AoE so enduringly appealing.

Now, this is a tricky one, because you do need to keep introducing new ideas to keep things fresh. You can’t just keep throwing out minor variations on the same gameplay forever. But you do have to be careful that new ideas fit the core gameplay principles of the franchise, and you need to manage the complexity creep.

For me, hero units are a step too far. They can work in games that are designed for them – Warcraft III is one of my favourite games ever – but they don’t fit the macro-focused gameplay of Age of Empires. They also don’t fit the fantasy of guiding a civilization over the course of centuries. Are we to believe Joan of Arc lived for five hundred years?

I’m mostly okay with any of the other new mechanics introduced by recent and upcoming DLCs across the franchise, but they need to be portioned out better. Throwing multiple new gimmicks into a single civilization gets overwhelming.

AoE4 suffers from this severely. When I finally tried the Byzantines a few months ago, I was hopelessly overwhelmed by trying to learn the multiple unique units, olive oil resource, aquaduct system, and mercenary mechanic all at once. All of these are good ideas individually (I actually love the aquaduct mechanic), but cramming them all into one civilization is way too much. This isn’t as bad a problem in AoE2, but definitely some of the upcoming Three Kingdoms civs feel like they’re trying to do too much.

Finally, devs need to remember this is largely a casual franchise where most people are versus AI and campaign fans. AoE2 has mostly been good at remembering this, but it is distressing that Three Kingdoms is skipping campaigns for the Jurchens and Khitans, and personally I’m disappointed they’re not taking this opportunity to add campaigns for the Koreans and baseline Chinese. AoE4 is really neglecting campaign players, though; again, I’d rather they cut some corners than just give up on the idea entirely. Spend less on flashy cutscenes and documentary movies if it means we get campaigns for more civilizations. A simple narration over some static images like AoE2 does is good enough.

This is already very long-winded, so I’ll try to wrap this up, but in summary, I really think the developers across the franchise need to go back to basics and remember what originally made the Age of Empires games appealing.

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I agree with everything.
Especially when they could have given us a jurchen vs korean campaign for example.

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completely agree with everything. very well said.

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Most of europe is not civilizations just germanic or slavic tribes.

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The original concept of Age of Empires II was that the civs represented the peoples at the Fall of Rome, and your job was to grow them into an empire. That’s why we have Britons, Goths, Franks, etc. instead of more obvious medieval kingdoms. The Conquerors started to drift away from that with the Spanish, and by now it’s been completely thrown that out the window, so we have a bizarre mix of broad Dark Age cultures and more specific medieval cultures. This new DLC makes it even weirder with three ancient versions of the Chinese in addition to the already existing Chinese civ. It doesn’t feel streamlined at all.

At this point, they can’t really undo what’s been done. Maybe there’s a way they can introduce multiple sets of civs for different time periods, but solving one problem will just create another, and they’ll never please everybody.

One simple thing they could do to make the civ pool less confusing is just show the Chronicles and Three Kingdoms civs separately under the other civs with their own headings in the civ selection UI.

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Then why did aok have chinese and japanese from the beginning which had nothing to do with fall of rome?

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Roots ? Age of Empires 1 playstyle ? With no soldier formations, no training queue, no castle, no unique units ?

Thanks but no, I prefer where the game is nowaday than the roots of my collector CD version of the game.

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Because it made the game more interesting, and other people around the world existed at the same time. The tagline for the original game is “Rome has fallen and the world is up for grabs”.

In some cases the expansion civs stuck to the idea of general cultures that evolved into medieval kingdoms, like the Slavs, but as soon as they started introducing more specific divergent Slavic civs, people kept asking for more. It no longer makes sense to have both the Slavs and a bunch of other Slavic civs. Every time they introduce more European civs they muddy the waters.

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But this way the only thing they can do, is make more similar factions.
How is it better to have 10 more factions with just 1 or 2 units and slight changed bonuses.

I would prefer like 1 more faction, but actually to be very different asymmetrical to the ones we have.
As long its in own game mode, who cares if its AoE3 Aztecs or Orcs from Warcraft?

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Yes, I noticed that too, and is sad, buuuut, through communication we can at least influence owners, to a certain degree, to obtain what we want the most (or at least, that’s how I like to see it, since, if not, there would not be many reasons to dive in the forums; that’s the main reason why I ceased using AOE1DE forums - and the game itself, to be replaced with AOE2’s Return of Rome, for example, since my most favourite game is not AOE2 but AOE1, instead, although I really like a lot the sequel as well, since it maintains the isometric and charismatic artstyle and many features from the original).

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Agreed about the 3K civs. But Burgundians were a civilization, just like Franks.

I don’t want more African or American civs when there’s so many more European and Asian civs that deserve representation first.

Aside from that I do agree that they’re ruining the game with these new kingdom “civs”.

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Tribes are civilizations in this context.

Wu/Shu/Wei aren’t tribes. They all belonged to the same tribe.

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Which are the top 5 peoples missing from Europe, considering your preferences?

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You could split both Vikings and Slavs into a few more civs (Danes, Swedes, Rus/Novogorod, Kievan Rus, Vlachs). Maybe even the Swiss could be considered.

If you go back in time further (like year 500-800) there’s Varangians, Vandals, Gaets, Jutes, Lombards etc. But I’d rather focus on the late Medieval period personally (so they fit with civs like Poles, Portuguese, Lithuanians etc).

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I’ll answer for me, but it’s not my first civ picks to have in game.

  1. Frisians - they had both the Early Kingdom and the Frisian Freedom period as principle examples of peak periods for their people, whereas the Dutch peaked later, in the 1600s. They feel like the more appropriate Low Country culture to use for this game. And before you say Burgundians… the Burgundians never owned Frisia Proper.
  2. Vlachs - Dracula, as well as the fact that Romanians definitely didn’t consider themselves slavs. Slavicized, maybe, but not full on slavs
  3. Vandals - everything they were recorded for kind of turn the Goths in-game on their head. They focused on cavalry-based warfare and the navy rather than Infantry and land-based armies. Would be a good chance to reflect another group of Germanic tribes to reflect those with more cavalry focus.
  4. Serbians- yes, I know, Balkans drama. But still, they were one of the two South Slav groups to actually claim an Empire (The other being Bulgarians). Also plenty of campaign worthy individuals throughout the period.
  5. Croatians- same as above, with a really cool focus for a campaign (Tomislav).

Special mention for Venetians too, but that’s only because they were so different culturally from the rest of Italy thanks to Greco-Byzantine, Slavic, and more specifically Albanian influences causing them to view themselves as different to the peninsula. It also feels… weird, seeing their rivals’ flag representing them when they not only smashed Genoa, but were the dominant maritime power of the Mediterranean from the High Middle Ages to at least the Battle of Lepanto.

Actually, wait… could we flip the script, add Albanians as the civ and give them Venetian influences since they did trade and support each other heavily? Would that be a better alternative?

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Still fine in my book, even though they spent much of the Middle Ages under the radar as subjugated by the Franks, then were a late-medieval supernova (the Grand Dukes taking over much of the Low Countries with a very advanced economy for the time, almost formed a proper kingdom until it all crashed down in front of the walls of my home town). And they form a surprisingly good placeholder for the Swiss. So realistically, they can cover all of Lotharingia.

But indeed Joan of Arc’s army crosses the line (she was only active for 2 years and fully loyal to King Charles VII) and the 3K are very questionable, it should have been a chronicles and done AFTER a classic medieval chinese DLC that everyone was asking for. Not even the Chinese players (the obvious primary target for that DLC, to expand the AOE2 playerbase in China) seem to be happy about that, the 3K has been done an excessive amount of time while most of the chinese medieval history is ignored (do the chinese campaign during the An Lushan revolt, it will be a slam dunk !!!)

AOE4 made too many mistakes. IMO setting it in the Middle Ages set it up for failure and jeopardised the whole franchise by overextending it on too many games at once, while it should have been set in Antiquity (primarily in the Fertile Crescent & Med Sea to stay focused at first, if you launch with only 8 civs. Keep East Asia for an expansion) while ditching AOE1, instead of setting it up on a frontal collision with AOE2. On top of that it was released severely undercooked, without even a scenario editor…

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That’s a terrible idea… oh wait we have kitanguts already.

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You could add either civ but with a Stradiot unique unit? Those were Albanian soldiers, employed as mercenaries by Venice, so they’d fit in either civ.

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Well, at least Venetians and Albanians did influence one another heavily, unlike Khitanguts… but fair enough, I get the comparison.

You’re right, either way I could see Stradiots as a UU. Personally, I’d opt for Venetians since they were the dominant power. But I understand that people like to think they’re more akin to the Italians than an independent culture, so I don’t really try to push for them that much anymore.

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Well the military structures differ for both.Albanians cavalry and ambush focused venice marines and ships.

Overall my top picks for more european civis would be frisians/dutch swiss albanians.honourable mentions venice romanians serbs austrians sweds+finns.

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