60 is a good number. But I will say 64 is better number. Considering upcoming DLC will add 3 new civs - Jurchens, Tanguts and Khitans, and Koreans campaign, we will have 48 civs in total. So that will give us 16 more rooms. My suggestion would be -
South America - Mapuches and Chimus. (with Mayans campaign)
East Africa - Nubians and Somalis. (with Turks campaign)
South-East Asia - Cham and Siamese. (with Chinese campaign)
Central Asian - Khazar, Sogdians and Gokturks. (with Magyars campaign)
India - Pashtuns, Kannadigas and Sinhalese.
For last 4, either -
Africa - Any two among Kanembu, Swahali, Benin, Shona, Congolese, Songhai, Soninke
America - Zapotec and Musica
or just add 4 Africans.
If this DLC doesn’t include Khitans, Central Asian DLC needs to be split into two.
I don’t totally agree.
They found a beautiful way to make money, without degrading the core game with a boring european split : Chronicles. They can add a lot of stories !
I don’t really think of there beeing a civilisation cap.
Why should they stop adding civilisations when people keep buying DLC? Like ever?
World of Warcraft is also still getting new DLC.
As long as they don’t start adding to many civs at once everyone will have many months to learn the new civs. I don’t think 4 civs/year are too many to learn.
Of course the more civs they add the less popular ones are left to be added, but that’s where Chronicles comes in and allows civs from a different time period to be added.
But I don’t think we run out of civs any times soon. We only have 1 civ in South America and people already want to split apart the HRE.
I think we need more maps. There are very few maps I like, so would appreciate more options. Age of Quantity should hit the map section
As a player who plays vs. AI all the time (unranked), I play for the experience and immersion, not for the robotic competition of it.
Unfortunately, 95% of the land-centric maps look like hand-sculpted arenas rather than natural, organically formed land areas. I don’t want mirrored land and water features. No historic battles had mirrored lands, so it’s weird to me that it’s so hard to find natural maps. I end up playing the same one or two maps as I try to avoid the mirrored arena look AND have green scenery (I rule out snow, sand, and archipelago maps, or maps where water is so encroaching on land that ship fire can reach towns). It’s pretty impossible, though
I know MP ranked people would hate having organic maps, so just add a filter for the natural ones and don’t put them in ranked map pools.
Luckily maps are something that the community can easily make themselves.
Modding civs is more complicated especially if you want to have new assets and bonuses.
For 16 slots, well, here are my pick. There should be quite a few of them that are the same.
3 in Southeast Asia DLC: Siamese, Chams, Nuosu.
3 in Central Asia DLC: Gokturks, Sogdians, Tibetans.
6 in 2 Africa DLCs: Soninke, Songhai, Kanembu/Kanuris, Nubians, Somalis, Bantu.
3 in America DLC: Purepecha, Muisca, Chimu. (with Mayans campaign)
1 in Europe DLC: Vlachs (with a series of Balkan stories for Magyars, Slavs, Turks own campaigns)
If the 16 civ requirement is to be adhered to, Nuosu or Bantu would honestly probably be overlooked in favor of other potential civs like Vandals or Sclavenians/Serbs added in the Europe DLC.
If it’s possible to have more than 16, then there could be not only the Vandals and Sclavenians, but also more South Asian civs, more Turkic civs, the Yoruba and Wolof, then the Kongolese, Shona and Swahilis from the Bantu split, and finally the Venetians from the Italians split.
Yes, that makes sense to me… East Asia, then the Balkans, and then revisiting Africa and America…
Na, it would not be necessary to extend the timeline … Iroquois would have Hiawatha (1534-1580) (more or less the same as Bayinnaung covers from 1538 to 1581) (here the Franks of Jacques Cartier would arrive at the Hudson River where they would put their first settlements in 1534 and where they would have some clashes with the Iroquois between 1541 and 1543 in these settlements and then in the 1560s to the 1580s, Hiawatha would try to achieve the unification of the Iroquois and the creation of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy in 1580 and in the final cinematics there would be allusions to Francis Drake -he could appear as an enemy in the last mission such as destroying the Roanoke colony in 1585-1587, John Smith and Samuel de Champlain) and the Dutch William the Silent (1552-1574) (last Italian war and the beginning of the Eighty Years’ War)…
Yes, but, nothing says streamlined quick selection polished gaming like using the drop-down to get to a completely separate map area, and then seeing a bunch of blank <?> tiles, and having to somehow make graphic tiles for custom maps you or others make:
I don’t think the community should have to build everything resulting in a smattering of band-aids and Frankenstein patchworks across the game, especially not for something so simple for devs to spend a week or two on cranking out some cool organic, natural-looking maps based on their wisdom of the game’s back-end and what all it has or can bring.
Since I can’t update my last post since editing posts doesn’t work since this topic is in “Slow Mode” (Forum "slow mode" not working correctly), I have to make this new post…
Was going to say that as examples on the inorganic “arenas” that currently exist, so many maps have clearly equal quadrants or halves, or a clump of resources to fight for in the middle, or perfect walls or trees around the perimeter of the map, perfect tree tunnels between players, and so on. For example, but I could probably paste 95% of the ‘mostly land’ maps here:
I think random map scripting is by far the easiest type of modding someone can do for AoE2 – especially if you don’t want to make maps with balanced layouts.
I’m sorry, but I’m really struggling to understand your position here. You seem to be saying that the game supporting custom random map scripts is “a smattering of band-aids and Frankenstein patchworks” because you have to select “Custom” from a menu to access them, and the game doesn’t magically display map icons that no one has made. Instead of supporting custom random map scripts, you think the devs should have added official maps satisfying your very specific preferences (no snow, no sand, no islands, not much water, no balanced layouts) that, as far as I know, you only expressed for the first time yesterday.
I think that can’t actually be your position, because it’s obviously preposterous. But it does seem to be what you’re saying.
Regarding band-aids and patchworks, that comment was wrought from years in these forums and earlier, where practically any and every idea or suggestion outside of ‘new civs’ is shut down immediately with “just mod it in if you want it.” So, I’ve grown a little jaded to that comment , as it’s the most easy cop-out possible to say, highly frequent, and takes the burden off the developers who could be adding more to the title from their highly capable and professional level… and also by fixing the simplest of things imaginable if they were provided some time and money to focus on cleaning up the title and adding a few more extra things here and there to satiate players who use the part of the game that is notcampaign- or rank-related.
This isn’t to say some modders aren’t dev-level good in terms of skillset or knowledge. I just would like the official vanilla game to have more of the asked for and more of the polish asked for, rather than a ragtag group of modders modding it in – which, as you know, are not officially supported, can break, can break the game, and are 3rd party and therefore susceptible to malware type stuff.
and the game doesn’t magically display map icons that no one has made. Instead of supporting custom random map scripts, you think the devs should have added official maps satisfying your very specific preferences (no snow, no sand, no islands, not much water, no balanced layouts) that, as far as I know, you only expressed for the first time yesterday.
I made some of the custom maps above, and I have no idea why the tiles look like <?> or how to fix. And some of them were from the community, and maybe some were included with DE? Can’t remember. Not high on my priority list to make custom map tile artwork for any and every custom map I make or for any modded map I download that doesn’t have one, if that’s what I need to do.
I’ve asked for no snow and no sand several times before because of how bright and uninteresting those terrains are to me, including here with a proposed lobby solution (for snow at least, but would add sand) - Would you like to see new paid content for this game? - #26 by Darkness01101, see screenshot here:
Water is a new one to express, but I don’t like maps with waterways because according to the tiles at least, your towns are in striking distance of ships. And since the AI love to spam ships, those games aren’t fun for me.
Oh well, I’m not a dev. I don’t get paid to know the engine possibilities or design the solutions. Just giving my feedback like everyone else in hopes it can be implemented by the pros someday.
Yes, somewhat narrow preferences, but would the game really go downhill all the sudden by giving more options for players to create the type of maps they want to play from unranked private or SP lobbies? And would it really hurt to take some resources away for a short time (we’re really talking days or weeks here) from creating the 80th new civ? Not in my opinion.
The game has a ton of arena style maps. Is it really that big of a stretch to ask the devs to make some natural looking ones, so it looks like we are playing battles on realistic landscapes rather than unrealistic gamey landscapes designed specifically for video game players? I doubt any past war or battle had such finely crafted landscapes bisected or divided into equal partitions provided to them.
If it’s so easy to make maps as said above, then devs can crank some out and add to the vanilla game for all to rejoice and play if they want, imo. Yes, only more streamlined by a click or two since it would be a filter on the main level, but it makes for a more professional presentation, rather than having to go to the Custom sub-area to look through there for the map you want.
Yeah that is a stupid UI issue.
Generally the UX for using unser generated content should be improved.
I don’t really agree. I think there are some types of content that are perfectly fine when they are user generated like maps.
In some games basically all maps are user generated.
Even in competitive games many maps are user generated, but often polished by the developers.
I did play around with it in the past. Especially the Definitive Edition has some cool new features.
My main issue is that you can’t make custom Real World maps.
I think it would be interesting if there was some system added to make random maps configurable. Basically adding public variables to a map that a player can change.
It could open up some really cool options for custom maps too.
But that would require some bigger code rewrites and interface changes.
I see. You do realise those people are generally trying to be helpful, not trying to shut your down? Other forum users are no more able to force the devs’ hands than you are, and posting a suggestion on the forum doesn’t place any “burden” on the devs.
Updates to the game aren’t going to break random map scripts – they are very backwards-compatible. I have successfully run scripts from an alpha version of AoK on DE with no problems.
If you have a .png image with the same filename as the .rms file, it will display it as the map icon. If there’s no such image, it displays the question mark instead. It’s not broken.
Don’t get me wrong, I like it when new map scripts are added and I hope we get more in the future. But let’s be realistic here – there are about 100 official random map scripts (excluding real world maps and maps for specific game modes), and by your own admission, you only like two of them. If the devs add more maps, the chances of you actually wanting to play on them seem very low to me. Given that you have such specific preferences, you’ll be much more likely to get the maps you want if you script them yourself.
Sure, there’s an element of helpfulness in such replies, however it’s usually feels more like, “Just mod it in and don’t bother devs about it.” (I.e,. “Devs have more important things to do like make new civs, tweak civs for ranked MP, and make new profile icons and cheat codes for challenge weeks. I don’t want them spending even a day doing anything other than that.”)
I don’t aim to “burden” devs, as you maybe suggest(?). I’m all for them doing their own analyses and figuring out if they like or don’t like the ideas. Admittedly, though, it’s pretty impossible to know what ideas they see in the forums or which ones they’ve evaluated, and so I never want to let the last post in a topic be, “Just mod it in”
I’m sorry you don’t have the backstory and more, so I understand where you’re coming from and how silly my words may sound
Even a thread asking to remove bouncy text on the stats screen had multiple deflection attempts, and nobody supporting the idea – when all that is needed is probably 10 minutes of dev time to make the game look more polished:
Darn, this topic’s “slow mode” won’t allow me to Edit my post again (forum bug), and I forgot to address your other points…
Yeah, DE seems accommodating and does pretty good with older RMS scripts, but it changed “map size” naming conventions. I wondered why my RMS created for HD wasn’t scaling stuff correctly in DE and later learned some map size names changed. I think it is struggling with something else on my old RMS that I haven’t yet figured out, but in due time…
Do you need to hand-paint the PNG in Photoshop? Or do you just make a blank PNG file with the RMS file’s name and it will auto-create the map icon graphic for you. I’ll try to research someday
I’m hoping it’d be an apples-to-oranges comparison.
I would like a lot more of the existing 100 if they weren’t mostly mirror worlds and equally-proportioned fake worlds. If they made 20 new land maps that looked natural, with organic layouts, the chances of me playing 20 of them are pretty high because at this point I’m confident devs would make each have “grass” and “trees” as a terrain gen %. Arabia was made to have grass and trees occur as a random chance, for example. Now I just need to re-launch Arabia 3-5 times before grass/trees occur. So, assuming they do the same for the 20 new maps, it’ll be great. 100% chance of me using the 20, as long as they aren’t forcing Nomad or non-TC buildings upon me from the start.
This criticism of “too many civs” has become such a common trope in the Age community, but it comes from a fundamentally flawed way of thinking. The idea behind aoe2 has always been about classifying civs into categories like archer civ, cavalry civ, infantry civ, cav archer civ etc. So it’s not a case of “50 civs is too much to remember”, because the number of civ categories always stays the same. Every cavalry civ can do scouts into knights. Every archer civ can do man at arms into archers or fast archers into crossbow / mangonel. Adding more civs that can do these strategies will not make the game more complicated. We could have hundreds of civs and still have a balanced game which is easy to remember, because so much of the tech trees are shared. Shared tech trees is one of the reasons why aoe2 is by far the most popular Age game. The formula works, so why change it?
, as it’s the most easy cop-out possible to say, highly frequent, and takes the burden off the developers who could be adding more to the title from their highly capable and professional level… and also by fixing the simplest of things imaginable if they were provided some time and money to focus on cleaning up the title and adding a few more extra things here and there to satiate players who use the part of the game that is not campaign- or rank-related.
