^
I almost guarantee it’s something like this. Stuff like Clubmen and Axemen as editor units would be awesome, but I doubt that’s where this is going. People thinking it refers to huge, transfomative stuff like
are engaged in wishful thinking and probably have no concept of how many resources it would take to do that, to say nothing of there being extremely limited demand for that. This whole thing is like if your friend offers you a ride home from work by saying “I’ll give you a ride,” and you overanalyze it and think he’s going to gift you a Ferrari.
I have high hopes for the future of AoE2, but let’s try to be a little grounded and not read all our wildest dreams into short, cryptic statements.
That would be a game changer, having AoE1 with AoE2 capabilities (triggers especially), but I highly highly doubt the devs would have any reason to make this massive investment.
I suspect the mention of Dynasties of India is a reference to Mod community that created Dharma Expansion which focused on Indian civs. Romae ad Bellum is similar effort I started and am still apart of, but focuses on Ancient Empires during Antiquity. I am admittedly biased here, but am hopeful this is alluding to adding content loosely explored in our mod.
Up to interpretation of how this would be achieved, but if this comes in the form of a DLC the effort could be limited and maybe just add Late Western Roman Empire. A slight rework of Medi Architecture specifically in later ages along with unique castle and reassigned scenario editor assets like Legionary, Centurion, and Amphitheater would more than do the trick. They could even leave most of Medi architecture alone and just add unique content like Roman Pagan Temple/Wonder. Complement this with some new Campagins from perspective of Roman’s and you have some nice content for a DLC.
While many point to Byzantines as the Roman Civ for period, there are several campaigns that have ancient civs Goths and Huns facing off against Western Roman Empire. They are represented currently with other placeholder civs (vary across versions) that are renamed Western Romans.
If the goal is to add interesting new content, why not go all the way and add them as a unique DLC Civ complemented with new campaigns focused on Flavius Aetius or Majorian. This would put the player in the perspective of Late Western Romans (distinct from their Eastern/Greek counterparts Byzantines) as they fend off the Huns and Goths.
Fighting as a declining power would test your skills. Can you forge a coalition to stop the Hun invasion of the West as Aetius, or retake Gaul and Hispania by defeating the Goths as Majorian?
I don’t really care about Ensemble, I don’t believe they would be good at balancing the game. However, they wrote a lot of code, even now with the additions to the game, they wrote the base code that the game largely runs on. Therefore, they might be able to quickly and efficiently rework stuff (at least in comparison to the modern devs, because the right coding skills aren’t as common now, considering time moves on and you get new programming languages).
I think when the current Devs have been working in the game for 7/10 years they would probably understand most of the code better than someone that worked on it for three years twenty years ago.
I think it would be more about new civ designs or campaign stuff
The current devs, especially FE are better at the campaign and civ stuff, and I agree with you on the programming point, it’s just the first thing I can think of.
This roadmap is for aoe and not a aoe franchise roadmap. For that reason we should exclude AOM:DE as option. Ancient friends should mean something else.
They are better at balance but when we got the abomination that is LotW just a year ago then not really sure they are better at civ design
In terms of campaigns, I think the old devs were more consistent and told better stories, even if the new campaigns can be better, campaigns like Sforza, Pachacuti or Longsanks were not as good as the old stuff we used to have
If it was something like that, would they announce it one year in advance?
Not sure. It is very likely a reference to an upcoming DLC though.
I wonder if there is some translation error going on here.
Maybe it translates ancient into something that just sound like “old”.
You would never ever call someone ancient. That’s something you just don’t do in English.
Someone made a thread in the AoE3 forums about “ancient civilisations” but they were just talking about the civilisations from the base game. Maybe that’s the same translation error.
There is a very clear hint to something AoM related for fall this year.
This year is the 25th anniversary of AoM so AoE2 will very likely get a crossover event.
They could also announce something for the future of AoM like AoMDE but that’s not AoE2 related.
The new campaigns are made by a much larger group of people. They sometimes hire people to just make a single campaign for them.
It says “invite our ancient friends” that sound like there will be something from AoE1DE added to AoE2DE.
So no changes to AoE1DE itself.
Not sure… they always do cross events with new skins to gain when a new game in the series is released or re-released, maybe it’s what they’re referring to here… although I hope it’ll be something more relevant for AoE2DE.
How would the player numbers be if they made aom? Im not really an aom fan, i think ive only played it twice for about 2 hours total and i wish that community well, but if theyre gonna poach pur players then im not too keen
Of course not. It’s much smaller.
One reason is that the Enhanced Edition is pretty bad and the other reason is that the game was never as popular as AoE2.
But does that matter?
I think AoE3 is a much better comparison. The fan base is of more comparable size and both games use the same engine so it would likely be the same effort to make an AoMDE as it was to make an AoE3DE.
Seeing that AoE3DE still gets a lot of support, I feel like it’s more then AoE2DE even, so it seems like it was worth it for them.
Speaking of AoE1, while probably not included in the roadmap as it is for AoE2, wouldn’t that coincide with Red Bull Wololo event where AoE1 is also played? I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s a cross-over or something similar. Would make sense to connect the games using Red Bull too.
Great thoughts. I also was reminded of your big mod when I associated “ancient” with AoE 1 content.
Yea, it would be possible to add West Romans (great idea to experience Catalaunian Fields from Aetius’ perspective) and 1-2 other civs like Avars or Alans plus a campaign e.g. for Persians as Sasanian Empire (there should be enough campaign possibilities). Would be an interesting new take on Age II DLCs.
They don’t need a fill civ set for West Romans or Sassanids. They would just need 3-4 Roman and 3-4 Sassanid specific units and heroes (with unique skins) - Aetius, Honoria, Valentinian III, Shapur, Khosrau, Rostam and Yazdigerd III which could be used in the campaigns with triggers used for tech trees.