AoE 2 DE Campaigns suggestions - Feedback DLC: Return of Rome

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Dear Age of Empires 2 Developer Team,

AoE 2 DE: DLC: Return of Rome: Feedback:
-Firstly I want to say thank you for the recently released DLC for Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition R E T U R N O F R O M E. As you know, the Romans are very popular and we appreciate really, having them also in the game for Age 2. I had some fun with playing all 3 campaigns, which recently were added to Age 1 and I have accomplish all the Roman missions successfully completed, 4 of the Macedonian missions out of 5 each and 3 of the Sumerian missions out of 4 each.
-But anyway I noticed also some negative things about both the DLC and the main game, which should surely be improved, if the game is to be reasonably reasonable. Bugs to the game I have posted into the bug theme.

AoE 2 DE: DLC: Return of Rome: Suggestions relating Roman civ name, campaign and hero:
-Give the new civ of the “Romans” in Age of Empires 2 a new, more appropriate name for the time age of antiquity. I am thinking on “Western Romans or Late Romans” to be historically correct, since from around 250 AD, we can no longer speak of the classic “Roman Empire” of the “Iron Age”, but of the above mentioned designations. You should also use the new name, so that there is no confusion with the civs of Age of Empires 1, which depict the “Roman Republic” and the classic “Roman Empire”.
-Give the Western Romans or Late Romans a new campaign in the near future in order to do justice to the whole scope of this DLC, including a new Leader (a Western or Late Roman Hero) for the campaign.

AoE 2 DE: Further Updates or DLCs: Suggestions relating civ names, campaigns and heros:
-We have already a european campaign with the Vlachs, although we do not play with the Vlachs at all, but we play with the Slavs, Turks and Hungarians. It would be good, if you recreate this civ and give them as a Hero “Vlad Draculea” for a later DLC, which you are already using in the current campaign as a leader. For these two main reasons give the players please a playable civ called “Vlachs”.
-Give the “Vikings” civ and the “Slavs” civ a “own campaign”, which is missing so far. With the Vikings you can draw a connection from Denmark to Sweden in the individual missions and with the Slavs, you can draw a connection from Kiev to Novgorod.
-The “Burgundians” as a civ name is questionable, “French” or similar terms might be better. In any case, the “Flemish militia” should be given an other french orign name, since this name has “Dutch” connections.
-The Britons should stay Britons, as they were a fixture on the English Isles in antiquity and partly on the Middle Ages. Also the “Longbowman” as their special unit, is chosen appropriately. But doing “Edward Longshanks” as the British Hero in the Definitive Edition campaign is pretty much out of place. Longshanks was an Anglosaxon and fought against the Britons. You should therefore choose an other Leader than Longshanks, better would be “Robin Hood” or another Island celtic Hero.
-Rename the “Celts” to “Anglosaxons”. Since the Anglosaxons according to historical informations, represent an Infantry and or Monks civilization, they would be well suited as a replacement for the Celts, since the Celts also provide an Infantryman as the “Woad Raider” with their special unit. The Continental celts refer the Celts in the game, have long since died out as a civ in antiquity and in the Middle Ages and are therefore historically misplaced in the game.
-The designation “Slavs” as a civ is very general and for the time age period of the game from the Antiquity around 250 AD to the early modern period around 1500 AD, we can no longer speak of pure “Slavs” but in the full sense of “Eastern Slavs”, “Rus” or “Kievan Rus”.

AoE 2 DE: Further Updates: Suggestions relating campaign overview maps:
-Divide certain campaigns overview maps into “cultural areas” for the sake of a better view and historically more understandable overview map.
-Divide Europe graphically better into following Groups: Western Europe with Western Latin speaking civs (Portuguese, Spanish, Burgundians or French), Atlantic europe with Insular celtic and West germanic speaking civs (Britons, Celts=Anglosaxons), Central Europe with West Slavic and Ugric speaking civs (Bohemians, Poles, Hungarians) and Northern Europe with fully German speaking civs (Vikings, Teutons, Franks, Goths). A further subdivision into Southern Europe with Greek and Eastern Latin speaking civs (Byzantines or Greeks, Sicilians, Italians and Western or Late Romans) and Eastern Europe with Slavic and Eastern Latin speaking civs (Eastern Slavs, Bulgarians, Vlachs) is also appropriate. Now Europe is much too compressed and does not look pretty.
-The campaign overview maps for Asia should also be revised. Enter new maps for the Near East with Arabic speaking civs (Saracens), the Middle East with Turkic and Iranian speaking civs (Turks, Persians), Central Asia with Turkic and Mongolic speaking civs (Huns, Cumans, Tatars, Mongols), India with Indoaryan and Dravidian speaking civs (Hindustanis, Bengals, Gurjaras, Dravidians=Tamils), South Asia with (
, 
) speaking civs (Burmans, Khmer, Vietnamese) and East Asia with Altaic and Chinese speaking civs (Japanese, Korean, Chinese).
-For Oceania with (
, 
) speaking civs (Malay). Please create a new campaign overview map as it shows the Indo-Pacific area, who has not been represented at all so far.
-Furthermore, I see also the campaign overview maps for America and Africa as being much too general, especially for future DLCs in the game. Divide America into Latin America (Aztecs, Mayans and Incas) and North America (No civ yet), Africa into North Africa (Berbers, Malians, Ethiopians) and Subsaharan Africa (No civ yet).

AoE 2 DE: Further Updates: Suggestions relating architecture sets of the Dark ages:
-Give all previous civs for the “Dark Age” own buildings adapted architecture set according the previous selection. The current buildings of the Dark age just look awful, because all civs use the same architecture set for it. Since the Dark Age in the game himself and in the reality encompass the Antiquity and not the Stone Age, an architecture adjustment is necessary, if the developers want to be historically sensible in this consideration. Even at the Stone Age, there are architectural differences of buildings between people on different continents but even more so in the Antiquity.

AoE 2 DE: Further Updates: Suggestions relating better special units:
-The special units of the “Persians”, “Khmer” and “Koreans” look horrible. These animal and wagon special units should be replaced by historically more appropriate human special units. Give these civs mere human units, as they never fought with War elephants or huge Armored wagons as their main force, because it is from a historically view clearly false.
-Additionally are a larger group of War elephants very difficult to defeat in the game and the Persians act historically incorrectly with a massive superiority. Even in the Indian areas (Hindustanis, Bengals, Gurjaras, Tamils), where they originally come from, War elephants were mainly used by natives and not for state warfare.
-The “Bohemian hussite wagon” should be operated by a group of soldiers on the wagon itself in terms of graphics, that would be a historical appreciation and a win for the game


AoE 2 DE: Further Updates: Suggestions relating graphical adjustments of the units:
-Mentioned as an example, it is just horrid to see, how a Saracen swordsman look the same as a Teutonic swordsman, at least give the Saracen a saber.
-The units on the ships and boats should be graphically visible on the water, not as until now that they are cooped up on the lower deck like slaves, which also looks very unrealistic.

Best wishes and I hope that the points mentioned will be implemented. If the mentioned things will not introduced or only insufficiently introduced, the game remains a ruin of a good game
 Foresight is required.

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They actually used mainly straight swords during the Crusades, sabers were mainly adopted after turkish and mongol influences. Armour would be much more different, however.

If I had to guess, as sabers are typically better against unarmoured foes and on horseback (slide better on target) while straight swords are better for piercing, the utter destruction of the Middle East made metal armour less common so using better slasher weapons was preferable to armour-piercing ones (few could afford metal armour anymore), while tactics switched toward cavalry which was favoured by Turks and Mongols. Hence the switch to curved scimitars after 1258.

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Alright, rapid fire response :

Burgundians : the name is fine. They cover the Burgundians from the invasions period, Lotharingia, and Burgundy who expanded into the Low Countries, so they are fine.

Celts. An umbrella civ mainly covering the Scots and Irish, celtic languages still exist to this day.

Romans
 it’s understood they are the WRE but they still call themselves Romans. The Byzantines also called themselves Romans. No one called the Romans “Late Romans” at this time.

The campaign map is fine as it is. It’s not hard to intuitively find campaigns, Saladin may feel more asian but his center of power was in Egypt. DLCs have their own separate maps because it’s optional content.

The Dark Age is fine, in practice very few campaign missions start there anyway, it’s when civilisation collapsed so a fancy architecture was on no-one’s priority list.

I agree some UUs need a redesign. The frankish throwing axeman is quite awful when zoomed in (and seems to throw dwarven double battleaxes instead of franciscas).

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In this case they called yourselves Eastern Romans.

They were inofficially called Late romans. From the split of the Roman empire can no longer be spoken of a Roman empire, hence the term Late Romans is more appropriate.

No in any way. The campaign maps without the new DLCs maps have been crammed into a few large maps and just look ugly.

It is difficult. A complete novice does not immediately find the campaigns of their desired civ because the civs are placed too close together and are even on parts historically incorrectly placed on the hole map.

The new Definitive Edition DLC campaigns concerning 3 maps and they are well designed, I do not say anything against that. However all civ positions from the main game need a major overhaul including new maps like Northern Europe, Western Europe, Japanese Islands, Maincountry China and so on


No overall not! The Dark Age graphics looks equally very ugly for all civs. Only if you have severe brain damage concerning the sense of beauty, can you appreciate this terrible presentation of the Dark Ages.

It is about the principle and not about whether it affects few or many campaign missions.

The opposite is true. The Dark ages is the time, when everything rises again. You can see that this is true because it corresponds to the first Age of the game.

From historical view civs need a specific architecture for the Dark Ages, since we are not in the Stone Age there.

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“Western Romans” maybe though you’d need renaming the Byzantines “Eastern Romans” if that was done, I’d be okay with that change.

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Well then, stop talking beautiful about everything in this weighty error game


If the devs could do that, yes I would be agree, although Late Romans or New Romans suit me better.

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“New Romans” would imply it’s a roman colony on another continent (and I don’t mean in North Africa or West Asia, beyond the oceans), no no no no nope, that’s alt-history with Rome surviving in America :laughing:

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So Late Romans would also certainly fit.

When it comes to New Romans I can partly agree with your argumentation. But the developers themselves recently announced that you should find out what is it like to play against the Aztecs with the Romans, so the name New Romans would not even have been chosen incorrectly, but would still make sense :smiley:

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“Neuro” as in “related to nerves” ? That sounds like cybernetics, I know the Romans were quite advanced but that’s the territory of Cyberpunk

(Yes yes I’m nitpicking, you meant Neo-Romans :wink: )

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Of course yes, i mean New romans. Just wait until I have done the correct English translation at the post :sweat_smile:

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Anyway the term “late roman” was only coined by historians much later who looked back at the history of Rome and said “this is the later phase of their empire”. But that’s not a civ name. Romans at the time surely knew their empire was not as great as it had been but did not know it would end, until it did. The fall of the Empire in 476 was not even seen as that significant, compared to the sacks of Rome in 410 and 455.

Either keep Romans & Byzantines, or rename both to Western/Eastern Romans.

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I agree with them. It is better to use West romans and East romans than the previous names Romans and Byzantines, because in the case of the Romans, it is just confusing with the Romans from Age of empires 1 and the name West romans would better separate the Romans as a new civ from the first part.

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We also have the Persians in both games, both included in the vanilla CD version, it’s not confusing as both cannot play in the same game.

For forums if you want to be extra sure, say AOE1/ROR Romans and AOE2 Romans.

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Unfortunately yes.

It is more confusing than not at least for me. The Persians in Age of empires 2 are also not appropriate either, the name of the Sassanids would be better for the second part.

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It cannot be done as the Sassanids are named after a dynasty, not a people (at least an exonym). The Persians also cover later Persian dynasties.

And where can it be confusing ? If we’re debating how good of a cav civ the Persians are compared to the Franks and Huns, you won’t think about AOE1.

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False then the Romans could be also a dynasty, which they were in parts of the Roman republic.

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I agree about regional graphics for units (provided it’s done very carefully and is optional), but the rest of these suggestions seem quite arbitrary and weird to me.

The term ‘Anglo-Saxon’ usually only refers to the English before the Norman Conquest. It certainly isn’t synonymous with ‘Longbowman’. The Britons’ civ design is based almost entirely on the period from Longshanks’s conquest of Wales onwards, well after the Anglo-Saxon period. ‘English’ might be a better name, but has the downside of excluding the Welsh.

Celts includes the Irish – in fact, it’s primarily based on the Irish (as much as it’s based on anything except fantasy). The Irish were definitely not Britons.

This seems like quite a weird way to divide things up to me. For example, were Burgundian buildings really more similar to Spanish and Portuguese ones than to Frankish ones? How would ‘Island Europe’ be different from the current western European architecture? Why is central European architecture not appropriate for Teutons? etc.

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Last I checked the Romans are named after the city of Rome since the city was founded by Romulus, they didn’t call themselved the Caesareans between Augustus and Nero for example. It’s not a dynasty, they changed their political system several times, monarchy then republic then military dictatorship with some republican remants (principate) then back to monarchy that looked increasingly feudal (dominate), and their emperors was not a dynasty either.

The Persians cover Iranian people, for a longer time period than just the Sassanids. Just like the Saracens (yes, a medieval exonym) are not called the Abassids or Umayyads.

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Yet they were, as I have already described, at some times of their epoch.

The Romans were a political system as you saying yourselfes. So the name of the Sassanids would be more appropriate for the second part of the game :stuck_out_tongue_winking_eye:

A few yet, but the most not, that is true.

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Not even that, there are huge differences between the monarchy, republic, principate and dominate.

The Romans is the civ, its people.

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