… making a square into a triangle or a square into a hexagon or alike involves drastic changes on every layer on the game.
A change which affects the final age, at its final phase, for 1/10th of matchups for 1/1000 games is on a much smaller scale, but yes it would corrupt gamebalance if ’culture’ is a new game element.
Maybe AoE V can include such a ’culture’- element as a superior tactic versus ’Turtled Growth’ or vs High-Teched Units.
Local Culture: beaten by infiltration/local domination & plagues.
Infiltration beaten by prejudical rush.
1 Just Throwing in “original ideas” is for a complex game a bad design choice.
how is your suggestion supposed to work? As unit, ability, building ?
You have to bake the cake first, than make toppings.
You cant simply focus on one thing, and forget all the others.
The problem of RTS genre in past 15 years can be simply be simply summarized by a question, what was feature the game is most remembered for? And that’s probably the main reason why it’s failed.
2 I expect AoE V to be made by Creative Assembly 2030, who would merely transit AoE2 into 3D.
I doubt by 2030 would be any other AAA RTS developer team around.
Well they made already for MS the RTS game Halo Wars 2, it does have base build.
What I find better by CA, they are Consistent and Resilient by gameplay design.
Just pick up a good game formula and provide a lot of content.
A simple example, how would average RTS team these days design archers?
Modern day teams would make one faction with Long bow archers, one with stone throwers,
one faction with no archers at all, because it has to be different and original.
Creative Assembly would simply give all the 20 till 50 Factions access to bows, short bows, long bows, fire arrows and poison arrows. Each faction would have access to very comparable tech with access to some specific, but not overpowered units.
While other teams are goofing around with gameplay elements,
Creative Assembly makes a gameplay focused game.