Aoe5 should be followed aoe3

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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I believe that AoE3 still has a lot of untapped potential, it doesn’t need a replacement just yet. When the time comes for a new installment to “replace” AoE3, I would like for it to focus on the following:

  • Much better naval gameplay. AoE never has been very good at dealing with navies, I believe there is a lot of room for improvement here with a new engine. It’s also historically relevant as this is the period of the “Great Navigations”.

  • A Revolution revamp. The entire revolution mechanic is such a cool idea, but it’s very poorly implemented. If I had the chance, I would love to scrap everything and start over with a clearer and fresher goal in mind.

  • More coherent allies. Because of content creep, the different native civilizations are very uneven. Euro and African allies have much better and more interesting features than their Asian and American counterparts. Also, I would have european and asian allies being actual natives, instead of “Royal” or “Religious Sites” for consistency.

  • Some sort of World Conquest mode. It think it could be cool for a dynamic campaign-ish mode where you can pick an Empire and try to take over the world, conquering territories and managing resources on a macro-scale. It could be online or offline.

  • Different terrain types with different effects. In order to make maps feel more unique and force players to use different strategies, I would like to see stuff like Snowy or Desert terrain making it impossible to build Farms or muddy areas that slow units down.

  • Finally, my starting roster would be:

  1. Britain
  2. France
  3. Netherlands
  4. Spain
  5. Portugal
  6. Ottomans
  7. Ethiopians
  8. China
  9. Japan
  10. Inca
  11. Aztecs

With more civs as DLC down the line.

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I was as disappointed as everyone that aoe4 ended up being aoe2: 2 but I really think aoe has no business going into the modern era… I tried to think of a specific reason why but I think it’s more of just a vibe. Playing with knights and castles, swordsmen and archers, and pikemen and musketeers is fun and very remote from the “real world” or current world, and heading into the world of machine guns and poison gas just feels… off.

Especially with the niche that aoe fits in to now, which wasn’t as clear when ensemble was joking around with aoe 4 being ww2 and aoe5 being scifi. Aoe has that sort of empire/colony builder game thing going on where you feel like you’re building up a strong new kingdom before defending it and driving off the others. In the modern era this is a lot trickier to feel natural. Nobody was building fresh new kingdoms. Maybe you could have it be about building army bases or something, but would that be anywhere as satisfying as building “New London”? Modern war is more about tactics, combined operations, and politics, all of which other rts games specialise in. E.g. tatics → Company of Heros, combined operations → Steel Division, politics → Hearts of Iron.

The original Aoe3 was set in colonial america because it fit the Aoe empire-building gameplay concept; it neatly explains why you start with next to nothing and build up your city/train your army. Of course things got muddy as soon as they added the native american civs (why are they starting from nothing?) and then even more so with the Asian civs. Now with the DE european civs on european maps, the whole “you’re founding a colony” concept is extremely shaky for even the OG euro civs. So, I suppose the aoe3 empire-building gameplay isn’t necessary and our hypothetical modern age aoe4 could just work like all the older ones. Why, in 1900, are you founding “London” for the first time, on a desert map? Who cares!

I think the fact that aoe3 had to be adjusted a lot to fit modern culture is a strong indicator of the dangers you’d have trying to make an aoe4 1900-1990 game as well… Aoe3 is set hundreds of years ago, but the events that the game depicts still have an impact on people today, and it was decided that it’s important to make sure the game doesn’t cause harm in any way by perpetuating (or allowing) cruel or mean-spirited ideas. Imagine how much more careful everyone would have to be with a game that features modern nations and their recent modern leaders, policies, religions, national goals, dress, etc. I strongly doubt any company the size of microsoft would touch the era with a ten foot pole.

Imo, if Aoe was going to continue going forward in time (I wish it did) I think sci-fi makes the most sense. But at the same time obviously, Aoe is a historical series, so I assume they would lose a huge number of fans if they tried that. Still, I think colonising a new planet is the perfect setting for aoe’s gameplay in a new era. There’s even Star Wars: Galactic Battlegrounds as an example. A sci-fi conversion of Aoe2 where the base infantry all use laser guns that features aircraft as well. It played well enough!

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The problem is most of the changes done for woke reasons made the game objectively worse.

Plantation is by far the most accurate term possible for that building. “Estate” is needlessly vague and a complete mess in other languages.

Censoring every instance of the word colony is beyond ridiculous. The entire game is designed around colonialism as the core theme. Anyone too offended by terms like plantation or colony should not be playing a game themed around that.

Medicine Man being renamed to “Healer” has no justification. It is perfectly descriptive and inoffensive. It creates confusion because healer should be the term for the entire class of units.

I don’t really care whether or not they dance around fires. It was historical but also something that should maybe not be gamified in some cases so that’s fine if they replace it. What isn’t fine is replacing it with the complete trash that is the “Community Plaza”. Now instead of performing ceremonies that inspire and bring together a culture, they just randomly stand around and do nothing. The Aztecs and Incas had impressive monumental temples, but their core building is instead a fancy patio where people do nothing.

Building outhouses next to mines is the biggest joke. They touted it as a new “fur trade” system, but all it does is make the native civs tedious to play and suck the fun out of the game. I haven’t played the civs with that system since that change and I’m probably not alone. Mining isn’t even an issue at all for Haudenosaunee so it is completely unnecessary to ruin the civ like that. If they wanted to do the right thing, they should have actually put some effort in to make a unique Lakota mechanic that respects their attitudes toward the earth.

Then there are all the things that won’t get included because of wokeness. Marginalized people don’t get featured because their history is perceived as risky for business (even though other games show you can accurately cover sensitive topics). We’ll never get a proper Haitian revolution or faction like maroons because telling the story of poor oppressed black people would be admitting that slavery happened.

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When can we get some screenshots/video from the new AOM?

Please? Would make a nice Christmas present.

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So far, the fur trade mechanic has not much (only a little bit) to do with wokeness. The Lakota don’t mine. The haudenosaunee can technically mine but never historically did. My gripe with this mechanic is that its badly done. But i feel the devs, how can they balance the game if hunts provide food and coin for some civs?

I don’t think AoE3 is a game about colonialism. It started off as that. But with Native americans and Asians and now Africans, it no longer is.

While commerce age isnt the best name for it, colonial age is not accurate either.

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India is a janky British Raj that they refuse to split into actual native Indian empires and the African expansion has “Colonial Oppressors” as the evil treasure guardians. The game always has been (and will be) about colonialism at its core. It’s just unavoidable in a game set in that era.

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India is just bad. Should have been about mughals. And we have told them that, a million times.

This gets political so we should not talk about it, but in the US, some cases of colonialism are more urgent than others. So the horrible Indian civ in this game wasnt changed but the native american ones were somewhat altered.

Japan and china are not as colonial as India. There are nations which are very much into the theme of colonialism but now that you have European maps etc, the focus is to shift away from there.

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not the right place to ask mate, go to AOM and ask the devs but no it probably wont happen.

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I largely agreed with you… Until you used Victoria III, a game that is largely panned by the Vicky fanbase as being an over simplified snooze-fest, as a good example for anything. Victoria II and EU IV would be better examples.

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I’m not saying Victoria 3 has spectacular gameplay, I’m just highlighting the fact that they chose to depict the history instead of completely purging the game of even slightly tangential references to it. Whether or not it is boring is probably not related to that.

I’ve only ever played EU4 and I find it to be a frustratingly complicated map painter. It also doesn’t depict slavery beyond having slaves as a commodity and maybe a few events so it’s not a good example for the point I’m making.

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slavery in EU4 is essentially just economic, slaves arent really treated differently than dyes or salt, they are just a modifier that increases your province production of wealth and as such are close to meaning, you have no real agency over if you produce slaves or not and they dont really factor into anything in the grand scheme of things.

the nature of an AOE game is that depicting slavery will always be closer to the actual execution than it is in EU4, economy isnt just a number on a page here, its villagers performing labour that drives the economy. you cant depict slavery in AOE without actively using them as villagers, which at that point you are making an active choice to do slavery, its just not possible to have a neutral stance towards that in an AOE game.

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i recall aoe3 having to be super careful to avoid refering to slavery in gameplay, DE taking the step further by renaming plantations to estates and few others

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AoE5 should be in ancient era - rome, carthage, pharaos…

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makes me question if its even logical to do ancient again, medival raised plenty of eyebrows, and 4th fails to stand on it own vs its predecessors, as another better aoe already covers its time period
i’d prefer if this scenario doesn’t repeat

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You don’t need to go all out and have a slave economic unit that takes up 3/5ths of a population or anything like that. You don’t even need to depict slaves at all. However, it’s going to far to wipe out any reference to anything slave adjacent. There’s no reason to be afraid of the word “Plantation” or depict the Haitians as thieving pirates instead of liberated slaves.

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Not that it triggers me personally but plantation could be potentially triggering to some people who are playing the game…

It’s okay to be on the safe side if you want to get today’s audience to play the game.

Nobody wants bad media. You can say that the fear of cancel culture is too much these days and I agree. But hey, MS is here to make money.

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Very simple, AoE1 is very obsolete

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Plantations run off slavery haven’t been a thing since Brazil abolished it in 1888. This isn’t trauma in living memory that could possibly trigger someone. Even if it was, they don’t actually care about that. They’re only concerned about fake good press by touting their zero effort woke measures.

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pleas not more nonsense of combining bronze age with the roman world.

we are closer culturally to the romans than they where to bronze age egypt, if there was ever a point where you can clearly make a distinction between what came before and what came after its the bronze age collapse, we barely are even able to reconstruct their written languages today. meanwhile roman law, political understanding, philosophy and language all still impact us today, we can see the remains of the roman world on us today.

i think AOE 1 is so outdated that making an attempt at retrying, preferably in 2 games, is a good idea. the eras it tries to depict isnt done justice within the game. AOE2 while certainly not perfect at least somewhat works for what it tries to be, AOE1 doesnt really.

personally i think changing the name of plantations was not necessary or needed, if for no other reason that we still have plantations today and that they existed before colonial times as well. but its also not one that i personally care that much about. it doesnt bother me whether its called estate or plantation.

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we’re technically getting aoe1 ported to 2 de engine with return of rome, so any new ancient period game will compete with that one

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