Helms’ crests and rags are the only tournament-associated elements within these armors. They are made of light material which easily fall when hit, so not that impractical even in battle. I don’t know where you see “capes”
I’ve checked the St Petersburg Swordsman Club: from what I’ve seen they are focused on late medieval to early modern era foot combat and mostly duels, as such it has little to do with High Medieval knightly mounted combat
I am myself an academic historian and never claim things I’m not sure about
What a shame, I feared it as they did the same with Delhi, whose units often wear 18th-19th century Indo-Persian armors (kula khuds, etc.). It’s like they just googled “Indian armors” and selected the first pictures without reading the texts associated.
Dude, this is a game. It does not have to be accurate or historically accurate. In strategy, the brightness and recognizability of units on the battlefield are in the first place, no one will bother with the reliability of all rivets on the horse’s butt, this is ridiculous.
The strategy, first of all, should be convenient, including for e-sports, which means that the units should be bright, stand out and not load the engine with lighter details that the player will not consider in battle, so that the coffee makers do not smoke.
Lol, I never asked for fully accurate armors. At the end, why you competition-obsessed players don’t make your own strategy game in which mere pixels of different colors would fight against each other? That way your “readability” won’t be hampered by annoying historical visuals. Why are you even interested into AoE in first place, which has always been a history-focused game as the devs themselves always claim?
I play custom scenarios and singleplayer and I don’t like the idea of making armor so colorful. Like I showed in my above post (which you conveniently didn’t respond to) colorful armor and capes wasn’t normal for a true battle, only for jousting
The fact is that AoE is going into mass and e-sports, and the developers would not want the game to be a niche. Then I have a counter offer, why don’t you find a game that meets your requirements for realism and historical accuracy. Age of Empires is not about that.
Why do competitive players like you claim for themselves the right to decide about what the game is about? AoE is not only about competition, nor did the devs ever claimed it.
Having historically-inspired armors won’t harm competition anyway. English fortifications shown yet are pretty accurate, does it harm the gameplay? No.
Academical historian and reenactor for years. Any person into medieval arms & armors would say the same anyway. I won’t even waste my time explaining why those armors aren’t accurate, they’re just fully wrong, made for mere entertainement.
Are you blind? The core of my drawed armor is the same as in the photos I posted, i.e. full hauberk, arming surcoat, enclosed helm, heater shield and horse caparison. Only colors and decoration change. The current armored cavalry of the game look nothing like that.
While knights dressed like this would be awesome, I doubt it will ever see the light of day… closest will be differentiating knights with swords and lancers etc…
How I could see this implemented in a DLC though, is a civ bonus could be as units get kills they rank up, and get new crest and design motifs to show their increased power for the opponent to try to micro down.
Right now though they seem to have too much on the plate to try to polish this game up. Good luck to them!
i think baby steps are okay in the case of age. lets start by unique unit designs for each civ, which should be around 20-30 units times lets say 3-4 upgrades to model for each civ
AoE is not about realism. Have you played the previous parts at all? Knights for the Aztecs, paladins for the Huns, and so on.
Even story campaigns in AoE are not the main part. The whole essence of the game is in modern mode, people remember it exactly as what they were cut into with friends on the local network. I guarantee you that no one will deal with the realism and historical accuracy of armor in AoE, accept it.
What are you talking about? There were hundreds, indeed thousands of sites / forums / communities (some still exist, such as heavengames) that dealt with scenarios, campaigns, mods (Does Forgotten Empires tell you something?) And much more “material” only single-player, l 'multiplayer aspect a large portion of users did not care / did not play it also obviously due to the limitations of the internet at that time.
True Age of Empires “was not realistic”, but in any case “tried to look like it” (perhaps representing a certain “cliché / idea” of the Middle Ages) but with the limits and the ingeuineness of the development of those times, and in any case the units did not they absolutely had the cartoon / mobile game look I saw in the fan preview,
However, personally this caricature style seems more confusing to me and the units seem worse than the previous age of empires
