Campaign Arsenals?

So, I’m not sure if this is a bug/oversight or what…but I found it very odd that you have separate upgrade buildings for melee and ranged units (Blacksmith and Arsenal, respectively), while in an actual Skirmish they are consolidated into one building (Blacksmith) for every civ.

It’s strange to me that the Campaign would have gameplay elements and mechanics like this that differ from the core mechanics of a regular match. Obviously, I don’t speak for everyone, but I like to play through the campaign, before diving into online…but it was a bit confusing when I jumped into a match as the English and started looking for the “Arsenal” to upgrade my Longbowmen…only to find out that building does not exist at all outside of the Campaigns.

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Not only that, the tech tree is different there too and some landmarks like the french guild hall work entirely different as well.

I can think of two reasons for that:

  • They designed the campaign first and later made balance changes to the multiplayer (like realizing that having two tech buildings doing the same limit the player too much when tech switching)

or

  • They took artistic liberties and combined different techs from different ages together for each mission.

Yeah! You know, you’re right! I didn’t even notice that, until you mentioned it. Like…in the campaign, there are two different mining upgrades, one for stone and one for gold…while in a match, they are consolidated into one upgrade that affects both.

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The hotkeys are also different, and this bothered me a little bit. My understanding was that the campaign would help players learn how to play, but that doesn’t appear to be the case. If they added something for the sake of interesting mechanics or just something cool for single player, then that’d probably wouldn’t bother me.

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Only on the first two missions I think, but that did annoy me.

Do they have any hotkey challenges?
I thought that they might, it’s something I would put in if I wanted people to learn to use the hotkeys

I think these were buildings and features in the early builds of the game, which they streamlined down. I also noticed that the research only costs gold, while it costs gold and wood or food in Skirmishes.

It’s kind of like in some of the older campaigns of AoE2, where the university techs cost stone instead of their updated amount (Treadmill Crane, Guard Tower, etc.), and how the tech-trees were based on a pre-Definitive Edition version.