The Hero units in the campaign feel kinda boring, especially now with the increasing number of new unique units with new abilities, first and foremost the Centurion.
Another issue is the inconsistent way the death of a Hero is handled.
In some missions they are just gone in others they respawn after a certain time. In some older missions the hero must stay alive so you don’t want to use it at all.
My ideas:
Give almost every Hero an Aura like the Centurion has
Allow the Hero to be retrained at the Town Centre or the Castle
Add Hero units to missions/campaigns that don’t have any yet (like Saladin or most other AoK campaigns)
Heroes should have unique auras buffing units that they were famous for leading into battle.
In many cases that would be the unique unit of the civilisation.
They type of buff should also depend on the Hero and civilisation of course.
The Auro could also do things like passively healing certain units.
Saladin could for example heal nearby Camel units with his Aura.
Other existing heroes could be reworked to only provide an Aura and no fighting capabilities like Jeanne D’Arc.
The ability to retrain the Hero at the Town Centre or Castle (depending on the Hero/campaign mission) would add consistency to how the death of a hero is handled and it could also give unique costs and train time to each hero.
Having to idle your Town Centre for 2 minutes to get your hero back might be an interesting strategic decision.
Giving a very high price to a hero that is required to finish a mission (like a hero that has to work into certain areas of the map) makes the loss of the hero a big disadvantage but not automatically makes you fail the mission.
This all applies to Return of Rome too.
Let us retrain Sargon of Akkad at the Temple instead of letting him respawn for free.
Doesn’t work because if you allow heroes to be created at any building, nothing prevents the Player to queue several of these units before the trigger checks for the unit creation, and disable its creation until the unit dies again, and you currently cannot establish a unit limit count via triggers in the game.
Likewise you cannot give aura or bonus to a unit that doesn’t have the trait/bonus to start with. For instance you cannot give a bonus VS camels to a unit that has 0 anti camel bonus to begin with.
Yes we can’t do that because we can’t change the code (unless we mod the game) but the developers sure can.
That’s the point of this thread, suggesting a change in the actual game and not just adding some triggers to scenarios.
Also a lot of heroes that don’t have unique skins don’t appear in campaigns and only exist in the game files.
Almost all of the base game heroes don’t appear or almost don’t appear at all.
I think they should be added to the campaigns and then given a unique skin, giving them a unique skin is kind of a waste when it’s not used.
They should rather invest their time in making regional skins for units (monks at last please) then making skins for hero units that are never used at all.
What you mean never used?? Plenty of people use the scenario editor/mods. The reason we have AOE2DE, AOE3DE and AOE4 is the scenario editor and the possibilities it offers. It is in the devs interest to strengthen the editor base for the long term survival of the game.
This is next to including the heroes in campaigns of course.
Also I dont understand the fellow who claims using a hero in multiplayer games will break it. Just grey the hero out once it has been trained.
I think you are perception of the game is not shared by most people.
The majority of people never really used the scenario editor or ever really goes out to play custom scenarios.
The majority plays the official campaigns, normal skirmish against AI or of course multiplayer, often ranked on official maps.
The list of content they could add to the Scenario Editor is practically infinite.
They could add completely new heroes or units too, because why not.
So why is updating hero units that don’t appear in official content so important?
There is a whole game worth of content in the game that we can’t access since they released Return of Rome.
The AoE1 and AoE2 content is completely separate (besides a few left over AoE2 units and buildings that technically still exist in Return of Rome).
I personally spend most of my time playing AoE1-3 in the Scenario Editor or playing scenarios but I know I’m not representing the majority of players.