The engine supports building absolutely massive cities, but people don’t. First, its really easy to get to 200 pop cap, and second many buildings dont need to be built more than once. As a result, city building is simply not done.
So, here are some changes that would make cities a necessity.
Houses by default now only give 1 pop. They can be upgraded by their placement with other structures to give additional population.
Houses next to a monastery, archery range, stable, or barracks give an additional +1 pop.
Houses within 5 tiles of a university give an additional 1 pop. This makes building multiple universities a good idea.
Castles increase pop by 5.
Houses can be upgraded to 2 story houses. These support an additional 1 pop, and catch cannon balls and trebuchet shots. 2 story houses cost wood, food, and gold to upgrade.
This game is a RTS. Not Sim City. These changes would drag out the game and also make it very boring on closed maps of 4v4 black forest, where is a lack of room to build anyway. This would make it even worse.
I think there should be sooner or later a civ with fortified houses or some kind of upgrade for them.
The issue with your idea is that at a certain point (usually when you boom in castle age) the game becomes too micro intensive and you lose the plot about your town or multiple ones, often forgetting aesthetics to be efficient. So the problem is even if you could build many cities like in a real empire in the end you won’t have time to care about them because aoe2 strategy is not at that level of abstraction, every task is specific to a single unit or a group of at max 60 (btw why not remove this limitation?) so it would just be a mess after 300 pop or so, even if it would be more realistic.
The solution could be implementing a system of abstract planning that helps the player to not deal with every single task, like a sort of automatism or AI colleague after you hit a certain population that deals with single units by following more general orders you give them (like 200 people on food, 100 on wood, 1 ram every 20 infantry etc but without sending them one by one) but it would probably become a different game.
Some recent qol improvements actually go in this direction but without basically changing the “role game” part of aoe2 where you need to control almost every single element in your possession.
However a separate game mode has sometimes been proposed as a kind of “city builder” like there was in stronghold with no enemies on the map.
I had an idea for a Durdzuks civilization, representing the Vainakh peoples of the North Caucasus, who would get their houses upgraded to Aul Houses in the Feudal Age. These Aul Houses come with a built-in tower that shoots arrows if villagers are garrisoned. The Aul Houses have 3 range, which can be improved through a unique tech.
If they were a full replacement for houses, available from the Dark Age instead of upgraded in Feudal, they would have a 5 or 10 stone cost and probably get range improved by Fletching, etc. I’m undecided as to what would be more balanced.
Didn’t know about them. Is there enough material for a civ? I could think of a Lazica/Abkhazia civ as the biggest hole, does it make sense? You’re the expert lol. Also Circassians maybe? Caucasian Iberians and Albanians are just Georgians I guess.
As for your house upgrade idea I knew that Caucasus was one of the places that could use something like that but I’ve seen something similar on a jurchens built too!
I think so. The hardest part would be finding AI names, as a campaign is easy to figure out. It would Gayur-khan, a leader of the Princedom of Simsir who worked with Tokhtamysh to fight Tamerlane. In a similar way to the Briton campaign or Burgundian campaign, this one would tie in very closely to the Tamerlane campaign, but on the opposite side.
Maybe? I admittedly haven’t done that much research on Abkhazia, but it could probably work.
I mean, maybe. I don’t have a history degree. I just happen to have done the most research on the subject out of the most active members. There’s still plenty I don’t know.
and we could build roads and make units unable to walk anywhere else like in the Sierra city building series. oh, and water fountains. units need to drink.