With the Definitive edition every civilisation got their own crest in the interface and it’s also used on some of the unique units of those civilisations.
It would add a lot of flavour to each civilisation if generic units like Long Swordsman, Skirmisher or Knight would use those on their unit sprites similar to how every building set also has unique sails for the ships.
Depending on the shape of the crest and the boni of civilisation the crest would be used on different units. If the crest doesn’t fit a unit the generic one is used instead. There could also be generic shields for each architecture set.
Always keeping the shape of the original shields to make the sprites fit on easily for every angle and keep the readability of the units.
(simple edit without proper shading. The crests on the castle would need some more work but it doesn’t move so it wouldn’t be too hard.)
The Frankish, Teutonic and Burgundian shields would look perfect on a Knight/Cavalier or Paladin.
The Aztec or Vietnamese skirmisher would look nice with the round crest of those civilisations.
While the round shield of the Saracens, Turks, Persians, Malians, Tatars or even Chinese would look nice on a Camel Rider.
Those could also be applied as decals on buildings like the Town Centre, University or Castle of some civilisations.
This would be a relative easy was to make units look more special while still being very readable.
Seeing a Paladin with a Frankish shield you know it’s gonna have more HP or a Camel Rider with a Malian one will have a high attack.
A similar system is already used for ships so it should be possible in the engine.
This is an interesting idea in theory, and if we were talking about some other game, I would agree. But there are 3 problems with AoE:
In reality, not every shield had heraldry on it. This was only among nobles and generals. Ordinary soldiers did not have shields with symbols.
The units are very small, these emblems will not even be visible.
Units in the game are represented not by 3D models, but by sprites. This means that devs would have to create 40 variants of sprites with animation from each unit. This would require a lot of work and would increase the size of the game VERY SIGNIFICANTLY.
Instead of this whole idea, I would suggest having flags just waving over town halls and castles.
The Knight line certainly falls under the definition of “Nobles”, doesn’t it?
Also a lot of civilisation crests are just generic shield designs.
Some unique units like the Serjeant or the Magyar Hussar already have the same shield as the civilisation crest.
Isn’t that true for every detail?
Also if you have many units then you see the same thing multiple times on the screen so it become noticeable again.
I don’t know the technical details but the game already has regional sails on ships, that system should work for units too.
Overlaying parts of the unit instead of making a unique sprite for every variant.
Also not every unit would have a variant for every civilisation.
Only civilisations that have a bonus for a certain unit have a unique variant.
The models are made based of 3D models btw.
So they can relatively easily generate multiple variants of the same model.
Yes, but the game engine does not support the models themselves. Therefore, this is how it is done - in a separate editor, renders are made from the model, of each of their movements from each angle. Thus, each unit is a lot of consecutive pictures. With your proposal, it turns out that there should be 40 times more of them. It would be insane.
You can simply overlay an icon only on top of static buildings. You can’t even dream about shields. This is possible, but the game will weigh, for example, 80 GB. For what?
Of course, everything would be simpler if the game simply used models in their pure form. But alas, the whole engine doesn’t work like that.
In general, your proposal would be better suited for some game with large units, for example Ancestors Legacy or some kind of RPG. But here the feasibility is very small. I understand what you mean, but this is a case where a lot of work and very high costs are needed to achieve a very dubious result.
I’m pretty sure they have automated that already.
No way they are manually taking screenshots of animations.
Sails already work on a rotating and moving unit why shouldn’t overlayed shields work?
How would that make the game suddenly be 80GB?
They would only have to automate the “make shield” pipeline once and then just run it multiple times.
It’s not like a human has to manually do all those steps.
Oh man, I know how bad it is when people come to your thread to tell how unsuccessful it is. I don’t like this myself. But in this case I want to say that I really don’t believe in this idea. It could poorly be implemented technically, it will require a 40-fold increase in image storage, and it is not particularly historical. And all this will barely even be visible in the game.
And this will create a particularly crazy combination with the HD add-on, in which this 40x increase will also be multiplied by a multiple increase in the sprites themselves. There are hundreds of them for each unit. The talk is about hundreds of thousands of png.
I’m not against your concept as such, but it simply won’t work in AoE. I am pleased to communicate with you, but I simply could not believe this idea. I will be glad if I can support some other one.
Have you read anything I wrote?
How would it even remotely come close to doubling the file size?
Probably not even a 1% increase.
Add the civilisation crest to 1-2 units per civilisation, not every unit!
Also I said multiple times that they can only add the crests on top of existing sprites like they do with sails on ships.
So the only new image files saved on the players hard drive are the shields with the civilisation crest for every angle of the unit sprite.
Nowhere remotely close to storing all units 40 times.