Civilization idea: the Elves

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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The elves are agile, intelligent and protected by powerful but unreliable magic, but are lacking in fertility. They strive to make a name for themselves before magic withdraws from the world entirely.

Archery and eagle and monk civilization

Civ bonuses:
All techs are 25% discounted.
All units attack 33% faster (25% less reload time) and (randomly) dodge 25% of all attacks.
All units are trained 25% slower (33% more training time)
Pop cap is reduced 25% (max 150 pop with normal settings)

Explanation: These features together should ensure the civ gets by with 25% less pop. They need 25% fewer resources, but also collect 25% fewer resources, and they have 25% fewer army units but each unit has 25% more dps and is 25% harder to kill, so that it should all balance out. What remains should be an ability to micro differently, a small eco advantage from starting with 3 vills when it ā€˜shouldā€™ have been 2.25, and 25% ā€˜moreā€™ resources.

Tech tree:
They have eagles, but missing Plate Mail Armor and Champion. (Heavily armoured champs would go against the flavour)
Full tech tree for foot archers and skirmishers, and have access to Imperial Skirmishers as a regional unit.
The stable produces only unicorns.
Access to gunpowder units, both HC and BBC, but no siege engineers. Heavy scorpion and Siege Ram, but no Onager.
A full dock.
Monks donā€™t get Redemption or Illumination. (But do gain access to powerful damage-dealing abilities via the UT.)
No Fortified Wall.
No shaft mining upgrades.

UU: Troll. Slow(?) melee unit with very rapid regen. Takes bonus damage from Tarkans. Deals bonus damage to Samurai. (Is expected to be relatively weak against archers because of focus firing, and relatively strong vs champs because the regen will be more effective in that situation. Is effective under town center fire for the same reason.)
UB: The White Ship: a Wonder replacement that can sail away. It represents the elves leaving to the mystical continent of Aman.

UT1: World Sunder. Randomly kills half of the trees on the map and half of all units. Permanently inverts colours as the world enters an eternal night. Monks gain access to the Fireball attack.
UT2: Half-elf infantry. Barracks units cost half as much gold and 25% less population space. This tech is cheap. (modified)

Team bonus: Monks have 10 more hp.

Obviously this is just a bit of fun. I hope I could make you laugh. But maybe there are some ideas worth keeping in here.

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This is something like the meso cavalry meme unit?

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There are people who make Venice concepts and then say ā€˜itā€™s just for funā€™ but you know they want Venice in the game. This concept is fun just for being fun. I liked it

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What
20 characters
20 characters

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No one really made any roman civi concepts but here we are.

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I only found that Roman+Papal States hybrid* thread, but I do remember a lot of posts in different threads, even before the announcement of this DLC, that discussed adding (Western) Romans**. Even some surveys that showed that Romans were kind of popular if included in a Late Antiquity themed DLC

Anyways, this is way better than splitting Italians or Teutons concepts.

ā€Ž * is there a contemptuous word for hybrid in English?. Thatā€™s what I feel for this Roman+Papal States concept
** I opposed it

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Probably
Bas
tar
diz
ation
Because of the filter, i cant put it all together, but put those chunks together and itā€™s close to what youre looking for.

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you can always make a mod for it and try them out!

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I found this an entertaining read, but Iā€™m actually quite confused about the concept. You mention

which makes me think these are supposed to be based on Tolkienā€™s elves. But then you have

which I think is from WarCraft? Tolkien has something called the Sundering of the Elves, but itā€™s not anything like this. Also, either way, I donā€™t know what the effects are referring to:

And then thereā€™s the unique unit:

Tolkienā€™s trolls have nothing to do with his elves, as far as I know. I think WarCraft trolls are related WarCraft elves, but theyā€™re not slow. So Iā€™m not sure what this is about, and you also have an elf civ without an elf unique unit, which is odd.

You also say

but I donā€™t see why. And then thereā€™s the unicorn thing. I donā€™t know of any fantasy race of elves that has anything to do with unicorns.

So overall, Iā€™m confused. Itā€™s still more historically accurate than Celts, though, so well done there.

Mishmash, hodgepodge/hotchpotch, jumble. Maybe pastiche, but itā€™s not normally used in that sense.

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Iā€™m shocked and scandalized! The elf UU should obviously be the shield surfer, a ranged unit with speed bonus when coming down stairs!
Absolutely inaccurate portrayal!

It was meeee!

Also, I think this can sumarize @TommoChocolateā€™s comment quite well.

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Thanks for the positive replies @everyone!

@TommoChocolate:
You picked up on most of my sources of inspiration.

Iā€™m rather a fan of (post)apocalyptic elves, a floundering magical race in a world of dying magic. The time of elves is over, the time of men is at hand. So I stole that from Tolkien.

World Sunder is actually a technology from a fantasy mod of an old strategy game. But the idea of people (often cultists) tearing holes in the veil between realms occurs in various stories Iā€™m aware of. Usually it also ends up killing a lot of people. I believe it also happens in Warcraft in some manner (?). It made sense to me that a desperate, doomed civilisation might take rather drastic measures, their aim being to let more magic into the world. Thatā€™s slightly different from the usual motivations, but it still fits the trope.
Inverted colours is a filter where the rgb values get inverted, either as [r][g][b] ā†’ [255-r] [255-g] [255-b] or as [r][g][b] ā†’ [(255^2-r^2)^.5] [(255^2-g^2)^.5] [(255^2-b^2)^.5]. Its a common enough filter, and results in fotos like this one. Some computers have the option where you can do it to your whole screen. It tends to look rather aery.

Youā€™re right I got the troll-elf connection from Warcraft. Mostly I did it for the pun though. And to dump on Samurai.
Theyā€™re slow only because I thought that would result in the best gameplay. Gameplay trumps realism. (Except if youā€™re gonna have trolls you need to give them very strong regen.) I thought theyā€™d be a real menace if they could hit and run properly. Thinking about it again now, maybe that is actually the better (more fun) design.

And I couldnā€™t think of a good (thematic and useful) elf-based UU. Maybe shield surfers are the way to go :disguised_face:

The heavy armour thing is from generic (arguably bad) fantasy impressions. Elves are wood-working tree-huggers without heavy industry. Only dwarves wear full plate.
If I recognize the trope as potentially bad, why use it anyway? Because fantasy races are useful as a shorthand for collections of traits.
The elves I envisioned refuse to adapt to some degree, they long back to their glory days, and so theyā€™re not going to build modern forges and cover themselves in full plate. To do so would go against their very self-image.

The unicorn thing was intended as a bit of a joke, a bit of a pun, and a bit of a nod to generic (bad) fantasy wherein elves and unicorns are both pure, good and nature-aligned, so off course they belong together. I saw them together in a mobile game (not that that game had particularly good lore justification).

Another reason for including Trolls and Unicorns, is as a nod to AOEā€™s umbrella civilizations.

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I would unironically have this over an Italian split 11

Now we just need dwarves and orcs.

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It would be cool to get some fantasy units added ingame for flavor.we already got a penguin riding a polar bear.

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How about some undead?

MY LIFE FOR NERā€™ZHUL!!!

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Hell, I already miss the good old days when a potential superfluous Euro civ was considered one of the worst things that could happen to AoE2. Instead we get permabugs, questionable ports, and possibly a battle pass and other skeezy monetization tactics. Itā€™s like a race to see which aspect of the game will be the first to crash and burn hard enough to finally yeet OG fans away for good.

Decent Elves civ concept though, I give it 3.5/5 Phials of Galadriel. My biggest issue is this:

Sorry, but this is very afantastical, (unless you have a link to sources proving that someone did in fact make up such a fusion). Perhaps you get away with including unicorns under the umbrella - although they should probably get their own civ, which can include Pegasi, Thestrals, Hippogriffs, Kelpies, and S1eipnir. But trolls are (under) a bridge too far given their well-fabricated antagonistic, or at best, neutral, relationship towards the elves.

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soā€¦ AOF (Age of Fantasy) creators might bring AOF to DE. which would probably mean high quality animations, more unit facing angles etc etc. Iā€™ve never tried AOC/HD but since its a total conversion mod Iā€™d assume its got undead, elves and bunch of other factions involved

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I thought of an idea for a futuristic Age of Empires game that revolves around the colonization and terraforming of various planets. The concepts would obviously all be fictional, but since itā€™s supposed to be based on future ā€œhistory,ā€ I wanted the concepts to be fairly grounded. Yes, FTL travel would be part of the game, at least in terms of setting, because scientists have accidentally created a Star Trek-style warp bubble, so warp travel is theoretically possible. Maybe I can introduce aliens later on, but that would remove a bit of the groundedness, probably.

Anyway, not super relevant to the post, but itā€™s the same kind of creativity involved, so maybe hanging around these kinds of posts is a good source for ideas and vibes.

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If you could redesign the UU and the stable, what would you put in?