Franks unique unit was also suppose to be lance wielding Frankish Paladin, which ended up only as scenario unit.
I like them too, but I don’t think they have the same sense of progression as the graphics we ended up with. Plus the Paladin looks a bit off to me – oversized, and his posture looks weird somehow. I’d like to see Knights with lances as an event mod sometime (especially if they’re remakes of these ones).
I discovered that the Knight on the left was originally used for the Paladin in the earliest available alpha build, and the Knight looked different. (There were no Cavaliers then, as far as I can tell.) Here’s a very early screenshot showing what those Knights looked like:
Meanwhile, a render from an AoE2 press kit calls this a Cavalier, and another similar one is labelled Paladin:
I’ve read that before, but I’ve never seen any evidence for it. The Throwing Axeman is listed as the Franks’ unique unit in the Age 2 Design Document from July 1998, and the alpha version from around that time has Throwing Axemen but not Frankish Paladins. A later alpha version has Frankish Paladins, with the same graphic as the Paladin I posted earlier, but Throwing Axemen are trainable from Frankish Castles in that version.
So if the Frankish Paladin was intended the Franks’ unique unit, it must have been at a very early stage, and either never implemented, or implemented but then completely removed.
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These knights with capes look very nice, I think it should have ended as paladin unit.
AoE4 is kinda what AoE2 was planned to be.
In many ways AoE4 went back to ideas from the AoE2 betas.
Kinghts having lances.
Spearman being the Dark Age unit and MAA being a Castle Age one (AoE2 MAA look like dismounted AoE2 Knights).
Crossbows and Archers being two separate lines.
Mangonels having to pack and unpack.
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Archers upgrading to crossbows seems a particularly unfortunate idea in hindsight, since it’s led us to the rather weird situation where Mesoamericans and civilisations well-known for their archery (e.g. Britons, Japanese) are some of the biggest crossbow users.
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In case you didn’t know - there are some AoK alpha leftovers in DE’s folders.
Formations:
This one opened a sub menu with the following formation options:
Low res gold icon (not sure where this was supposed to be used:
These seem to be AoE 1 leftovers and seem to have something to do with trading:
This is a button that ordered villagers to drop off resources at the nearest building.
Flaring icon. Iirc in the earliest alphas, you could flare individual units.
Grouping icons - AoE 1 leftover:
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They probably scrapped these when they did not finalise the Charging mechanic (that we now see in DE) and replaced them with the current Knight, Cav, Pala.
What if Paladin was an UU for Franks similar to current Imperial Camel? And it was then called “Frankish Paladin”? But later the unit is given to 3 more civs, changed the name to just “Paladin” and also changed into sword holding cavalry just like Knight and Cavalier. However original sketch with lance holding “Frankish Paladin” remained in scenario editor.
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It’s plausible, but I haven’t seen any evidence of it. In the earliest alpha version available online, civs other than Franks can train Paladins already.
The change to swords happened at a much later stage, during/after beta, not at the same time that the unit line was made.
Not sure what you mean by “original sketch”, but the Frankish Paladin sprite that appeared in the release version of Age of Kings doesn’t appear in any alpha or beta version I know of. I assume it was created at a fairly late stage, specifically for cavalry heroes.
Maybe the civs should get new more accurate wonders
That would be cool! Same for teutonic Ritterbrüder.
Also something else. I found this old link:
The first picture says “These archers” while i see Samurai coming out of a military building.
And in the interview the same answer comes up as if Samurai were supposed to be a cavalry unit with sword and bow:
Another interesting mechanic are the raider civilizations:
That sounds like GTA… Goths Theft Armed
5 different winning mechanics:
And they already had Kings and Queens.
The tradeworkshop, the making of tradegoods. That sounds like something that offers a constant production?
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Yes,we say that AoE 2 is what it is because of the limitations it had at the time… Now with AoE 4 they can apply everything that could not be applied with AoE 2; it would be like a modern remake of AoE 2 but with everything that was not could have the second…
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They probably scrapped these when they did not finalise the Charging mechanic (that we now see in DE) and replaced them with the current Knight, Cav, Pala.
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Of course, luckily they were able to incorporate it into 2 DE…
Well in AoE 3 the samurai come out of the barracks and maybe in AoE 4 the same thing will happen…
Maybe they’ll put it in AoE 4 0r go directly for the Yabusame…
Well AoE 4 Mongols move their bases and loot resources from enemy buildings…
The feitorias of the Portuguese and the factories of AoE 3…
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Okay maybe the whole information of “Frankish Paladin” being Franks UU is just a rumor.
The building looks new to me. Seems like didn’t make it into the game.
One of “four” wonders. So back when they had 4 wonders for 4 different architecture set.
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The funny part is that AoE4 is made by completely different developers.
Not entirely. Relic led it, but to my understanding, FE did work on it, so there were almost certainly people with AoE2 development experience working on AoE4.
Sorry, I wasn’t trying to be super negative or anything, just explaining why I think the evidence is against it. I’ll change my mind if someone has some evidence in favour of it, but all I’ve seen is speculation.
Fantastic, thanks for sharing. I’m pretty sure that’s an Archery Range (since it has archery targets). Interesting that they had unique units being trained from there rather than a Castle.
Kind of funny that they say “no one knows how to deal with a unit like that”. I guess they meant deal with it in combat, but judging by the Ratha, the reality is no one knows how to deal with designing a unit like that.
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I think both. Because i imagine a Samurai would be way stronger than a Ratha. Imagine a Samurai Paladin that can also switch to Heavy Horse Archer. That is immense to deal with! Because it can switch to counter the Pikemen and you would always need to bring Skirmisher. Thus the bonus and anti’s are hard to design yes.
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Also you can always share ideas.
Sure. I understand.
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How would it be different from Ratha?
How many FE people worked at Ensemble Studios during the original development of AoE2?
No idea, probably not very many, if any. I don’t really see how it matters, FE worked on AoE2 a lot, and worked on AoE4 as well. Even if they didn’t originally create AoE2 or anything like that, it doesn’t mean that they aren’t a key developer group for the game.
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