Early Age of Empires II: The Age of Kings Screenshots!

True, but those from Relic are heavily influenced by AoE 2 to develop AoE 4, since they liked AoE 2 a lot, besides being the most popular game in the series… you have AoEO which is a modern remake of AoE 1 and now you have AoE 4 which is a remake of AoE 2, so AoE 5 will be a remake of AoE 3 or will they go to the 20th century?..

Yes, although Forgotten Empires takes care of the AoE 4 dlcs based on the AoE 3 civs (Ottomans with automatic generation of units and vizier points (aka cards) and Malians with automatic mines and festivals that improve production and units)…

Well, they would end up adding unique units from military buildings in AoM…

None…FE are a new team of AoE 2 modders that was created in 2012…

Of course, just like the FE team that is in charge of AoE 4 are the modders that come from AoE 3 that joined FE back in 2014…look for Alexander “Tilanus” Flegger and the Napoleonic Era Team mod…

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Sort of, although since basically every unit in AoM is exclusive to its civ. I wouldn’t think of them as “unique units” in the same way that I wouldn’t think of units in, say, StarCraft as “unique units”.

Before AoM, they had a unique unit from a building other than the Castle in The Conquerors. (Even if we exclude unique ships, which obviously had to come from the Dock.)

Anyway, the reason for my surprise was that unique units training from Castles seems to me to be the biggest design flaw in AoE2, one that massively decreases the viability of unique units. So making a deliberate change from Samurai being trained from a regular military building (where they’d be viable) to being trained from the Castle (where they basically aren’t) seems strange to me.

If Matt Pritchard counts who worked for FE for a while, then there’s indeed one.

My point was that it’s interesting to see so many AoE2 alpha/beta features in AoE4 despite it being a different development team.
They clearly done their research on the AoE history and AoE2 in particular.

Not that they’ve tried very hard. Been almost a year since DOI and IIRC the Ratha hasn’t been changed at all, despite some easy tweaks that would make it more useful (25% bonus damage resistance, smaller hit box, maybe lower frame delay).

There’s something to this, but IMO it’s more an issue of the units themselves. Many UUs are strong enough to justify the Castle bottleneck (Conq, Mangudai, Jannissary, Obuch, Ghulam, among others), and making them more accessible would be a mistake. The issue with Samurai is that they don’t stand out enough from champions to be worth 25 more res, except in a few fights vs. other infantry UUs (many of which are also rarely seen).
Also good reminder to post my thread of suggestions for UU viability that’s been sitting forgotten in drafts for months.

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Good point – in fact, I think Bengalis have only had one balance change, the monk bonus. I agree Rathas should be buffed, but even then I don’t see how they could cover for the lack of knights.

Yes, I agree. Alas, I’m not sure if that list still includes War Wagon…

Add a new building called “Academy” that only trains your unique unit (no upgrades not technologies) for 200W to civilisations with less powerful UUs.

How take:
Knights should have been trained at the Castle instead of Unique Units.

Right, I forgot the longboat of the Vikings… Maybe they were probably ideas they had in mind and in the end they preferred to keep it for AoM…

Of course, although from what I understand, those of Relic had Bruce Shelley as a consultant and he will surely have told them all the ideas they had for AoE 2 and that they did not apply them due to limitations of the time and that they surely took them as concepts that could be applied. in AoE 4; which they ended up doing…

True, perhaps it would be something of the balance…

Interesting suggestions. The possible “fix” I thought of was that every civ can build Kreposts (with a more generic name) – but I’m not actually suggesting that because I think it would have to come early in development. Your Academy suggestion is similar, but would work much better being introduced this late in AoE2’s existence.

(Not sure about the name Academy though – I mean, it’s fine, but in AoE1 I assume it was a reference to Plato’s Republic, which would no longer work in the context of AoE2.)

I was referring to missionaries. Of course, Longboats and Turtle Ships had to be trained from docks but I think they required a castle originally.

Also…the missionary at the monastery and the longboat and the turtle boat at the dock…

I suggested a building that doesn’t cost Stone but also doesn’t have any defensive capabilities.

Having access to the building would basically be a civilisation bonus since it allows you to get your UU out at the beginning of Castle Age instead of having to invest 650 Stone first.

Yeah that’s where I got the name from.

Academy sounds like a fancy building for elite troops.
But also doesn’t sound like it has any defensive capabilities itself.

Also sounds like something you would train cool units like Samurai in.
There are a lot of Asian civilisations that have low Win Rates atm, giving some of them an Academy would allow them to get a stronger unit at early Castle Age.
Vietnamese, Dravidians, Bengalis or Japanese could be some candidates.

Not exactly what I had in mind, although you can make an argument for it. Most of my ideas have to do with making UUs useful enough to justify the castle bottleneck - greater accessibility is one possible option, but not always needed. Samurai, for example, are ironically sometimes at least temporarily more viable than swordsman-line - mainly in situations where you have good food eco and a castle or two, but can’t immediately spare the time/res to upgrade the swordsman line and build half a dozen barracks before being able to field a decent melee unit. Best example of this is in pro 4 Lakes games.

I’ve called them Manors in one of my custom scenarios. Truth is, it would make sense for a lot of currently “unique” things to be more widespread - Slingers, Kreposts, [Steppe] Lancers, and garrisonable houses among them, but it’s hard to add more things into the batter once the cake is baked.

Eh, I think the Castle is much more fitting for that, and more aligned with the spirit of AoE2. UUs from Castles is an iconic feature of AoE2, but I agree that it can fall flat where some of the UUs’ performance is too lackluster.

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Yes, we have the Castle Age for a reason…

I think there are two conflicting interests:

  • Games should be able to be won at all stages. That includes Feudal Age and Early Castle Age
  • Unique Units (or unique things in general) should be used in more games to not make every civilisation feel the same

The problem is that many of the most important engagements of a game are before you can build your unique unit.
In some ways that’s fair, Cavalry Archers or Hand Cannons are also expensive to tech into compared to Knights or Crossbows.

I think a one size fits all solution to this problem is bad. Giving different civilisations ways to train their unique units earlier could be a nice way to diversify the game and it can be done very incremental in balance updates.

Some unique units also represent Early Medieval units despite only being available in Late Game, that is kinda sad.
Early access to unique units could also be done as a nerf.
For example for the Franks:

  • Weaker version of the Throwing Axeman is available in Feudal Age
  • Cavalry has +10%/+15%/+20% more HP in Feudal/Castle/Imperial Age

This is just an example, not an actual suggestion.

Serjeants are the only real Feudal Age unique unit at the moment (Camel Scouts just turn into Camel Riders).

I think it’s especially strange when the Unique Unit is very similar to a generic unit that has a civilisation bonus.
Like the Britons using Crossbows instead of Longbows because that would require a Castle.
In my opinion the Longbow should just replace the Archer line. But AoE2 is kinda stuck at 1999 game design in some ways.
Only new civilisations brake out of that like the Indian ones, that have a lot of unique things outside of the Castle.

There are things I love about all AoE games but there are also things for ever one of them that I dislike.
And the way unique units (and unique technologies too) are handled in AoE2 is one of the things that just don’t feel right to me anymore.
If you only compare AoE2 with AoE1 it feels like a great innovation but if you compare it with AoM, AoE3, AoEO or AoE4 it seems outdated.
But then those games took away some things that made AoE1/2 great too.

To keep things somewhat on-topic, maybe it could look something like the alpha version university:
uni-castle
uni-imp

I’m not sure I’d consider “outdated” a bad thing for a computer game – there are definitely features I dislike that are common in newer games but were rare or unheard of in the '90s. That said, I haven’t played AoE3 or AoM for years, and I’ve never played AoEO (looks goofy and is essentially playable fanart) or AoE4 (tried the beta, didn’t work on my computer).

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True… I mean AoE 2 in 1999 was super cool, but seen with more modern eyes it feels outdated, but it’s still incredible by the standards of the time…

As which?..

AoE 3 with the European dlc improved a lot… I tell you that currently AoE 3 can look at AoE 2 from you to you calmly… AoM you know that it has its 2014 remaster that is kind of weak so wait for its version Retold, so AoEO is an excellent game; I also criticized it in its day for its cartoon graphics, but I’m telling you as an insider and veteran of the saga who played all the AoE and put my hands on fire, that AoEO suits you to love; it is much better than AoE 4 and for scandal… it has charisma, the civs are very deep, very long campaigns, coop, pvp, ranked, seasonal events, customization of the civs and units and a long etc… and good AoE 4 is fine I guess, it has potential; the only new thing it has are the troops on the walls that gives a lot of defensive play…

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Really cool, Good graphic for the time!!

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That looks a lot like an academy kinda building.
I could totally see that train some elite units.

If an old thing isn’t bad you wouldn’t call it outdated, would you?
It is up for debate which aspects of a game are outdated and which aren’t.

I think we can all agree with that.
But we should be careful to not be too selective with our memory.
There were a lot of very bad games in the past but those are forgotten for a reason.
Also the culture has changed. People like making memes about bad games and stuff like that while in the past those bad games just got bad reviews and bad sales and time forgot about them.

I can definitely recommend AoE3DE if your computer can handle that (if it struggles with AoE4 it will struggle with AoE3DE too) it removed a lot of the annoying aspects of the game like having to level home cities.

I’d wait for AoMR to try out that game again. It feels closer to AoE1/2 in many ways.

I haven’t played AoEO myself either. It suffers from a lot of strange design decisions and also has a leveling system and things like that.
The actual core gameplay is very good from what I’ve heard, so it could work well as a Definitive Edition but I doubt that they will do that.
AoEO with more realistic graphics and where everything is unlocked from the beginning would probably be a good game but that that point they should just make an ancient themed AoE5/6.

I’m playing AoM EE to spend the Arkantos campaign and then spend the rest of the campaigns in Retold…and about AoEO put it without fear… it’s free on Steam…

It would be cool to have some of these buildings in the scenario editor (even if only as decoration for campaigns and scenarios). Especially the big castles and the alternative versions of the monastery and the marketplace. They would have to be updated to DE graphics, of course.

The Scorpion was originally manned like the Bombard Cannon.

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