Janissary
Ruyter
Strelet
Cassador
Dopplesoldner
Uhlan
Aenna
Tomahawk
Chu ko nu
Samurai
Daimyo
Yabusame
Morutaru
Shinobi
Sepoy
Gurkha
Sowar
Zamburak
All mercenaries.
All outlaws.
However I don’t know where to highlight in those names.
From those very straightforward names, me as a nEw PlaYeR immediately realize these are the units with the exact same roles.
Same with these names.
As if all veteran guard elite imperial super duper pro players call all the units by their full names every time.
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It’s obvious the new Russian musketeer is a musketeer unit cause it’s not a Stretlet and it’s standing like a musketeer. Also the new spearman unit is a melee unit cause it has a spear in its hand.
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the unique names you listed refer to unique units. That’s fine. What I object to is giving unique names to non-unique units. That is bad design. Merchants and yoruks are just villagers; rekruts are just muskets, poruhiks are just halbs. Units that are the exact same should be named the same.
Janissary is just musketeer.
Aenna is just archer.
Uhlan is just hussar.
Cassador is just skirmisher.
Do you think units with the exact same name and look (well not the same for villagers since day 1) but drastically different roles are more confusing than them being actual different units?
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oh in general i also object to those unique names btw. it was bad design from the beginning but it just keeps getting worse and worse. i don’t even get what the pro-unique name argument is. can’t you just use your imagination? what is the benefit of more complicated names?
Thank god.
BTW, I still don’t know what “new players” in the mindset of you guys look like. They see an icon in the first row first column of a Town Center, and they cannot tell it is a villager unless it is called so?
Well maybe they did not know how to play AOE3 before TWC because there was no unit called villager.
A pretty crazy one, and I’m drunk when writing this: maybe because this game happens to be inspired by history and different countries in history happened to have different units and/or different names, as well as their unique events, technologies and cultures.
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still don’t know what “new players” in the mindset of you guys look like
i have personal experience trying to get my irl friends to play this game. the most common response is that it’s just too much information to memorize and learn. the bar is too high. the scenario you are describing doesn’t even happen since they don’t even get that far.
A pretty crazy one maybe because this game happens to be inspired by history and different countries in history happened to have different units and/or different names, as well as their unique events, technologies and cultures.
read a book if you care about history, this is a computer game.
chess is also inspired by history but it is so successful because it abstracts historical ideas into concepts that are very simple to grasp but which still contain endless possibilities for emergent play.
I have personal experience trying to get my irl friends into other AOEs and they quickly got bored because they are playing the same few units every match, and almost every civ has “knight”.
Play AOE2/4 if you want a “simple” game.
Sorry those games have been getting more and more “complicated names” as well, so soon there will be no place for you. Hah.
Makes me wonder why they did not choose to use names like “eco faction 7” “military faction 2” “infantry 3” “cavalry 12” “land map 9” “water map 3” but those complicated names no one can remember.
If they didn’t make this mistake, AOE will surely take over the world as the one and only RTS.
I can buy a really good chess set with $10 or so, and there are a lot of free apps online.
I do not want to spend $40+, a decent computer, 50G space, to play another chess, in real time.
There may be another hundreds of thousands of “simple to grasp” games throughout history that didn’t last and you’ve probably never heard of. With that success rate it would not be a good idea making a video game that mostly would only have 10 or 20 years of lifetime with the “I’ll make the next chess” objective on mind.
And in chess they are also using the complicated names like pawns and knights which do not tell me anything about what they do. They had better called them “piece that can move 1 square forward” “piece that can move two squares vertically and one square horizontally”
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I’m sorry but my friends all left AoE4 because they hate that all factions have a guy that shoots an arrow (that’s fine) and for all of them it’s called an Archer?!!
It’s a preference. If you like playing purely for strategy, play another game. AoE3 is not your thing if you can’t digest some unique skins and names.
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Let me give you a serious reply:
Why do you think games like paradox games or total war all choose some very specific time period, and even get out of their ways to make period and/or culture-specific artworks? Why do you think civilization games give every civ/leader/unit a relevant and special name and “justify” their combination of name/look/effect with real historical backgrounds, instead of randomly putting some go-to bonuses together? And why some games in those series with relatively “less popular” settings usually sell worse?
If you just view the games as another ranking score you’ll need to grind, you probably won’t spot the difference, and there are a lot of games like that for you. But for many people, especially the target audience who choose AOE over Starcraft or Warcraft, which are both far far better in being RTS games:
“Playing as French against British on Texas using voltigeurs against redcoats with thin red line”
is simply more fun and immersive than
“Playing as cavalry civ No. 2 against eco civ No.6 on random map seed 114514 using ranged infantry counter (with hp/damage upgrade 4) against ranged heavy infantry (with hp/damage upgrade 4 and hp upgrade 7)”.
That happens to be the main selling point of such games. There are also a lot of simple and straightforward games you can happily grind 24/7 doing the same few things facing the same few opponents. Don’t waste your life on this one.
On the other hand, very few really people learn the games just by memorizing the names. You have a million ways to familiarize with the game and communicate with others, and name is probably the LEAST important. Even for the “simpler” games like AOE1/2 I see a lot of competitive players mostly communicate by hotkeys or abbreviations, not the actual (“simpler”) names of the units.
Same with the unit models. Even if you never zoom in to look at the details, you already have some good grasp of their roles by their short descriptions and animations. And each civ only has that few options of the same unit type. It’s very easy for you to play the game normally without remembering all the unit skins. The upgrades have been giving them drastic skin changes since day1. Nobody ever complained “no I cannot remember the units anymore if the upgrades would change their looks”.
It’s like the history compendium. It’s there for those who enjoy looking at them. If you don’t, fine, but it would not affect you at all either.
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A good compromise here would be a naming convention like : Generic Name [ Historical Name] or even the vice versa.
Villager [ Merchant ]
Villager [ Yoruk ]
Villager [ Settler ]
Villager [ Courier de Bois ]
Musketeer [ Redcoats ]
Musketeer [ Sepoy ]
Musketeer [ Janissary ]
Or maybe just a toggle in settings to use either the generic name or historical name.
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This is problematic because not all musketeers are the same and this can be misleading.
Would you call the abus gun a skirmisher?
Would you call the Chevauxleger a dragoon?
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Of course abus guns and Chevauxleger will not have a generic name as they are unique units.
Honestly if you play,enough you instantly recognise yoruk or merchant is a villager. You also immediately know sepoy and ashi and tomahawks are musketeer
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Russian musk always confused me. They are weaker so they shouldn’t be called same generic names
Oh I do, becuase I have been playing this game for a long time. This is only to make it accessible to new players without losing the historical flavour. Because most other aoe and rts players will come and look for ‘villager’ button and would be confused there is none. And the way things are going, it won’t be long before all civs have unique villager name.
I understand both sides, so the best compromise is to use both names.
accessibility + historical
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I think there are enough differences to make yoruk or merchant or CDB unique. Like they cost different, yoruk make TC slower etc. But settler and villager should be merged
Yeah, and adding a generic name would not take anything away from the uniqueness of it. They are all villagers functionally, but they are unique versions of it.
We already have a kinda sorta similar thing with explorers, monks, generals and ras. They have a generic name + unique name. Explorer + [a historical name], Indian Monk [a historical name] etc.
i like the idea of adding generic names + the unique name, like Bonny Mountain suggests. that would be a good compromise.
I think we can work on the unit description as another way to improve things. a lot of them were created before our conception of counters were a thing.
just adding the counter class as the first descriptor when you hover over them is basically most of the information you need