Personnellement je n’ai jamais été déboussolé quand j’ai commencé des jeux (genre les Warlords Battlecry qui étaient pas mal en ce domaine d’unicités si on ne tiens pas compte de leur manque d’équilibrage flagrant comparé à AOE3) parce que ça diffère de AOE2 ou Cossack, d’ailleurs je trouve même ennuyant AOE2 parce que j’ai l’impression de jouer des clones et je suis content que les devs s’orientent vers un sens où chacun est unique car c’est un peu ce que je reproche à AOE3 vanilla à l’origine, trop d’unités génériques pour les civs Européennes.
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Well, “Settler” was the game’s original definition of villagers for European civs in the original game
As a game about colonialism and building settlements in the New World and abroad it makes sense
and historical accuracy!
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I hope they change names to everyone and lots of new civilizations come out so I can come back to this post in the future years to come, I also hope that every animal on the map will be given a name with variable food so you can call it directly by name.
“You must wait one hour between each post placed in this topic”
We will have the timer ticked to write here!
I hope to see you winning a $10000 championship in some other natural born competitive RTS with 10k competitors instead of wasting your talents on this poor little game that had no chance of being competitive since the very beginning.
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Thank you so much brother I hope you can do the same and that you are happy in life 
P.S. I quit this game over a week ago and I already feel better, I stay from time to time to read some discussion when I have time to spend.
Do you really feel the need to declare your departure?
In the words of a friend, this is not an airport.
Good riddance tbh. And honestly people should just respect the devs’ choice here since they already made all the nice skins and art.
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Ce n’est pas parce que je ne suis pas de votre avis que vous avez besoin de dénigrer mon opinion, j’ai exprimé mon avis sans vous tacler ou troller, j’aurais voulu que vous fassiez de même.
I didn’t have it against you but in general in this thread, I didn’t read the whole thread because I’m lazy
People reallly want to play aoe3 as an historically accurate battle simulator RPG rather than the RTS it actually is. May I suggest Total war games for accurate history strategy game - Shogun 2 is a fantastic game. All the unit names are unique and accurate there.
RTS by design has to take some creatve liberties and shortcuts for gameplay purposes. Historical accuracy goes out the window when you are fighting lakota on korea as sweden.
I do not think people are rooting for absolute historical accuracy.
It’s about flavor. Cultural identity.
To use my previous example, there isn’t much historical in naming a card “coffee consumption” for Ethiopia. It increases infantry speed. They could have called it “Infantry speed improvement” but they didn’t.
All musketeers could have been the same stats if all people cared about was historical accuracy. But each musketeer has different stats and is different at different things - Janissaries are stronger but hit less hard, ashigaru faster. The choices to do this are not really historical (Janissaries were not known to be stronger in real life than average musketeers) but game design in an asymmetric RTS.
Starcraft is asymmetric with 3 civs. AoE3 is going in that direction with 22, but all units fall under unit classes so it’s still not completely random. People can still figure out what each unit does. Just read.
I really wish people would try to know what is what instead of complaining for hours that units are getting confusing.
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I dont think OP or me have any problems with asymmetrical civs or having unique units in the game. It is just about slapping on names on previously perfectly fine cards and/or units. Which is also fine, whatever, it is a neutral change. It neither degrades nor improves anything about the game. I feel either 2 name convention or a toggle in game settings will definitely work the best.
History reference name + [ Cavalry Combat ]
History reference name + [ Fencing School ] - names like this would work for everyone.
And a toggle in game settings to show either the new historic name or the legacy traditional name.
No one is asking for making civs or units symmetric. Or naming every unit Hand Cavalry1, Musket Gunner2, 
That is absurd.
The original devs had a game design in mind. Some things were abstracted, some details omitted. I remember the original campaigns, I never bothered me when units were reused for different civs. I had enough suspension of disbelief and imagination, that it didn’t matter to me.
In the heat of battle, no one is thinking I should send the [long historical reference name]. People just use cav combat, infantry attack, artillery hp.
The thing is, the historical reference name used to mean something. They were reserved for cards which were special and had a special effect.
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Nobody said so.
May I suggest SC2 for a very clear and straightforward and accessible RTS, and AOE4 for the “welcome to competitive AOE” RTS.
No wonder RTS utterly dies in this current era when almost every other genre of game can accustom for better graphics, more creativity and more flavor.
It’s not just AOE3 or this discussion. Try suggesting some aesthetic improvements in the AOE4 subforum. Some people will teach you that you cannot do this because it is an RTS. You cannot do that because it is an RTS. This genre is more causal than RTS so it can do this. That genre is more competitive than RTS so it can do this. Sounds like RTS stands in the perfect middle ground that is neither casual enough or competitive enough to become fun and creative. Well fair enough. That’s why it dies.
That’s another point thar people keep throwing out but makes no sense.
We all know the original devs also made a lot of the most unique names in the game since 2005. Half of the RG names were nonsense. A lot of non-European unit names were direct transliterations of the local language.
Then where does that “design principle” come from, when there are more than half exceptions since the very beginning? Because the other less-than-half? Or someone else long after the game was made looked at all the names and ran a linear regression on it (and even in that case it would be a really bad fit)?
It’s like pointing at TAD and says “the design principle of this game is all civs are European who had colonies in America”. It makes no sense because:
(1) There are already lots of exceptions.
(2) It does not have to be followed. If it does then it only limits the game while doing no good.
BTW: I think your suggestion might be a good one. But I disagree with your reasoning. That mindset would limit the game in a lot more aspects beyond this discussion.
There are RTS with FAR bigger competitive scenes such as SC2 which never need a very standardized naming.
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People recognize it by the ICON. Do you veteran guard imperial pro players recite the full name of every unit and every card whenever you use them?
And if “people” will eventually recognize them as “cav combat” etc, what’s wrong with the unique names then?
In Chinese we rarely directly use names like blast furnace in AOE2. We just use “attack level 3” or sth. But nobody has problem recognizing what blast furnace does or what its icon looks like. There are also games where pro players would call units and buildings by the hotkeys. I don’t see anyone from those games suggesting such kind of naming to be officially made compulsory for everyone.
And that proves further my point. Name does not really matter. Veteran players will find their ways of remembering it anyway. Casual players do not need to memorize anything. It’s like detail in models or history compendium. They are nice and fun bonuses for people who enjoy looking at them.
Would you suggest removing the compendium because “people” do not use it?
Well AOE4 did it! No wonder it is the perfect “competitive AOE”.
Acemi Olglan School
Acupunture
Kensei
Onin War
Dravidian Martial Arts
All are regular effects.
Well I know what you’ll say “no but these are civ unique cards and affect a unique set of units”.
Then the million “cav combat” cards all affect different units, some affect tags, some affect only the specific list of units available to that civ, and they are all treated as different and unique cards in the source code.
How is that more simple?
Now I see where these are coming from. If some people would call Shogun 2 names “accurate”, I now have a sense of what their metric of “historical accuracy” is —— they don’t care about history at all. That’s why they immediately start tagging some simple name changes as “historical accuracy simulator RPG” when it still has a loooong way to go before it even touches the brink of historical accuracy.
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You will end up playing as sweden fighting india on bayou anyway. What makes that okay in terms of historical accuracy? The very foundation of the game is historically inaccurate. So why even care about names
They are speacial tho, some are team cards, some apply to all units,etc.
I never used the word “historical accuracy”. You guys use it as the strawman.
Next time read what I write before repeating the same preaching.
Ask yourself.
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Seems the many pvp-oriented RTS out there, even a recent one in the exact same series, still cannot contain the competitive pvp plague from spreading to other games.
I have no idea why some competitive people are so obsessed with this one game AOE3 in particular. Does it have any special competitive appeal? It was more asymmetric than any other AOE, and have far more factions than any other asymmetric AOE, from the very beginning. It was designed to be very different from the “traditional” sense of competitive pvp RTS, from the very beginning. If you like competitive pvp so much why not switch to games far better optimized for pvp, have much bigger pvp community, and even larger prize pools?
And some of you pvp elites here already acknowledge that ----- the game is and has been not optimized for competitive pvp. And you think competitive pvp is the most important, and this game is doomed because it did not appeal to competitive pvp like the the far-seeing Blizzard did. And you don’t care about the game’s setting or historical/cultural references either. Then, what are you doing here? Why waste your life and talents as great pvp competitors in this game, if you only care about pvp, and do not care what the game is about?
I see games and genres with far bigger pvp scenes. They could happily accommodate far more creativity than RTS (according to some people’s reasoning here), and I don’t see the top competitive players rarely jump out trying to stop that.
In the already-very-conservative domain of RTS, I don’t see such level of outcry when they added more civs and gimmicky mechanics to AOE2, or when they removed the need for the “essential pvp skill” of continuously reseeding farms (there were people who oppose these changes of course, but got easily suppressed by the majority).
Now AOE3 being THE most radical RTS maybe in the entire history ironically has such a very conservative group than the other games that are really more conservative. And I rarely see those vocal competitive conservatives in the rank of major content creators or top players.
Reminds me of how AOE2 players, including one certain former member from ES, bashed the game for being “too radical as an AOE”. But now even the AOE2 elites are more open to changes than here in AOE3. What a sarcasm.
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TEAM Ranged Infantry Attack (III):
Now improves Ranged Infantry damage only by +10% (down from 15%), but grants extra +5% to French and Hausa players.
Card renamed to TEAM Tirailleurs Sénégalais.
textbook example of the problem I am talking about in this thread. guess I’ll just agree to disagree with the devs who obviously think this is a good thing, not a bad thing that makes the game more and more complicated and less accessible by replacing descriptive names with obscure historical references
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Reopen, srry for the mistake!
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As always “new players” do not rely on the icon which they see most of the time, but instead choose to hover over the icon and check the name and try to recite it for the rest of their life, while totally ignoring the descriptions right beneath it.
Stop pretending you speak on behalf of “new players”. YOU cannot remember names. YOU cannot play the game without remembering the names. YOU want the game to become “range infantry #11” of “civ #6” on “map seed 382829”.
I hate myself for thinking for a second it is probably a good idea to reconcile with the competeteeeeeeeeeeeve espooooooooorts elites a week ago.
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Its a meme.
TEAM 3 villagers turned into Calpulli and now everyone get TEAM 3 Villagers…
Just a nosense