Extending the timeframe of vanilla civs?

Age of Empires IV IV - Discussion
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The 8 civs at release were somewhat focused on the high-late middle ages, especially European ones, from their shield and armor designs. For example, even the early knights and man-at-arms have heater shields which were a 13th century thing, and close helmets which are even later. Upgrades only change their textures from “leather” to steel to gold.
The intention may be consistency. However, (like in every previous AOE), more updates to the game introduces civs that are focused on an entirely different timeframe, so the consistency no longer holds anyway.
For example, the Byzantines is almost solely centered on early middle ages. Limitanei was a late Roman Empire thing (when the Western Empire was still there). Units start with round shields and upgrade into kite shields, something earlier than most other civs’ visuals in the game.

On the other end, there has been also firearms as advanced as arquebus when most other civs still have the very primitive hand cannons. Some like Janissary can be trained earlier. Meanwhile Japanese have sengoku ashigaru using hand cannons which is a combination that never happened.

Because of these I think it would be a good idea to extend the timeframe of unit visuals of the vanilla civs beyond high/late middle ages, into both early middle ages and renaissance.
More specifically:
Dark: early middle ages featuring round shields and mail armor.
Feudal: 10-12th century with Norman helmets and/or greathelms, and kite shields.
Castle and Imperial: what they look like now, but with a late game technology that changes the weapon of hand cannoneers to arquebus.

Some of these assets are already in the campaigns

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French and English:

  • The Handcanonner is fine, because even their own armies took a long time to adopt the Arquebus, and they only began to produce them after the success of the Spanish Tercio harquebusiers, but that was already around 1560 onwards, and not even in mass production.

  • Well, as you suggest, maybe would be a technology to improve their handcannons to arquebus, to represent those years (post 1500), but without more utility that boost their attack in +2 or +3, not much more, because the devs know that the handcanonners attack in general is very broken. In a future, if a campaign of the Italian Wars happens, the French will have to be represented with arquebusier handcannonners instead of the short culverin handcannoner that they have now.

  • However, for other civs, such as the HRE, this measure of extending its timeframe for more unique gunpowder units could well be considered, not necessarily Handcanonner, but I am talking about the Black Rider, (those who play Aoe3:DE will understand this)

Holy Roman Empire

  • Although its time period says 1517, in theory if it were extended to 1560 they could consider putting the Black Riders, or Schwarze Reiter as an extra unique Imperial Age unit

  • On the other hand, I take this opportunity to suggest more units for the HRE. Consider that there were several types of Landsknecht: “Pikeman”, “Doppelsoldier” and “Arquebusiers”. There were also some with halberds, but those are already in the Order of the Dragon. The doppelsoldier already exists as the base.

  • In fact, the other 2: PIkeman Landsknecht and Arquebusier Landsknecht could well be new unique units of the HRE, the pikeman with more range than a common spearman and the arcobusier with more attack or range.

Consider that there are already exceptions with Arcabus or Musket and they work in the game:

  • In theory there are already civs that exceed their limit year in order to have more unique units. The Rus, for example (1547), have an age limit before the creation of the Streltsy (1550 ->), but this unit is vital for Rus because it was their special gun unit.

About the Ashigaru Handcannoner

  • I think the Ashigaru Handcanonner needs a Arquebus, with the name of a certain Landmark (As the self-rector censors the word I’m going to write it like this: "T4n 3g4 shlm4). And not as a unique technology, but to have it since It would only be an aesthetic change, we are not asking to give special skill to the Japanese version, but anyway, it would be nice and a better historical representation if they had the traditional firearm that they used during the Sengoku era and for which even the Europeans were impressed by its high production speed.
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Visually units aren’t exactly depictive of their period, so, although models succeed in envisualising a progression, sticking to the real thing would do it just the same, but looking better.

Considering the reported timeframes of various Civs, some go even into the 17th century. There’s totally space for more advanced technologies as far as gunpowder goes,