One question that always came to my mind playing AoM was: Why are the greek roofs grey/silver? Is it based on a historical architecture period or something? I always thought because of that the greek cities in AoM looked so ‘‘cold’’ or ‘‘sterile’’. For example in AoE1 the greek cities look beautiful with their ‘‘orange’’ roofs. Just curious. Can someone answer this? And what are your thoughts?
Edit: In the last age
Do we know from what time period they drew inspiration when it comes to the buildings? I don’t think that the buildings in classical ancient Greece looked the same as they did earlier with the Mycenaean Greeks.
This is an interesting question because, to my knowledge, no other RTS game has buildings that look like that for the Greeks as in AoM.
I did some research and I found this picture attempting to recreate ancient Greek buildings, and you can see that there is some red/orange coloring on the roof:
I still can’t find evidence or information about this grey/silver plate roofs of the greek mythic age buildings. I hope someone can explain it to me. I’m very curious. And i personally hope there is a historical reason or whatever for this because i don’t find them appealing at all. They should be orange in my opinion. But to have an explanation for this would be nice.
I had a little hope that they would change that in retold like they did for the roman roofs in the AoE1 definitive edition. But the trailer and screenshots already showed the silver roofs.
Here are some screenshots. From the original:
and from Retold:
I think they’re supposed to be made of lead – they’re quite similar to the kind of lead roofs one might find on a large medieval church, for example. Similar styles of roof are sometimes made of copper, but the colour looks wrong for that.
I don’t know whether the ancient Greeks used this style of roof, or even if they used lead or other metals for roofing at all. A quick Google search didn’t bring up much – the closest relevant thing I found was that the Pantheon in Rome (which is obviously not Greek) has lead plating on the roof, added in 735 AD.
Maybe they just wanted a different roofing style to give some sense of progression through the ages, and this was what they came up with?
I mean, you can clearly tell that they are the Greeks, even though this might not be the most authentic ancient Greek architecture of that time. Could it be better? Of course, but the question then becomes, should they change too much from what people are used to by now and expect the Greeks to look like in the game?
And I don’t think that it’s wrong to compare with ancient Roman architecture, as they took a lot of inspiration from the Greeks in architecture, among many other things, so they could give the roofs different colors, but I doubt that will happen at this point.
Yes the reason for the sense of progression sounds plausible. I don’t think they will change it either because the silver roofs are already in the trailer and screenshots. I’m just curious about the reasoning. After all they changed the silver roofs for the roman architecture in AoE1 into red roofs. I personally think it would’ve looked much better with orange tile roofs. But this will sadly not be the case i guess.
Yes, I agree that the Greek architecture in this game has too much of the same color. More variety would be nice and it could look amazing.
Just for fun I asked the AI to draw me some ancient greek cities and this is what it drew:
I think the greek base would look more alive and cooler like this in AoM.
I visually love the aesthetics of AoE1DE (AoE2RoR).
I hope they take some heavy inspiration from that for future civilisations like Mesopotamians or Romans.
I also wonder how the Chines are going to look like and how long we’ll have to wait until we can see them.
This is also good representation of Ancient Greece buildings. Just changing the colors and make more variety of them would do a lot in AoM.
