One worry I’ve had is that we might reach a point where there are so many Civs added to AoM Retold that they start to blur into each other across multiple areas and essentially become the same. One of the original corner stones of classic AoM was that each Civ had to be highly unique to each other. This counts for uniqueness in all areas including:
Civ bonuses
Favour generation
Major God bonuses
God powers
Myth units and their special abilities
Economic and military bonuses/ unique game play
I feel we have already seen some erosion of this with similarities between a few god powers (particularly the Mythic Age destructive powers) and myth unit abilities (so many myth units have knockbacks and AoEs that they are definitely becoming a bit generic). I think the hardest one to honour would be favour generation. There would be a very limited number of ways to possibly generate favour uniquely without it becoming super convoluted and silly imo.
My question is simple: How many more Civs could we theoretically fit into Retold before they start to become homogenised? Why do you say this? Would love your POV. Bare in mind, this is assuming they provide a fourth God DLC for the majority of current Civs, which is going to add even more pressure to the sustainability of uniqueness.
How many more Civs do you feel could be added (after the Japanese) that would be sustainable to maintaining a unique feel for each?
No more, after we are done with 4th God DLC the game will be at capacity
At least one more
At least two or three more
At least 5 more
A lot more, I don’t really care about uniqueness anyway
Nahuatl: Without cavalry units, gods demand captures and human sacrifices. Warrior priests, specialist heroes.
Babylonian: Gods demand animal sacrifices and “enlarge” the main temple (Ziggurat). That, and “mistreating slaves” (Code of Hammurabi).
Pre-Inca: Favors for agricultural festivals or feeding huacas, donate food as a favor. No cavalry units, and various counter-units.
Celts: Various legendary heroes. They earn gold by looting buildings and killing enemy units. They gain favor by sacrificing loot (gold) to the temple.
Where I see problems is with the Mayans. Aside from the fact that they would be very similar to the Aztecs in unit composition, they also performed human sacrifices like them, so they would also have a similar model for gaining fervor.
On the other hand, although several civics have different gods for the same natural phenomenoa (Sun, Moon phases), they often view these aspects differently.
The Aztecs, for example: They do not attribute powers of fire to their Sun god (Tonatiuh), but rather see him as a sun of life. Huitzilopotchli, by the way, is not the sun; he is the god who protects the sun on its daily journey, a warrior god.
The Incas viewed the sun as an agricultural and war entity. He was also a protector of the Inca nobility of Cuzco.
Amaterasu, of the japanese, was a sun goddess of hope. Her shield Divine Power is a good manifestation of this atribute.
In general, I’d say there’s still room for those four pantheons I mentioned.
I’d say Indian Hinduism, but as with another topic about the debate over whether “There should be pantheons of cults that still have a large number of believers?”, I think it’s better not to.
Something exotic would be Thai gods, or African animism.
I would say add Slavs, or swap Incas out with Slavs, and i’d be happy with this list. Tbh I don’t have anything particular in mind to differentiate Slavs, but I very much would like to see them present and think there is merit in adding them.
You can still do a lot, particularly via favor generation. Just some ideas that popped into my head that haven’t been mentioned:
Have villagers earn devotion (or whatever) while gathering resources. Sacrifice said villagers once the bar is full. (Add a special building for them to gather devotion from for lategame to reduce micro)
Have a “tithe” on all resources gathered that gets turned into favor, sort of like how export functioned in AoE3 for the Asian civs.
Earn favor through trade (great for a civ that has no ability to mine gold but gets access to markets in the archaic age)
Earn favor by stocking shrines with animals (Buddhist or Hindu civs work well here)
Earn favor by building shrines near forests or other natural resources that can’t be harvested while the shrine exists (could work for Celts with a druid focus, or other animist religions)
Earn favor based on the area of the map where you have LOS
Unlike AoE2, where every civilization has to follow a certain formula and there are increasingly limited ways to diversifiy them (eco and combat boni), you can do so much with AoM.
Just looking at other games’ mechanics can show that there is a lot of options to play with.let it be other aoe titles or completely dofferent rts titles.
I once created concepts for 7 new civs. It’s far from perfect and it is very outdated (before retold release, and I already have better ideas to implemwnt some of the concepts). But I’m just one persin so I think it’s a good prof of concept that it is possible mechanics wise to create many different civs.
I think we’re already at capacity. There’s a lot less real variety in most of the mentioned areas than people assume in my opinion.
Let’s take favour generation for example.
econ units gather it - greeks
military units gather it - norse, atlantean
buildings generate it - egyptian, chinese
All the suggestions I’ve seen for favour generation is just a variation on these. The more civs we add the more convoluted the suggestions become, being overengineered with all sorts of conditions, thus lessening the clear asymmetry between civs. I think there’s only 2-3 places in each category, so that the mechanics feel truly unique. The asymmetric design is what I really loved in the game, so I would be more than happy if they stopped after the Japanese and fixed the damn bugs already!
I would be much more interested in a 4th major god to all pantheons than having new civs. With new civs you also get feature creep, which clearly happened with the Chinese and will no doubt happen with the Japanese, which also diminishes the identities of the existing civs.
Sure. If you think combat units gathering favor by dealing damage is somehow the same thing as oracles gathering favor by not having other oracles in their radius is basically the same thing, then it’ll seem like very little variation is possible.
It’s not entirely the same, that’s why that distinction works and feels unique still. But the things a combat unit can do are limited, it can either fight or not fight essentially. Anything else will just be a restriction on these. So generating favour by fighting a specific enemy or generating favour by running around or what have you, to me, would not be fun nor that unique, I much prefer these broader categories, because it keeps the civs obviously unique and thus I prefer fewer civs, but rather more gods.
In fact, the differences in the mythologies of different civilizations are very small, even Indo-European and Chinese myths are very similar to each other. So we cannot have a large variety of civilizations in this game. The Greeks and Altantis are essentially one culture, and the differences between the Chinese and Japanese are much smaller than between the Greeks and Egyptians.
It is also worth noting that the asymmetric balance in the game has been gradually removed from the game over the past year, so I’m afraid we will come to a diversity at the level of AoE 2.
i think 2 or 3 more is definitely doable to still feel unique and interesting enough.
also i think adding a 4th major god to every civ and giving us more god potrait options (and maybe even some myth unit design overhauls) are similar important and that would give them still enough room/space/time to do and improve on these things before finishing the support of the game.
i also think a lot more would make the hole game too complicated and even 5 more would reduce the possiblity to see a 4th major god for every civ and some other improvements, additions and overhauls much less likely.
Depends on how far they want to go. Nomadic civs are possibility (pack any building that isn’t TC). Civ without town center is possiblity (they can use settlements for something else). Camps are possible.
Favor generation is hard to come up, but technically they could add micro intensive mechanics like gathering something on map (Bard from league of legends), an actual resource node like favor farms, sacrificing gold deposits to generate favor (Malians from AOE4), and such. Hardest might be to create unique economy: Evolving villagers when? Imagine a villager that starts as pleb foot gatherer, but gets a mount later, and eventually wings once he gathered enouigh so he can gather resources safely from foot units. Oh boy, can’t wait for civ with mounted villagers.
Heroes could get stronger as they kill, even evolve into other units. There could be a civ without myth units or god powers, but use AoE3 card system instead.
If you take inspiration from other games you can come up with many ideas. For example I like the Vizier points that AoE4 has for Malians since it breaks the generic upgrade cycle.
I also want a civ that can place something else on settlements than town centers. Choosing between Town Center (Economic), Military Base (Could boost training speed around it and be able to train all human units) or a Fortification (Stronger castle building, no unit training) would be cool. Maybe you could place a temple there too that provides healing and access to some dryad-trained like myth unit.
Hrm. Nomadic civs like the Mongols in AoE4 won’t work as well in AoM, since claiming new town centers is so critical to increasing your population. You can add a civ that doesn’t build town centers in, but it’s going to be really hard to find a way to make that work with a core element of strategic gameplay.
It’s possible to add other functions to settlements that are just as vital as the population cap. For example, increasing the resource collection rate per TC. It’s not difficult. What’s really difficult is coming up with a replacement for farms. It didn’t work in AoE 3. Livestock farming didn’t have an automatic queue, so no one used it to avoid distracting from micro.
I feel as though the gods being too similar is okayish. Even though they play a huge role in the game itself, we don’t really necessarily control them as a player. The creatures, the architectures, and the people should be more unique imo.
It’s funny, I fell the opposite. I really don’t enjoy the Japanese favour system, and I love how unique the Chinese system feels. Though the Chinese system really doesn’t feel like it was made to really represent China in the way the Greek, Norse, and Egyptian favour systems were. Japan is probably better in that regard.
But the Chinese myth units and heroes are by far the worst design in the game.
The Greek one is the worst thematically in my opinion. Greek religion was centred around sacrifices and stuff like that not just praying, that is more of an Abrahamic thing.
The Chinese favor generation sorta represents how it was always a very large empire. Egypt basically hugged the Nile, Greece was city-states, the Norse are known for raiding, etc. China gaining favor by grabbing more land fits thematically better than the old system Atlantis had did them.