I realy hope you can pick your era. Either Ancient Era or Medieval Era.
It will break all immersion if I were to fight the Babylonians as the Turks.
The only difference I see would be the civs.
It would be nice if they would add some civs from the mods in this DLC as well such as: Athenians, Spartans, Cretans (split Greek), Dacians, Iberians, Judeans, Nubians and Thracians.
But slim chance for that.
What do you think, will there be different eras in the new DLC or simply all of them mixed together?
And do you think they will add new civs as well or just all of the existing ones from Age of Empires 1 ?
I don’t think the devs have disclosed exactly what Return of Rome is going to be. I really hope it’s not just a AoE2 graphical upgrade of Age of Empires 1: DE but rather implements Age of Empire 2’s gameplay style which is far better than the one in AoE1.
Define “tweaks”. Do you mean removing gunpowder kind of changes, or do you mean doubling UTs and overhauling water (still in the works, but that update is getting close) kind of changes?
We have two official descriptions of Return of Rome. From the livestream:
(A bit nonsensical, since they already use the same engine.)
From the news page on the website:
From both of these, it’s pretty clear that the content of Return of Rome will be AoE1 content, not something new – it’s essentially a port of AoE1 into AoE2 (although exactly what that means is still a bit unclear). Rome at War is very much its own thing – apart from the visuals, it’s closer to AoE2 than AoE1, but has plenty of original features to distinguish it from both.
This thread, and others like it, confirm my opinion that the title “Return of Rome” is poorly chosen, though. AoE2DE DLCs have a history of taking inspiration from mods (Age of Chivalry and Dharma mods, specifically), and the title, artwork, and news page announcement do present it as if it’s an official version of Rome at War. Even Spirit of Law seems to have been misled – in his most recent video, he (rather unhelpfully) said “my instinct, or optimistic hope, is this is similar, or ideally even directly related, to the Rome at War mod”.
Cretans are effectively already in as Minoans. I think Athenians and Spartans would be too similar with the AoE1 tech tree – plus what about the other Greeks?
I don’t think there will be crossplay between AoE1 and AoE2 civs.
Just the existing ones from AoE1. Maybe if it’s successful they’ll add more, but having a DLC for a DLC is awkward, so maybe not.
Yes, exactly, you have more design space to play with. The AoE1 tech tree is pretty narrow. In fact, I think (I’m sure someone can correct if I’m wrong) that most units in it were used by some of the ancient Greeks, e.g. all the siege weapons are essentially Greek, the Epirans used War Elephants, the Cypriots used chariots well into the Iron Age, Rhodians were well known for their slingers, composite bows are mentioned in the Illiad, etc. But Athens and Sparta fielded primarily infantry armies, and there are only really two infantry units in AoE1, so not a lot of scope to make them different.
Ancient Greece was diversive enough that you can make more factions out of it.
But at the same time, they can’t use the AoE1 factions except for Greeks who will be split. Either they use hte AoE1 factions or the R@W factions.
The way the devs expressed themselves was “AoE1 content” not “AoE1 civs” so the case that they are importing R@W rather than AoE1 into AoE2 is not excluded.
The difference is, AoE1 civs would need far more tweaks to bring them to the AoE2 standard layout than R@W civs would.
