AOE2 is a game released 26 years ago. Over the past 26 years, it has developed very successfully, which is why it has received the long-term support of so many players.
Every time a new civ appeared in the past, devs would bring us new units. But in the past 26 years, no new universal buildings have been added to this game. Therefore, I think it’s about time to add new universal buildings to this game.
Although I know that for many ranking players, this means a significant change in game balance, and many veteran players also do not want the game’s form to change excessively.
But for the long-term development of the game, adding new universal buildings can bring more diversity to the game, which is definitely a good thing in the long run. I hope devs can seriously consider this suggestion.
What would be the point of this building though? A new production building? what “universal unit” would justify it, that would not be produced in any of the existing buildings?
Same thing for techs, what’s the point of creating a new building, just to put in techs that were already in existing buildings. We a have a building for every categories. To me it looks like change for the sake of change.
If it’s just to shake the player’s experience for 10 games, then become standard, the please don’t.
Most players already don’t play a lot of water, and if anything it might make the water play on nomad even less interesting, because you will build whatever dock can make fishing ships, and build the one combat ship from this dock.
I don’t expect this without massive balance changes to uu, it is for a good reason that most unique units are locked behind a castle.
It would certainly need more then just a building split to work but water is in a general need for a rework.
There are many issues from having military units and civilian units be trained from one building.
The Dock basically combines the Town Centre, Market, Barracks, Archery Range, Stable and Siege Workshop into one building.
The Shipyard should be a more defensible building that allows garrisoned ships to fire from it while the Dock would just focus on the economic aspects plus a scout ship.
It would also make trading on water a lot more reliably because your stupid Trade Cogs wouldn’t suddenly suicide run to your forward base just because you build a dock there.
There are some ways to balance that.
Like the Academy could be an Imperial Age unit or require a Castle technology to be unlocked.
The 2nd limiting factor is no technologies, that means no unique techs and no Elite unique unit either.
Damn, dude, you’re firing your shots right away without even considering that there might actually be a nice idea in OP’s post. This deserves some brainstorming
At the very least, I think the Dock should be split. And there are mods that already do that with GREAT success. I think one of them was called Rome at War
Shipyard (The 2nd page of the Dock becomes it’s own building.)
Mercenary Camp (Trains units with 0 population. Prices increase like market exchange rate.)
Yeah, but at the same time on most maps water is secondary, you want to give it some attention but you also have to focus on land. So I think it’s fine if the water play has less depth than the land play.
I guess if water was revamped, full water maps would become more interesting. But I’m fine with the current situation, land just has more flavor than water.
I love the magyar mission where I play as a true nomad, with no town centers but cav archers in feudal to raid the opponent. This is great for a campagne, but I wouldn’t want the magyar to play like that in multiplayer. Multiplayer is more straightforward, I don’t think adding new buildings and techs just because it looks cool makes much sense.
Being able to repair all other ships is a relatively powerful ability. Especially if there is an auto repair mode like the monk that auto heals when idle.
Also would make accessing the water buildings a little harder which sounds good for balance.
But anyway this thread is not about a water rework. There are a bunch of interesting concepts on how to add buildings to water.
Isn’t that mostly down to what maps are available?
Water maps are not fun to play. Water needs to be made more interesting by adding more things to it like Gold, some kind of “terrain” and of course a better counter system that doesn’t include self destructing units.
But more cramming more ships into one building would be annoying.
Also Chronicles makes the Port cheaper then a Dock to make up for it having less units in it. That does make it more accessible.
And yes, there’s an empty space below the market/right to the wonder on the civilian UI and another one right to the siege workshop and above the bombard tower in the military UI, though I think some civs might use those spaces for unique/regional buildings? I’m not sure…