“The game has been about colonialism so it has to remain being about colonialism only and the game design does not fit with a non-colonial theme”.
Problem comes with the latter part of the sentence.
EDIT: I think the game design can accommodate to a much broader theme than just colonialism but they narrowed it to colonialism at some stage of development. So European maps would definitely fit in. (I’m not suggesting adding them right now. Maybe after Africa and Middle East are better represented)
No, it refers to a Heavy Cavalry contingent in Europe.
There were no cuirassier in the Colonies, and it is not just a man with a cuirass, it is a class of soldier, like Man-at-Arms.
It was even a social class, for a time, like Gendarme (Man-at-Arms).
Nah even if the New World was always the planned setting I imagine they would’ve included units that didn’t necessarily travel there like Curs. As explained previously, most wars were fought by militia, irregulars and woodsmen with maybe a few canon. Cav weren’t common and line battles with colorful uniformed musketeers were infrequent, even during the Seven Years War.
Colonial or not colonial, I’ve never understood the British getting Longbowmen would love to ask the guy who made that desicion. Might aswell have given the French full plate knights haha.
Longbowmen were still used in Britain, in the 16th century.
They are also an iconic AoE2 Britons unit, that the devs likely wanted to have in the game, for nostalgia reasons.
In AoE1, the Composite Bowman was originally supposed to be called Longbowman, until the devs were told Longbowmen were not part of Bronze and Iron Age warfare.
Nah, they could easily have had militia be the basic military units, with Cavalry only becoming a major force in Age 3, just like Age of Empires II does it.
The devs originally intended for the players to start with the ability to produce medieval style units in Age 1 but found that most matches never progressed past the first age in playtesting due to how easy it made rushing. xD
They still had some lying around in the 1500’s but not much evidence of being used. Not an iconic unit for colonial age Britain at all either. None of the tentpole conflicts of this setting involved longbows. Britain should have had a unique musketeer like the Turks Jannisary or a light cavalry. These just got ‘Royal Guard’ status which is just a stat boost, no unique model.
If Britain was a fringe civ for this setting where there wasnt much to go off with I’d be more understanding but Britain is literally fighting all over the world at this point and they were not doing it with longbows.
That is actually one very interesting aspect of the game design.
You cannot let the player produce expensive, “advanced” units like heavy cavalry or artillery (in the sense of the AOE series) in the early stage of the game, whatever historical period it corresponds to.
As a result, “early” periods in the game setting are always poorly represented. The only one that makes sense was the “Stone Age” for AOE1.
It makes some sense. When explorers and settlers first began to colonize the New World, most of them did not have access to cav or heavy artillery due to the expensive and distant nature of colonization. Most of the early conflicts engaged in by Jamestown, Quebec etc. were light skirmishes and such by a handful of gritty settlers with a few matchlocks they had on hand while greatly outnumbered by enemies and threatened by starvation and the elements.
New France was basically stuck in the “discovery age” for 20 years before they used a home city shipment on the Carignan-Salières Regiment and built a couple more TCs in Montreal and Trois-Riviere to boost settler production.
IMO that is another aspect of this design logic of AOE: “development level” is somewhat intermingled with “progress in time”.
So if you want to represent a backward settlement in 1800s with minimal military, you still need to place it in the “colonial age” with 30-years-war-looking units, as in Act III: Steel.
Similarly the Battle of Tours in AOE2 happened in the “dark age” or at most early “feudal age” in actual history, but you still start with the “imperial age” with late medieval plate armours just to enable advanced heavy cavalry.
It seems to me that Longbowman, for example, could already be trained in the Age of Discovery. It looks weird when the Archer is available in the same era as the Musketeer - it’s weird.
We have a Barracks model in the Age of Exploration. It could be built at that age, and you could train units such as the Pikeman and the Crossbowman. After all, soldiers came to Nowy Świat with the Discoverer and the Settlers.
In AoE 1 and AoE 2, Barracks are available in the first Age. This could also be the case in AoE 3. It would be more in keeping with history, and it would better place the different units. In the Commerce Age, there would no longer be a sudden plurality of Units.
Except for the War Wagons (because they only fight in Europe),the other units were in the colonies (the Caçadores were in Portugal and Brasil since the XVII century,the Cuirassiers fight in the Franco-Indian War and the American Revolutionary War,the Strelets were in the early Russian colonization of America between 1648 and 1720 and the Longbowmen,despite being archaic for the time of discovery age,they saw fight in English Civil War in 1642)
