Japanese keeps/castles should also be able to be attached to stone walls.
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It is genuinely upsetting that they decided “guys guys… hear me out. 1 Stone wall per continent”.
From experience I can tell you the walls are literally one of the easiest assets they could make for each civilization. It is based off a spline system that is already made, meaning you only need to model 3 “sections” of a wall (beginning, middle, end) that all use the same baseline model and textures, with some slight differences.
Basically, I’m saying the effort is next to nothing compared to say, building 3 different houses that has a model for each Age. Remember, they go out of their way to create both Stone Gates AND Stone Towers–but not the walls; WHY?
Mind you, you can reuse elements from the Stone Towers and Stone Gate to make that Stone Wall itself. That is how you’d do it in 3D, and how there is no real excuse for them to be skimping out on Stone Walls. You’d for example reuse the texture and structural “teeth” which are called the Battlement that archers hide behind.
Notice how the rounded Delhi battlement clashes with the sharp and blocky Chinese walls. There is no need for that. All the ingredients are already there for the modellers.
Remember. Walls in AoE4 are gigantic. They take up a massive amount of screenspace, and should as such, have a lot more attention in creating them to compensate for how much of the screenspace they take. In terms of development costs, this is not only one of the cheaper assets you could make for each civilization; it is also one that gives the most bang for its buck. Technology (spline system) is already there. The individual assets are super easy to put together. And they are huge, making it very easy to impress using little effort.
For those confused why it even matters; walls are an incredibly important part of how portraying civilization’s capabilities and why they do things in the way they do. Chinese walls have for example an incredibly interesting historic reason for varying to other walls, being extremely thick earthwork that protected many of their cities–but ironically, prevented the development of cannon based technology (for no cannon would ever blast through several meters thick walls). This is even in the game, present in the campaign and editor, yet not available for players. As shown with the pictures above, the Japanese had a completely different take on Walls and it reflects so much on their personality and history. The Editor even shows that they had at one point intended to make Rus specific “stone walls” that is of wood, reflecting the real civilization, which baffles the mind that they refuse to use it or continue development considering how “cheap” they are to make.
It baffles me that AoE3 has the best walls out of all the Age of Empires games.
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Where did you find that civ picture (The one with the Japanese city)?
There are a lot of unused assets in the game files, and that wooden wall is one of them.
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你仔細看城鎮中心，那個才是你想要的。石牆和塔都是竊取中國的。
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Damn it looks so good if they already make that wall why not put it in game like English are only who has different 3 rd age they should put that in game we already have exception for Mali
and; sad that the TC has the small wall, which is historically correct and the wall is not, it would be nice to see an update with reworkings of the wall, since in my opinion it is now little used, with a redesign of the walls and give back the wall of the Russians to the Russians, although I think it creates problems with the roof.
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Btw all Delhi landmarks and 2 3 4 age ottoman landmarks and ottoman TC for age 2 3 rlly need graphic rework
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I’ve seen a lot of discourse on this subject that relates to it just not being historical. If you ask me, I’d just make the walls without floors to walk on, it is such a minor mechanic that it really doesn’t matter, especially if you could design the civilization around that minor nerf.
But, you don’t have to go that route. The fact is, they could easily just give the Stone Walls a “theme” that relates to their real life equivalent. For instance, they did this with the Malian Stone Walls, and they could easily do it with every other civilization in the game.
Keeps already do this. They follow a basic shape that is unnatural and ahistorical for most civilizations, yet represent the architectural style that was present for those peoples. There is no reason for them to not do the same with Stone Walls.
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Knowing relic, they might have scarcity of modeler in their team as well as game feature/mechanics department.
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I think all keep castles should be able to be built on top of stone walls their are a lot of European examples of that as well
Japanese walls in teaser vs Chinese walls (comparison)
In effect, they are using the Chinese model of walls with bricks, which is incorrect, since the Japanese had their own model of walls whose most notable characteristic was that its exterior was a stack of huge stones of different shapes and sizesm, and a somewhat inclined trapezoidal edge.
I had already mentioned it before in other topics, but other games or even animes that represent medieval Japan do use the classic model of Japanese castle walls.
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