Population has been one of the bigges (or the biggest) issues of AoM ever. Motivated by the lack of computing power of its time, it did not allow you to amass an army like in other AoE games. In the past, I did this Population Thread.
Devs already say that population will be increased, but they did not specify how much, how it will be done, or if it will be enough to bring AoM to the level of other AoE games.
So… here I am going to gather a summary about all the information I have.
1. FIRST Poplation count
UNITS
Population AoM classic
Population AoM Retold
Phoenix
5
3
Scarab
5
3
Minotaur
4
2
Centaur
3
2
Hydra
5
3
Valkirie
4
2
Mountain Gigant
5
3
Hoplite
2
2
As we can see, Mythic units cost less population. But the human units remain costing at least 2 population.
2. House LIMIT
In clasical AoM we had a max. of 10 houses (100 population). This is not a reliable source, but we can analyze the number of houses that have the images shown.
I don´t know how many houses you could to build. In classical AoM you had 160 average population (with 3 TCs per player), but military units would cost at least 2 population and your production (peasants and trade) required 80-90 at least. So the army of weaker units you could create didn’t exceed 40 units, usually around 20
It seems that indeed, devs have lowered the population cost of Mythic units and they have given more houses increasing the population, but I worry that it will not be enough to keep up with the other AoE games and that POPULATION will always be a weak point of AoM Retold.
Images are all worthless for things like this.
They are not organic gameplay screenshots. You can easily place more then 10 houses in the Scenario Editor.
Not saying they didn’t increase the housing limit. I think a limit of 20 houses seems like a likely thing they did.
Kind of a waste of time to count houses.
But as I said, I wouldn’t be surprised if they just simply increased the limit for houses to 20.
Maybe the did more clever things that are different between civilisations like adding population to Longhouses, Monuments, Places or something like that. Those buildings would then have to have a build limit though.
As I’ve said before in another thread, the best solution in order to be able to mass bigger armies would have been to increase the house build limit or make so they give more pop space, instead of reducing units pop cost, because this would require further balance adjustments.
But I’ve seen the leaked gameplay and it seems that the devs chose to reduce to lower the pop cost of myth units, which is fine. Just more work imo.
Either case, I’m glad to know we’ll be able to mass big armies in retold.
If his suspection of 13 houses over 10 is correct, then we are dealing with +30 pop. If we suspect town centers grant +5 more, then maybe +45. With myth units taking 2-3 pop slots less, realistically with favor income it will be +55 pop at max.
So you could theorically field like 27 human or 18 myth units more.
Even if they allowed 200 pop to be normal amount with 3 Fortified Town Center and max houses will allow for 100 eco units (villagers/Caravans) and 50 regular infantry.
Best way to allow for more units would be to reduce pop of all units except for the titan that should remain 20 pop.
I hope for a adjustable Pop limit like AoE 2, so everyone can play like they want. Im just a casual and like to play with Big armies knowing i don’t have the brain capacity to handle it al😂
And I hope they remove the building limit, just make buildings increasingly more expensive after you build a certain amount of them, for example you already made 10 fortresses and then after that the resource costs for each one you build will cost more.
Currently the game has a population limit of 300 and a house limit of 10 with 10 population each.
Since Fortified Town Centres have 20 population you need 10 of them to reach 300 population overall.
I think a house limit of 20 and a max population limit of 400 would make sense. That would mean that in an average game you are a lot likely to hit 300 population.
That would be relatively comparable with AoE2 or AoE3 where the population limit is 200 but most units cost (or almost all for AoE2) only cost 1 population.
The best would be to give us a lobby setting so we can choose the population and house limit (maybe even independent of each other).
But I think 20 houses 400 population would be good default settings.
210 population with 2 TCs. So Now we know that we going to be able to build between 17-18 houses at least. (170-180 population in houses). I hope that at least 20 houses can be built, provided that the cost in terms of human population does not decrease
I am concerned that mythic units will gain too much profitability in population compared to human ones
yes there is a developer during an interview who said that except that looking at all the gameplay that we are shown, the pop has been slightly retouched just for the mythical units, we are very far from the “are impressive visual” which is announced , I hope that the release version will be better than what we see in terms of Pop, the rest is great
“The population limit in particular will be a big change for Age of Mythology, not only in its visual impression, but also in the fundamentals of its gameplay. Strategies in AoM were often framed by the strict limits of units set by the limits graphics technology of the time, although they were widely praised at the time”
