Not sure if this has been discussed before, but I’d for one like to see Outposts, forts, town centers and other buildings show the unit that is firing from the inside. How about you?
Currently… most buildings hide this by just shooting from between the windows, so you can’t see the units even if they were there, BUT, the default UN-upgraded outpost and the campaign/Maltese fixed gun doesn’t show anyone where they should.
No crew
Specially odd with the fixed gun (It’s a pet peeve that in AoE2 most siege units fire like they were animated with magic, I’d like to forgive the mortar a tad since it would take forever to animate a HUGE CANNONBALL being loaded on it… (Then again, they have slow fire rate…)).
I don’t imagine it would consume too much extra RAM or anything like that to modify the buildings to show some units, the outpost only needs the one sniper to be legit (Unlike boats, those things had crews of 20 to 50 per caravel, imagine a battleship!)
I’m inclined towards this, so I’m not choosing to vote either way:
I don’t care enough about this to want the devs to devote their limited resources to it. It could be cool having people in the buildings shooting, but I don’t really care either way.
I’d probably lean towards yes if the devs had like 10x the resources and manpower, but currently they’re too busy between (presumably) AoM Retold and the next DLC to even be able to give us quarterly patches.
If all issues/wish/updates were all addressed and the only thing left to polish was a but of aesthetic finesse, sure - however it’s a no for me as TBH, it’s never really appeared in my mind when playing.
A better, aesthetics-only thing I’d rather see would be that all ships get some crew models onboard, however I must reiterate, that’s all very much at the bottom of a (big) list for me.
I answered no because honestly it would just point out how small buildings are compared to units. obviously a tower the size of the outpost wouldn’t be able to have cannons.
If it were 2003 and I were somehow working at eso, I would be pushing for earthworks, stationary artillery batteries, and blockhouse style outposts more along the lines of these things:
Woah dude! First time one of my polls get so many votes in half a day.
Btw, I obviously agree that there are more important things to invest in prior to this, the poll was more on the sense of…
“Now that we are free to develop the game further, is this a good idea to add on the to-do list?”
And as for that, likely we would need to adjust some of the sizes to fit units “scale-wise”, then again, I would love to see GIANT FORTS in the game hahah (I think that one, the fountain of youth and wonders are the biggest in the game right? Also the battleship).
and then the next step after putting doods in towers would be to add little animated people that hang around the other buildings!
people haggling and milling about the markets, citizens who open the windows of the houses and look out, bankers who exit the bank to smoke out front before going back to work, ar.senal workers carrying supplies in and out of the building…
It would need some extra animations though, it’d be weird seeing a salesman happily selling cabbages to a settler while the whole town is burning down in flames
Sort of like what happens now, in a Seminole post a grandpa tell his grand kids stories, while right next to them Ottomans are blasting away Argentinians :v
In all seriousness, I remember first laying my eyes on the Russian Blockhouse thinking how odd it was for them it as a unique building and for it not to actually look like a Blockhouse!
I’d love to have seen (blocky!) blockhouses for all civs that with their firepower being in relation to the infantry garrisoned.
I absolutely hate how all the other games have siege units operated by ghosts (sadly it’s looking like even the new AoM is going suffer from this).
But that being said, the building and ship scaling makes adding units to them pretty much impossible to do in a satisfying way. Either you’re going to have regular sized dudes in a little building, or little dudes next to your regular sized army. Both would be really weird to see.
The only exception would be on Fixed Guns since they are big enough to get away with a regular sized crew and they are unique in being a building that takes up population. So having an actual crew would explicitly show that.
No crew 
