Below you will find a graphical overview of the current distribution of architecture sets in Age of Empires 2 DE from the Fandom Wiki. Historically false assignments and completely overloaded individual sentences characterize the picture.
It is stupefying to see, that the Mediterranean and Eastern European set are now the “largest”, although both sets came late to the game namely 2013 with the HD version of “Age of Empires 2: The Forgotten”. Both sets also only started with 1 civ, the “Italians” for the Mediterraneans and the “Slavs” for the Eastern Europeans.
I hope that Microsoft and the devs will take a look at it in foreseeable future.
If the Armenians, Byzantines, and Georgians received a new set, that would mean the Mediterranean set had only 5 civs, which is about average nowadays. If the Bulgarians received that same set, and the Bohemians were moved to the Central European set, then the Eastern European set would only have 4. This is much more balanced.
If any one architecture set takes up more than one row on that table listing the civs that have it, there are too many.
Indeed the problem again is not too many civs but rather Devs being lazy with new sets.
I mean if you think byzantines, Romans or Georgians fit the Mediterranean set you’re kinda blind or in denial. I could argue for Armenians fitting but only because they’re actually Cilicians.
The Mediterranean set is basically the Italian set+. Not even Sicilians fit at all.
Spanish and Portuguese fit better than others but still not ideal.
It occurred to me that if there ever was an Avars civ added in some kind of Early Middle Ages expansion, they could have the Caucasus/Balkan set, not just because there was a group called the Caucasus Avars, but also because they were a notable bane of both the Byzantines and Bulgarians.
I think creating a new civ is actually the easiest thing to do so I don’t know why they don’t add more, probably cause of balance and because they want to profit out of it (something like DoI seems now a dream).
What it takes the most time imo is designing campaigns, I mean 15 scenarii for each DLC is a lot, I take one month to design 1 if I’m lucky. And slides, and voice acting… I’m sure that’s the longest thing to do.
I don’t think designing new mechanics is that hard once you have the idea and hit the right balance but I guess new architecture sets require a lot of time, specially with De destruction animations while in HD was almost as easy as designing a new civ.
The game would really benefit from taking a break from jamming new Civs into the game, and just shoring up the Asset Quality of the things that are now left behind. We’ve already talked about Architecture Sets, but there are some other things such as:
Goths/Huns/Byzantines/Italians don’t get unique Voice Lines and just reuse what other Civs have, it is only impossible with Huns to get period accurate voice lines (Gothic has a large body of surviving writings, most notably a translation of the Bible), but with Hunnic there still survives related languages unique to what we already have in AOE2 that could be used instead like Chuvash, which is exactly what Civ 5 does https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYVisFccpFo&ab_channel=FoxxySphinx.
I also understand that the Latin lines Byzantines speak is original to them, and that it’s really Italians copying them, but we literally have a new grammatically correct version of those lines with Romans, and during the time period of AOE2, Greek would be more accurate, and more importantly Greek would be a unique dialogue language to hear ingame.
Britons could also do with unique lines for their Monks and King (Currently uses the same gramamatically incorrect version as Byzantines/Italians), but I do recognise that atleast for the Monks it’s not inaccurate for them to speak Latin.
I have also heard that the voice lines for certain civs like Berbers is also very badly done, I will not be talking much about this as I don’t understand enough about this to confidently comment on it and I think the prior is much more relevant due to it being quite egregious asset recycling, but it’s still relevant to mention.
South Asian Civs Warships have the exact same appearances as the Middle Eastern ones, all the other Architecture Sets have their own unique Warship appearances.
By no means do I intend to be exhaustive with this, and I could bring up other closely relevant things like new Castle appearances for older Civs like the New ones have being getting. But I wanted to limit myself to purely egregious asset recycling
Yes, they should do that for next. Players are tired of constantly being presented with new, immature civs, like the Romans which appeared with the last DLC.
The players want at least, that finally the graphic side of the game will be improved and other game relevant things like improved voice output of the units.
Well written. It is not just details, rather around basic things that the game has not even managed to do sufficient yet.
Normally I don’t care much for such topic. But now I can’t unsee it.
To begin, yes, this is not a written rule, but we can’t not see that there had been no more than 4 civs that share the same architecture before LotW. Now 8 is too much honestly.
Furthermore, I really want to take this to again voice my opinion. $15 for such laziness is not worthy at all. People taking it as standard which is why devs keep putting stunts like this.
After LOTW, I wanted more unique castles for all civs and because of DoI, I wanted splits. Now with the Persian rework, I want more reworks. The problem to me is that this game used to be filled with umbrella civs but then the new team added the forementioned ideas and now I need everything consistent across the board because it is now weird.
It makes sense to have more civs reworked. Also the Indian civ split was a truly remarkable work of all dlcs. But then again, problems lead to problems. This could be subjective though.
First is more civs mean more architecture share and it will bugger if they just copy-paste again.
But still, the real matter is that I feel like since RoR, the costs are all about campaigns which is not what I need. Look now, maybe they need to raise the price because they need to keep their current staff, but on the other hand I CAN’T see that their work is worthy of the cost. Therefore I’m not sure if I’ll want devs to do more any of this. Or perhaps I would need them to open more about their plans or problems to the community, not this boosting up the price behind the scenes.
I can tell from experience that making a campaign is very hard work, they’re probably starting to get tired and run out of ideas. In the end the game is pretty simple and there’s only so much you can do to not make it feel repetitive… One thing would be actually hire people who feel invested by the plot they’re going to write and who have some novel or crazy ideas (contact me Devs!)
Making new civs instead is pretty easy and there’s a lot more space there, it’s easier to come up with new mechanics and boni and there’s plenty of variety in this world to choose from. Making civs is easier than making campaigns and less time consuming imo. It’s like three weeks against three months of work to be optimistic (it’s probably more for campaigns).
Campaigns are the salt on the soup in the realtime strategy. They give the game a certain spice.
I really hope that we will get another Roman campaign soon. The Late antique time frame still has potential, to be represented by the Romans. We already have Huns and Goths as opponents and can exclude them for a campaign, but Vandals would be one of the few suitable options in a Western Roman campaign.
