Mongol Lances Westernized?

It’s unacceptable. This franchise deserves better. It’s not like we don’t know what cavalry units the mongols had. They don’t need to copy the English.

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Actually, the pictures you brought were painted before the “knight’s lance” was a thing. Except the last image, which have lances with vamplates. Tapering shaped lance/lance with vamplate, or something others would call jousting lance, was invented in late 14th century~15th century or so, and it was definitely used in the battlefield since it was absolutely much more powerful than normal pointy sticks that you showed with images. :grin:

Although they look absolutely awesome, those kinds of lance which knights would have used wasn’t used outside Western Europe. :grinning_face_with_smiling_eyes:

Not true. They were used outside of western Europe for exampla in Poland and Hungary.

Any awesomeness is immediately stripped away when one realizes how wrong it looks. And it’s not hard to be realised by the majority of the players as it does not really require extensive, detailed research. One can find such depictions in any children’s book

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I guess there is a lot worse that offend me worse that I never noticed it this way. When one points this out though it is peculiar. It makes the units look like an Asian variant of a European Aesthetic. Helping to contribute to the cartoon representation of the game in viewers eyes.

I am not sure how it looks in game, as if it just appears once an ability is ready.

one thing I noticed was when some camels were running towards a war elephant when it got in range slowed down. So maybe an ability elephants have is to render charges useless. Which would make some sense as to not expect cavalry to charge a fully armored elephant beast.

I’d like them to change this and other stuff that we have yet to see, so that it’s as authentic as possible for each culture and civilization.

Would be awesome to get a reply from a developer here but highly unlikely. Let’s hope they read the forums.

The game has two kinds of Generic Cavalry:
Horseman and Knights.

The Horseman have spears and the Knights have lances and swords.
If some Knights would get spears too than it would be harder to tell them apart from Horseman.

It’s a balance between readability and historical accuracy.

I don’t want to believe that it wouldn’t be possible for them to communicate the Knights’ role in another way without having to mix up the cultures in such a distasteful way.

I kept having trouble recognizing each unit’s faction but now I realized why. It’s because of the generic units that look too much alike.
Knights for example is a European concept. I certainly do not want to see a Mongol or Indian unit called Knight or look like one.

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There are many ways to do it. AoEO has almost every combination of unit based on Type (Inf, Cav, Ranged, Siege), Role (anti-Inf, anti-Cav, anti-Ranged, anti-Siege, anti-Building, etc) and Attack (Melee, Ranged, Both). And the units can have various weapons such as swords, spears, axes, javelins, etc.

It is perfect to tailor every civ to history.

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They looked a bit different in those regions sometimes, so I didn’t mentioned Eastern Europe.

“Readability” is not the justification to everything. People are so fond of using “you’re right but readability”, as if the AOE4 approach is the single way to improve readability.

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+1 I hope units are updated before release at least visually

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It makes sense taht units have only slightly different skins, but standardized weapons, sizes and animations. They are clearly going for recognizability, instead of fully unique rosters, which AoE2 proved to be the superior option.

It is silly, however, taht they are using jousting Lances, and not military Lances.

Jousting Lance only used for sport:
image

Military/War Lances used for combat:
image

image

image

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I noticed that the small triangular on the top of their lances is removed, which is good but still not enough.
Unless it has anything to do with unit upgrades or age progression and we just don’t see it here but still exists somewhere.

Screenshot_2

This readability argument is such BS. Are we not expected to learn a game anymore? Are we all totally unable to go into a game playing against Mongols and French, and be able to recognize and differentiate Knights from both factions if they don’t have the same ridiculous flag on their lances? It’s OKAY to not understand everything on your first game. It’s okay to take a few games to understand and learn that both factions have the same unit but with different aesthetics, and learn how to identify them. I don’t get why this game is trying so hard to be understandable and readable for everybody on their first playthrough, at a glance, from a 0.3 second look at the screen with one eye closed. Make it immersive, rich and complex, and let us LEARN the game.

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