Hear ye, hear ye,
The update will add alternative attack animations for some units to give it more variety, meaning the engine allows several types of animations. Why not push it further by having dedicated animations against buildings & farms ?
Against buildings : the unit now uses a torch instead of his regular sword/spear/…, which feels more appropriate to damage buildings. Even stone castles have some wooden structures that, if destroyed, will make it mostly useless. It’s already the attack animation used in AOE3.
Against farms : poking some wheat with a spear doesn’t sound effective, and using a torch is very dependant on the climate and crops used. So how about salting it ? True it would be very expensive but attacking the fields themselves weren’t the prefered action when trying to destroy a harvest, burning barns & mills would be much more efficient or, when available, destroying the irrigation systems (the Mongols did that in Mesopotamia). So at least salting it would be coherent with attacking the fields themselves.
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Infact, it’s re-introducing an old mechanic that was transformed into the “charged attack”.
If you played the original game and the HD version you can eventually remember two-handed swordman having two idle animations, as the horse-mounted unit have, and also huskarl and militia-line having two different attack sprites.
My guess is that, on the DE version which introduced higher resolution graphics, and 16 angles vs the old 5 mirrored angles, they choose to avoid doubling the total update size. Also remember it went from like 24-32 fps to 45-60-120fps animations, which requiere HDD space when you add everything together.
But still, there is a new idle between attack animation, that’s a new feature, maybe something related to battle-stance, but mainly for spear units to, I think, having their spear pointed toward ennemy between attacks. I think it’s also related to the synced damage with animation and attack delay, leading to sometime the unit beeing “idle” between attacks. This will avoid Kamayuks rising their spear inbetween, for example.
But your right saying this can open lots of possiblities, as in AoE3 we saw infantry throwing torches against buildings, but I doubt they will go that far, or at least not now.
For the villager I think it’s mainly because right now they draw a sword, and then have no more swords in idle version, which is abit strange. Or they’re changing the attack type to be spear based, but I doubt it.
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Chronicles DLC ate up HDD space too. Even for player who don’t own the DLC and can in no way use it.
I meant, why they turned off that before was due to HDD space, but they introduced a new file format since, that so they choose to go for that addition that is coming, bringing back some animations they “sacrified for the stability of the client”.
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Yea honestly this would have been a far better use of unique animations than what they are doing. Hacking at buildings with swords is far more jarring than having the same animation in hand to hand combat between melee units.
Also why do people keep complaining about HDD space like its 1999? Do you guys not play any other games? Modern games are massive and take up way more space than AOE does. Who is really running out of HDD space because of a few sprites?
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