Please make fish ponds consistent on Arabia

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

I like fish ponds, but as they currently exist, they are more often annoying than helpful. They only seem to appear in about half of games, and half of those seem to be in really awkward places, like displacing wood lines, or being so far away they’re not actually useful.

Please make them consistent, kinda like deer; there every time, far enough away to not displace other vital resources, but not so far away as to be impossible to use.

Here’s a great example of both cases:

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As you can see, blue has two perfectly placed fish ponds; far enough away to not displace their woodlines, but close enough to use. Red, by contrast, has them much too far away to be practically used, so they have a major disadvantage.

It would be nice if they would spawn like for blue. It wouldn’t always need to be two; maybe just one sometimes, but it would be nice to typically have them. Heck, they could even replace deer sometimes, since people don’t seem to enjoy chasing deer anyway.

2 Likes
2

They aren’t meant as ponds, they’re meant as to be Oases. So having them in woodlines is intentional.

3 Likes
3

Unfortunately, this is almost impossible with the way random map scripting works. Even placing forests roughly the same distance from players requires some pretty hacky code, because the rms format wasn’t designed for it. Implementing a minimum and maximum distance for oases and having them spawn in forests would need an even bigger hack, if it’s possible at all.

This was true in the original Arabia too, where they only spawned on desert maps, not on grassy ones.