I think the main concern are units like the Crossbow where they need to use an entirely different weapon for some civs to even look remotely correct.
Many civilistations did not use crossbows at all, that includes a lot of Archer civilisations.
Maya crossbows are just utterly wrong.
Pikeman and such will be easy to adept to other civilisations because everyone used poky sticks.
I don’t think that it’s realistic to assume that because one DLC flopped they will completely utterly ditch a whole year worth of content, but they might take some time to fix V&V, which would delay other content.
They didn’t know yet how bad V&V would be received yet, though they kinda should have known, because it’s pretty obvious that people would not be happy with it.
Note: this doesn’t at all mean that the DLC you love is going away, but it definitely means we’re trying new things in an effort to make you even more happy.
This confirms that they:
plan to do more of the classic DLC
plan to try other DLC on top
Which is the important part.
No way they just dropped the work on all those thing just because one DLC didn’t sell well.
They might take some time to rethink them and hopefully get better QA.
They reply to almost every bug report but rarely reply to other threads.
You can see an icon infront of the thread it a developer or any other Microsoft employee replied to it.
Exactly.
They explained it somewhere else before.
Some troll called the Moderators “Dev Agents” because they defended the developers against some pointless hatred or something.
They thought the name is funny so they started using it officially. Each moderator has their own number.
Still the unit is called “crossbowman/arbalester”. Maybe changing the name for civs that didn’t use it and make the unit skin accordingly, but then it would open the floodgates for other units who’d also need being renamed such as knights, which only existed in Europe with only some broad equivalents in other parts of the world (the Japanese samurai are quite close but typically weren’t heavy cavalry, for example).
Best to stick with that inaccuracy (would still be recognisable with the weapon), after all it’s already a game that made the Aztecs balanced with the Spanish without relying on quantity, despite some noticeable tech level difference when they met and the Aztecs being knocked out before any chance of catching up…
But the main reason for regional skins is to remove the massive historical errors like Crossbows and Plate armour for Americans.
Considering that the game already has a lot of Archer units that more or less behaved the same it wouldn’t be too hard for readability to give the Mayan Crossbows a normal bow.
You just have to be bale to quickly recognise that it’s not an Archer anymore and that it’s not their UU.
A lot of other upgrades like blacksmith upgrades are invisible anyway so it’s not really that important for readability to know if you are fighting am Archer or Crossbow. Ballistics, Thumb Ring and the Blacksmith upgrades are invisible and more important then the Crossbow upgrade itself.
(“Bowman” feels weaker than “Archer”, and “Composite Bowman” is already an UU)
Also rename “Knight” to “Mounted Lancer” for non-european civs to fix that problem. Paladins are only in Europe now that Persians have the Savar so the problem is bypassed for that one.
you can still make an argument to put these 2 in Europe. Attila put his main camp in Hungary, while the Cumans were on the western steppe so the very edge of Europe at the time, then moved to different parts of South-Eastern Europe.
The problem of a civ that vanished in the 5th century before Europe had developped any heavy cav, so balanced to compete with civs that were relevant in the late Middle Ages, and being focused on melee cav…
Correct. The Dev Agent thing dates back to an in joke from someone accusing us moderators to be “agents” shielding the devs. Back when this forum used the legacy theme, it was actually also easier to differentiate between Moderatos and Devs as the former had a green border around their posts.
Actual devs from Forgotten, Relic and World’s Edge have a little logo attached to their profile icon.
Edit: the other dev was Ramsey aka Phillysouljah/Philadelphia who is an actual dev and also pitched V&V since the scenarios were originally made by him.
Honestly why not do something with the steppe cavalry like East Asian civs should get this instead of knights. Huns, Cumans, Mongolians should get nomadic architecture and Persians, Tatars with the Persian architecture.
Maybe European civs should also get new unit skins that have a lighter skin colour. At last the none Mediterranean ones. Since the skin colour of most units is in a more neutral skin tone that is darker then most Europeans or Northern Asians.
This way everyone gets something new.
You mean the Steppe Lancers?
Heavy Cavalry was a thing that existed in most places of the world so they Knight is not really out of place in most places in the role it fulfils.
Just making the Knight look different outside of Europe would help a lot to make it thematically fit in.
Renaming the unit to just (Elite) Heavy Cavalry instead of Knight and Cavalier would be an additional nice touch. They can’t train Paladin anyway.
The Crossbow and Arbalester could be named (Elite) Reflex Bowman to get a new unit name that has not been used before.
It could as well be called Persian Architecture set the way it looks like.
The East Asian set is also 90% Japanese.
Basically, I personally support the naming principle of Archer → XXX Archer → YYY Archer for every civs rather than naming to Bowman for certain civs. The reason is simple, that is, units with different names in principle are very intuitively perceived by players as different units with different stats. Rather than forcing the players to resist such the reasonable intuition, there are other ways better, Otherwise you should give them a bit different stats to make thme different units.
But having said that, I wouldn’t mind having Japanese, Mayan, or Ethiopian holding crossbows. This is not something the game can avoid from the beginning, just like you can’t avoid these civilizations using trebuchets that they possibly had not actually used in reality. The adjustments to the clothing details are already enough for the change.
Yes, I think the same… this dlc like RoR is to experiment with the game and the next dlc like TMR is going to be a regional dlc, whether in Asia or Africa; or even America…
True, we have to take the balance into account too…
It’s called Crossbowman atm so something like Recurved Bowman (since Composite Bowman is already taken) would sound similar.
But names are just details.
But I kinda get why having the same names for everyone would make sense.
AoE4 has 2 different names for the Knight though and it doesn’t really bother anyone.
I think this would be a bad idea.
It would be a middle ground that makes no one happy.
The best solution in my opinion is to make the regional skins more historically accurate then readable and then just let people that only care about readability and competitiveness just turn them off completely.
This way everyone is happy.
People that want immersion and historical accuracy get what they want and competitive people keep the game as readable as it is.
Currently the generic units often have very none generic stats anyway.
A Briton Crossbow is a lot closer to a Longbow in stats then to a generic Crossbow, despite looking the same.
So you are already trained to think of a Longbow and a Crossbow as practically the same unit.
On top of that everyone is already used to the Archer too. If the new regional skins of the Crossbow looks and moves like an Archer or Longbow you already have the right instinctive reaction to it.
They need to make sure that Plumed Archers, Rattan Archers and Composite Bowman keep looking different enough so the uniqueness of those units is clearly visible.
That shows how much the people want regional skins in AoeII.
Microsoft, read this thread! Most of the assets already exist in the editor, it won’t be that hard to implement the basic regional skins for villagers and monks, just work a bit for barracks, archery range and stables and that’s it.
If it’s DLC, I’ll absolutely buy it. Absolutely.
Besides the cool ideas that I love so much about the unique features of each civilization, this is really something that is needed and noticed.
Of course I wouldn’t want the change to be radical, the game should remain the game we love.
But in the worst case - you can always remove the settings if it doesn’t suit you.
I would pay 10$ right away for an expansion pack that brings regional cosmetics for Far East and 3 missing campaigns ( Korean, Chinese and Japanese) + a new civ like Jurchens.
Then again 10$ for another expansion that brings the cosmetic sets for Mesoamericans with some Maya Campaign + adding Olmecs, Toltecs in the game.
I would also pay 10$ for an expansion pack that adds eastern Europe cosmetic set that solves the Slav issue (splitting it into Rus and Ukrainians) and adding the Wallachians that are missing because they already have a campaign.
After all 10$ is the price of a good pizza that disappears into your stomach in few minutes.
P.s. Monk regional skins should be added for free because they are already in the editor, no work required for them the be added.
Most of the assets already exist in the editor, it won’t be that hard to implement the basic regional skins for villagers and monks, just work a bit for barracks, archery range and stables and that’s it.