I don’t like the Malay castle. The house on the stones look so big and weirdly put!
I need some time to adopt to new castle skins. I confuse wonders with them.
Initial patch notes said original woad raider skin will be the elite version.where is the naked woad raider skin??
Still the mounted samurai is a hussar.
Too much gold in their armors and weapons ruined the elite skins.
Wouldnt say they ruined, but, yeah, definitely worse than could be. Just armor/weapon upgrade, maybe some fancy details to represent prestigious warriors, but not gold-gold-GOLD-gold-gold details. This lack so much creativity, even though I like almost all the rest of it
I voted new castle skins are Some are good some are bad
Mainly because of bad proportion:
This is AoE4’s small building problem all over again. It feels like the model are scaled down to fit in a 4x4 grid. (Which I heard similar happened in AoE4, 4x4 building scaled down to 3x3), And they don’t feel like they exist in the same world when put them alone with the older castles.
I would love to see if they could make the gates and windows larger, at least make it feel that a person could fit in it.
Some of the castles seem excessively large but overall the only castle I did not like was the Inca one.
When it comes to Elite units the ones I found problematic are:
In some cases the problem can be solved by removing the cloak the units wear from the non-elite version.
But otherwise, the developers did a fantastic job!
Yea man! What’s with the half job. Heroes also didn’t get unique skins.
Worse, if you notice the Chinese castle above. It’s blurry and poorly rendered in the UHD version of the game even.
Malay Castle and Elite Karambit Warrior model is comparatively bad, considering the devs correctly modeled other units like Elite Jaguar Warrior and Elite Leitis.
The castle can be forgiven to some extent because the medieval Malay did not build castles and even rarely made stone/brick fortifications. Most of the time Malay fortification consists of palisade/stockade made of wood and bamboo. However, the Javanese, who are included in the Malay umbrella, did make fortifications of brick and andesite. Still, since the castle is modeled after the Sumatran (Minangkabau) house design, its appearance in the Gajah Mada campaign is absurd, you will see it in the heart of Java (it even appeared as starting structures in 4 out of 5 campaign scenarios).
The devs had to add a stone base because the Castle costs 650 stones without wood. But the stone base design is strange. South East Asian polities prefer symmetric buildings. If they’re going to represent Sumatran temples, the material should be red brick.
What the devs completely butchered is the Elite Karambit Warrior’s model. The modeler straight-up used Sinic (Chinese, Mongol, and Viet) and Mainland Southeast Asia (Khmer, Siam, and Burmese) war attire for the model. They could have used Baju Lamina or Baju Rantai, but no, I guess mixing up other people’s armor is easier.
I suddenly believed they were scaled when saw their blurry texture and small doors.
As someone who’s mostly been in the “no we don’t need more regional skins it will get too hard to tell what’s going on”-camp I’m happy with how legible the units are. They’re still recognizable at a glance as the same line, which is important for units you’re going to see maybe ones every 100 matches or so. And I think the silver/gold theme is actually pretty clever and helps you immediately see if the units are elite.
The unique castles are an often requested “just for fun” thing that adds personality to the civs. I feel like the scale problems are in part because they all have to be unique now, and also based preferrably on a specific historic castle. There’s just only so much you can do with a simple square keep that fits the scale of the rest of the buildings.
As a Berbers picker I was expecting more of a square towered mudbrick North-African Kasbah, but I’ll get used to it and my historical knowledge is lacking anyway so my expectations were probably just off. Although I am just slightly worried that it is an awfully large building. It’s getting ever so slightly harder to see your base if castles keep growing like this.
Thanks now I can never unsee it 
Some look great like teutonic knight some look ridiculous like the santa hat kipchak
Not a fan of so many units getting gold trim. Makes them less distinguishable
Like the huskarl for example. So distinct with its white armour. Now it looks more blended in and bland. Same with the woad raider and chu ko nu.
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Some castles like the turk, byz, ethiopian, vietnamese look great.
Some castles look too wonky like franks, celts, malay. I get the accuracy but for the 4x4 sprite it looks all cartoony/willy wonkaish
Some castles lost the ‘aura’. Mongol castles used to be so intimidating in the past. Now it looks ass
Now waiting for unique skins for standard units like spearman or archer and also unique villagers.
I hope they soon add regional skin for villager.
Are you still hoping of an introduce of the Old Prussians into the game? When do you expect their introduction? I really do not know, if that will happen, concerning the already high density of civs in Europe.
But the Old Prussian civ has definitely a highly unique in the central Baltic sea area. And yes, they also cover the “Late antiquity” framework, which is currently playing a major role in the game. This could be your “advantage”, when it comes to the decision, introduction yes or no.
I think they look okay. European castle need not always be bigger.
They must have reused assets to create the model quickly without doing research. Malay use Turbans, loose cloth or baju lamina armour which looks like the Indians. They could have used Japanese Spearman and Cetbang Cannon model from AoE3 models as the base and that would have been more accurate.
