This is basically a restriction on play to give more challenge, like not allowing yourself to ever go to Castle age, or limiting yourself to 15 APM, or only making petards, or trying to complete campaigns without killing any units, or in roleplaying games it could be deleting your character if you die once. In Japanese this is known as 制限プレイ or 縛りプレイ.
The restriction: in each age, you pick one type of military unit available to you in that age. You can only upgrade that military unit in the current age, and make that unit and the units from previous ages. (You cannot upgrade the previous units.)
Example: militia (only trainable military unit in Dark Age except for Armenians, who can make Spearmen); then archers; then monks; then trebuchets. So no upgrades for militia, and only Feudal-age upgrades for archers.
Another example: militia; then scouts; then Guard Towers; then Heavy Cavalry Archers. This would leave you with no siege, though.
This encourages strategic play and possibly delaying your unit choice until you see what your opponent is making.
I think that as a way to play, it would often be more fun to do it against a player who isn’t doing it, as a handicap. As an official game mode that affects everyone (like Capture the Relic), it’s basically just a way to introduce people to a way of playing they don’t know about, which they could thereafter do by themselves outside of the game mode by just not training or upgrading units.
All economic upgrades and Sappers would be unrestricted. Towers would count as a unit. Transports and siege towers would not. Any military upgrade, including unique technologies, could only be researched if it affects the chosen unit for the current age. Unique technologies that don’t affect military units would be unrestricted, and I guess this includes Supremacy for Spanish; but Flemish Revolution and First Crusade would both require selecting the military unit, as it counts as training the unit.
Automatic upgrades don’t count: so Bulgarians would get Two-handed Swordsmen, although they might not have any blacksmith upgrades or the armor unique tech.
Yes or no?
- This would be an interesting game mode
- This would not be worth the development time
- This would make the game worse if it could be included in the game by pressing a button
- I am still confused about how this game mode would work