Will we ever get regional unit skins to replace generic lines? For example, unique looks for militia, spears, archers, skirmishers, etc.
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That would be great. Obsidian clubs and spears for the Meso-American Barracks units woudl be a good start!
Also, regional Villagers would be nice.
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Seems like we could be heading in that direction. Personally, I’d love to see it!
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Although that would be really nice, Cysion has revealed in an interview a few months back this would significantly increase the file size of the game and would therefore not be realistic. During said interview they were speaking about unique skins for every civilization as opposed to regional skins, however.
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Just delete x2/x4 size sprites already. That’s taking most of the space
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So not to be pedantic, but while yes the interview took place a couple months back, Cysion is recounting from back when they were making DE.
So as of 2018/2019 unique unit skins was not feasible. To be fair, I assume it is STILL not feasible for every civ to have unique unit skins.
Regional skins…especially if they combined some regions, like all the european regions together, might be more feasible. You’d only have like 8x the assets, not 35x when they were looking into this originally, 50x now after the newest DLC drops.
And I’m sure if you were motivated you could find optimizations. Perhaps if had a base graphical layer, and then had a overlaid layer where only the regionally unique parts of a skin were, you might be able to vastly reduce the asset size just by removing otherwise duplicate assets.
Could also carefully load and unload assets as the game progresses, to minimize the amount of RAM required.
That all being said, best case you’re looking at a whole bunch of effort to add all those assets, then a whole bunch more effort on top optimize it 9 ways to sunday, to still considerably increase the size of the game and the amount of RAM required.
Maybe as free (or very cheap) DLC’s so people can opt in to having all those extra assets on their machines, but even so I wouldn’t hold my breath
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Sure, just go ahead and massively balloon the game’s size. There will be NO downsides whatsoever.
Tbh it cam work like the enhanced graphiv pack, who wants it downloads it, who doesnt want it doesmt
Tbh I dont think its a huge deal, its just like adding another hundred Hero graphics, qnd the filse size of the graphics has been reduced substantialy
The mainnproblem is that its just a lot of work and deciding what to add and what not to add would be tricky
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I heavily disagree with the narrative of adding regional skin would bloat the game size somehow when its actually is feasible. Game literally got 2/3 extra copies of same sprite for zoom level. Think someone in the forum made calculation in past. To his rough guess, with current civset, it’d take 2-3gb+ only. You just have some generic units and villagers left. Even many possible overlaps are indeed possible. We even got rough implementation how it is possible to keep readability similar to old civs.
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Also DE is actually badly optimized and has weird constant loading/unloading and auto atlasing which results in bad optimizations. In theory it should’ve been cheaper than 3D assets itself. Some stuffs are never unloaded from GPU and has weird DirectX 9 layer just for GUI. Aka stuffs from main menu screen itself always exist.
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Wont that be the same as adding military skins?
Yes, which I’m also opposed to, as well as for readability reasons.
This video again.
Someone did the math and it turned out that what he said was pretty wrong.
Also it was assuming that every single civ would get completely unique sprites, not regional ones!
Plus we literally already have regional skins of Chronicles already that coexist with AoE2 sprites with no issue.
Pretty sure that was a test run for that.
I should remake this thread [poll] Cosmetic DLC with new polls after the DLC releases because we have Elite Unique Unit and Unique Castle skins now.
Even some unique Monasteries.
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Guys we’re in 2025, it’s not some sprites breaking a game, not even 2000 of them. As with chronicles new assets, architecture etc are there to show if they want they can.
So you want to play Micronesians using European longswords?
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In past major issues that prevented regional sprites was because of DAT files reading. Like Unit Abilities were shared across all civs. Overtime with each update, DAT file got improved by a large margin. Which allowed Chronicles with unique villagers.
Today if you need to solve something that might be restructuring sprite reading. Devs shouldn’t bother with 4K(4x) sprites tbh since that hardly matter much from distances. Even so, if it does matter then they should make 1.5x sprites. Size somewhere between 1x and 2x. For low end machine support, even though DE fails to deliver it, it should be more smaller as in similar to old AOK style size pixels. Which would result in significant compression. That’s my 2 cent of guess since Im involved in gamedev scene.
Once again game is 8 player and realistically all of the units wont necessarily be on the scene. Even if all 8 villagers are unique then it still be very optimized than normal 3D assets that AOE4 uses. Performance is less of a concern there. File size issues realistically can actually be solved. Rather game went through many compression over time actually and today its slightly bigger than what it was during release time. If you tell me, game is visually degraded a bit than AOE1DE. AOE1DE had cloud shadows on terrains even.
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TLDR; its possible to have more sprites without hampering performance in theory. Rather performance issue is happening mainly due to its bad implementation of pushing sprites into GPU and weird auto atlasing. Even I highly doubt what they can do to solve pathing even. Its been bad for years by now.
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Yes, I do.
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I did a back-of-the-envelope calculation in this thread:
I estimated 1GB per region for both standard and enhanced graphics, which is not much by today’s standards. For just standard graphics, I’d guess it’s about 200MB per region (since enhanced graphics are about 4 times the size of standard ones).
Yes, not only did Cysion give completely the wrong answer, but it’s the answer to the wrong question.
I’m confused – these are an optional download. You can already uninstall the enhanced graphics pack if you don’t want to use it. (Also I didn’t know there were 4x graphics – thought that was only AoE1DE.)
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Oh thanks. I looked in the wrong thread.
To his defence he was being interviewed and didn’t have time to crunch the actual numbers before coming up with an answer.
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sorry i was wrong. You are right. Im saying possible room for further optimization.
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Yeah, as someone who sees some merit in unique sprites for units (though other than Monks which we’re now getting is very low priority for me) I do think that the way to do it is regional, every civ getting its own special sprites is waaaaaaay overkill. Just splitting into European, African, American, Middle Eastern, Central Asian/Steppe/Nomadic, Indian Subcontinent, and East Asian (including SE Asian) is plenty enough differentiation IMO to avoid too much bloat.
There are readability concerns which are very valid though, and honestly I’d much rather have some new architecture sets and more scenerio eye-candy and regional flora/fauna/terrains that regional unit sprites.
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