For as long as I can remember, the “Gaia” in AOE has always been so fascinating to me. In most rts games the neutral or natural stuff was always just a few random eye candy units that would barely do anything. In aoe i always got the feeling that something was watching me. At the time I didn’t know what gaia meant and the first few times I saw a message referring to it I was almost scared that there was something … else in the map with me. Was especially bad on black forest.
Anyway I wish the devs would release some kind of script file or something that would enable more control over the gaia stuff, like deer grazing distances, wolf sight ranges, that kind of thing. Maybe I’m missing something but it seems VERY difficult to do anything with the gaia functions. Eventually it would be great if there was the ability to edit the behaviors like a regular AI. I would like to be able to have wolves roam the map in packs, attack, and retreat with at least a little bit of intelligence.
Tying this into better control over specific tasks in the scenario editor triggers would be a big help to a lot of modders and map makers trying to create specific scenes for their projects.