Chronicles: Battle for Greece is an interesting addition to Age of Empires 2 Definitive Edition, yet it doesn’t follow the conventional expansion format; I thought it would incorporate new campaigns to Return of Rome plus a fundamental overhaul of the progression from the Stone Age to the Roman Age where applicable (expanding and modifying how buildings, units and technologies work through the ages).
I also think the missing campaigns from Age of Empires 1 should be added to Return of Rome as it would be great to have the complete “all-in-one” experience of AOE1 through AOE2DE.
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The thing is: Chronicles is about AoE2, in Antiquity.
RoR is AoE1, ported to the AoE2’s engine.
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Chronicles is taking roughly the same era and bringing it up to an AoE2 standard (or even higher in some ways). New content going forward would be better with this approach, and there’s nothing to say most of the civs featured in AoE1 could eventually be added to chronicles.
That said, I do wish they’d port the rest of the AoE1 campaigns to RoR, it’s hard going back to AoE1 DE after getting used to RoR’s QoL improvements.
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Yes, if we think it that way, it is crazy to conceive Return of Rome being transformed to fit the “shape” of Chronicles. And probably we would miss the classic-ish experience from AoE1, so the best option would be to have all game modes separate (AOE1, AOE2 and Chronicles), so there’s no real “losing” but gaining in terms of ways to experience the game (AOE2DE).
Considering Chronicles’ complexity and uniqueness (compared to AoE2DE and Return of Rome), it would be convenient to keep adding content to it along the way, and absorbing Return of Rome’s civilizations could significantly expand and enhance the experience even further.
Even if Return of Rome only receives the original missing campaigns and no extra content, it would be finally “complete” with both classic and new stuff. Return of Rome would then be the true Definitive Edition of Age of Empires 1.
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As much as I want to try Chronicles it makes it weird that ROR AND this exist at the same time. One of them is going to be completely redundant. If chronicles is going to take off it’ll need a lot more content, and if that gets added it makes it hard to justify playing AOE1 when that exists.
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If you count individual units then Chronicles already has more content.
55 new land units alone!
But it’s just 3 civilisations for now. Well 3 plus all the late antiquity civs from AoE2 if you are generous.
AoE2 RoR has 17 civilisations but 0 unique units, 0 unique technologies and just 5 architecture sets.
I think many people want an ancient AoE2 because AoE2 has very strong game mechanics and the ancient setting is underused.
Some of their wording implies that they are planning on making additional Chronicles DLC and might already have started working on them.
The first one will be the hardest to make because it has to introduce all the new units, especially on water.
I do wonder though if all Chronicles civs will always have the same unit sprites for generic units or if they will add regional appearance to them in the future.
They certainly won’t work well for Celts or Chinese.
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I personally like AoE1 (and Return of Rome specially), but I can accept most people liking AoE2 over it. For me it is good to have both Chronicles and Return of Rome within Age of Empires II: DE despite the tendency or inclination of consumers to pick one or the other, and we should not forget there’s still Age 2 which is different even compared to Chronicles.
I started ignoring AoE1 with its unofficial patch (aka UPatch), when AoE1DE emerged, and then ignored AoE1DE when Return of Rome was launched. Now, since Chronicles is not a remaster of AoE1, but a remake at most, it should not conflict at all with Return of Rome, and that I love, since I was getting tired of searching and deciding which version of AoE1 was ‘better’ in general terms.
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