True,it fits a merchant ship better than a war ship.
At the cost of sounding arrogant I will repeat that, specially in aoe2, modders and scenario designers are what makes the game.
The last two dlcs are basically mods sold by the main Devs who seem to be out of ideas since some time. Even before, a lot of ideas were taken from mods to the official game, to not speak of official creators who initially were modders like filthydelphia.
Everybody laughed at me and told me to seek help when I said a year ago that mods should be monetised but now you basically have that in the main game, the only difference being that thereâs an âofficialâ logo printed on them and some additions to justify the price.
Content creators are the backbone and soul of a game like this specially when Devs seem to lack direction and donât know where to go next.
Hell this game wouldnât even exist anymore if there wasnât a modder making forgotten empires.
This is clearly not âonly an hobbyâ anymore since youâre factually contributing to the game and how the game evolves and sells, you just happen to be out of the games because there isnât legislation about this yet, itâs an unpaid performance. I think this is ethically incorrect but the future will tell.
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Alright when will they Collab with Dharma mod?
i want more triggers like we have in Age of Mythology which is a way more userfriendly editor.
If BOG is successful which I believe it will be, it might be next.
Just seen this Byzantine mod https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXS39FTkC1I and I really want this in the official albeit more in line with DEâs graphics.
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You also have goodie A and Goodie B. I spam the hell out of them whether I go mapmaking.
Market stall, amphora, and wells too. Especially well when some forms are just âfountainâ. Itâs really beautiful compared to handmade fountain in current AOE2.
Wooden fence and stone fence is a better âFenceâ since itâs not bloated too much space.
Dragon as flying decoration is cool. Although not red like OG, but itâs a silver dragon. Fitted for fantasy map.
Why they donât carry these things over baffled me. Itâs a potential gold field.
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We could have stepping stones, rope bridges, wooden bridges, moon bridges, moon gates . I also wish for much more house/apartment/manors variants.
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Regional ship skins please!
We have the 1x1 bridge tiles now which allow any with of bridge, even Bridges changing size and direction.
But they only exist in one style.
It would be cool to have bridges work like walls where you simply drag a line and it automatically places the end parts on both ends.
What do you think they should do to improve the live of those scenario designers though?
You think asset DLCs would be the right path?
Oh yes please!
The triggers I miss most are the army triggers and the spawn triggers for multiple units.
In AoE2 you can only spawn one unit at a time and then it blocks the tile so you have to move it away before you can spawn the next one.
âCreate from Sourceâ would be really neat. Basically uses the same code as training a unit from a building so it should not cause any issues because you can easily train many units at once with the âaegisâ cheat.
I rather have a simple trigger then to have to write AI code to make an AI train a special unit in a specific quantity at a specific time.
How would elevation on a bridge work?
They sort of did half of it with dynasties of India without contacting the modder. I guess with the next Indian dlc theyâll add the rest.
You mean selling scenarioâs objects? No that would be terrible imo but I think at this point they can basically sell their audience anything.
I meant that instead of themselves choosing what mod to make official and monetise they should open it to âfree marketâ. At this point itâs becoming rather arbitrary (from their part) what they pick up to be the next DLC and I donât think itâs very transparent from their side.
Chronicles is not just Rome at war like it was v&v but still it could be considered a demo (only 3 civs) of the original mod sold by Devs for money (and with original modders getting their share of course, I mean that would basically be a crime otherwise). Itâs not that different from v&v in concept, itâs just somewhat a bit more shiny.
You can do that already, I donât use AI to create units for example. I think they recently added a âtrain unitâ trigger but you can use âcreate garrisoned objectâ and loop it to spam an army very fast from a building. I think you could also use âreplace objectsâ to replace invisible objects on top of each others or flags with units you want to spam but I still have to try that (some uses it though).
That would likely backfire massively. Paid mods have always been a huge issue with every company that tired it. Skyrim is the best example. In the end they started hand picking mods that can be sold.
There is many issues with allowing modders to freely choose how to monetise their mods or content in general.
There is a train unit trigger? Interesting.
I have to look into that. Gifting units to the AI has been really annoying in the past but itâs one of my favourite ways to balance the difficulty of scenarios in AoMR and AoE3DE. Also allows me to control the enemy army composition or give them units that they usually canât train like Scenario Editor exclusive units.
Spawning and moving armies is something that I like doing with fully scripted players do have full control over attack waves. Especially interesting to have 2 sides attack each other in waves automatically.
Yeah I know very well, the thing is thatâs the direction the game is taking unless they take a U turn and go back to just make normal DLCs.
But in the very same moment you as a company start to sell mods, it feels unfair that the competition is not on equal terms or the rules are not clear.
Iâm not against anything in particular, I just wish they would take a direction and be coherent, consistent with it instead of just going with what they think will be popular or surprising like grandparents too out of touch with their kids to care for what the game is and where should go. Then surprise becomes just a nice word for âI donât know where to go next so I go random or pick content that was not created by meâ. Yeah for sure you wonât expect it if I just start to type random words or quotes.
The ai behaviour without a made up ai is very inconsistent, specially because of pathing, so the outcome can be random, like the future of the game funnily enough. The more the behaviour is random the more you need to script it to make it consistent or players will have an hard time in scenarios that largely depends on the outcome of two ai clashing with each others.
Is it really?
Chronicles is not just selling Rome at War.
It is a DLC inspired by Rome at War and made by the same people but it is not just a copy of the Mod and also itâs assets are made by the same guys who are making the normal AoE2 assets by the looks of it.
Itâs similar to how they hired AOE3 modders to work on AoE3DE, particularly from the Napoleonic Era mod. You can see all sorts of influences from that in AOE3DE but they have not directly copied the mod.
Thatâs why I like adding AI players that have no AI. They do not give any commands to their units, they are 100% controlled by triggers. This allows to perfectly control part of the scenario.
Combining it with normal dynamic AI players gives the scenario both reliability but also a way to dynamically adjust to the players strategies in some ways.
I personally need to get more into AI scripting to make the AI in scenarios behave the way I want to but itâs not that easy and the AI scripting is different between different titles in the series.
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No indeed itâs more of a demo, only 3 civs for now. Rome at war is way bigger. Maybe they can get away with selling civs after civs. Good for them if they can, the issue is how all of this is regulated (or not) in regard to other modders, the main Devs, mods themselves, the right of intellectual property etc.
Do anything guarantee me (aside from expecting them to be decent human beings) they couldnât just pick my mod or chunks of it and sell it just because they own the game? I mean to me itâs crazy nobody raise doubts about this but itâs probably cause 1 many users here are not into mods or scenario design and 2 they of course wouldnât like to advocate for paying mods or give a right of property to the modders.
I still stand my ground after a year and repeat this is unfair.
Same although itâs more work probably and many donât like it. I personally also have ethical issues against AI in art but rn you need minimal ai to make units do some tasks like attacking walls.
And yes you can control everything better with triggers only but that was the case before they broke pathfinding. Try now to task move a bunch of units via trigger when they need to move around obstacles. In many cases they will fail to regroup again and again and accumulate or get stuck somewhere (and you need to make another trigger for them to unstuck).
Since they literally hired the team that made Rome at War to make Chronicles there is not copyright issue here at all.
The problem can generally simply be avoided by going to the mod creators and ask them if they are ok with it being added to the game.
You sign of all rights to them if you upload a mod to their servers.
But also can you prove that what you did isnât something they also happened to do internally at the same time unless they literally copy the images from your mod or something.
Like if you make a mod for a new civilisation that happens to be one of the most requested civilisations for the game and you make it based on history then there is a good chance that they are working on the same civ and are obviously basing it on the same history.
Game AI has nothing to do with what âAIâ is being referred to nowadays.
AoE2 AI is just a complex script.
Generative AI is based on machine learning not scripting.
So many things are being called âAIâ that the word has essentially no meaning anymore.
There wouldnât be anyway (?), thatâs my question.
Yes youâre describing what I think is the issue. Iâd say it shouldnât be like this but more democratic. You pay the assets because they of course own those but what you do with them is your work and creativity so it should be yours according to original liberalism. It should be automated imo and not something you must âaskâ them or they need to ask you, it should be formalised, thatâs my point otherwise itâs just arbitrary, a bit âfeudal-likeâ and not transparent. Only them and the modders know what happened cause they reached a private agreement. What about the others?
Not a very good argument imo. You could extend it to everything and say we donât really âownâ anything because we all take inspiration somewhere so itâs not clear what is ours or not. And the fruits of our labours in the end theyâre not really ours (which is the main point of liberalism) so everyone can take everything from everyone.
For example Iâve seen modders concerned about other modders taking their campaigns to translate it to other languages. Some modders simply do not want it but since there is no rule or law to enforce it⊠Guess what, they can.
Personally I donât care if they translate my campaign, I even think they actually do me a favour, still those modders raise a good point, specially when it comes to Devs (rather than other modders) attitude towards the mods.
Yeah youâre right, still like you I prefer to use triggers, itâs less aleatory I guess.
I think itâs actually still a legal grey zone.
Just because you some terms of service say you lose all your rights when you upload it to their servers does not mean thatâs legal. I donât think there was a president yet for game developers using a mod against the will of a modder and the modder going to court over it.
Also modders might come from different countries. In some legal systems itâs not possible to even sell copyright on something.
That is not what I wanted to imply.
Like imagine they are adding the English to AoE2 (I know they are already there but imagine they didnât exist) as a mod and you come up with the idea of giving them Long Bowman as unique unit but then the developers release a new mod with the English a few months later and they also have Long Bowman.
Then did they do that because they copied your mod or did they do it because itâs the first unit anyone would think of when designing the English.
Even more so if the thing they copy is just something as simple as a civilisation bonus. Like giving Archers +10% speed is not really something you could claim copyright on, right?
If you see that as âstealingâ mod content then that would mean that the developers would have to make new content in very strange and unintuitive ways to make sure they donât accidentally add something that was a mod before.
Itâs a different thing if they come take a scenario you made and just make some small edits and then claim itâs theirs.
Once Chronicles is out Iâll take a look into AoE2DE triggers again.
I got some ideas for scenarios that could need some unit spawning.
The editor shouldnât have so many restrictions. Everything contained therein should also be usable or editable. Swan towers, for example, should be a normal building. I tried to edit Keeps as Swan Towers for one scenario. You can assign populations to donjons via the editor, but not. But such things should be possible without having to use AGE. Everything that looks like a functional unit or a functional building should also be able to be made usable in the editor if necessary.
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You can change the Dragonâs colour with the Change Object Player Color trigger.
The unitâs icon probably shows the creatureâs intended final appearance, but the sprite is still monochrome and was not updated with the iconâs introduction.
Iâve got the impression that the work on RoR sprites was not completed. For example, the Long Swordsman uses improved, livelier animations, while the Legionaryâs movements are still the somewhat stiff ones from AoE DE. Queen Zenobia is still a (male) Camel Rider, and the latterâs model really deserves improvement. And then thereâs the blurriness of many graphics, of course.
Iâd like to see more RoR units and objects in the base game, too, but such things should be fixed.
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You can change the model of a building via triggers. So make a Keep look like a Svan Tower for example.
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