No I didn’t mean large sprites. I meant the additional frames.
There might be a lot of practicality considerations going on back in the production of AOE 1. For example, given the fixed disk space and memory requirement, whether to sacrifice the quality of all models as a whole to make some models more realistic and have more animations. Like if you make sprites for all 8 directions, you need 3/5 more space and the overall quality of models need to be reduced accordingly. Same if you add additional animations that need 2x frames. In that case, you need to reduce the frame rate for all other animations otherwise they would look inconsistent (this is overly-simplistic, just making this up).
Your opinion is: they need to make the models more distinguishable so they intentionally removed the crew.
Mine is: they cannot incorporate the crew due to technical limitations (that includes limitations of space and memory), so they designed distinguishable unmanned models, otherwise they would be making distinguishable manned models after all.
That’s based on our own understandings of game design and production, but I think only the devs could tell why they made these decisions.
They don’t need additional frames. Take a look at the catapult animation:
They could, if they wanted to, easily have incorporated a full crew into that animation - with it’s current size and amount of frames - that would pull and release the mechanism. It would have made the game exactly 0% more resource intensive. Ditto for pushing the thing during the walking animation when the wheels are turning. They chose not to.
We see this trend in other units as well. The war elephant is unmanned while the elephant archer is manned, It’s a conscious art decision to make units that are distinct and have strong silhouettes.
That is only for “firing”. You can see that the new projectile instantly re-appears in the bowl. When it is not firing, the crew needs to reload another projectile onto them. In fact, they only used their idle animation for the “reloading”. That’s one example of the additional frame you need.
That goes back to my old argument: “manned” models and “unmanned” models have their own design standards. You can make both of them distinguishable by themselves. You can also make manned models “have strong silhouettes”. That just requires a few changes in your design consideration.
Speaking of elephants, in AOE1 and AOE3 all elephants are manned. But the “ranged” elephants have a whole howdah mounted on the back and the “melee” elephants have the riders directly sitting on the back. That is no big problem.
For siege weapons, take Rise of Nations for example (because AOE3 does not have medieval siege engines, only cannons).
These are different siege weapons with crew, and they still look very different from each others.
That is the exact kind of practicality considerations I’ve been talking about.
(1) Unmanned, with only firing animation.
(2) Manned, with only firing animation.
(3) Manned, with both firing and reloading animation but lower frame rate.
If you go (2), it’s like half the models have 8 directions while the rest directly flips from left to right, or half the units reload while others do not. That looks a little stupid perhaps. So they removed the crew after all for better consistency.
If you go (3), that is the “sacrificing the overall quality for some details” I’ve been talking about.
EDIT: in summary, because they could not perfectly incorporate a crew into the sprites with animations to make them less stupid back in 1990s, they simply removed the crew.
No, you’re thinking to much into this. They had an idea for a simple art style and just went for it. Having crew probably didn’t even enter into their minds at all because this is an rts after all, not a simulation. If they did really really want a crew, though, they could have easily done it.
Stronghold has crew, no explicit reload animation iirc, it even has a interactive crew, and it uses the same fundamental sprite system that AoE does. It’s from 2001, so 1 year after AoE2, but it was made by a indie team. This stuff just isn’t a problem in the world of sprites. Incidentally Stronghold does not have as distinctive and clear siege units as AoE.
Pretty sure Rise of Nations catapults do not have a reload animation despite having crew.
The thing is, many RTS especially post-2000 ones have crews and there was no problem with them. AOE 1 and AOE 2 did not have very simplistic art styles (by 1990 standards) to begin with, and many units even have more colors and patterns than AOE 4 has shown.
Even if that is the case, having a man or two operating the weapon does not contradict with simplistic art styles either That’s why I think that’s more of a technical limitation.
Also I don’t see how stronghold siege weapons are not as distinctive.
If you really wish to pick on it, there is probably too little color on the engines themselves. If they add some player color rather than wood color only they would stand out a little more but that has little to do with the crew.
They actually do. Not really an obvious one for catapults or trebuchets (which somehow overlaps with the lowering of the lever, as you suggested), but cannons do have quite a long and independent reloading animation.
They also have packing/unpacking animations.
I think crew would be good on ships as well. In aoe3 ships are bigger than in aoe2, i’m hoping for the same here, but men on the ship would make it even better.
Keep in mind that the camera is at an shallow angle so those ships are much more magnified than the dock. On the other hand there is another “supership” shown in the trailer that is about 50% bigger than these.
Overall, though, these are of the approximate size as all other AoE games except AoE3. Ships are slightly longer than docks but fairly thin; which is the same as in AoE 1/2. Only thing “bigger” about AoE4 ships is that they have sails proportionate to their size, while AoE 1/2 had truncated sails for visibility’s sake.
Safe to assume an AoE3 player would be dissatisfied with these ships if you told him they would have the size of AoE3 ships.
The Knight in Chess is just a horse – just as the siege weapons in Age are just the siege weapons. It is a symbol of the force, not the literal force itself.
may as well just have floating bows and swords with that logic… or a picture of an icon horse and a sword, why even have animations of siege weapons at all at that point?
AOE3 is similar to chess in that it is a strategy game, but Its the immersion as to why people love to play it. The game is alive, and in real time. Chess is stagnant and cerebral.
