I’m not going to spend much time re-hashing what’s already been said. It looks very ambitious and promising. If this had released at any other time, I think it’d have been awesome. But after RoR and V&V having THIS as the 5th anniversary DLC feels extremely tone deaf.
Moving on, some observations:
Given that the antiquity civs can be cross played with the medieval civs, and the antiquity civs have different unit skins from the medieval civs, seems to me that’s functionally the same as regional skins. For those of you who haven’t seen it, there’s a video where cysion talked about when they started working on DE they’d thought about giving each civ unique unit skins, but because aoe2 is still a 2d game, with the number of animations, orientations, and the 60fps frame rate, it would be too much data on your hard drive and more importantly in your RAM. However that decision was made over five years ago, and we’re talking about regional skins, not civ specific skins. Admittedly what they’re doing in Battle for Greece is not for ranked (so performance isn’t quite as important), and it’s only two sets, not up to 8 (one regional set for each player). Still it gives me hope that this may be able to be pushed further in the future.
Also talking about crossplay, I’m curious if the 48 antiquity and medieval civs now have the “same” tech tree just with each now more heavily customizing their shared tech tree, or if the there are two separate, tho similar tech trees. If the latter is the case, then they’ve seemed to have solved the issue of not being able to have two players with two different tech trees problem, which seemed to be the big technical road block with RoR offering crossplay between aoe1 and aoe2 civs.
Somewhat relatedly, i’m now no longer convinced Battle for Greece is the missing DLC 5. Chronicles seems to be another “mode” like RoR.
Per this post text resources for RoR are kept separately from the rest of the game, within the /modes/Pompeii folder. DLC 5 is in within the folders for the main game. If Chronicles is going to be it’s own mode, then it’d stand to reason it’d work similarly to RoR, so it’d keep it’s text resources in /modes/some-mode-name-for-chronicles, and not in the main game where DLC 5 is missing.
Maybe Chronicles started out as a main game dlc before morphing into a different mode, but it seems very early on it was decided it’d be focused on the antiquity era, and it’s civs would be so different it wouldn’t make sense to add them to ranked. So if that decision was made, if not at conception, very early on, why was V&V named DLC 6?
I guess we’ll know more when Battle for Greece comes out and we can see where all the files ended up.
Lastly I assume the achievement_319 referred to when the campaign ends, 319 BC. I haven’t been able to find a video that shows the date for the end of the campaign, but that seems to be what the achievement was teasing.
