Suggestion - The details of the tables in the newly added mercenary camp can be adjusted

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
1

This camp is very beautiful and has the feeling of a battlefield military camp. But because the model was modified from a field hospital, there are still many surgical tools and blood stains on the table.

screen28
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Considering this is a mercenary camp, maybe swap out surgical supplies for gold coin bags, mercenary contracts or something?

12 Likes
2

Especially since there is a camp model without the table in the game (mining camp seen in the campaign)

3

The OP is right.

Variants of the Mining Camp/Field Hospital model (along with PROP Campfire and SPCXPCampire):

feedback Mining Camp Hospital merc
feedback Mining Camp Hospital merc1208Ă—296 66 KB

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From a content maker perspective, the Mercenary Camp building is a bit of a missed opportunity. A soldier’s camp site that looks the part would be extremely useful to scenario designers, not to mention one with ready-made mercenary recruiting functions. And AoE3 hadn’t had one 100% suited for the purpose.

However, a few factors have dragged down the Mercenary Camp’s potential:

  • It’s implemented as a tech upgrade to Tavern, without an independent protounit. From a dev perspective this is perfectly logical, but makes it harder to use.

  • The golden tents with Habsburg eagles are both excessively flamboyant & overly specific for wider use.

  • What the OP said: the surgical table inherited from Field Hospital sets a grim tone for the building, incongruent with its song and laughter SFX (since technically it’s still a Tavern).

I think all these can be improved on the cheap, with minimum hassle:

  • Make a Mercenary Camp protounit for scenario use, that’s functionally a copy of the default Tavern. The multiplayer version can still be a Tavern upgrade.

  • Lower the tent texture’s specularity (metallic gloss), replace the Habsburg eagle with less specific symbols that fit broader historical scenarios.

  • Replace the surgical table with thematically fitting props that already exist in the game, such as:

  1. A campfire pit (numerous existing buildings);

  2. A pot over the campfire (from native settlements);

  3. The turkey table, guns, swords, chairs & stools, straight from the Tavern, which also serve to create a visual link between this and the Tavern:

turkey

  1. Dishes & mugs from the Plymouth props, from which the turkey & chair originated.

mug

1 Like
4

Technically the game already had a Mercenary Camp building.
It is available in the editor and looks like a Barracks but it trains mercenaries like a Tavern.
This building should get reskinned and used instead of the Tavern for Germans.

5

That’s why I emphasized “a soldier’s camp site that looks the part”, because the legacy “Mercenary Hut” doesn’t :smiley: