Terrain in AOE2 is static once placed, it doesn’t change over time. It can be spiced up by having some terrain types that change over time, on a periodic way. Notably :
Tidal floodlands : walkable ground at low tide, flooded at high tide. The most famous example is around the Mont Saint Michel, being fully incorporated into its defensive layout.
Freezing lake : freezes then melts depending on the season. Famous examples include Charles X Gustav of Sweden marching his army over the frozen Danish Straits, and how the Battle of Lake Peipus was portrayed in the soviet movie Alexander Nevsky with the ice breaking under the retrating Teutonic Knights. Or the Dutch fleet trapped by ice in 1795, allowing the French cavalry to capture it.
The tide and season could be controlled by triggers or set to an automatic timer to alternate between its different states (in regular maps).
Such terrain would offer a very high degree of risk and reward. Timed well, you can bypass enemy defences or at least strike from an unexpected angle, or even tighter you can safely retreat by having an uncrossable water wall form behind you (that reminds me of some old story from some old book, about letting the main character’s people go). Timed poorly, and you’d see much of your army drown.
When I was reading about Sunni Ali, I thought about having exactly that mechanic in the first scenario for Askia Muhammad’s campaign, where it would simulate the long siege. You would have to take the city of Djenné (to destroy the king’s castle) in certain short periods of low water between the floods of the Niger River, which turns the city into an island fortress. The player wouldn’t be able to build anything and would receive troops by war canoes during the flood season, but would be heavily attacked by the city’s defenders every time the river receded.
Call it the Deluge. The biblical/mesopotamian/… (the same myth is in pretty much all neighbouring mythologies) myth comes either from the Black Sea or the Persian Gulf flooding all what used to be flatlands around 9000 years ago.
I imagine it’s possible with triggers, but we would need at least two new units, something like this:
You insert Unit 1 (an unit with the graphic of a rising wave covering one or more tiles and 1 HP) multiple times, in several columns and rows covering a large block of tiles. Then, set, through a timer, that when the ones behind die, the ones in front die next, and so on until the last row (the last row will have Unit 2, one with a graphic of a breaking wave). When each unit dies, the terrain beneath it changes from shallows to deep water and so you have a large river flood.
Creative idea, but I think I would rather not, except for campaign maps.
Imagine building a cluster of buildings, only for them to get destroyed by floods. Or parts of your empire gets cut off with no way in or out since we can’t build bridges. Villys happily gathering resources drown. Military milling about drown. Wolves, sheep, geese, yaks, and monkeys perish in the floodwaters. Mines, berries, forests, farms, etc. incaccessible for minutes on end. No moon cycle visual or doppler radar to see impending floodwater doom
I like this stuff more for a game like AoM, personally
However, if it only happened during the Dark Age and a new earlier age, I’d enjoy, as I’ve long felt we should be more at the mercy of mother nature and random environmental threats in early game. Since an earlier age will never exist, though, then Feudal can be the other age. (Since a good 90% or more of forum members despise the Dark Age and don’t want to linger in it longer than the routine memprized series of clicks they do to get out of it, I don’t foresee this ever being a thing)
The way shallows work in AoE2 kinda make this illogical. Well shallows are generally illogical. Ships should not be able to navigate in waters that are so shallow that people can stand in them.
Most logically would be 3 states:
Land
Shallow
Water
and then switching between those. Technically all beaches are already shallows.
I like the idea of players starting with a base that will eventually get flooded, forcing them to migrate.
Other interesting maps could simply be one where the shoreline changes regularly with only some places being suitable to build docks.
Since the concept was already done flooding is something quiet possible to do ingame.black tiles replaced with water tiles and would get activated back and fourth.
It would indeed be limited to campaigns and to very specific map types, not put in the existing ones. The affected terrain should also be recognisable, so that you know what to expect on it.
One thing to note: if a unit is placed on a terrain that it’s restricted on, it won’t be destroyed but is instead unable to move. This is something that can happen (and has use cases) in custom rms scripts. So unless you have a trigger to kill the units, they won’t actually drown. Furthermore, galleons (and other ranged units) trapped on frozen ice would still be able to attack anything that moves within range.
Great idea. Maybe adusting the health loss based on the total armour of the unit, as you’d get tired swimming much faster in a full teutonic knight armour than you’d be without armour.
Also make it depend on the terrain type itself, you’d die faster in freezing water.