Elagabalus says hi. 
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Weāre getting seriously off-topic here. Get back to the subject at hand before things become controversial.
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So you are saying that there is already a sprite for AOE for it? sounds like an easy insert then!
on a serious note, thanks, I hadnāt really dived in that deeply into the history, but I think it would be a cool graphical addition, to at to OPs point, about more diversity in the civs and graphics.
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Iām all for graphical additions, but maybe we should try to keep them in the timeline. If you want Roman flavour, maybe Infantry Centurions (Western and Eastern Roman, for even more variety) would be cool.
Also, I believe one there was an event which replaced Champions with AoE1 legionaries, so if you REALLY want them, download that mod, copy the corresponding SLXās/SLPās and rename them to the legionary ones
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Yep, agree with this, they need to complete the transformation by also changing the preceding units.
Yea I donāt like those either. I only posted the video as an example of what was possible, but ofcourse we want original units.
Regarding the whole Roman thingā¦ Maybe Italians could be changed to Normans or Lombardsā¦ but I donāt know, I donāt really have strong opinions on this tbh.
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Sicilians are normans.current italians best represent genoa which could be a lombard city state.
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I donāt think Italians is a bad name, even if itās not the best.
We need a UU added for the Italians to show the Venetian angle of their identity. Genoese Crossbowman for the Genoese, Condotierro for the Milanese and we need a special maritime UU special for the Venetian such as the Galleass which would be an upgrade for them instead of the Galleon in Imperial Age.
When I played AoE 2 my first days, I was shocked that some details looked historically plausible, while others were completely ignored. How is it even possible that Americans have a national monk skin, but Muslims, nomads, Asians and Slavs do not? At the same time, the same Americans do not have a national Iroquois warrior, although there IS the unit in game files. The kings in the game are different, but the queens are not. The mills are different, but the peasants who work at them are the same. Mongols look like Chinese, seriously? Why is there no nomadic architectural style? And the Caucasus? In this game there are more colors of cows than necessary skins for horsemen.
I rate the visual style of AoE 2 as a job abandoned halfway through. I donāt think every unit and every nation should have a unique skin, but at a minimum there should be more architectural types and they should include variations of at least some units.
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I agree. The models and concepts in many cases were made and not utilised. Thatās what infuriates.
See the screenshot gallery of the entry on the monk in the AOE2 Wiki.
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This is exactly right. The original developers never really truly finished the game. Which is why its so odd when people appeal to the original vision of the game designers to justify keeping things as it is. Its specially absurd considering how much new content has been added.
Youād think at least the African empires would have darker skin tones. At this point its just pure whitewashing and in any other game or medium I feel there would be an uproar.
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Btw yes. Any other game would got canceled right away for showing historical Africans as white. I am not a fan of cancel culture and over-serving some groups of people but I am fan of realism. I donāt know how can they be serious with ignoring such things.
Can you tell more about this? I donāt know the story.
Not much to tellā¦ just how they were saying there was always all these time pressures to finish the game by the deadline that was set by the studio. Several civs didnāt get in. Some game mechanisms couldnāt be polished up before release and were left out of the game. Some bugs were left in the game. I donāt remember all the details now but remember Sandy Peterson talking about it somewhere or otherā¦
EDIT: This is purely from memory and so it may be completely wrong, but if I recall correctly they even wanted to have siege towers and more complicated siege mechanics that didnāt make into the game. And then later FE reintroduced the siege tower idea.
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Why didnāt they finish it later withā¦ patches? There were no patches back then, ok. But they could make a CD-addon like StarCraft 1 got its Broodwar which almost replaced the original game for everybody.
No idea. Money? Other priorities? Didnāt care?
Amazing that a game with such attitude keeps living for 25 years )))
I mean donāt get me wrong, this isnāt a dump on AOE2 devs or MS or anything like that. I think this was just how games were made back then. There would have been many games that cut corners or didnāt include certain things due to time constraints. Game industry was much smaller then, and there wasnāt this whole culture of continuous updates and expansions and content additions and paid DLCs etcā¦ post-release. It was just a different timeā¦ which is why I think people (purists?) who try to appeal to historical reasons for not changing the game too much are just completely missing the point as well as the opportunity we have now to finally create the game that the original devs just couldnāt create and finally make AOE2 the game it deserves to be rather than the game that the 90s could deliver us.
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I think videos like this really highlight how alarmist the argument about readability is. As some of the side by side comparisons in this video show it is quite possible to create regional skins for units that are very easily identifiable compared to their original counterparts.
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Yes, I agree, with a 2013 PC with 2011 components and 8 GB of RAM and an Intel HD 4000 I was able to play AoE 3 DE on its release and it was running around 25 FPSā¦
Yes, Rome stopped being the capital of the WRE in 408 and became Ravenna, which is why when Alaric sacked Rome in 410, Emperor Honorius was no longer thereā¦ the imperial court of Ravenna disappeared in 554 after Narses conquered all of Italy from the Lombardsā¦
Of course, although AoK starts after the fall of Rome in the 12th century with Barbarossa and then with The Conquerors it moves the timeline to before the fall of Rome with Attila in the 5th centuryā¦
Itās not possible, the Romans with square shields are those of AoE 1, the Romans of AoE 2 use round shieldsā¦
Of course, the Romans abandoned the square shield after the crisis of the 3rd century by order of Diocletian, because it was too heavy and the round shield was more flexible to be able to fight against the barbarian invasions, for some reason the Byzantines and the Vikings later fought with round shields, even the Spanish adopted the rodela (which was the Spanish round shield) and the rodeleros continued using it to fight against the Aztecs and Incas in the 16th century (for some reason the rodelero is a Spanish UU in AoE 3)ā¦
Yes, Galeazza could be a good addition for the Italians in AoE 2 as a third UUā¦
Yes, for redability reasonsā¦
Yes, the original developers of AoE 2 wanted samurais in the barracks and troops on the wall, many of those concepts would later be taken by AoE 4ā¦ in addition to the fact that they also wanted to make expansions in Africa and the SEA, something that AoE 2 HD later did with TAK and RotRā¦
Thanks for sharing.
Here is some of my other works if youāre intrested in it
Letās hope regional skins become a reality some day.
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