Chronicles gives the devs a safe space to experiment with new features and mechanism in a way that will let players test them and at the same time won’t risk throwing off the balance of the ranked competitive scene.
For example, the new navel balance. I think devs are testing it out in chronicles, and if it works good, we might see it added to the main AOE2 civs. Same thing for the new resource (oysters). we may see them in new ranked maps soon.
One thing that’s interesting to me, is in the SOTL video, he talks about how there are more infantry options and some of them look similar. This is interesting because many players have been asking for more regional skins while other players don’t want to mess with the instant recognize-ability across all civs. I think chronicles is a way the devs are experimenting with more yet similar looking infantry, and will be watching how it affects play. if successful we might see more regional unit skins.
In the end, it doesn’t really matter that the first Chronicles is about ancient Greece, it could be an 1800 civs next time. What I think is important is that new game features are being added and tested and AOE2 continues to grow.
I mostly agree.
Some things are not really transferable. A Hoplite of Chariot regional unit does not fit into a medieval game and the Ships in Chronicles are also not directly applicable to AoE2.
It is still a good way to test things.
I think mutually exclusive UTs is one of the biggest ones. Currently UTs are basically just delayed civ bonuses. It it that different if a bonus is unlocked automatically in Imperial Age or if it’s though a Castle Age UT?
Though finding 2 new UTs for all old civs and then balancing all of them seems a little too much.
Also generally about Chronicles. I think that will stay a Classical Antiquity thing (so no Bronze Age and no Modern Age) because it’s made by the guys that make the Rome at War mod that entirely focuses on this era.
So no USA and no Sumerians.
Wouldn’t chronicles be the best place to put all the bronze age empires and city states. I know it overlaps with aoe 1 but I thought this was the devs intentions. To subsume that all into aoe2. Their Rome dlc was really half hearted. I’d say a proper remake of the Hittites, Assyrians, Egyptians, etcetc with new mechanics would be good.
The current Chronicles is clearly focused on the classical antiquity.
The Bronze Age was inherently very different in many ways so it makes little sense to put Bronze Age civilisations there. Chronicles starts in the Archaic Age which is almost 500 years after the end of the Bronze Age.
If they plan to do Bronze Age then it will be a different Spin-off with a different set of civilisations.
But I think for now they will do Classical Antiquity there.
Are we sure that when they say Classical though they mean it in the proper sense? I could see meaning classical as just anything BC; I could see Sumerians, Egyptians, and Hittites and such coming along at some point, though i’d imagine Rome, Carthage, Macedonia, and Babylon would probably be higher priorities. Hopefully some Celtic and Germanic barbarian civs too…
It starts in the Archaic Age, that’s almost 500 years after the end of the Bronze Age and over 1000 years after the Sumerians.
All units and game mechanics are designed around Iron Age.
I generally hate that AoE1 mixed those time periods together.
Classical Antiquity is in basically every way closer to the Middle Ages than to the Bronze Age.
Almost no civilisation/empire made it through to transition from Bronze Age to Iron Age, and that includes India and China too.
Edit:
Also the Rome at War mod that Chronicles is based on limits itself to 500 BC to 500 AD civilisations.
For those people the Sumerians are as long ago as they are for us. The Sumerians are from before 2000 BC!
There is still a prescedent for it though, whether ideal or not.
Though this probably reinforces that what you’re saying will happen though.
I’m admittely not as familiar with the transition from the Bronze to Iron age as I should be for having been a History Major in college lol, but what was the status of Egypt during that time? I get the impression at the time of Alexander they were under some form of occupation by Persia, was that occupation the result of some manner of end-of-Bronze age fall?
Egypt was the only empire that survived the Late Bronze Age collapse but they declined massively. They lost most of their trading partners.
Egypt spend the following centuries under various different foreign and local dynasties until it was finally conquered by Alexander. After that it was under foreign control until the 20th century.
Generally there was a world wide collapse:
Mycenaean Greeks
Hittite Empire
Assyrian Empire
Shang China
The remains of the Indus Valley culture
The Greeks even lost the knowledge of writing. The ability to read and write the Linear B script was lost and the Greeks got an entirely new alphabet from the Phoenicians multiple centuries later.
Shortly before that happened Iron working was discovered. The Hittite Empire particularly already had a part of their army equipped with Iron weapons, but the majority was still Bronze.
The Trojan war also took part in this time period btw. which is one of the reasons why so many historians are so interested in this war.
So there isn’t really any civilisation besides the Egyptians that made it though the transition so there is little reason to have Bronze Age and Iron Age be represented in one game/civilisation set.
I think the Bronze Age is interesting enough to deserve it’s own game.
Also the Bronze Age is a more limited scope because there aren’t that many different empires so it’s something that could be done more easily.
That isn’t strictly true though. While yes the glory days were gone with the collapse of the bronze age civilizations. Their knowledge, beliefs, etc seeded the next generation of settlements. It’s why so many bronze age stories became myths going forward.
Technically bronze age should include city states and civilizations stretching from the Mediterranean to the far East. So not a small area at all and would be ideal for a proper chronicles style reimagining. I would have been eager for a new game to tackle this but my confidence in the devs being able to deliver was shaken by aoe 4.
A Bronze Age game has to be done in a different way then later time period.
Most Classical Age civs have written records and that’s even more true for Medieval ones. Also warfare did not change that much between Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages other then that Cavalry become more popular because of better breeds of horses. Fortifications and Siege also got a little better over time. The big new things in warfare in the late Middle Ages are the Blast Furnace and Gunpowder.
A lot of Bronze Age civs have no records, only extremely limited records or ones that we can simply not read.
The fist historian in human history lived in the Classical Antiquity, record keeping before that was mostly economic and religious things.
We know which guy in Sumer had bad copper but we know very little about their society and what “stories” they had.
It will be hard to impossible to have AoE2 style story telling for an Indus Valley civilisation campaign since we don’t even know a single named person from that time period.
From Shang China we only have Oracle bones which have little information on them. But at least we know the names of a few Emperors this way.
Bronze Age warfare was pretty different.
There was essentially no cavalry. Horse breeding was not far enough for have horses strong enough to carry an armed soldier, and certainly no horse armour.
Chariots were basically a way to get around the limitations of horses of that time. But AoE1 does them very wrong. In reality they were so expensive that they nearly bankrupted some of the empires while in AoE1 they don’t even cost Gold.
Generally many armies were just foot soldiers so many civs will need to be designed more like Eagle civs.
Even some units that seem very “Bronze Age” aren’t really. Ancient Slingers used Iron bullets. Stones are way worse projectiles.
Also there were no “Castles”. Almost all defences we know are around settlements. So there should be no “Fortress” building.
Many civs also likely never used siege units. Sumerians had siege towers and rams though.
Maybe we should make a new thread for that to keep this one on track.
Fair although I was suggesting by looking at what directly succeeded these civilizations. The knowledge to build walls, cities, tame/breed animals didn’t magically appear for them. It was built on word of mouth from these bronze age cultures.
Suma, Egypt at least have some good records to look into.
I am pretty sure most cities back then had walls at least. To deal with them attackers would need to employ siege in some form. So rams, ladders, siege towers, ramps , sappers etc would be a safe bet.