Why don’t we hear the sound of drums when we have a drummer marching beside our army?? We can hear the shouting of the troops but no drums. I think it would be a cool idea to hear the drums beating loud to signify the trek to battle. This would make the battle experience more cinematic and create better immersion within the game.
How about we introduce more musical instruments to the battlefield. A mounted bugle unit would be a great addition to the stables, as it would solve the problem of the current drummer’s inability to keep up with most cavalry units. I believe adding more civ specific musical instruments, sounding a different tune unique to each civ, could be a lovely addition too. For instance, the Swedish could be given a flute player, the Germans a fife player, the French a french horn player and the British a bagpiper. (I’m not sure the historical accuracy of these but you get the idea.)
This whole post relies on the idea that in future updates we are going to get more access to military musicians, rather than the current niche access through the House of Hanover.
I believe that military musicians could be given an even greater role in game play beyond just increasing the movement speed of units. I think it would be cool if they could act as a way of ordering the change of stance of all units within a certain radius. This could be obtained by them playing a different tune to signify each different battle stance.
Well this is just my idea. I’m open to suggestions…
Whilst I understood the lack of musicians in the original release of AOE3 due it trying to be simpler with less nuance in units, I think the game has evolved into its own niche on the unit front, which does of course musicians in the form of African UUs and Royal House Drummers.
With this in mind, I would love musicans to be embraced as a default unit type. During the whole roughly 1500s - 1800s timeline, literally all the civs in-game had musicans. To take a small perspective of it, we can look at the Europeans and see that Drummers, Fifers, Pipers and Trumpeters were all used with their respective armies and navies.
What I’d really love, is a total Command Unit - a purely support ‘crew’ of people consisting of a General/Officer/Leader with a Flagbearer and Musicians - acting as a single unit (in much the same way artillery crews do) and shamelessly stealing the mechanisms from Rise of Nations’ General/Patriot unit…
…but anyway I’m sidetracking myself. Basically Musicans should be available to all in various guises and trainable via the Barrracks/equiv and be expensive in cost but worth training multiple to extend their area of effectiveness.
Going back to another old game, ‘Cossacks: European Wars’ and its offshoots - your armies always felt completely having the drummer in their midst and just really helped with the immersion, with the drum beats following the mass of marching musketeers.
However, I think the musical units should not be a forced unit into the game. If they become available to all civs you shall have to create them every time. I will add a new layer, like, villagers, infantry, musicians, etc.
As a skin for the Hannover Drummer or as a free unit from Factory, Church or Arsenal maybe, but I still think they should not exist as a new base unit
I was also thinking that it would be nice if the current drummers were permanently left in the “defend mode” stance as it can be quite annoying when the drummer decides to run directly to the frontlines of a battle and gets himself killed. The drummer should be left behind the frontline and only attack if directly threatened.
I think that musicians being unlocked in from the advanced arsenal tech “drummers” would make sense. From there they should be trained from the church. This will make it harder for them to be replaced when lost on the opposite side of the map. To mitigate this, I think that drummers should have their range resisted further increased.
I really like this idea. Maybe they could have the ability of placing an inspirational flag, for a short term aura boost. Or place down a base camp (which looks like a field hospital) for an increase cost, but also increased area of effect.
