The game so far shows that they were willing to be very creative with the civs so far, but there are a lot of other things I would like to see. This will all depend on how historically accurate they want to be with how the civs play out.
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Ninja like scouts who can scale walls and assassinate vills on a 5 minute cooldown that gives you some sort of bonus like the RUS bounty mechanic. They could be really weak and maybe not ride horses as a trade off. Ninjas were nothing like the commercialized versions we have today. They were more of a intel organization and dressed as farmers to blend in. Could be interesting to have a unit that can disguise themselves as a enemy vill or something.
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Scouts that could scout with hawks? Maybe Scouts that could hunt with dogs??
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Non combatants. Maybe a scientist unit that could garrison himself in an enemies tech center to give yourself a bonus.
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A propagandist who can go preach to the enemies units and provide some type of debuff on vills making them distrustful of your rule and providing 5% less resource gain for a time. Of course the numbers I use are just there to paint the picture of the concept.
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Pitfall traps.
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Weather. I want it to be able to rain and storm causing you to have to play around certain things or even altering the map. for example maybe there is a storm over bodies of water making you unable to engage or fish in those areas. This is more of a base concept that can be built upon.
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Nighttime maps. Low vision skirmishes during nighttime would be sick.
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Scouts who can go atop towers or highground and use a telescope to scout out the enemy base. Maybe like dota2s scan ability you can choose to see if there are units somewhere on the map but not necessarily know what they are.
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HERO UNITS: not really. But it would be cool to be able to summon special units like a king or a special knight. it could be really powerful but also unlock a new win condition for your enemy like " kill the king" to win the game or something. Over all i think these types of units could give some nuance to late game siege monotony, Maybe you could even have some maps or game types that simply don’t allow siege to be built to switch things up. Nothing wrong with diversity of game rules in competitive games like this.
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Capturing enemies and putting them in prison. With captured units you could even force them to work in the fields or wood line for you. Depending on the unit you could maybe even have them join your army or interrogate them to reveal something about your opponent like maybe which upgrades the enemy has.
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Pirate faction. cause …pirate faction.
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Tamable fauna?? just spitting out ideas at this point.
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I want a civ that is able to manifest their god somehow. Like to THEM their god like appears and buffs them in battle, Maybe hes like a spectral unit that can buff your army in battle like warrior monks but the enemy cant see him because well…he doesnt really exist? Or maybe their god appears at an alter and gives them upgrades like courage or faith that gives them more resolve in batte that increases there accuracy or attack speed. Maybe they have to set up alters all over the map and pray at them to receive a bounty type thing like RUS idk.
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Israelites as a faction. Tons of cool things to be done there.
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I have wondered about having NPCs on the map or maybe even like camps with traders or something.
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I want to harp on different competitive game types. I play a little Halo as well and though I would never compare these genres I find the concept of having different competitive game types very interesting. For example in ranked Halo you have CTF, Oddball and slayer. Why can’t we have that in AOE as well? One mode where siege isn’t available to be built. One where you have to protect your king and one like the one we have now. I think they would diversify the game enough to make siege less monotonous but also force players to stretch themselves to the fullness of their capacities as players.
anyways just some ideas to brainstorm. I want this game to do well because I love RTS games and have been waiting for something like this to come along for ages. Please comment some other ideas you may have for interesting mechanics that could be added to the game.