Look, I don’t quite remember who it was. And I have no technical knowledge on this subject at all. All I know is that I trust the developers can add more slots if they need to.
Not to be defensive but I don’t really agree with you tbh. I think the civ would theoretically be good on water maps because 40% faster training Fire Ships (could have a discount instead/also) would be a very strong bonus to my knowledge, whilst being historically appropriate, and alongside 40% lasting longer trees especially, as well as a good naval UU and Imperial unique tech, would make them strong on water.
The food cost for wood cost bonus would really be more for land maps, but its not detrimental on water maps at all because the much longer lasting trees more than makes up for it. Really you’d just get to have a more streamlined economy if going for swordsmen, hand cannoneers or (battle/archer/armoured) elephants on water maps for whatever reason.
There’s not a “hard” limit to the number of civs to select like there is as to max number of players in a single game (where over X amount breaks the underlying algorithm used, something goes too far exponential, etc). Code does need to change, but it should be straightforward.
It’s more about managing stuff be broken into DLCs, the UI for it all, etc.
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I was considering that myself but I’m thinking in terms of gameplay on arabia one could just Mill deer instead of berries, particularly to go Scouts (also gives better scouting because pushing Deer isn’t necessary). Or you could just build a Barracks as the second Dark Age building, with the design intention being that the wood-costing militia bonus synergises with not needing a Mill so early because you can save wood and use it to make Militia, which wouldn’t delay one from clicking up to Feudal because you’re not spending food.
Who is he? Matt Pritchard?
Yup. (20 character limit)
Correct - an actual developer of the original game. So if he’s saying it can be done, it definitely can.
I mean we can program walking robots but can’t add slots to a string… It’s not that you need to be an expert to know that such a limit is arbitrary… you can change a variable from int16 to 32 in a click. People are really conservative about this game ah? 
Wait, the whole 48 civ limit thing was based entirely on strings in a text file? If so, that’s hilarious.
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This file seems to changed with each new DLC, so I don’t see why more civ entries couldn’t be added.
Alas, if only there was some way we could crack the code behind this beautiful but mysterious ancient virtual parchment technology. Until further advances in string theory, I don’t believe we have the capacity to change this. I’ll probably have to finish my time machine, go back to 1999, and convince ES to inscribe a few dozen more lines upon this holy scroll that decides how many civs may be added. Only then can my dreams of adding an Andorra civ be realized. (As a bonus, I may be able to stave off the horrible Y2K bug that precipitated the technological dark age in which we now find ourselves)
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There was a time when the general consensus was that no new civs can be added at all, at least not with the available tools at the time.
This happened before HD and the Forgotten unofficial mod. Some guys started asking on the forums (AoKHG) what new civs we would like to see in their new mod.
People were skeptical, but the modders found a solution and now they’re the official devs pumping DLCs left and right.
There’s definitely a play milling the deer and scouting earlier or even laming at the same time. With regards to skipping the mill and building barracks, this is already a thing with other civs and I feel going this route you’ll end up building the mill same time as other civs when you need farms and therefore not really using your bonus. As for the wood militia, admittedly I didn’t read the other bonuses 11 so there might be more synergy than I initially thought.
Yes, but you still have the limit of 48 civs (perhaps because it is divisible by 8, which is the number of bits needed to make 1 byte)…in any case, you only have 5 slots left for 2 more dlcs and nothing more… so we have 2 more expansions left and that’s it…
https://www.ageofempires.com/news/age-of-empires-ii-definitive-edition-update-83607/
- Allowed using 32-bit numbers for technology name and description IDs.
I’m pretty sure there is no 48 civilisation limit.
They are also working on a rewrite of major parts of the Engine so even if there was a limit they’ll remove it.
Age II:DE is built on code that was written 20 years ago, much of which isn’t particularly modern and has been complicated by all of the work we’ve done in the past three years supporting it. So this year we’re absorbing the cost of some housekeeping which is intended to help us move towards more frequent updates, deliver better stability and improve overall performance in several areas.
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As a software engineer myself, my best educated guess is they only allocated this memory size because it fits the current number of civs and they had to fill in the other unused names with some string values so that the game does not unexpectedly crash from other unsafe spaghetti code memory read.
Since they expanded this memory location before, I am quite sure they can do it again. There are plenty of tricks to inject new behaviors in old legacy code and there is a big probability they are actively refactoring (cleaning up) old parts of the engine.
An engine is nothing more than a set of joint parts connected through other parts. It’s the same as with a car. You can make it pretty, you can make it powerful, but you can also make it break at any point.
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Yes, I think they do it to see if they can get more civs into AoE 2/RoR…
Dude, one of the Ensemble Studios developers said that there is no civ limit. Pretty sure he knows what he’s talking about.
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Ok, I didn’t say anything… let’s put 100 civs in the game then xd…
Based on what? On the fact that a text file, in which the game looks up the names of civilisations, has 48 lines labelled as being for civilsation names? It’s totally implausible that that alone would make it impossible to add more than 48 civs.
Oh no, I just realised I didn’t even notice the pun the first time I read this!
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