I know I don’t represent the majority of players, but I loved this new addition in the Beta, and that was the reason why I bought the premium edition of the game.
Even if I try to optimize my play, by doing actions fast, managing my citizens, ressources, training new units while managing my army at the same time, …, I also do decisions based on aesthetical reasons. Like I choose the major god I play based on its portrait, I turn my buildings to make a good looking city, I don’t kill animals even though I know they provide food faster, and also I don’t do certain upgrades to have my units look the way I want them to look.
To people who don’t know what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the unit upgrades in military buildings and armor upgrade in armory. In classic Age of Mythology, armor upgrade didn’t change the visual of the armor of the units, unit upgrades changed the whole armor visual (excepted for the shield and the weapon).
But in the Beta they added this new feature that when you do the unit upgrade of an unit, it changed the visual of its helm only, and when you do the armor upgrade in the armory, it changed the visual of the body armor, just the same it does when you do the shield upgrade or weapon upgrade.
So with this new feature it was possible to mix match different helms with different body armors and I loved that.
Now I know some people will talk about readability, but do people really look at the units to tell if they did the unit upgrade or not ? And if so, ok now you can say easily if someone researched the unit upgrade just by looking at the whole unit armor, but now you can’t tell if they did the armor upgrade just by looking at it, while you could in the Beta version of the game. You could tell if someone did the unit upgrade by looking at its helm and you could tell if it did the armor upgrade by looking at its body armor, the same way you can tell if someone researched the shield upgrade by looking at the shields.
And as there are visuals for the shield upgrades and weapon upgrades, I’ve found that it was cool to have visuals for the body armor upgrades too while having visuals for unit upgrades with their helm.
IDK what you’re talking about, the Medium/Heavy/Champion upgrades are what dictate the body texture. Pretty sure it was in the Beta that Armory armor upgrades changed visuals. But it’s not in the release.
That’s what I’m saying, it was in the Beta, armory body armor upgrade changed body armor visual (not the helm) and unit upgrade in the military building only changed the helm visual. But they removed this feature.
Well, it’s technically not a waste of art, because the art is still there, they just combined the two visual upgrades into 1. While you had one for the helm and one for the body in the Beta, now you only have 1 upgrade that modifies helm+body and the other one that modifies nothing. But you could get for exemple a golden helm with a silver body in the Beta, and now it’s no more possible, you either have silver helm with silver body or golden helm with golden body.
In the original game, the armory upgrades did change armor, weapons and shield, but the color was mostly the general upgrades. So there are two different looks for champion infantry with all armory upgrades and champion infantry without.
Armory upgrades were more subtle, but they were there.
I just tested it in the original AoM and I don’t see any difference with the armor. For the shields and the weapons yes, I was aware of it and I said it in my post, but I don’t see any change with the armor upgrade. Or maybe it’s only with some specific units and I made my test with the wrong unit.
I’m not ruling out Mandela effect, but I do remember a subtle change on the chest harness on the Hoplite and Murmillo from an armory upgrade. Not a color change, but a shape change on the shoulder pads/pattern change of the scalemail.
They should definitely bring that back, it looks like they changed it after the stress test. I don’t think that this in particular made the game hard to read. But it definitely looses charm if one of three upgrades does nothing
Being able to get silver helmet and golden chestpiece, or vice versa, is also not what it’s supposed to be.
What it should be, in myopinion, is that the troop upgrades (medium infantry, heavy infantry, champion infantry, and their equivalents for archers and cavalry) should affect shape and color, while armory only affects shape.
Shoulder pads, cheek/face visors, and similar stuff be added via armory, in the color of the armor…
