Wednesday, June 26, 2013

Conquest Age

A huge update just rolled out, not necessarily huge in size, but more like in importance. What does it contain? Well, lets just say now you really feel like conquering the New World!

The update adds control flags for all maps. What are control flags? They are points on the map, randomly generated, which if captured give line of sight and a small XP trickle over time. You start with one flag near your Town Center and as you explore the map more and more flags pop up.

And that's not all! You know how Asian maps have water treasure which are completely awesome? Sadly I cannot add them for American maps too (not without starting a project which would take weeks, even months, which will probably prove useless since they might be "hardcoded"), so I decided to do something different for them. I took the Fishery, a water building I made a while ago, and transformed it into a capturable water trading post. So now those annoying pirate ships I added on American maps have a purpose, to protect their fisheries. Kill them and take the fisheries for your own.

I hope you enjoy these completely new features and if you find any problems, and you'll most certainly do, please report them!
Thanks for playing!


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I'm looking through the mod and I'm starting to question decisions I made a long time ago. For example, do Europeans really need all of those buildings? When I started this mod one of my main objectives was to add as many buildings as possible, but now I look back and it simply doesn't look as good as it once did.

So, I decided to make some changes. Now my main objective is to make every European building as useful as possible, because we had many useless buildings or many buildings that did too little.

First of all, I will make European Settlers able to build Town Centers and Trading Posts just like Native and Asian villagers.

Second, Banks will disappear from the French and Barons will disappear from the British, the Dutch will keep their Banks though. Furthermore, Lumber Camps and Livestock Pens (the new Bakeries) will also disappear from all the civs that had them. I do have a plan for Livestock Pens but I need more time to figure it out.

Third, the Capitol will receive a utility makeover, the old Forts will make a comeback and I will probably combine the Command Post (Saloon) with the University.

Now, instead of the Lumber Camps, Banks, Barons and Livestock Pens, which were resources production buildings, the Church will take their place. You will be able to research a tech at the Church which enables it to generate coin. This will be present for all European civs, they will now have only one coin production building and that is it.
Why do I do this? Well, mainly because the old setup was too "over powered" for Europeans. And because this is how other, non-euro civs also have it.

This is all for now. I know some of you might dislike the new changes but I think it will turn out good.
Don't fight the system, embrace it. XD
Nah, I'm just kidding, death to all politicians!

Friday, June 21, 2013

Age of Empires 2 "Reborn Edition"

Ok so, we were all disappointed that AoE2 HD brought nothing new to the table, and because it is laggy as hell, and some animations are even broken, but the game still is somehow popular so since Hidden Path were clearly not the guys to go ahead and properly change the game they gave it to someone who can, a team that worked on RTS games before, SkyBox Labs.

Check this out for more info!

Let me highlight some important stuff from that post...
"I’m proud today to announce that we’ve been working with SkyBox Labs to ensure that AOE II HD’s future is brighter than ever."
"we are thrilled to announce a new partnership with the team behind the community driven Forgotten Empires project." 
"Working with the FE team will allow us to focus on improving what the community has been deemed most important over the years!"
"Throughout the summer we’ll be providing a series of patches to the core title to continue improving the game, fix bugs, improve performance, and more."
 And some nice recent changes...
"Maximum unit selection increased from 40 to 200.
Internal game’s frame rate is no longer forced at 20 frames per second."
So yes, things look extremely well for the Age of Empires franchise once again. I hope we will get the AoE2 game we all dream of!
Who knows, maybe they'll even bring LAN back...

Thursday, June 13, 2013

Patcher Update

So the patcher's server was changed recently and the current patcher can't connect to it to update itself with the new address which means that everyone will have to download the new patcher manually and then put it in your AoE3 directory.

If you run the current patcher you will probably get this: Error grabbing master server list.
The error might not show up for everyone as I have been told but in case it does here's the fix...

DOWNLOAD NEWER VERSION FROM HERE!

The deal is the same, run it as administrator!
It will be included in the version 5.5 installer so after that everything will be automated.

We will probably do more changes to the patcher and its server so I'll update this post with news as they happen.

Thanks for playing!

Saturday, June 1, 2013

Update on Updates

This is just a heads up on the things I'll be adding soon, I thought you should know before I'll release it and get people complaining because units are more expensive now for no reason.

So, I want to make Imperial upgrades to increase the unit's cost with about 20%. Why? Well because units get really, really powerful with their Imperial upgrades and it kinda makes sense to also make them a bit more expensive, and this is how AoE2 also worked.
Not only that, but by doing this I give players an important choice to make, upgrade their units to imperial and have really powerful stats but more expensive units, or don't upgrade them to Imperial, be weaker but also cheaper. Each player's economy will determinate with which strategy they go.

You might think "But now players with the best economy will win easier!". Well, not exactly, because they will use all that economy on more expensive units and dry it out faster, while players with weaker economy can still train more units for the same, cheaper price.
Plus, I did not increase the stats Imperial upgrades give, I only made them increase the unit's cost.

Another thing that I will add soon, Revolution civs are now getting villagers! But only 10 of them...
The idea of Revolution is still the same, you have a shitload of resources, you want to go kamikaze and train units stupid fast (+ infinite Forts and almost infinite Factories), you go for Revolution. But now, after all your Settlers transform into Militia you will still be able to train 10 more Settlers. How you use those Settlers is up to you.
Revolutions are times in which every villager takes up arms against their oppressors, not many still have time to work.

And another thing related to the "Out of sync" error in multiplayer, I have a file that might fix it for some but not for others, so I'll decide if I release it or not according to the survey.
So please vote! Thank you.

PS: And for God's name people, run the patcher as administrator!