Wednesday, April 1, 2015

No Limits

As many of you know, AoE3 is not the most loved title of the franchise. Veteran players of AoE2 often say bad things about AoE3 and in a way it's understandable why. AoE3, like any good sequel, brought many new elements and features into play, features which turn away many AoE2 players for different reasons.
Features that make sense for AoE3's gameplay but still leave a bad taste in the mouths of veterans.

One of the most controversial feature is, of course, the Home City but that's just the start. Many also have problems with how limited some things are in the game, train and build limits to be more specific. And in some ways I agree, and since this is a mod where we like to experiment with stuff I thought to make some changes, which hopefully will freshen the gameplay up a bit.

Thus I have released an experimental update which touches upon some of the train and build limits:
- builder limits have been removed from all buildings except wonders and farm like buildings (you can now build a house with 20 villagers if you so desire)
- you get +1 to the Town Center limit every age, ending up with 5 max Town Centers for every civ in the Imperial Age (kinda like what the Portuguese had; they now also get a villager bonus)
- ship build limits have been removed, instead now ships cost population like artillery units (biggest change yet, please comment if you think they should cost more pop, or less)
- the Russian Blockhouse can now also train cavalry in blocks; to counter this, Russian villagers no longer train in blocks and Grenadiers have been added back to the Russian Foundry
- population max limit has been reverted back to 200, but wait...
- all villagers now take up 0 population (Fishing Boats too; Settler Wagon takes 1 pop) (this will allow players to focus all their population on military units, like the new infinite ships that now take up pop)
- the Poleaxeman was made into an Hungarian mercenary (kinda like a weaker and cheaper Ronin; comes with a full voice set, courtesy of AoE2 The Forgotten)
- added 11 new custom maps, select the Custom Maps option to play them (this is a bit older but just let everyone know; the maps were made by RF_Gandalf, Rookman64 and Neuron)
- ships have been revisited, movement speeds and turn rates (for Europeans) have been increased and obstructions (hitboxes) have been improved
- added 2 new Royal Decree techs: Slavery Abolition for Dutch (changes Settler cost to food) and Imperial Armory for Ottomans (artillery units take up less pop)

(I will update this list if I add more changes; if you don't like something please let me know)

Naval combat is not the best in AoE3 (most avoid it completely) and this is not the first time I try to make it more enjoyable. I don't really know what the exact results of this change will be, maybe worse, maybe better, but hopefully it was a good choice.
This is just the start of more changes I plan to make with the goal of, well, giving more power to the players, more choices and more strategies.

I've also made a poll so everyone can let me know if they like the new changes or not. Also, regarding the ship changes especially, please comment and let me know how it goes. I know some water maps are not that big and don't actually have that much water on them and ship models are very big in AoE3 so... yeah. I'm thinking, to make this work even better we need a pop limit lower than 300. More on this later.