Randomization!

You know what, Bob... WoL...
I'm a man of many contradictions. I've thought long and hard about a speech about balance, about realism, about rule of modding. Then I decided... I just say "fuck it"...
And hang the consequences.

This has been an exciting year for the mod. In the modding community we had a lot of breakthroughs in modeling and UHC features, and then there's AoE3DE which will release soon and... god help us all.

Somewhere around the start of the year I released the UHC2 version of the mod in the form of "age3b.exe", an extra executable along with some extra files that the Patcher downloads but which needs to be started manually (remember to put the exe in WinXP SP3 compatibility mode for settings to save).

I've already talked about some of the new stuff UHC2 brings in a previous post (stuff like 95 unit selection limit, multiplayer save and load game system, many engine fixes) but this post is about a specific, new, lit feature which right now is exclusive to the Improvement Mod: tech randomization.

But what did I use this new feature on? Well, I used it in one of the most controversial ways possible, I made European politicians, Revolutions, native Council members and Consulate allies random.

Now please, calm down, I know how it sounds. It sounds horrible. You're probably deleting the mod right now. But hear me out, you're not the first to think that, and I have honestly converted and convinced everyone who doubted the feature after they've tried it.

AoE3 is 15 years old. By now, there's hundred of metas and builds and not many surprises to be had. Which is why many people play mods. And which is why I wanted to add in these randomization systems.
In my opinion, the way politician ageups are made in AoE3, they screamed of randomization. The way there's multiple of them but some are only available to certain civs, and how the same politician can send different things for different civs. There are powerful hints there that it could be more. So I went ahead and made it more. Added a few more politicians along the way as well.

But how does this randomization work?
At the start of each game, a set number of techs are picked from a list to be made available that match to the player. Just like random mercenaries which have been in the game since the WarChiefs expansion.
Politicians (and councillors) and Consulate allies are random but shared between all players that play the same civ. So all French players will have the same politicians, all British players will have their own set of politicians and so on. This was made this way to ensure mirror games are still as fair as possible. Revolutions however, and randomized individually per player, because they are less impactful and for even more diversity.

"But Mandos" Bob may ask, "what do you mean with random Revolutions?"
Well, since many revolutions didn't make sense for the civs that had them anyway (looking at you Germans, Russians and Ottomans), I took all Revolutions from all civs and added them to a single pile from which 2 are chosen every game for every player.
Same thing for politicians. I took all age2, 3, 4 and 5 politicians, added a few more because I wanted to have 8 politicians to choose 4 from for every age and voila.
Native Council members are a bit different. For technical reasons I could not randomize the councillors themselves so I instead randomized the shipments they send. So, besides the 5 possible types of shipments councillors can send, per civ, which scale with every age, there's now 5 more for a total of 10 for every Native civ.

But you might have noticed something is missing from all this madness. That's right, Asian Wonders. I plan to add this feature to them as well, and again because of technical reasons, it will be done the same way as I did it for Natives, keep the Wonder buildings the same but randomize the shipments they send.

But this might not be all! This randomization feature has a lot of potential. A lot of potential to keep the game fresh and engaging every match. I've considered maybe using it on Firepit dances in some way or maybe on a new type of ingame events system, where at the start of each game an event is chosen which affects the game in some way, giving buffs, enabling units or techs, stuff like that, for all players.

And yes, you're right, such a system requires rigorous balancing. Which is why I always need help with balancing and why you can join the mod's Discord server to help out.

As for the elephant in the room, yes, I plan to make an Improvement Mod for AoE3DE if I can.
I just hope there will be people who want to play it.

Special thanks to Kevsoft from the Project Celeste team for making all of this and more possible!

Thank you for being here and for playing!

UnHardcode Patch 2

Through recent updates the mod now contains UHC2 and its new features, UHC being the project that allowed us to do more with AoE3 modding by "unhardcoding" game features to be modified. You can find more details here: https://eso-community.net/viewtopic.php?f=33&t=17284

However, for this mod right now the update needs thorough testing in multiplayer to check stability (Out of sync errors) and the new and updated AI made by @ageekhere, as we've had issues with them during our previous tests.

Because of this, the update comes with its own files and exe. After updating the mod, running the patcher or age3m.exe will run the UHC1 version of the mod. You will need to run the new age3b.exe to run the UHC2 version (please put age3b.exe in WinXP SP3 compatibility mode for settings to work properly).

If you need more reasons to try the new version, know that army selection limit has been increased from 50 units to 95 (95 being the max stable limit).


Thank you for your help and please report all issues.



(let's all act as if this is not just a copy-paste from the mod's Discord server. please join here)

Colombians?

Well. This is an awkward post, here on the blog, after almost an year.


Surprisingly, the Discord server was quite the success, now hosting more than 1000 users! And a very good environment where I can talk with people and offer live support, while also giving players a way to report bugs faster and give their input on features under development.

But I can't let a year pass without a blog post so here we are.

So I want to address the above comment made HERE and explain, once again, why I added the civilizations that I added so far.
And why I might also add Colombians. Maybe.


Both the Swedish and Italians were two civilizations already heavily featured in the game's files, the original game released back in 2005, that is. Both civilizations have all kinds of unfinished and unused assets, ranging from building models to textures, flags and even units. In the case of the Italians, the Italian Explorer and Architect models used in the mod were already in the game, fully functional but just unused.

Both civilizations however had less colonial influence compared to other civs in the game (but still had some) which is probably one of the reasons why they were cut. But since we still got Germans and Russians, it's safe to say time constraints were also an important factor. It could also be the case that these civs were planned at a time when colonialism might not have been the main theme of the game but that's another topic.
These civilizations would have brought the number of civs in the original game to 10, from the current 8.

And so, when thinking what civs could be "immersively" added into the game, well I had to look no further than Swedish and Italians. Which again, had some colonial adventures to justify their presence in the game.

Now the Americans civ, well, I mean, it's the US of A. Featured several times throughout the game's campaigns and one of the biggest outcomes of colonialism. So, again, it made sense to include them.
And let's be honest, all these 3 civs, they were relatively easy to make because they follow the European civilization style. And easy to make is important for such a noob as myself.

I would of course like to maybe add some more exotic civs, some African civs to go along with the new maps that I added (which will still be reworked) but that would require extensive work on new models which is not really that easy for AoE3 for several reasons. One being destruction animations. If I would add an entirely new building set made from entirely new models, I would prefer if those models were also fully animated for the physics engine.

I know, I know, I'm expecting too much and setting myself up for disappointment. So then, why do it at all? Why add something that doesn't look and feel good enough? Just because? Yes, the strongest argument that can be made here is diversity, but if it's not near perfection then it's not good enough for me.
I don't want to add something that looks too much out of place.


So then what's left? Well, I recently started to consider Colombians as a new possible civilization. Just as the Americans civ, Colombians would represent an important outcome of colonialism in South America, and so it would still fit with the game's theme. A North American civ and a South American civ.

The civ will represent Gran Colombia, led by Simon Bolivar. Now you could say that this whole civ happened too late in the AoE3 timeline, BUT I'd have to point out the fact that the game's timeline goes as far as around 1876, featuring the Battle of the Little Bighorn in the TWC Shadow campaign.
And also, Simon Bolivar is featured in the vanilla Steel campaign where you help him fight the Spanish.

Although other arguments can be made against this civ, and I welcome them, you can see that it would be a pretty reasonable civ to implement in the mod.

Outcome of colonialism, a state that encompassed a large territory and culture, easy to make, "claimed to be one of the most powerful nations on the planet" by an American president, it ticks all the right boxes.

This post has gone for long enough so I will end by saying this: I am still not 100% convinced and although I worked on the civ's homecity and some flags already, I'm not that happy to spend hundreds of hours on making a new civ.
So anyone who plays the mod is invited to offer their opinion and ideas for the new, possible civilization on the mod's Discord server (or here if you want).

Thank you and as always, have a nice day!
Adios.

Improvement Mod Discord Server

After a poll on the mod's blog, asking if people would use a Discord server for the mod, I decided to go ahead with it due to positive results.

Here's the link:
https://discord.gg/WRvuVFg

I will use the server to post news, work in progress (some hot, never before seen stuff in there), ask for opinions and you can use it to tell me how shit the mod is and the infinite amount of problems you have.

It's a win win situation.

I hope to see you there.
Thanks for playing.

New Patcher and server

So the old Patcher server went down and I thought this was it. But I was wrong.
I have to say that, in my modding years I have met some really nice and awesome people, people who have helped me without asking for anything in return. Two such people are Expression93 and TechAUmNu, who have offered to host my mod on their awesome servers, helping me deliver content in such a way that it rivals actual corporations. Thank you deeply.

The Patcher is now back up and running but on a different server, which means that everyone needs to download a new Patcher.
All links throughout the blog which redirect to the Patcher are the same, so just go ahead and click on one of them, like THIS one.

For the people who can't get the Patcher working, for some reason or another, a new installer will eventually come but it will take some time until that happens. I have A LOT of stuff to work on before I call it a day.
So in the meantime use the manual installation links, I guess. Please contact me if the Patcher doesn't work for you, this is ridiculous, it should work for everybody.

I would also want to thank DayoftheNinja from the Wars of Liberty mod, who offered to help host the mod in case everything else fails.

Thank you all for being here and for playing!