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!