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Some stuff I'm working on for Alpha 14 already (since Alpha 13 is so close and is in commit freeze). I'm starting to add more spec and normal maps again for terrains. Here you can see a mix of fancy normal/spec'd terrains and non-fancy terrains. I also made Phase 2 (Town) upgrade cost 1000 food and 1000 wood. This is to make Village Phase last longer and encourage different build orders and experimentation on different strategies in the early game. I tried this after some discussion on the IRC channel with some members of the core multiplayer group and so far, I think it works well. Just need to adjust berry gathering rates and some other things. We're also talking about removing the ability to drop off food.grain at the Civic Center, making the Farmstead more integral to farming. This would also help get rid of the ugly (and unrealistic) "plop a bunch of farms around your town center" technique and push farming a little ways out from the middle of the base. An additional idea is to make farms only available after a Farmstead is constructed. Basically, building a Farmstead "unlocks" farm fields for planting. It's just talk for now.

It seems like we won't be allowed to release our mod, at least not legally. This is what I encountered when I tried to download the Alpha 1 of Aristeia: It seems like AoEo doesn't want any competitors offering bronze age civilisations, and in some sense I understand them; they wouldn't stand a chance! But I think their reaction is a wee bit exaggerated, and I'm certain a lot of people will agree with me on this. It's not because they made a bad game that all good games should be swept from the market so that people don't have any alternatives. The most hilarious thing is that they actually think we want to make money out of this xD Man, we spend days on row modelling, texturing and doing research, barely sleeping in between, and then we give everything to you, for FREE, and then they'd charge us with something like that. That's just sick. If you're thinking something like: oh, no, now I'll never be able to play this AWESOME mod: don't worry! We'll continue working on this project whenever we find the time, which will probably be less often because of these f***ers, but hell, we'll even continue modding in prison if it ever comes to that! To circumvent the seized download link we'll spread each version by torrent from now on. And if the large media corporations get their say in U.S. law and all p2p file-sharing systems get put to an end (which I seriously doubt, but a doom scenario we must keep in mind anyway) we'll just upload Aristeia on some obscure filesharing site in Russia or China where they don't know what the word 'copyright' means ("什么？版权？") and post the link here. Once again we've had to learn the hard way that these large corporations are the cowboys on the information continent and we, copylefters, sharealikes and open-source fanatics are the Indians they want to crush. But we're glad to find out they are aware we exist. So one message to the large corporations: You'll never be able to control us And one for AoEo in particular: Just make a better game next time, that way you don't have to be jealous!

Waterfall-candy! (textures can be changed/modified if necessary)

I liked the idea of farmlands, I think we should at least try it before scrapping the idea, and I haven't seen much opposition to it. As far as implementation, I think it could be done fairly easily with special entities placed on the map by the designer (probably invisible in-game?), and then farms within X meters of that entity will get infinite yield or whatever bonus(es) we think best. Then you have to think about UnitAI, does it need to calculate which dropoff will be optimal based on the bonus vs. distance? If not, how does the user control that? Again, what if the CC and farmstead are approximately equally distant from the farm, which does it choose and why?

We can go beyond this and say this fork supports Windows 8, Windows Phone and Xbox.

Against farmlands there weren't any, AFAIK. It was needing only someone to go on and implement it. Now this idea of taking farms away from the civ center is new. And pretty interesting, if you'd ask me. Not to mention it is more realistic.

Maybe a different icon? Like a grain icon+the generic food icon or a small generic food icon in the corner of a grain icon.The food.grain dropsite thing was a compromise idea because some of the multiplayer core group were lukewarm about the farmland idea. I kind of prefer the farmland thing, myself, since it pushes farming away from the Civic Center, makes raiding farms a viable tactic, encourages exploration (to find the farmland), is something else for the players to fight over, and encourages hunting and gathering in the early game.

A different sound for each hero, even.

Yes.

I would like to see the burning of the library of Alexandria as a background with people trying to save important documents from the flames and soldiers who have just burst open the gates. The librarians, flames and soldiers/background could be on different planes. I can't draw something like that, and I'm not sure anyone else wants to, but I would still love a backdrop like that :-D

There have been some plans to have more than one main menu background. I recall some discussions about one for each civilization (but that was back when we still had 6 of them), but I don't think adding some variety would hurt.

I remade the models. Now they have the back "open", because it's supposed to get "in" the cliffs. There's too much textures to get them all in-game, so let's choose by biomes, or just choose one waterfall variation per biome or something like that. First row from left to right: mediterranean, desert, tropic, and savanna: