wowgetoffyourcellphone

Get me a normal map for this and we got a stew goin.

The team as a whole has forsworn the use of AI for now due to various concerns raised. The DE mod though does use AI portraits for heroes.

Already here:

Andy has said he's not interested in taking these maps. Best to have an an official "Legacy Maps" mod. Once we've finished polishing 30 good maps for the base game, we can polish 5-10 more maps from the Legacy Maps mod and merge them back into the game. rinse/repeat. Retold has 40 well-polished procedural maps: https://aom.heavengames.com/retold/random-maps/

The Last Alliance?

Removing maps doesn't delete them permanently. bahhhh

No disrespect to you personally, but I grow weary of this topic. I've made my case several times over several years. There are just way too many low quality maps.

A lot of modern RTS games don't have procedural maps. They're of the "Skirmish map" variety. Age of Empires games use "Random maps" I think, but again, that's the reason 0 A.D. chose the term. I think Procedural Maps or Generated Maps are good terms though.

We should, honestly, strip out the worst 50% of maps.

Procedural Maps or Generated Maps are my two preferences. I agree that "Random" here is misleading and not very accurate. The only reason this term is being used is inertia.

I'm replying to the discussion as it has evolved.

Perhaps a Fortified Watchtower could train some Border Troops.

A major difference between the original vision and what the game has evolved into is the territory mechanic. Originally, the map would have pre-defined unclaimed "provinces." You'd see the map divided up in the minimap into your home province, the provinces other players start with, and then a number of other unclaimed provinces. Similar to a voronoi diagram. And then you'd claim new provinces by building your Civilisation Centres (original terminology) on an unclaimed Settlement, very similarly to Age of Mythology. The standard Building roster was much more streamlined (too much, IMHO) and the number of planned civs stood at 6. The way that biomes and seasons planned to work was pretty cool, but super difficult to achieve, so abandoned early (which is fine). I'm personally glad we have many more civs than originally planned because of the cultural diversity we can allow players to experience and play around with. The tech trees were supposed to be 95% choice-based, like with the tech pairs in DE. The tech trees were going to probably be the most complicated aspect of the gameplay. While each of the few civs were to have a slimmed down building roster and unit roster, they would have had 100% unique tech trees that would have determined nearly all of the differentiating features of the civs. It was desired that phase 1 spearmen and phase 1 swordsmen would be nearly identical in stats, only to later in phases 2 and 3 be differentiated via each civ's unique tech tree. The number of phases were limited to 3 (too few, IMHO) for simplicity and to keep these tech trees from growing too massive.

Depends on the map type and biome. You don't want a bunch of trees in the Sahara desert, for example. Also, there's a big difference in the gameplay experience, as far as the map is concerned, between random maps and skirmish maps. What kinds of maps are you playing? Are you single player or multiplayer?

A lot of fantastic information and visual references in this one. Great find and very helpful. It's clear to me that the Dominate Romans should have some kind of difference between "Border Troops" and "Royal Troops," perhaps with 2 different barracks. Possibly, Border Troops could be made of mainline classes of soldiers, while the Royal Troops are the counter-classes of troops, or vice versa (thinking like the Atlanteans in AOM). I do something like this already with the Imperial (Principate) romans in DE. Another thing could be making their territory borders more porous. So, their buildings could possibly having a +10 to 20% greater territory range, but a much less (-50%) territory strength, so that enemy borders push back harder against Roman expansion. Some kind of bonus to Outposts, like upgrading to Watchtowers could be interesting. They would lose the Army Camp and Siege Walls of the Republican and Imperial/Principate Romans, but by upgrading Outposts to Watchtowers, they can project power and cut off trade routes that way. You could have an additional upgrade, "Fortified Watchtower", that adds a palisade around it, with greater health and hack armor. And while "Greek Fire" is still a couple hundred years past the the time period, a Greek Fire Ship would be a nice addition to their Naval roster. With the Dominate Romans and Gothic civs, we could introduce Transport Boats that are super cheap, but are low health and have no attack, just a large garrison space. Wonder could be The Hippodrome. We can introduce "ruined" versions of a bunch of Republican/Principate era structures and Ancient Greek structures for scenarios, campaigns, and skirmish maps. These can be ruins on the map that you can exploit. A great one would be a toppled Colossus of Rhodes, a "Christianized" ruined Parthenon, etc. Temples -> Orthodox Churches.

Yeah. Some of this stuff is just straight up lifted from DE. lol

Correcto, senor.

Indeed, the seated Statue of Zeus at Olympia would be desired, as are all of the "Seven Wonders of the Ancient World." @nifa