Wesley

yay Google translator has just fingered out you guys are speaking Spanish and finally kicked in after I've been on the forum for a week. yay el traductor de Google acaba de descifrar que ustedes están hablando en español y finalmente comenzaron después de que haya estado en el foro durante una semana.

I will see if I can find it. The eland are all the same species with the north, east and southern ones and the giant ones being able to breed. At least in captivity. That's bad for the rare ones. The zoo I know of had no normal eland specifically to keep the rare ones pure blood. P.S. I'm looking at doing a bison for the game. They have the same pure breeding problem with cattle. There are no pure wisent bison in Europe. They Scythian faction. I better go to bed or all be here all night. lol.

I found the right forum page finally. As Sundiata said they built foggara or Qanat, deep underground canals. That could be their wonder. The technology also occurs in Persia, Afghanistan, South American deserts but the Sahara has the longest and most impressive Qanat systems. Some still barely explored today. Some still run with water. Also some Qanat tunnels have rooms and stars out. Probably cool accommodation for those that dug and maintained them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat From on top they are just a line of holes. Most aerial photos are from Iran. Its not an impressive wonder visually but its an achievement. Also, in the desert water is the most wonderful thing you can find. The sands are wide.

Now that's that's answer I need. You need psychic powers to find the projects in the search engine. lol. Lets see what boss lion has for me. The eland thing is a New Scientist paper and a Scientific American paper. Something about genetics; a marker common in domesticates that's rare in never domesticated species. Years ago. The western plains zoo in Australia has a small herd and a plaque mentioning it. That's what put me onto the papers. Several miniatures game company's have done eland chariots. The animal is easily tamed. https://hiveminer.com/Tags/cart%2Ckenya

I like a the mix of units and the back ground. Can I suggest when it comes to creating dedicated units for this you could create the following: A royal archer and shield barer. That shows up in the bible often and in the other books. A heavy archer that is visually two men moving together; one with a big shield and one with a good bow and both with fine looking armour. A prophet unit trained and spawned from a house might be fun. High building capture capacity. No melee attack but a push/ confuse attack [blinding the enemy] manifested as a few almost invisible no damage blocking units spawned near him when a foe is in range. Good arrow armour, good view range. Night raiders: Abraham did night commando a raid, so did Samson, Gideon & David. A unit with good stealth but very low view range; its dark (no day night cycle needed). Good first attack and a kitting retreat. Strike fall back fast, stop & strike again when they reach you. Like horse kitting. If stealth is not available add fast burst speed. Good armour verses arrows because its dark. Low view range and stealth means you may lose the foe or he may lose you. Some models need the round chest shield that doubled as a griddle iron for cooking flat bread.

The catch with any Scythian build is that it ends up a clone of the AoE Huns which already has kurgans and a giant horse statue. What else could the wonder be? How about a giant herd of horse and cattle in a truly huge royal corral? Builds empty add horses and cattle to it from normal corrals. Uses food but do not hunt them or your going backwards. Have grouped herds in it: 6 horses, 8 cattle, 4 horses and 4 cattle to reduce the unit spam. A chariot without the chariot as it were. [Errr "as it were" will not translate well will it. Sorry did too much Shakespeare as a kid.] When the herd number equals a target your wonder activates. This is a true wonder for nomad herdsmen. Kings are always bragging about herd numbers in the ancient world.

@Sundiata @Lion.Kanzen I've been looking at the Garamantes. There is not much to go on. Only 5 small cities in central and west Libya. No monuments with faces on it. Desert Mounted and Chariot based raiders. Raiding out of oasis' and Sahara lakes that were drying up. To save their oasis' they dug foggara or Qanat, deep underground canals. That could be their wonder. The technology also occurs in Persia, Afghanistan, South American deserts but the Sahara has the longest Qanat systems. One other thing makes them distinct, they domesticated the eland and bred a draft animal, possibly the giant eland (Taurotragus derbianus). Its not found in Libya today but there are reports and pictures of eland drawn carts and chariots. Houses are mostly mud brick or simple stone. They seem to have provision for nomadic tents in the city edge. Open areas walled off from the afternoon sun and hot winds. Crops: wheat, barley, dates. Could we make a field with palms along one edge? Have it yield food and a small bit of wood. The lakes had crude docks, boats, big fish and one lake cluster in the Sahara had whales! (over in Egypt) The bulk of the lakes dried up at the end of the ice age but some were still there in 0 AD, brackish I suspect. All are gone now becoming salt pans and sand filled depressions. As the sahara dried out the sand covered almost everything. You can stand on a city and not know it. Most useful new archaeology is discovered thanks to satellite imagery and sand penetrating radar. The Roman writings talk of people, barbarians as the Romans called them, living in caves and being raided by the Garamantes. They also mix that up with Garamantes in the caves. This mix of things makes me think we could do a build with mud and stone buildings mixed with walled tent compounds and underground shelter marked by stairs and ramps disappearing into the ground. Monuments including a great Qanat or a desert lake. A very limited dock making only fishing and trade boats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garamantes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Qanat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_eland The whales are in Egypt. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wadi_El_Hitan

I'm playing them I found it workable without a farm. I put out a corral with a CC and a few women and a mounted unit and spammed sheep. Got food to 6500 fast. Doing that out side the main CC area prevents clutter and pathing. Sending out 6 mounted archers to hunt everything on the map with defensive set works to. So its working.

OK can that be used to detect maps as the game runs and used to activate special tech on a certain map. Or does it only work in choosing a map from the random pool or choosing a random army for a map. I'm thinking about sleds and sled dogs which are available on snow and ice maps only. Its for a different kind of nomad.

OK so I've missed a post on this topic, thanks.

OK thanks. Nice to see you've done the linguistic work and researched him. The catch is the same site that debunks him attacks personal friends of mine some of whom I've worked for. I guess they get it right some times. I'll have to have a word with someone at the omniglot site.

Is there a boat or dock planned I can't see one? If not might I suggest a Ferry. This is built on the water edge like a dock and when finished launched with the pack button. It "despawns" the dock. It should have a limited attack, small carrying capacity 6-8 and is not for fishing. Strictly about getting across the water. Even steppes have rivers. This stops the player or the AI getting very stuck on some of the islands maps.

https://www.imgrumweb.com/post/BSXhbujDFx5 Charge.

The omniglot page on Meroïtic is interesting. Dr Clyde Winters is there and says its spoken form is derived from a buddist language, Kharosthi, or Kharoṣṭhī, from Pakistan/India imported into Egypt and Kush with trade goods. The video at the bottom. http://www.omniglot.com/writing/meroitic.htm If you google his name the first thing that comes up is an attack on him from a group that attacks some of my friends. So he might be trouble or he might be on target. He reads and translates all the available text on the video and it makes sense.

It does look like all the worlds historical RTS & TBS games are heading in the same direction. We are running low on untouched civilisations, empires and cultures.

OK so this makes anything I do boring and sane by comparison. Whew. Stone age civ's with ride-able diprotodon coming up. In a year or three. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diprotodon#/media/File:Diprotodon_optatum.jpg For those that don't know it is a giant extinct relative of the wombat and the koala. One got chased down a hole, the other up a tree and the rest died out.

OK looking back at this its clear that most of the work I suggested now been done in the Xiongnu and Kush mods. Very nice. I'll see what models I can make for hunting variants and some modelling for moving out into the wider world. Maybe a few animals for practice. What's needed in animals? I read llama, turkey, some where. Half tempted to do a Capybara for fun. South American hunt/ decoration fauna. Bison/ Wisent is probably needed. For steppe tribes. And Amerindians if we ever try that. Kangaroos and wombats because I'm an Aussy. Diprotodon because I'm a weird aussy. Yes its extinct but we do have a dragon I noticed. One of the elephants in the game are almost extinct.

Understood asterix but I've been a way only a few months and see so much progress. You guys are always close to it so it seems slow but a year and a half is fast in this field. AoE definitive edition has been three years and it wont run on most people computers. They're supposed to be the professionals.

If I get my act together and make the mod I want it will be much dirtier: bark huts, ocre, caves, and burnt wood materials that make the xiongnu seem like its glimmering. If we want to do natural historical colour them most blues are out altogether. Proper blues were very rare and expensive in antiquity. A donkey load of royal blue or priestly purple cloth was a kings ransom. Don't get us wrong the game can do fantasy, mage towers etc, but that's a mod that far from its heart.

I noticed sheep in the Zapotec livestock corral; is that a known bug? I know someone's doing turkeys and llama (for the Inca I presume). The guinea pig is a Andean food animal too. It's raised in a room in the house with a high step at the door to keep them in. So it would be a house upgrade adding food. I thought of a way to add exotic hunt-able fauna to a map. If an area is burned off it creates ash and regrowth patch spawning new rare fauna. Building a hunting lodge or trap line would have the same effect. A wilder kind of livestock corral for wilder peoples.

The Xiongnu work well. I'm obsolete yet again. lol. We have working nomadic civilisations. Nice job. A Scythian build would be just the Xiongnu with brightly coloured pants, farming and a small traction trebuchet. OK over simplified a bit. What needs to be done? At the risk of getting flamed. lol. An Amerindian, north american, build could be the Xiongnu with Tipis replacing yurts & moved with dog Travois (two or three per tent). Log and earth lodges. Mound & earthwork monuments. Meteoritic iron (Canadian Indians & Inuit) & a big Nerf to mining metals. I know some one wants only civ's with written languages but Wampum was a proto- language according to some. Similar to quipu or khipu with beads on a string replacing knots on a string. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quipu https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wampum#Among_the_Iroquois If you want them to have horses give them a horse capture mechanic. That's how they got them in 16th century. Horses were lost in east Texas and within 30 years Indians were using horse travois and riding them soon after. It would be a little non historic to have Amerindians facing Romans but so is Carthaginians facing Celts or Kushites facing Xiongnu. However we do have the bay of jars mystery in Brazil, Roman jars in a south american marine archaeology site!?! That's one seriously lost Roman.

My archaeology prof did his grad work on Pre Aztec/ Inca central and south america sites. Except for the lack of cut stone and metals they were largely the same. The site worked on appear to be limited to earthen pyramid about the size of a modern 2 story house. Mud brick and some loose free stone. The sites were very early, fuzzy dates, but closer to 100 AD not 500 AD. Olmec societies were well before 0 AD 1500 BC to about 400 BC. You could easily rename everything in the Zapotec civ as Olmec and nothing would be changed except its 0 AD. Names and hero's would be the only significant thing. Names of hero's would harder, we have none. The same with low land antecedents of the Inca. They were similar but there is less work. One thing they did do was fertilise crops with fish caught in the pacific with crude reed boats. Fish meal fertiliser at the dock would do that. Use the fishing boat model from the Kushites. Note: I am not suggesting new civilisations. I'm just saying that the Zapotec build is basically the mesoamerican build and the Inca are really that build with llama and potatoes. There is not much change in the archaeology from 300 BC to 1600 AD.

The log in for the game site and this page is different or have I just stuffed up my password? OK Got it but Its past midnight so tomorrow I'll give it a go.

Thanks guys still trying to navigate the site. The search is no help if you spell everything wrong. lol. I thought I had that mod bookmarked but can't find it. I'll give it a go. PS I have been reading about Scythian temples. It looks like they were giant wood piles the size of a soccer stadium and the one to Ares had a meteoritic iron sword at the top. A lot of wood should be in the build resources. Given that the priests smoked pot and wore women's clothes I suspect a few temples burned well.

I have an idea for Scythian structures. The accounts talk of them living in wagons and wheeled huts. I knocked up a pair of models. A simple wagon and a big dray with a yurt on it. and Done in wings 3D but I can covert them to blender. I'm still not great at UV mapping. The idea is that these would be houses or included with other odds and ends to create larger structures. I would add a few Tipi, conical tents, yurt or dome huts, wheeled forge, and covered tables. Some on the ground with the wheels removed but leaning on the wall. A few palisade, low stone walls or log walls to give the structures some bulk. This creates a true nomad feel and its something I don't see anyone else doing in RTS games. Notice I don't do great wheels. These are not meant to be moving structures like siege wagons. [We are not remaking command & conquer with its mobile command centres.] To make the Scythian's feel nomadic demolishing these wheeled houses should give back 80% of the wood cost. The castle could be a raised mound with steep sides and several wagons with wheels off & stacked. A big tent and low palisade, stone crenellation, or chest crenellations along the upper edge. Gated entry ramp. The wonder obviously would be a kurgen. The temple would be a raised platform with sparse decoration on the upper edges. Decorated poles. A small focal tent, hut or yurt for the tribal priest/ healer. I would also not give them a barracks; with all infantry made at the town centre [wagon/ hut cluster], the stables [horse pen], and the castle [hill-fort]. What do you think am I on the right track?