Thanks + Trees AOE 3

[ralphierocks]

Let me just start and say you guy(s) are doing an excellent job with this.

I am a die hard fan of the Age of Empires series me and my cousin play weekly via GameRanger. We both grew up on the Age of Empires series and it has more than entertained us throughout the years. Recently however we have found ourselves getting tired of the same maps, computer AI, etc and this sent me off on an adventure to find a new game. I ran through google search after google search and bought and downloaded so many games that I ultimately reformatted my 1.5TB HDD because it was so cluttered with random files from random games. This didn't stop me from searching though, I finally realized that all of the searches I was doing yielded results for commercial games and then it hit me, we also play Minecraft and that's an indie game, what if I search for indie RTS games? Low and behold I found 0 A.D. and I have to say I love what I see thus far. See we are old school (but not that old school), we are not into the sci-fi, robots, space RTS games at all, and unfortunately they have more than saturated the market since the Age of Empires series has ended. On top of that there was an influx of WWII genre "capture flags" (resources, I guess) style games. We drilled through them all, hoping that one would offer the resource gathering, base building, rts combat that we grew up on, and none of them delivered. To me, creating a troop, sending him to capture a flag and then have oil (or whatever) automatically deposit into my resources was not anything close to what I wanted. At the end of the day those games relied on numbers, if you brought more tanks than I had, I was done for. We also tried out AOE Online, and that is just a travisty, a complete disgrace to the series, I won't even go there right now about the horrors of that game.

Your formula seems to be working well, and I never expected a AOE clone, and I appreciate that you guys want your own spin on the game. I think that alone is going to help this game take off. It amazes me that no one has done this before as I cannot be the only person seeking a new "AOE - RTS" game. I do however have some complaints about the game that I love so much. AOE is not perfect and I hope that your game will avoid some of the pitfalls that AOE suffered. There were three main things that hurt the game in my opinion and I will list them here just as a suggestion to avoid:

1. On AOE 3 it took forever for them to release a update to allow you to use scenarios created with their editor in multiplayer games. Here we were, hours invested into one of the most epic maps ever created, only to find out that we could not play it online. This was eventually fixed of course, but it took forever to do so.
   
2. The "AI". At a certain point in the game (single player scenario, or multiplayer) it seemed as if the computer AI simply "gave up" or "broke". I would withstand hordes and hordes of their armies pummeling my walls and towers and around the same point in EVERY single game the AI would just stop. They still had plenty of resources, so this made no sense what so ever. They would only create roughly 2-3 soldiers and camp them around their Town Center. Upon me invading them, they would simply continue to gather resources and not create more soldiers until the 2-3 they had were killed, only creating 2-3 more at a time. This essentially ends each game when it happens, what's the point in playing from there?
   
3. TREES...Oh man the TREES...there were never enough to last for an enjoyable game, they never grew back and if you were on a map with no trade routes, or if you were a civilization that did not allow you to generate factories for resources, you were pretty much screwed. I borrow from games that allow you to build a forester (Anno I think allows this) to create more trees. AOE could have included a forester as a building type that would generate trees around the structure, much like Gaia and her Lush in AOM. When we log in to play, we want to spend hours base building and warring it out through the ages, the lack of trees prevented this.
   

Don't get me wrong, we do rush, turtle, fast fortress, etc. But there was nothing more enjoyable than building that epic base protected by 3 layers of walls (because in AOE 3 the walls were "up"(underpowered) and the cannons were "op") and sending out our troops. Sometimes we meet on the battlefield as gentlemen, sometimes we send in a few spies others we just rush. The options were limitless, minus the trees lol. I understand the strategic value of trees, but for people that are not looking to end their game in less than a half hour, trees become vital to your civilizations growth. I think adding a forester building to the game would not throw the balance off because you could limit how many a civ could build and their rate a generating wood, plus like fortresses in AOE 3 you could limit their builds (how many they can build period, if it gets destroyed, it's gone for good).

Sorry this is so long, I just wanted to point out my highs and lows from the AOE series, and throw in a few suggestions as well. I hope you guys keep up the great work and I can't wait for more updates!!

Edited August 31, 2012 by ralphierocks

[feneur]

First, thanks for your thoughts and your nice words

Second, here are some attempts at responding to your three things:

1. You can already play custom maps in Multiplayer. However, you do need to manually distribute them to your friends. We do hope to make it either directly automatic (the host selects a map, the game checks to make sure everyone has it, otherwise downloads it for all players who don't have it) or at least create a central hub for where you can download them. Exactly what/how we do it depends on security issues though, we don't want to end up with a scenario where people could use our game to install viruses on people's computers or anything.
   
2. We do hope to have a good AI for sure, and if not someone else will hopefully create one I remember there being a ton of user-created AIs for AoK at least, and they were a lot harder than the ones that shipped with the game, so hopefully there will be one to fit everyone's need
   
3. At least personally I'm very much against re-growing trees, and I doubt we will have regenerating resources in the official game (though there are more people than you who are interested in it, so if nothing else there might end up being a mod doing that or it might even be included as a non-default option. Either way there should be no need to as you can trade, and more specifically, you can chose to get either of the four resources from your trading, so if you need more wood, just set your traders to wood, etc
   

[ralphierocks]

First, thanks for your thoughts and your nice words

Second, here are some attempts at responding to your three things:

1. You can already play custom maps in Multiplayer. However, you do need to manually distribute them to your friends. We do hope to make it either directly automatic (the host selects a map, the game checks to make sure everyone has it, otherwise downloads it for all players who don't have it) or at least create a central hub for where you can download them. Exactly what/how we do it depends on security issues though, we don't want to end up with a scenario where people could use our game to install viruses on people's computers or anything.
   
2. We do hope to have a good AI for sure, and if not someone else will hopefully create one I remember there being a ton of user-created AIs for AoK at least, and they were a lot harder than the ones that shipped with the game, so hopefully there will be one to fit everyone's need
   
3. At least personally I'm very much against re-growing trees, and I doubt we will have regenerating resources in the official game (though there are more people than you who are interested in it, so if nothing else there might end up being a mod doing that or it might even be included as a non-default option. Either way there should be no need to as you can trade, and more specifically, you can chose to get either of the four resources from your trading, so if you need more wood, just set your traders to wood, etc
   

Okay that sounds great. I have not gotten far enough into the game yet to experience trading, just a quick question; is it based off of AOE 3's trading i.e. the market place where you basically buy a stack of wood at a set price and ultimately saturate the market with too much gold / not enough wood, or is it more like the old ship trading style where you dispatched a unit and set them to trade "x good" for "y good" (trade food for wood, stone for food, etc)?

[Zeta1127]

There is bartering and both land and sea trading, like AoE style market and traders.

Edited August 31, 2012 by Zeta1127

[feneur]

Trading is very much like Age of Kings, let me first note that trading and bartering are the two different concepts in this game: Bartering is what you do in your market when you exchange one resource for another (i.e. wood for food, or metal for food, or stone for metal, or food for metal, or food for stone, etc etc), and trading is when you send a unit between two markets/docks and it generates a profit of one of the four different resources that gets transferred to you at the end of the travel. The amount increases with the distance traveled, and if you trade with another player (though you can trade with a market you own yourself as well).

[ralphierocks]

Trading is very much like Age of Kings, let me first note that trading and bartering are the two different concepts in this game: Bartering is what you do in your market when you exchange one resource for another (i.e. wood for food, or metal for food, or stone for metal, or food for metal, or food for stone, etc etc), and trading is when you send a unit between two markets/docks and it generates a profit of one of the four different resources that gets transferred to you at the end of the travel. The amount increases with the distance traveled, and if you trade with another player (though you can trade with a market you own yourself as well).

Excellent, I remember that style of trading I think civilization used it or something like that. That's the best way!!

[raymond]

re-growing trees: yes