I agree to some extent, the villagers are also designed to look lazy on that note. However you can also join the developement stream every Wednesday and Friday at more or less 20.30 GMT and let the devs know your opinion, they really care!
The art style is fine for the units and the buildings, but the terrain just looks bad. Everything appears flat, which makes it difficult to gauge scale and is boring to look at. The unit examples are strange. Does each faction have basic units, or are all of their units weird? It’s difficult to get a sense of the mechanical theme of each faction; it feels like this game does not have a serious game designer on staff.
Does each faction have basic units, or are all of their units weird?” Well the ‘unit lines’ that you remember from Age of Empires 2 (spearman, militia, cavalry etc.) are still sort of intact. But some units could have some extra abilities, depending on the unit and the civilization. There will be bonus damage against certain types of units, so all units have a counter. But the old idea of Age of Empires 2 (that all civilizations for example should have a unit that is called a ‘spearman’) is removed. Instead, all units will have a unique name with it’s own unique look. This in order to prevent big historical inaccuracies, like Aztecs with a trebuchet, or Mongols that are using pokemon (I believe that the Mongols have a big focus on cavalry in Empires Apart). At the same time these ‘unit lines’ are still kinda the same but they have a different name and perhaps slightly modified stats. Compare it to a AoE2 civ bonus (+2 attack infantry for example), but now these bonus are included within the units itself, to balance the civilisations out. The Aztecs will have a compansation for their lack of siege weapons for example.
Why would you come to such a conclusion? This is just a 3 minutes long devlog. I’ll let the devs know the feedback about the terrain but i’m pretty sure they don’t want to keep it like it is now, this is still a very early stage of developement. It’s not an overview of the whole game and it’s reasonable that you didn’t get a specific idea of the mechanics of all the civs. However every civ will have its own set of unique units and mechanics. As a general idea there will be rushing civs (Aztecs, Mongols), booming civs (Byzantines, Franks) and support civs (Arabs, Chinese). If you want to know more or have more specific questions you can join the stream and the developer will answer to al your questions. (Wed, Fri - 20.30 GMT)
That’s completely the wrong way to design RTS factions. Every faction should have access to units in every role (put another way, no faction should have a unit type it can’t naturally counter), and should be capable of every kind of strategy. If all your faction can do is rush, then it will be really boring to play with & against. There will be no risk of failing to guess what their strategy will be, that faction will always rush. If that rush fails, guess what, they lose.
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