Complete water unit overhaul (Rome at War mod AoE2) 

All right, just going to clarify some stuff for people who keep asking, or discuss other potential changes that could follow: 1. The ships all look too similar: Maybe I'm biased, but for the most part, I think it's actually just the Monoreme/Bireme that look similar to the Hemiolia/Trihemiolia. The others are all pretty distinct. We're going to give people some time to get used to our changes, and if readability really is an issue with these ships, then we'll look into doing something about it. 2. It seems really complex, what's the point?: Right now, water maps are very unpopular with the player base. There's a number of potential reasons for this, but we choose to focus on how simple it is, compared to land, as it seemed like a significant possible cause. As explained in the video, there's a much more fleshed out tech tree now, with units filling a number of different roles. And maybe we did go overboard ;), but I think that people just need to try it out, and see if it actually is that problematic once they get their head around it. There's less units than on land all up, although more from a single building. Basically, I think this is about letting people get used to it, understanding the nuances of the naval combat doesn't come just from watching a video showcasing a lot of changes in a short time. 3. There should be more resources on water, making it more important: Totally agree. We would like to add sources of both gold, and possibly wood as well. Our problem here is mostly that we don't have any good random map scripters working for us, or we would make these kind of changes. 4. The fishing ship and builder boat should have been one thing: From a functional perspective, this wasn't possible in the editor. They also do have fairly different roles that we wanted for them. The fishing ship collects food, and the builder boat not only constructs various naval defenses, it can also repair ships, making it more of a viable option nearer to actual combat, to fix up your fleet. 5. Why would you make a Port when the Shipyard is so much better?: Because the Port is the only naval building you have available in the Iron (Dark) Age, and it's a prerequisite building for the Shipyard, which isn't unlocked until the second age. I think that should cover most points, if I notice people are bringing up something else a lot, I'll add it to the list.

Not even three minutes in, and both the concepts of sea defenses, and an expansion beyond the usual rock-paper-scissors is something I truly wish we could see in the main game! Imagine what it could bring to sea maps and sea civs.

Microsoft should 100% hire these guys. This looks so well made and polished - great work from the Romae ad Bellum team.

I love the concept and implementation of boarding ships. It works so well as a parallel to monks without being the exact same and has a perfectly reasonable historical basis, too. Also, the ability to construct sea walls and gates is such a nice use of a feature from campaigns/the scenario editor and adds more tactical depth along with it. It all seems very well thought out. Props to the mod team!

Just the fact that you don't NEED demolition ships is great, they are fun to use as tactical/strategic weapons (like petards) but as a counter unit were never fun nor efficient

Now THIS is just mind-boggling. 🤯 The fact the entire IDEA for the overhaul of the water gameplay came not from the official studios, but from a very small group of modders really speaks to me how there are countless talented minds out there, unheard of and just waiting to be found and have their chance to shine! Thank you for doing this video, Spirit! And I hope you're planning on covering this mod more in the future. Possibly play a few quick Skirmishes once it's fully completed or with more variety than its current build. Love your content, man! Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! 👍

When you think this game could not get any better, they bring a very logical and historically accurate “monk on the water” lol

a lot of this reminds me of how aoe3 water works, ideas that are already proven to work, the boarding being a conversion meanwhile is an excellent new idea

Water is an important part of AOE2 and maps like continental have made some of the most memorable 4v4 team games of my over 20 years playing this game. Continental, open but defensible. Land but water civs can shine too. Is Water unpopular because it is neglected? Or is Water neglected because it is unpopular?

this is a welcome step! Still, I think a big player is missing: the effect of the landscape, which is something important in land strategies. For example, deep water could have some effect on ships (it can damage scout ships and other small ships, can increase ships speed), while low water can reduce big ships speed

This is quite well made and shows how naval warfare could be as nuanced as war on land is. I love the fact that they introduced naval "monks" (never thought of that) and of course naval "villagers"/"builders". I think they missed a trick by not updating the naval trade aspect of the game. However, as much as I love this, I don't know if I really want it. The game is soo complex already with so many civilizations, bonuses, unique units and maps. I think my head would explode making sense of it all if we introduced such a complex naval tech tree.

I really hope AoE devs watch your videos and take some ideas from this as i LOVE the idea of a monk-type water unit and a builder-type water unit as well! Keep up the great content SOTL!

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="74">1:14</a> I sea what you did there, sir.

It's almost like they listened to the players and decided to do something actually good. Love the split into ports and shipyards. Also feel like everyone should start with a port by default on water maps (we do start with TCs after all)

Yes! The juggernaut trireme's were designed so well in AoE1!

Great content as always Spirit.

As a kid playing AoE2 in the late 90's/early 00's I used to love playing on water maps, especially islands so to me this mod looks incredible! Like you said I would love for this to be made official!

Wow now that is awesome. New maps tailored to this overhaul could be real fun to explore, something like where you'd start with a dock and a small wall around it, maybe some natural water "chokepoints" to give you a safe starting fishboom. I want this to be in the game already I'm ready for team islands all day baby.

Really cool. I always like how the ships and docks looked on age I, cool to see it being used like that.

100% agree with splitting out the dock into an economic and military building (port and shipyard). This is my biggest problem with playing water. It's such a pain to send both fishing ships to fish and military ships to the front without accidentally swapping the two.

This is AMAZING! Just 20 sec after hearing of the construction ship and im sold. The ability to add sea defenses shakes me to my nerd core. If AOE2 added this, it would revolutionize map possibilities and strategies, bringing back old players, as well as new blood RTS junkies. A Change like this would ensure AOE2 would thrive for another 20 yrs. Bring these developers on board ASAP!!! Edit: i will say though, after watching the gameplay footage, the counters appear a little too strong. Like, not take a single hit strong. Still, these could be tweaked im sure.

That is very interesting. What a revamp. I hate water fights because it's just 2 units mainly, and you have to dump resources into them to just have more than the enemy.

An immediate problem I see with this is that all of the ships kinda blend together. It's hard to distuinguish them.

Hopefully the official developers take inspiration from them or directly hire the modders. Because the overhaul is interesting to say the least. Obviously is not perfect (I guess the designs are interesting and mostly historical accurate but can be somewhat confused pretty easily at first). Anyway, it is not a bad start.

I think the Galleass could be a cool unique unit for the Italians. No joke my vision for an Italian Gallese was basically the thirisadai. I still think a Galleass could be a cool imperial age water unit. My idea is that it is a cannon galleon that is bigger, slower with better range. However it also functions as a transport ship and the more units you have garrisoned increases the amount of cannon fire. Kind of like the keep except on water. It is also kind of a risk reward mechanic because if you send it into combat with units gairosned in it and it get's killed you lose those units. Also an onager on water would be a cool way to shake things up.

Such cool ideas, I never thought about how to make water interesting before and this is blowing my mind

Like many of the ideas of the mod, especially water defenses and boarding, yet feel like some of these abilities should be featured in the basic ship types instead of adding more single function ships. The first combination to come to mind is merging the fishing ship and construction ship to make it essentially the water counterpart to villagers.

My problem with water maps is wood sources. Forests require large amounts of land mass compared to the other resources, and are thereby far more limited than other resources on water maps, especially since there is a focus on wood heavy units in ships. Resource starvation happens a lot in team games on water maps. If there was a way to change what the trade cog collects between wood and gold, allowing your economy to be more focused on water, that would increase the gameplay options for water maps immensely. And, it would have no impact on the normal games.

I'm glad to sea he's still making such great videos. :)

Man, the in-game sound...brings back so many hours of mindless fun, back when I was on elementary school.

Amazing mod, they put quite some thought and creativity into this! Firing transports sounds like a dream 11.

These modders deserve a god damn job in game making

I like the ideas all around ! but one of the problem I see, is that with so many different ships, it might be hard to differenciate them, they would need to realy play around with the colors and shapes of the sail to make it easy to understand what you are fighting

This looks incredible. Just when you would think that AOE2 can't get much better, this would take it to the next level for sure!! I hope something like this comes to the game.

The egyptian unique transport ship is a thing of beauty. The thing I always loved about the star wars aoe2 clone was there was some truly massive units and buildings and this echoes that. Reminds me of c&c where you see one unit and go "oh shit", its legitimately intimidating to look at

this mod is really impressive, hands down!

@ <a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="72">1:12</a> Awesome PUN in the text there, SoTL! 👍😁 But, I would expect nothing less of you, sir. Hats off. 😊 I love the Boarding Ship. That's a logical, yet brilliant idea. "Water Monk". 😉 So many new Units and interactions for Players to learn. Brilliant! 💎 Thanks, mate! 🙏 M 🦘🏏😎

This is sick. i would love this

I personally don't hate water maps, but most people do. And it's solely because they're not thorough enough. This video shows exactly what is needed to make water maps loveable.

I think what would work best for water, instead of a triangle counter, is a pentagram counter. Aka, 5 ships (none are demolition ships, thats the 6th shiptype), and each ship counters 2 of the others. Maybe one hard and the other softly. Not sure about the exact balance though.

The siege type ships could maybe have their own dock. Maybe a drydock because they are so large/heavy. And the ability for builder ships to make more docks would be nice

super interesting video. I think this amount of ships would be a bit too much for competitive aoe but I'd love to see some of them implemented, also the ability to build water walls and water towers would be so cool to have in the actual game and might actually make water more balanced.

There is some really good stuff in here that many games could learn from. Few RTS games treat naval battles as anything more than an afterthought. An interesting concept (although maybe misplaced in this game) would be units on transport ships being able to fight normally - melee units can repel boarders or board other ships, while archers can attack other ships or any passengers they might be carrying. But it would require ships to have enough visible space for at least a part of its crew (some might be below deck), and would also need to account for one potential boarder for each soldier that would be visible (for the sake of simplicity, you could have boarding parties fight one-on-one).

Everything about this mod is great and congratulations to the team for successfully doing it! I do think water maps need to have more wood and stone, unless of course the entire match focuses only on naval warfare. An idea I have in mind is, Trade Cogs providing the player X amount of wood per "cycle". If not, adjust the price of wood in the Market, although idk how much tinkering is needed to keep the balance.

This looks amazing, hope somehow is related with the actual DLC that is comming.

Great looking mod, be keen to see how l more of this

I love this mod, last time you told us about it, I downloaded and had a lot o fun. Great improvement on ships. The only thing that bother me is the size of the houses looks huge.

The concept of the counters is good, but it's hard to tell one ship type from another, the readability is not there.

This is totally awesome, and should be incorporated int o regular AoE2

This is pretty impressive stuff.

It would be so cool if the real game had the ability to build sea walls, sea gates, and sea towers. Would definitely make water maps more fun and interesting!

this is basically the only reason I even play this mod. naval combat in aoe2 with aoe1 ships are super satisfying.

We need some more historically accurate mechanics. Like the entire Roman fleet sinking. Multiple times.

This looks WAY more fun 😀

Funny that the "Boarding Galley" and "Armored Boarding Galley" were on AoE2 Alpha but it was cut. The unit had the Heavy Transport Ship appearance from AoE1 as a placeholder.

I enjoy your videos, but I believe the puns are the best part by far.

I will like to see a mechanic to get back into water, maybe some kind of dock castle or something, or boats that you can build on land and rapidly deploy, in a water map if you loose water its game over, no matter how good your land eco/lead is

It's nice to hear the original game's music. Great video, Spirit. ¿Does anyone else thinks that, unless the Rome DLC is the officialization of this mod, it will be overshadowed by it?

Yet another revision of Age of Empires 2, unfortunately for my spare time - it looks amazing! I guess all my life I will be playing Doom and Age of Empires 2 variants :D

I would come back to AOE 2 in an instant if they added a mod like this as dlc

Some ideas are cool (the port and shipyard disctinction is a huge plus, juggernaut and boarding ships miss a lot) but I'm not totally sold. You have something like 5 ships that are long distance attack ships with an attack bonus on something. Differentiate the ships in lategame might be pretty hard and messy. All these upgrades might be a big ressource sinkhole, and the fact warship guerrila enables you to get only a few ressources (fishes, that are more used to power land warfare) on most maps makes it useless to have such an intensive water game design. On the maps where water is the center of the attention, it is mandatory to get water control, but then again you don't gain much strategic value other than taking some island spots to make a castle, or take a gold ... Which is again a land mechanic. I'd love for water to give a more rewarding gameplay, with an emphasis on shallow and deep water (like the elevation damage boost, deep fish giving more food ?) , something like coral reefs to get gold on water and would be fought over in islands games, constructor ships that can map both shipyards and ports, maybe a small castle, unkillable neutral merchants trading posts... I mean, real strategic points and means to fight over them

This is so nice!

This is crazy! From graphics to concept design to sound design to resource balance, etc. If the devs of this mod are not getting paid, then this is even more crazier!

Hear me out. A completely water map. Ship wrecks replace trees. Fishing ships are villagers. Sunken treasure for gold. Stone can be Atlantis style ruins. The dock becomes like a town centre and then this mod fills in the rest ie military units and defensive buildings

Love the mod! Had some great fun with a friend of mine but we think that there needs to be a lot more balancing. So keep up the work! People are excited for this. Also, am I the only one that is annoyed by the AoE1 sound of the builders hammering? I wish they would keep the sound sample from AoE2.

The best hope is the AoE team seas this mod, and goes yep water map rework, and takes this as a base adding more unique versions of ships. like imagine the turtle ship getting an immunity to boarding ships, and side cannons for example. Each current unique ship can be given a unique upgrade as well.

WOW! Now water could be interesting if all this apply to the regular game. I think it's just all we wanted for make water amused (except for the awkward movement of the units, but i think that is imposible to solve with this graphic engine). Amazing job!

They basically recreated Ancient Conquest (rts ship game from 1998) into AOE2DE I LOVE IT

my cat loves watching your videos

Really wouldn't mind to seeing some of those concepts inspire some water overhauls in the original game. Well even if they never happen playing with that on the mod will already be plenty of fun

Splitting the dock into multiple buildings is a really great idea, gives more room for techs and units. As one of the few enjoyers of water-maps, I do admit they are way too linear in how they play out. I hope the devs are taking notes!

(<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="620">10:20</a>) - You're Canadian, but are you sure you're not half-American too? 'Qwince-Uh-Remes'... No, no 'Qwin-Qwehr-Eemes' - Quinqueremes. (<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="845">14:05</a>) - Wait you have REDEMPTION too, haha awesome! But overall I have always wanted more sea wall and defence at sea in this game. This is fantastic, thanks for showing it and to those who created it.

Love it!

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="412">6:52</a> Wow, it's that the helepolis?? Such a cool design!

What a great mod! A quick note if you'd like to make some water maps - neutral sea trade points like on AoE4 maps would add even more layer to 1v1 in a good way imo!

NGL, I like the sound of these changes.

I love it!

This is such an amazing idea and implementation!! This mod is already amazing, this simply takes it to a completely different level!! My only complain is that I'm not a fan of water walls... I wish it worked differently or at least looked differently (like chains or something).

It looks great and many of the ideas in the mode should be implement to other games as well, but I must say from my own expirence. Have to many options to pick is in the end worse than have less to pick.

This is mind blowing mod

Love videos on modded stuff, and this mod's water dynamic is crazy interesting. I wish basegame was this deep for water, it's a shame water maps don't get their fair shake.

I really hope the AoE2 Team takes notice!

Love this mod. Would still take me a while to learn to love water and I don't think it solves the fundamental problem of snowballing water because without investing a lot early into naval fortifications you can still lose a fight and then get cleared and dunked off water because, unlike the land, the baseline creation building (TC) has no defensive capacity. I think the one thing this is missing is making all Docks also have an attack.

I love the use of Age of Empires I music, the Definitive Edition AoE ship models and sounds aside the original ships (Elite Scout is AoE "War Galley", and the Juggernauts are "Catapult Trireme/Juggernaut" in AoE, the other ships seem to be unique models) all in all a very cool nod to the original game and a cool looking mod 🙂

I grew up with the naval combat of games like Warcraft 2 and Red Alert 1 (and 2) and I enjoyed it so I'm intrigued by attempts to make naval combat a viable field as much as land. As long as it doesn't go the Red Alert 3 angle where half the units can be ships and half the ships can be tanks.

Damn, Forgotten Empires really should make a water focused DLC.

building see walls is a chilldhood dream come true

I had an idea of how I would change the water balance. It also had the Dock and Shipyard separation, but with basic attack ships (Scout, Fire Galley, and 'archer-ships'). Shipyards would come in in the third age and produce bigger ships that would take multiple population, but are very powerful.

this mod has very good ideas, monks in the water

The rock paper scissor counter thing was in age of mythology already. Naval stuff in aom is awesome

A lot of this I'd like to see introduced into the main game, especially the seperate eco and military docks (the current dock UI is a mess and very confusing to new players!), and the ability to construct defences at sea. As for the ship types, I'd probably only want three in feudal (galley, fire and maybe a ram/scout ship). With more ship types, demo ships could be pushed back to post-chemistry so long as an effective water triangle is mantained early on. The Age 3 boarding a seige ships are a great idea and I'd love to see those included!

I have always wanted buildable sea walls and sea towers! Would add a fascinating extra layer of stratrgy.

I loved the wooden towers found in the campaigns. They're like crappy and cheap watch towers. Wish we could build them!!

Boarding Galley, it was once included in the AOE2 trial version 2 decades ago.

Surely interesting and very well made but I think that the only additions really worth adding without making the water gameplay overly complex are the construction ship, scout ship and monk ship.

This would make me play water maps more often.

<a href="#" class="seekto" data-time="809">13:29</a> It seems like having redemption could be a game changer in water combat situations

I'd rotate a few of the sails and add some horizontal stripes or whatever to distinguish some of the ships from each other. Probably not accurate to history at that point but easier to read, certainly. If the mod author could pull it off, if the boarding ship could shoot out lines and then pull a ship together with them that'd bring a whole new level of utility, like a viper from SC2

I wish land combat was more fleshed out as well. For instance, only having 2 types of infantry units at the barracks is ridiculous, when infantry were by far the most common troops in the middle ages, and there were many types of them.

The Boarding Ship is an awesome, yet simple concept. I wonder why it wasn't utilised before in RTS games...