Through the Ages: Teutons and Japanese (AoE2) 

Cheap Gurjaran Chakrams with blast furnace and squires could be really solid

@@furkansaryerli imperial camels with EXTRA ARMOR

@@SIGNOR-G Bonuses disappear on all techs though so you get the final blacksmith armor but not the +1/+1 bonus

@@SIGNOR-G Also wait didn't they removed that from the Indians/Hindustanis?

@@furkansaryerli i was thinking about the tech with extra armor

I remember building a monument to more than one ancient battlefield of corpses, usually with a temple and a castle to these areas, complete with housing and a combat building for whichever combat unit of mine spread the destruction next to these sites sights. That and being really particular about where I allowed myself to engage AI units, always fighting for the uphill advantage.

I wonder if they removed corpses cause of frame rate or censorship...

@@SIGNOR-G aoe 2 HD addition still has this i think?

@@testaccount4191 i mean in the DE.

@@SIGNOR-G well, DE uses 3D models where as the OG engine used isometric graphics so it could run into more memory issues. I only play on voobly so i would have missed the dev explanation of that, but that is such a shame.

It is so nostalgic

I like it too, but I think it would work better with one video per civilization, rather than 2-3 crammed in. I know I would rather watch shorter and more focused videos more often than one longer video with less focus less frequently.

Me too

Fr🤌😁😁

The conquistadores in DErp look like hunchback freaks, and I'm sure they kept taking power from the Spanish.

The TC range bonus could have also been age gated. (And reduced because you know +5 range is actually insane on ANY unit) (Like +1 Castle, +2 Imperial like Britons archers or +1, +2, +3 starting Fedual)

I’d say TC range affected by blacksmith upgrades would be cool since Teutons don’t get bracer plus fletching and bodkin aren’t usually go-to techs for them anyways, so they’d have to deviate from other useful upgrades to make it happen. It’d be more about stopping mangonel pushes than sniping enemy TC’s.

​@@dazenith4517 Only problem is that even a +1 advantage on the town centers in Feudal Age would allow the Teuton TC to shoot another TC to death without practical counter. Also, there would have had to be a minimum of +3 for the original intent to allow an extra layer of farms to be covered by the TC. A +1 would thus not only not really help protect anything around the TC not already protected, but would still make it a functional Deathstar. Really, I am not seeing any way to balance the TC range without siege being available in Feudal Age, and even then, the enemy could drop a Deathstar faster than anyone was likely to build a siege engineer in the Feudal Age.

@@genericpersonx333 +1 range would likely not do that. Or more specifically would be far far FAR more difficult to pull off against any player paying attention. Since you would literally have to start building right in the opponents face. Mind you. You would also need to age up FIRST. Then delete your TC and then build a new one. By the time you get your villagers over to the enemies TC they should likely already have significant military. Enough to kill most of your vills attempting to build the TC.

@@dazenith4517 Difficult or not, once that TC is down with 15 villagers inside it, it would be unlikely that most Feudal-age players would be able to successfully destroy it. Whatever the case, it would be bad mojo in my opinion.

Its pretty likely. One thing I've noticed about game developers (from listening to so much commentary from them) is that even when they cut an idea from a game they tend to keep it in their minds just in case they decide to try implementing the idea in the future.

Check out Sandy Petersens interviews on his RU-vid channel. The current AOE II devs have taken a lot of cues from him and his old ideas. Guess they failed to read this interview however about attack type switching being a bad idea, which I fully agree with. The Ratha is annoying to use and annoying to play against, strongish sure, but not fun on either end.

@@dougler500 "The Ratha is annoying to use and annoying to play against" - that's just like, your opinion, man!

@@dougler500 they get more gimmicky with each expansion

I think a compromise that wouldn't be a complete overhaul of the samurai is if they could shoot arrows from buildings, like Teuton infantry after crenellations. Might be too much on top of Yasama, though.

There was a reason why the hardest mission was the fifth one, when you don't have a town center 🤣

Is there a way to get the original AoK now though? I've been searching for it for a long time now, and, the closest I've found is AoC. I've been wanting to re-experience that +5 Teuton TC range in the Barbarossa campaign for years now. xD Do you know where I can get the original AoK, assuming it can still be played on current Windows systems?

@AlHasan Sameh I posted a reply to your comment, but, idk, I don't see the comment now. So, gonna write it again, just in case. Thank your very much, kind stranger. I appreciate it very much. :) Don't go out of your way to help me/us. But, if you still want to try and share a link, it would be really awesome. Thank you. :) Also, it's awesome to hear that people are still playing on voobly. So many memories. :)

Yeah, noticed that some comments actually go missing all of a sudden. I fear it's unjustified censorship.

@@michaelandreipalon359 There’s plenty of censorship around here, but one thing YT will do consistently is auto-delete any comments with external links. You can only comment links to other YT videos.

Don't forget Chinese not getting block printing tech lol.

i could see chinese also being divided up into more civs at some point, with one getting firesticks/some gunpowder focus whilst the other keeps chu ko nu.

@@boarfaceswinejaw4516 That’s a lot harder to justify because that's functionally a separation in time, between different eras of Chinese history, rather than between culture/people groups, which has been the operating principle for AoEII, both with what happened to Indians and also with the introduction of multiple individual Slavic civilizations to the game as well (Poland, Bulgaria etc.) all the while "Slavs" still stands by itself in an awkward coexistence with the aforementioned civs. It's a problem somewhat unique (though not entirely) to such long-lived civs as the Chinese and Byzantines. Imagine if you gave the Byzantine Empire two or more civs, one for the early period when it was still a superpower stretching across continents, and another for the high medieval polity centered around modern greece and turkey. You could absolutely make those two civs distinct from each other, but that's going along a different axis of separation than the one AoEII uses between civs.

Byzantines had to represent late Western Rome in the campaign, that's where that's coming from.

@@Alias_Anybody Not necessarily. If you are referring to the bit about the Byzantines speaking Latin. That was still the language of government and administration in the Eastern Roman Empire up until the 7th century. The Romans used both Greek and Latin a lot throughout their entire history. As early an Emperor as Claudius complimented a foreign diplomat because he was fluent in "both our languages", referring to Latin and Greek.

They were originally supposed to have both modes, but they were unable to make it work at the time. Of course, now we have such units...but it's probably not easy to change the Samurai now.

weeb

I could only imagine the upgrade dependency now. Cav Archer -> Infantry kinda like the Konnik you say? Blacksmith: Archer armour, infantry armour, archer attack, infantry attack. Barracks: Squires, Arson Archery Range: Thumb Ring, Parthian Tactics Stable: Bloodlines, Husbandry University: Ballistics, Chemistry Castle: Elite Upgrade 21 upgrades. I think this makes them equal to the other unit with the highest number of upgrades unless I am missing or forgetting something.

@@dazenith4517 its probaly more, the other 2 competitors were the konnik which didnt need chemistry, archer armor and atack and the new chariot thing that only needs 1 armor (archer i think)

@@davidpereira5969 Possibly yeah. Though I can't remember the upgrade tallies for either of them or any other high upgrade count units.

Maybe this video will encourage that change in a future update

@@Ashman792 Unlikely. The community tends to react quite negatively to major changes to classic civilizations. Changing the Samurai at this point would be highly controversial.

Just play Age of Empires 3.

@@ArawnOfAnnwn On this specific topic I kinda disagree. This ability originally being intended for the Samurai has been such a well-known bit of trivia for such a long time that I think it would actually be received positively if implemented. It would also boost their anti-UU identity even further by buffing their strength against cavalry UU's in a roundabout way.

@@Copperhell144 Just said this under a different comment, but I think a slight change that would be nice is if samurai could shoot arrows from buildings, like Teuton infantry after crenellations. It's not much, but it'd be one more small benefit from actually using infantry as Japanese.

back then they were actually relevant and useful.

The problem with tk was never that they weren't, as you put it, incredibly powerful. Of course they always were. The problem is and always was that if you concentrate that many resources on a single unit, you better get some use out of it... and the only use of a tk is to punch anything that voluntarily walks up to it very hard, which is a rather restrictive niche.

@@naphackDT Not helped that Aoe2 Meta aggressively favours cavalry, archers, cavalry archers. Combine that with every new civ having some variation of armor ignoring and the TK looks really weak. There really is no justification for why they should be one of the only UU with an active debuff (slow as shit)

Teutonic Knights actually look better in old graphics. New cape reflections and new teamcolors in general and incompetently textured and animated, they look flat instead of shiny.

AOE 1 had a much smaller population cap, and resources were more limited, so the units had to count, which explains why most of them had huge stats.

I guess then if the devs add a ranged mode to the samurai..... Even assuming the target has more PA than the samurai's pierce atk, that overwhelming fast rate of fire combined with damage to UUs will make any army look like a joke in front of it. On top of it, it costs only 90 resources. People tend to love simple things the most. That's why there is much love for the samurai and the original AoE2 unique units.... And not much for new ones... Heck some people even hate the Urumi because of a new gimmick.

They can always rework it in the future.

It's interesting to consider. I'm just going to assume "balanced" stats for a hypothetical Japanese unique infantry unit with the ability to switch between melee and ranged. There should be some trade-offs so that each mode has situations in which it shines. There are two ways I could envision it being added to the game. A) The devs could add an option to switch modes to the existing samurai unit. There would probably be knock-on effects from balance decisions being made based on samurai being able to switch, but players could still choose to abstain from using such an ability if they really want to play with samurai the way they've worked since AoK. B) The devs could give the Japanese a second unique unit with the ability to switch between melee and ranged. Other civs have multiple unique units, so this isn't outrageous. The problem is establishing an identity for its melee mode. And making the unit itself on par with the samurai in terms of coolness. Maybe there are more ways for the devs to give the Japanese such a unit, but I can't think of any at the moment. The ratha has proven that the concept is viable, at least from a technical standpoint. It would be nice to see a prototype of the version of the samurai as it was originally envisioned, especially if the community could voice their opinions on it.

Imagine a hybrid between those two civs. Hell if you could replace the Knight line with the cataphract and the have the Teutonic Knight as a complementary unit to the militia line, you'd have a civ so dominant in melee battles that the only option would be ranged attacks.

@@Reaper_03-01 The Teutons already are that though. All of their melee units have so much extra melee armor that unless you have bonus damage, ranged is the only way to cost effectively take the fights.

Give him time for the new civs. He's not the kind of creator from whom you'd want half baked analysis.

@@harishsubramanian1241 You're right... These civs each need to be tried and tested by all in the community and Spirit himself thoroughly before he can voice opinions.

You won't get civ overviews for the new civs for a while. He tends to wait until the civ has been patched and rebalanced enough to have settled down before making civ overviews for them. That could mean the overview comes months after they were released.

There were actually 13 original civs

@@jefffinkbonner9551 He already did a video looking at three of them, so 8 more

What civ do u main

They look much more flashy, yes. I also like the graphics of DE. But I also really adore the somewhat stale old graphic specifically of the Teutonic Knight. It looks a bit like a man in a suit walking around and doing badss stuff such as more or less replacing every other sieg unit because the knight itself can and will bring buildings down reliably fast compared to most siege. Or killing Paladins 1v1 and even withstanding Jaquars and most archers for a remarkable length.

I don't really like the DE units stiff fondant capes tho

@@dirkauditore8413 Bohemians, Spanish, Mongols would probably be my main three

@@Randleray they still do that though, do they not?

Oh I wasn't born when aok came out but my father has a lot of memories from those days he didn't face as many teutonic death stars but the few times he did he absolutely hated it back in those days it was all Franks and Mongols

All units have stances like in aoe2 but all ranged units have melle modes and all melle or ranged units have a siege mode to atack buildings

I guess players were more patient back then

Maybe make a mount/dismount mechanic for Samurai, where when mounted they act as a slightly worse Cav archer but with bonus vs Cavalry. And when dismounted they would be the infantry Samurai we have now, with bonus vs UU's.

I don't think it would be much more than a Paladin spamfest unfortunately.

@@ruludos1977 Or towering until one side missplaces a tower and giving the enemy a gap.

@@ruludos1977 With teuton TC rush you won't get to paladin

Not surprising tbh. Game developers do get around a lot (i.e. laid off when a game is finished).

Well they defense forces never dropped so that would make actually sense.

Then what about the Koreans actually ? I heard they were pretty solid and quite well known as a defensive civ too, in fact...

@@798jeremy Yeah they are, but my point was about the "Defensive" classification being removed from Teutons for no apparent reason, whereas Koreans never had it to begin with (even though you could say they should).

Civ descriptions are a curious beast as the Britons are classified as a “Foot archer civilization” which is fair enough except that the Mayans-who don’t actually have a single mounted unit-are just classified as an “Archer civilization.”

@@jefffinkbonner9551 The thing is, In AoK there have been only two classifications: Defensive and Offensive. The specifics of 'foot archer civilization' were added with Conqs. And if I remember correctly, especially the Teutons and the Byzantines were two of the very very small group that kept their 'old' civ classification until Forgotten. Teutons lost it while are still described as slow and especially tanky. The Byzantines still have the old classification from over 20 years ago, but the only real defensive thing that they have going is a full tree for upgrading building HP and getting LOS for free. Looking at their techtree, they are actually quiet manouverable and especially the Cataphract is a great offensive cav... on top of that, Byzantines get discounts on every counter trash. Meaning they can just mix in a healthy amount of trash in every composition to throw off the enemies planned army.

This would be awesome