Post by carni30 in The Fertile Crescent comments

Viewing post in The Fertile Crescent comments

I downloaded this yesterday and I absolutely love it. I love AOE and so now I love this game. However, there are some things I hope to see in this game. I know not everything will be incorporated but none the less. I hope I can help. Bear with me. this could be a minute.

Just random questions:

If I have a group of houses to be built, is there anyway to have a villager continue to build houses without me selecting every house and telling him to build it? In AOE if you tell a villager to build a wall, he will continue to build said wall without stopping until they are finished. Its frustrating and time consuming when I have to micro manage. AOE isn't perfect but it has its quirks.
Will individual units be able to upgrade or will there just be more powerful units? Like a slinger for example, will it be able to be upgraded to a more powerful slinger or will the next unit be more powerful than the last? A composite bowman is more powerful than a slinger so will the next unit be more powerful than the composite bowman?
I haven't really noticed but is this game taking place in one age or are there other ages? I mean you go from copper to bronze when upgrading the units. Are the copper units an age and then the bronze an age or how is that going to work?

Now onto somethings I would like to see in game:

Walls
Guard towers
Cavalry units
Siege units (catapults, trebuchet, or any other siege units)
Maps that would incorporate water for either fishing boats or naval units
Allies
Trade with said allies
How about a chapel for priests. I had my scout out and he was attacked and I would've liked to have healed him. This could be done 2 ways: either priests are incorporated or we can have selected unit healed inside the tribe center.
More advanced tech tree.
Will there be more tribes? I want to be able to, not only select my tribe but the tribes of either my ally and enemies. Or maybe just have a "random" button.

There's more stuff I'd like to mention but I'll keep my comments short and sweet. I know this game is to mimic AOE and not be AOE at the same time. If you could just play AOE and take a lot of things from that, that would help you to understand what I mentioned above. I absolutely love AOE and I would like to see this game come close to being it. I took what I know from AOE and offered suggestions and I hope this helps.

I'm SUPER EXCITED to receive updates and I can't wait to watch and play as this grows into something more. I know as time goes on and I receive updates I'll more to mention so until then, It's been fun!!

If I could ask one more question. What's going to happen to the ones who downloaded this for free and played it and then made comments about this? Will it still be free to us while updates are going on or will we have to pay for this at a later date?

LincRead5 years ago (1 edit) (+1)

Hello, and thank you for sharing you passion for Age of Empires, the RTS genre and our project!

We've played Age of Empires since we were little kids. I remember when I was 9 (this was in 1997) my best friend and I were camping in a tent in the yard, and we had brought a game magazine with us. In it was an article about Age of Empires. I still remember a picture of villagers standing in a circle around a shaman. I thought he was talking to them and that the game seemed really realistic!

Moving on from nostalgia, our goal is not to mimic Age of Empires. We understand that the inspiration from Age of Empires is the most obvious, but it's inspired by a handful of RTS games that we love. However, most of all, the game mechanics are inspired by history.

We did initially experiment with upgrading through ages (one of my favourite features in Age of Empires), but it was an idea we quickly tossed away. The Fertility Crescent will only focus on the Bronze Age of the Near East.

Another obvious difference is how technology is researched. For example, we initially implemented that technology has to be researched in buildings, like in AOE, but we soon discovered that for our concept a technology tree is a lot more powerful. You have a better overview of technology research because everything is in one place, and part of our vision is broader paths of strategy.

To answer your other questions:
- Queuing construction of buildings for villagers is definitely something we'll look into when we start implementing walls.
- We're not planning to add upgradable units like the ones you find in Age of Empires. To improve your units you will need to research certain technologies (like Composite Bow for Bowman) or equip units with copper and bronze equipment in the Furnace.
- We will keep a free version of the game on itch.io, but for the premium version we will have to charge everyone to be able to support development, servers etc. These types of games take thousands of hours to develop and we have families to provide for. The price will reflect the amount of content and won't be ridiculously high - promise! :)

Of the content you're suggesting at least 7 of the bullet points are 100% planned. We'll just have to wait and see about the rest!