Real Time Strategy

[A picture of a large number of people seated at a conference around a large circular table]: AoE4 players agreeing that the upcoming Vikings civ should be called Denmark/Danes

In 1997 I got hired at Ensemble Studios. My first task was to create a magic-based RTS game to be a sister product to Age of Empires. Tim Deen was my lead programmer, and Scott Winsett my lead artist. They were (and are) great devs. We had other artists, and later on a few more programmers.

I named it Sorceress, based on the plot (which I won't go into here), and here is how it worked.

You'd design your own sorcerer, outside the game, and put him into a stable of sorcerers. You'd then load up one of your sorcerers when you started a game. You got 4-6 points to customize him. A point might purchase a group of spells (typically 2-6 related spells, plus their upgrades), extra starting Numina (our word for spell points) or a pre-generated band of warriors who would appear a few minutes into the game.

There were four realms of magic, each with its own preferred style. These were Dawn, Sun, Twilight, and Moon. The map had magic items to find, and immobile objects of value that you could derive magic or troops or spells from. These could be obelisks, moonstones, volcanos, magic groves, etc.

The random map generator included "supertiles" which let us have gigantic things like a Temple of Doom or one of those big skull mountains you see in cheap fantasy art.

1/3

You had two resources. Numina and Energy.

Numina is spent to power spells. Your sorcerer has his own personal Numina, and some creatures also have Numina which you can spend. Numina regenerates slowly, so you want to conserve it if you can.

Energy comes in the four realms (Dawn, Sun, Twilight, and Moon). This determines which spells you have available, based on how much Energy you have in that realm. For instance, the Werewolf permanently turns a human soldier into a werewolf. It costs 5 Numina, but you can only cast it if you have at least 50 Moon Energy. The Energy isn't spent - it's a requirement. This forces you to build up your Energy level over time to get good spells. It's also a unit limit. If you have 50 Moon you can only have 50 Moon worth of moon creatures and buildings. Weak creatures take 1 Moon to exist, stronger ones might cost more. So Energy is also a unit unit limit.

This is how I had you ramp up your magical power over time. You'd start with a little Numina and almost no Energy. Then as you built shrines and wizard towers and started tying yourself into resources, your Energy would increase, and your wizard would level up (more Numina) and he could summon familiars and mine magic rocks or harvest magic fruit (or whatever) for more.

2/3

You could train apprentices, who then became mobile spellcasting turrets. You could also give them magic items. Basically, an apprentice lets your sorcerer be in more than one place at a time. They can be killed, resurrected, captured, and even ransomed. I had set ransoms that the enemy had to release your apprentice if you paid.

Resource gathering and production was completely unlike Age of Empires. A Sacred Grove was a map feature. Once you attuned a Grove, you could train Green People from it (the lowest level of elf archers). You can then upgrade it to a Bower, which lets it shoot arrows, making it a defensive tower. If you find a magic stone, you can take it to the Bower, and now it starts accumulating Dawn Energy at the rate of 1/minute. Other upgrades make your Green People better, or the Bower's arrows more potent, etc.

I'd worked out 36 unit types by the time the project ended. They ranged from Sea Serpents to Vampire Trees to Basilisks (which turned enemies to stone which could be mined) to Crossbowmen to Amazons (who rode chariots) to Lizardmen (who were fast & strong in the day and weak at night) to Wraiths (who were deadly killers at night and weak in the day).

There is lots more I could discuss, but when Age of Empires 2 poached all of my people, I decided we couldn't do a whole RTS game with three of us, so we did Rise of Rome instead.

For every completed project, I have at least three canceled ones. No doubt there's an alternate universe where we never did Rise of Rome, but there's an awesome Sorceress game. But also Age of Empires 2 was delayed by a year because they didn't steal my team. Is that a better universe than this one? Who knows?

Anyway if you want to know more about Sorceress, let me know below.

One of the most fun civs for me to work in for Age of Empires: The Rise of Rome were the Palmyrans. They were also pretty obscure. I needed three civilizations to face off against Rome. For Rome's early days, I had the Macedonians (Epirus, for instance). For middle Rome I had Carthage. And for late Rome, I had to kind of go looking for a bad guy. I guess I could have had Huns or Goths, but Goths were already in the game, and Huns were soooo late that Rome was already Christian.

But I knew history, and I knew about the short-lived empire of Palmyra, and it's famous sexy queen Zenobia. How do I know she was sexy? Because historic movies & TV series have taught me that EVERY ancient queen was sexy. It's the rule.

Anyway Palmyra built itself initially on trade from Rome, but then it decided it deserved its own kingdom, and spread out. Though the major part of the Palmyran threat was only 50 years or so, it was a real menace to Rome. How do we know? The Romans said so. And they would know. Palmyra stood a sizable chance of taking down the eastern Roman Empire and actually did seize Egypt. If she could also get Anatolia, she'd control the vast majority of Roman wealth. If Zenobia's plan worked out, she would rule a more powerful nation than Rome and could dictate whatever terms she pleased. Fortunately for Rome, they saw the threat and Aurelian managed to crush Palmyra, capture Zenobia, and save the day.

Zenobia might well have won if she'd gotten more Persian support, or if Rome had been then ruled by someone like Commodus, Michael Ringas, or Elagabalus. Sadly, it was Aurelian, who was competent. Maybe she should have assassinated him. After all, when Aurelian DID die, his widow took over, and didn't do a great job of it. Finally the senate chose an elderly senator for the job. So yeah, bad luck for Zenobia.

Anyway, on to the Palmyran civilization for Rise of Rome!

1/

I started right out with giving them super-villagers. They had protective armor and worked 20% faster. However, I made their villagers cost 75 food instead of 50. This I felt would make Palmyra really interesting, because it totally changes the early game. So from the get-go you're focused on keeping track of what's going on. You can't just run on automatic.

I say that I gave them 20% extra work speed, and I did, but it wasn't that simple. You see, villagers do more than just gather stuff. They gather stuff. Then they walk to their drop site and dump it off, then they walk back to the gather point, path around their co-workers, and finally start working again. There's delay in all this, and I couldn't really avoid it. So in order to give them the +20% promised, I actually gave them extra, so that needing to walk around wouldn't reduce it too much. I'm told that in fact it ended up being something like 40-45% faster for most tasks, and about 33% faster for woodcutters and fishermen.

But another reason for this is I kept upgrading the work rate for the Palmyrans so they could keep up but left the description the same, still saying they got +20%. I didn't get called on it so ...

Now you start with 200 food in Age of Empires, and I didn't change this. This means that a normal civ can queue up 4 villagers immediately, while you can only do 2 (with 2/3 of a villager's food cost left over). So you need to get your dudes working as fast as possible! This was changed in the Definitive Edition to give Palmyra +75 food so you could dawdle around a little more. Wimps. Or maybe this was smart, because I'm told they actually also nerfed the villager work rate to a flat 25% instead of what I'd done. So the villagers were lazier and you had more food to pay for them. Well, as always, making the game more vanilla DOES make it better balanced. But not necessarily more fun.

/2

Palmyrans were famously rich, so I had two gold boosts for them. First, when you pay Tribute in Age of Empires, it gets taxed. Not for Palmyra. They get the full amount, which makes them the right guy to send money to. They also get more gold from their trade carts & ships. I think I originally had double the gold, but now it's been nerfed.

I realize both these bonuses are only good if you are playing a team game, but most of our games WERE team games by this time, and we assumed lots of other players were in the same boat. My apologies if we were wrong.

I had added Camels to the game for Rise of Rome, and Palmyra, based out of Syria, was an obvious choice for a camel bonus, so I made theirs 25% faster. They could strike in and out of your town quickly, and the high gold cost of camels wasn't as big a deal for Palmyra. This was their only military bonus - my logic was that they had such an interesting economy, balancing super villagers with regard to cost & work rate, they wouldn't need a lot of other nit picky things to worry about.

It did work though. Palmyrans were probably the most popular civ in Rise of Rome, and I think it's because of their weird economy. Also they were the only civ that specifically had a camel rider bonus. So I feel they were a complete and utter success.

/end

So making the Romans. I had two goals. First, I wanted the Romans to FEEL Roman. I wanted the player to feel like Caesar, commanding his legions & auxiliaries to wipe out the puny foes. Second, I wanted the Roman bonuses to be simple, straightforward, and obvious.

Lots of the Age of Empires civ bonuses are subtle, or only become clear after you've played for a while. But I didn't want that for the Romans. I wanted players to immediately start talking up the Romans in forums and elsewhere - to evangelize the Rise of Rome. This meant they couldn't have weird or esoteric advantages. It had to be easy to understand, so a player could just say, "Wow! The Romans get X!" X, of course being awesome.

You have to remember that no one had ever done an expansion like this - we were NOT sanguine about its success. I mean, I felt it would be a hit, but things can always go wrong, and the Homo habilis creatures that dominate MicroSoft's marketing and advertising could easily screw up, with their tiny over-caffeinated brains. ROMA REGNAT 1/

[A screenshot of the game, showing a Roman colosseum]

But yeah I had to use swordsmen for them. Now Age of Empires swordsmen aren't anyone's favorite. They don't have lots of health. They're not fast. They're not ranged. They ARE cheap at least. When facing hoplites, cavalry, or archers, they get skunked. What could I do? Well, one thing I COULDN'T do was give them extra health. The Choson civilization already had that as a bonus, and I didn't want to copy them.

Well the easiest thing to do is increase their attack. I had the Roman swordsmen attack 50% faster. This is h uge actually. If you understand the Lancaster numbers, it means a Roman swordsman is 2.25x as good as a normal one. Now, this has drawbacks. If you're attacking catapults or archers, it doesn't help a bit. Butt it pays off once you close in.

SALVETE ROMAM

2/

Picture this - you are attacked by Roman swordsmen. Naturally you pump out some archers or hoplites or (if you have them) elephants. But the Romans are caving in your buildings 50% faster. While you are training archers, suddenly your Archery Range crumbles. You try to train cavalry, but you get "housed" as the Roman swordsmen burn out your slums. You send villagers to build new houses and the Romans kill them in record time. Speed has a quality all its own.

Faster killing is at its most effective when used by skilled players, but we figured early adopters of Rise of Rome would be above average.

We have now made swordsmen pretty cool. What's next? Famously the Romans had ballista as a standard battlefield weapon. So yeah a Ballista bonus, and I had the perfect bonus. Just simply give them +1 range. Let's unpack this. If you are attacking enemy ballistas, your ballistas shoot first. Then their ballistas need to roll forward to get in range and shoot back. But now your ballistas in the second rank can still hit the enemy, but their rear-rank ballistas have to maneuver to the sides, since the front row is full of ballistas already. This takes even longer for them to get into action, meanwhile you are hitting them.

My example is ballista vs. ballista, but it applies to any range combat. That +1 range really makes more of a difference than one might think. One feature is that usually the first time you realize the Romans are in town comes when a bunch of bolts hits your woodcutters from off-screen.

Having good ballistas is also synergistic for the Romans. One of the main cheap counters to swordsmen is archers, and ballistas devastate archers. So fielding a swordsman/ballista army is a good combo, and you look pretty damn ROMAN as you order them forward. Of course there are plenty of units that can kill ballistas but the swordsman horde should be a comfort.

ROMA VINCIT

/3

I felt I had a solid military for Rome. But I needed a good economic bonus. Many economic bonuses in Age of Empires were picky or just focused on a single resource. The Yamato's only econ bonus was in fishing, which obviously sucked on all-land maps.

Rome needed an easy to understand bonus that helped everything. My first idea was to give them an instant resource reward each time they Aged up. This not only would give them an incentive to advance, but provide immediate funds for an army. It didn't seem "Roman" enough though. Anywhere there's one of the great unused bonuses from Age of Empires.

What I ended up doing is having ALL their buildings (except walls) cost 10% less. This meant they could build houses a little sooner. They could lay down mills sooner. They could build town centers cheaper. It also helpes their military by making barracks and siege workshops cheaper. Not much - a Roman storage pit costs 315 instead of 350. But that's enough wood for part of a house.

Also, this cheap building thing lasts forever. It's ALWAYS good. My theoretical "extra Aging resources" would wear off, but the cheap buildings are helping you even in the late game. I mean it's always nice to build a barracks near the enemy town 10% sooner, right?

I decided the Romans needed a defensive boost too, based on their famous ability to defend their camps. Something to give them time to put together their longsword/ballista army. I went with towers, and had them cost only 90 stone instead of 150. I realize this is a huge bonus, but I needed a huge bonus to entice the Romans into building towers, since they're fundamentally an attack civ. This would let them rely on defenses early on, risking an enemy rush, so they could attack with a zillion troops in Iron Age.

The goal was for Roman towers to be up before anyone else's, hopefully before the Shang come raiding with their crappy cavalry. An unexpected use was that you could build towers in an enemy town cheap, but I didn't think of that while designing the bonus.

Towers are also a mobile, flexible defense, & that seemed Roman.

ODIMUS ROMAM

/4

Did I succeed? Yes and no. The Romans were fun, and got played a lot. They didn't dominate the game as I'd expected. Usually when I saw people talking about Rise of Rome online, they talked up the Palmyrans or Carthage, possibly because they had whack econ bonuses that required lots of discussion. Plus they had weird units (camels & elephants).

The Romans became the "good quiet kid" who sits on the edge of the class and gets ignored. Everyone likes him kinda, but no one LOVES him. Oh well. They were still the hero of the campaign and I'll forever stand by the fact they are fun & easy to play. That might be why they weren't discussed so much - they are so straightforward no one needed to whine online.

ROMA EST MAXIMA

/end