hey guys Spirit at the law here in this video we're going to take a glimpse at how great
water maps in Age of Empires 2 and 4 could have been if it was fully fleshed out this isn't to
disparage what we have in game as the focus has understandably always been almost entirely on
land maps and keeping water Maps relatively simple but a recent update to the Roman War mod shows you
really can have the same complexity and dynamic counters on water that you see on land the general
plan for this video is to go through the different types of ships and buildings being added to that
mod how they interact and how interesting it can make Naval battles first of all though again this
is just a mod and not an official DLC I've covered it before but in case this is your first exposure
to it it's an ancient Roman themed overhaul replacing the game's civilizations and units
while adding some new game mechanics and in this case completely remaking the entire Naval Tech
tree with way more choices and interactions to be clear this is not the same thing as the upcoming
return of Rome DLC though I would personally love for them to bring these modders on board with that
as the the mod has so many innovative ideas I made a tutorial before on how to install it which is
linked below and basically just download the files and copy paste them into a particular folder it's
pretty quick and easy so with that let's talk about the changes the first is the port which
is where you make fish trade and transport ships like usual but you also have a new construction
ship this one's unique because it can build C Towers sea walls and Gates we've seen them in
scenarios but now they're actually in the game or at least a mod the tower and walls cost a mix of
stone and wood so you'd have to go on Stone early but it means you can section off parts of the map
to protect your fishing ships or prevent sneaky Naval Landings with enough resources you can even
try to wall in someone's Island so there's a lot of strategic options here the sea towers are a
little shorter range than a regular Watchtower and are fairly easy to take out with demo rafts
but right away you can see how the mod is making water immediately feel more like land another
little change is the fishing ships Canal Garrison import this is true for all civilizations and and
not just your jars which aren't in the mod as obviously this is a Mediterranean theme as it
is Rome at war after all so that's the port which is your economic building and separately
there's also a shipyard with a couple of extra Flags added to it in this architectural style
to make it distinct it's on the second building page for the Builder and is for military ships
only in fact you can't even drop food at this building this is purely for making your Navy now
there's lots of things to build at the shipyard including five main types of ships in feudal one
more in Castle and three more in Imperial age so let's take a look at the different types
first off you have the basic three ship types in feudal age that we're all used to you have
the monoreme which is basically just the galley the fire Galley and the demolition raft so this
part should be very familiar fire galleys beat monoremes up close monoremes destroy demo rafts
before they get close enough because of their range and demo rafts get good value against groups
of bunched up fire galleys that basic more or less rock paper scissors has been preserved they then
go on to add two more ships the first is the Scout Galley which does what it says it's quick to build
has a good line of sight and is tied with the demo raft as the fastest so it's perfect for scouting
while the others caused a decent amount of wood and gold this one only costs a bit of food and
wood and I see this being something you would open with to find enemy ports and starting positions
but would follow up with an actual warship to do any damage the other new addition in feudal age
is the hemiolia which I see as analogous to the Longboat but available to everyone in feudal it
fires multiple arrows and is decent against fire galleys and fishing ships but is soft countered
by monoremes which are the equivalent of galleys notice this means you have two types of units that
are technically good against fire galleys either demo rafts or the hemiolia Longboat type of ship
what I like about this is we now have a new rock paper scissors that doesn't involve a unit you
have to self-destruct and takes the pressure off demos having to be your answer to mass Fire Ship
the Scout ship also has a pretty clear role as something you open with one or two of discount
so you can see we're really getting away from spamming one single unit in feudal age so now
let's advance to the castle age or late Antiquity H as it's called in the mod all of the ships we've
seen can be upgraded and like vanilla AOE 2 that's largely done by a single general purpose
upgrade the Scout ship and hemiolia upgrade for free and the three others require just a single
Tech that's pretty cheap the main difference here though is we have a new boarding ship that's been
added now the boarding ship is basically as you might expect a monk but on water and attaches
itself to an enemy ship immobilizing it and after a few seconds we'll convert it to your side if the
boarding ship isn't destroyed I personally love this Edition both from a historical perspective
as this is how fleets at the time largely fought but also for bringing the monk onto the water in
a very logical way what I like even more though is the counter to the boarding ship is the Scout
ship not only is it cheap and easy to make so it's a low value Target but scouting ships have large
bonus damage against sporting ships reminiscent of the Scout cavalry's bonus damage against monks
this means you actually have a purpose to making Scout ships even in the mid game and it keeps them
relevant as they really are the most effective counter despite being weak to every other type
of Warship now if that wasn't enough variety already there's even more land units coming to
water in imperial Age first off many civilizations get a new tech called reinforced prow which gives
your monoremes that you've now upgraded to bireme and finally trireme a brand new ability instead
of attacking with their usual bolts you can give them a ramming ability basically like coustillier
charge quickly wiping out any small forces that you come across they deal an initial hit with
over a hundred damage but but then revert to a very weak melee attack to make up for it as
they recharge the Imperial age also brings three entirely new ship types two of them initially
appear kind of like the cannon Galleon though one called the Juggernaut is specialized to be more
like an onager with an area attack you can switch to that's devastating against bunched up ships
but has the trade-off of minimum range while the other is called the octares this one's more like
the traditional Canon Galleon or trebuchet dealing a lot of anti-building bonus with an incredibly
long range finally The Last Ship is the quadrireme which is basically the all-around ultimate warship
that's super expensive but population efficient if things are getting kind of hectic in the late game
and instead of counters you just want to spam one overpowering unit then this is basically what that
is it reminds me a bit of the war elephant where you have a massive economy and funnel all of your
resources into raw power on the field or in this case the water of course all the previous types
of ships can be upgraded as well so there's a lot of variety in Imperial age and at a certain point
it's nice to have a fallback that's it's just generally good against most of the things you'll
run into even if it is quite expensive I should mention there's also a unique transport ship
that can carry up to 45 units and fires arrows based on how many units are garrisoned though I
believe that one's unique to the Egyptians only now I realize that was a lot of information very
quickly and keep in mind not every civilization has full access to these or at least are missing
some of the last upgrades to certain lines so as any one civilization you're often working with a
slightly restricted version of this to give a better sense of how this all works in practice
and to make it more intuitive I thought I'd show a bit of a tutorial mission that comes with the
update they put together a little game in a style of Art of War where you pick counter ships to what
the AI is throwing at you it's very well put together and does a perfect job reinforcing a
lot of the counters we've covered if you already have the mod you can just download the tutorial
on the workshop and then you can find it under the custom scenarios tag I won't show the whole thing
as it is quite long but I'll just give a sense of how a few of these interactions look in practice
so just a quick word of warning make sure whenever you're using a data mod including
this one you're setting the mod in the corner before you start or the game gets very confused
and it's just going to crash all right so here we're in the tutorial we've got six enemy ships
and they are all Elite Scout ships and I'm gonna have to pick some unit I'm gonna get five of those
to fight it and it gives me all the options here basically I just click on the shipyard
and it's going to give me that corresponding ship you see there's actually a lot of them
and if you click on any one of them it tells you not only all of their stats and all their
bonuses but also what they're strong against and weak against so this is just practice there's no
time pressure on anything although I guess you could micro the units and put some pressure on
yourself and if you don't lose too many ships you can actually get gold medals and stuff like that
okay so it doesn't really matter what I pick against this it says it's weak against the uh
basically any warship except for boarding ships so we'll just pick the regular old trireme here
okay now we gotta follow that up and we have to fight triremes so
this is exactly what I just used this is basically the galley line so the rate
response would be the Fast Fire Ship I believe so let's see how that goes
okay so the next one's a little tricky so this is the trireme but with the ram attack and you
can see it's got regular three melee except a hundred extra attack on its first hit so uh
this one let's see look at weekends Fast Fire ships I have trouble believing that but okay
at boarding ships uh maybe not for outnumbered and heavy demolition ships and I'd rather not
blow up all my own ships so I'm gonna do what it suggests I'm gonna go with the Fast Fire ship
okay well this is actually really really effective wow fire ships are really good against those okay
so the next one here is the Fast Fire ships that's what I just had there's a couple ways to deal with
that I'd rather not blow up my own ships with the heavy demo ship so that's one thing I like about
this is I have a few different options so I could also do the one that's kind of like the Long Boat
which is this guy so it fires multiple arrows and it's supposed to be good against Fast Fire
ships let's see how it goes it's got eight range okay we can probably hit and run a little bit
well that's pretty effective all right so next one we got are the heavy demo ships uh let's see what
are they weak against triremes I feel like they should be weak against this guy but maybe not all
right well let's see the the quinqueremes I don't know how to pronounce any of this
all right I think we have to hit and run again that looks pretty effective
oops all right I'm gonna lose the ship oh nice I didn't even lose one ship okay so next one is we
got a counter that one that I just used this is like their Long Boat version in fact they
kind of look like a Long Boat I'm glad that they do that this looks vaguely Long Boat like to me
that makes it a little easier to recognize so let's see there weak against try Reams okay
or quinquereme that's the one we just used all right well let's
try the the trireme that's probably the cheaper way to do it let's go with that
all right one ship down not too bad
yeah so boarding ships means yeah this is what I really like is that Elite Scout ship
we could also use demo ships I'd rather not I think those probably count as ships that
I'm losing so let's do this is the probably the only time we're gonna use the Scout ship
that's such a cool idea all right so next one is the Juggernaut uh we gotta be a little careful
so the ones in the back it's got two different attack modes these fire cannonballs like a single
40 damage cannonball at 10 range these guys in the front a little bit less terrain so only eight
range but they fire seven or I guess eight shots uh all doing 30. so these guys are pretty crazy
I think we might do fire ships just to get in close because yeah they're weak
against Fast Fire ships heavy demo ships oh boarding ships uh that'd be interesting
I'm so tempted yeah I'm just gonna do Fast Fire ships I'm tempted to do the boarding
ships but since they outnumber me that seems kind of dangerous oh that's a lot of damage
they just gotta trigger their minimum range and they should
all run away from me not this guy apparently
okay that was a little rough
yeah so these guys are kind of sketchy these are the really really strong ones that I
don't even know if they have a good counter they're just really really expensive oh we
can get boarding ships all right this is what I'm gonna do boarding ships so let's try this
now I could be a little sneaky here and just pause and individually set
them but I think we'll try to manually do it a little bit
I think I'm gonna lose this one all right well I'm starting to think that boarding ships might
not have been the right choice there I guess I was outnumbered okay so this one uh two
octares and this is the really long range one I think just about anything should beat them
yeah basically any warship at close range all right a little bit of redemption time for the
boarding ships come on we gotta have one group here okay you over there and you guys over there
yeah they got Redemption so I can't steal them but that's right
all right here's the next one this one's pretty obvious we want something with 16 range if we're
gonna be attacking a fort and these guys are pretty beastly yeah there you go 300 damage
each that's a lot all right well that was pretty easy key is to outrange it okay so that's a lot
of ships we've got six of the Fast Fire ships we've got six try Reams and two octares and
also a couple of sea Towers because we have to be able to destroy those at the end so I think
we're gonna grab our octares for the sea Towers uh quick range I just think the best water ship
and I gotta decide I don't know what we want so we could get these guys to fight the fire ships
but they're really bad against the triremes so if we got our own fire ships uh the Rams actually
get against fire ships no they're not I think we're gonna go with the fire ships we're gonna
try to put the fire ships in front to fight theirs and hold them back and then we should
have more Firepower we'll see how this goes these guys got to go in front these guys gotta go back
all right there you go you guys just try to get in front and just tank some damage
yeah so far so good and you guys are firing right
oh he's still got a lot of ships back there okay let's bring back
so many little Dynamics going on here
okay you guys back I just gotta bait him with our high damage guys
yeah I don't I don't think I'm gonna get this gold medal no definitely not anymore that's fine though
okay so far so good he's attacking these little waves that's definitely helpful
all right if only I had lost one fewer ship I would have gotten the silver and
all right let me just destroy these with our long range guys yeah these are really
nice these quick rims because aside from fire ships they seem pretty good against everything
and that's just a matter of a few shots in these Towers
so I just wanted to share that really cool update with you guys and I have to say I
was really Blown Away with how well thought out all the designs were and how much more
interesting it makes the feudal dynamic in particular it really blows my mind that this
is a completely unofficial mod put together by a very small group of individuals if you
want to install the mod just follow the link in the description and honestly it's worth it
just for their tutorials which have a lot of replayability and things to explore the
mod can also be played online if you and someone else have it and if you want to
do that just grab the multiplayer version on the workshop after installing the mod and you
can host a game making sure to use the roam at War multiplayer data set unfortunately it isn't
officially supported at the moment so it's a bit of a hassle to get everyone in the lobby
to install it but that's just a limitation of Definitive Edition and not the fault of the mod
itself that'll do it for this one though thanks for watching guys and I'll see you next time