hey guys spirit of the law here in this episode of through the ages we're going to be looking at
the vikings now the goal of this series as always is a dive into the way civilizations have changed
between their initial design in age of kings and today in 2022. in this case though we're actually
going to start a little farther back than usual going back to the earliest conceptions of the
game when it was nothing more than a reskin of aoe 1. pre-alpha when the direction of
the game was still being hammered out vikings were originally intended to be one of a very select few
raider civilizations with totally different game mechanics raider military units could
capture enemy villagers and convert them by bringing them back to their town center
you could pillage trade carts or even buildings to steal resources directly from your enemy stockpile
and your buildings could also pack up and move identical to mongols in age of empires 4.
the trade-offs for these advantages were that raider civilizations had to garrison villagers to
turn them into military units rather than recruit them from buildings and they could also only have
one town center at a time the concept was for more differentiation between civilizations in ao2 and
this mechanic was going to be unique to vikings mongols and celts and i suspect it was at least
partly inspired by viking raids of the british isles given several of the parallels of course
the raider concept didn't make it into the final game and seemingly never made it past the early
planning stages but especially with the vikings unique units the concept of being tuned toward
raiding always seemed to be at the forefront in the official age of king's release in 1999 the
vikings bonuses ended up being pretty similar at a glance to what they are today though a lot of the
details have since changed their warships were 20 cheaper infantry gained a staggered hp bonus
starting in feudal they received their iconic free wheelbarrow and hand cart and their whole
team's docks were 33 cheaper the cheaper docks and warships of course made them immediately a top
water civilization almost to the point of being type cast in the early days as a water only civ
that's actually a reputation it seems they had to fight to some extent up until relatively recently
their unique units are of course still the same on the surface but were very different in terms
of balance longboats required castles to be built first and took 64 percent longer to train than
they do now which was even longer back then than the war galley making them quite difficult to mass
berserks also took longer to train moved slower had less pierce armor less hp less attack and age
were more expensive to upgrade and had no way of adding bonus damage against cavalry so they were
just overall not as good of a unit in pretty much every way possible they always had their unique
healing ability though making them especially good at quick raids and retreating only to attack a few
minutes later back at full health graphic wise you sometimes see the criticism of the horned helmets
being historically inaccurate though legendary designer and developer sandy petersen acknowledged
in an interview that they obviously knew that was inaccurate and just decided to play into the meme
general player opinions and comments from 1999 are difficult to find so it's not clear
how pervasive the idea was that they were only good as a water civ or how many players
realized their potential with either infantry or archers sandy petersen in 1999 points out he
thought they had good archers from the start so he definitely realized their land potential and
elsewhere mentioned they were a popular civ among internal playtesters even on land maps
he also expressed a lot of confidence in berserks even before their later buffs and thought
they were quite strong even favoring them over barracks units even just looking at the wording
of the question though it gives the sense that vikings may have been interpreted by players on
land maps as a fish out of water not realizing the incredible power of free wheelbarrow and hand cart
in the following year the conker's expansion was released with a number of important changes
the first is unique texts were introduced with berserker gang added to double the healing rate
of berserks berserks were also made 17 faster and gained one pierce armor the combination of which
helped berserk's raid under town center fire and escaped before enemy infantry or archers could
intercept there was one large nerf though to their team bonus reducing their dock discount from 33
to 25 offsetting that their long boats also became much faster to train basically you can now create
five in the time it previously took to create three also importantly thumb ring was added to
the game and given to vikings though they missed out on the newly introduced bloodlines hussar and
halberdier petersen at one point on the topic of halberdiers mentioned that usually horse strong
civs didn't get it or maybe more accurately camel civs didn't get it which is notable as vikings
were the only civ to not have halberdiers and also not get camels elsewhere though he explicitly says
they worried about vikings being too strong in the super late game an important piece of context to
add there is that the elite skirmisher gained its plus three bonus damage against pikeman and
conkers at the same time and it could have been they worried that the viking halberdier's extra hp
would prevent the elite skirmisher from being the counter unit it was intended to be between all of
the new techs units and civilizations you can see there was a lot they were trying to balance just
as conkers came out for the next decade plus the reputation of vikings was that they were
unquestionably top tier on water thanks to cheap docks and warships but their perception on land
maps was a mixed bag especially among casual players looking at comments made during that
time period there are examples of players asking whether vikings were in fact useless on land maps
though at the same time there were others happy to point out vikings had good infantry r-blasters and
what's really been seen more and more over time as a top-tier economy during that period though
the berserk itself was never a very popular unit which is in contrast to petersen's expectations in
age of kings that even their initial balance made them quite attractive during internal play testing
we've seen this before in the series with other civilizations already where the competitive meta
shifted toward archers and cavalry over infantry at least in the mid game in 2013's expansion the
forgotten vikings were then massively overhauled with nerfs on water while simultaneously boosting
their relatively unpopular unique units first the warship bonus was staggered instead of a straight
20 discount which slowed them down especially in feudal age similarly their team dock discount went
from minus 25 to minus 15 now less than half of what it was in age of kings with longboats given
a slight discount to compensate berserks were then the focus of multiple buffs to their creation time
hp and berserker gang also had its cost rearranged to make it easier to afford this is also when they
gained their second unique tech chieftains which initially gave berserk's plus four attack against
cavalry excluding camels even after these changes though it seemed like vikings were still treated
as an archer civilization with a good eco bonus on land in this exchange for example just after
the forgotten was released it seems at least here the perception was that chieftains changed very
little about the berserk and of course at this point the tech only applied to their unique unit
shortly afterward in african kingdoms in addition to adding arson to the game giving all infantry
units extra attack against buildings chieftain's cost was reduced while also seeing a bump to
its damage against cavalry a few patches later chieftains was again encouraged by
applying to all viking infantry units and gaining an extra plus two against camels keep in mind at
this point camels were still considered by the game to be ships and not cavalry so they had
previously been unaffected longboats also had their costs brought up again but critically no
longer required a castle to be built first so you can make them immediately upon hitting castle age
this is easy to overlook but was a game changer that made them useful for reclaiming water control
that had been lost in feudal letting you rebuild your navy quickly if you can hit castle age first
while this all sounds very good for vikings they were simultaneously hit hard in african kingdoms
by the introduction of the feudal age fire galley which at least before a couple of later
nerfs became the clear default feudal age choice vikings of course lack the fire ship line and by
this point italians in portuguese had also been added to the game so despite some improvements
on water vikings had stiff competition by this point as a top-tier water civilization
the next dlc rise of the rajas helped restore some of that former glory though with warships gaining
a bit more of a discount in feudal chieftains of course now applying to all infantry was also
made even better against camels again pushing for vikings to focus on infantry in the late
game against even camel civilizations finally heading into 2019's definitive edition it was
clear by this point that vikings were actually very strong on land with free wheelbarrow and
handcart being universally acknowledged as among if not the best equal bonus in the game
with that in mind chieftains which was now much better than its original form in 2013 had its
cost bumped up significantly this is in fact the first time we saw a change to vikings aimed
at making their infantry worse in any way though definitive edition simultaneously added supplies
free tracking and decreased the cost of squires so the net result was still probably an improvement
to viking infantry the main thing from a competitive perspective though was that
their archers hadn't been impacted and remained the most common default choice on land though
that was about to be targeted next soon after in the dawn of the dukes dlc vikings lost thumb ring
the developers were apparently fed up with dangling the carrot to push vikings toward
infantry and decided it was time to bring out the stick so just like that vikings no longer had
fully upgraded crossbows and are blasters looking back on the official forums aoe zone and reddit
it seems this was a controversial change though i do mean controversial and not universally disliked
arguments ranged from this was removing the one thing vikings will get at on land to the more
positive idea that this may increase the variety of strategies you could expect from vikings
there was a certain level of comfort factor at play no doubt as well since this was attack added
way back in conquerors that players were very used to being part of the vikings playbook to offset
losing thumb ring viking infantry were given plus 20 hp starting in feudal and berserks were given
more attack melee armor and castle age trained a little faster and their elite upgrade was made
significantly cheaper especially recently there's been a big push for infantry and vikings have been
one of the civilizations caught up in that being pushed intentionally it seems away from archers
i'm genuinely curious what mr petersen would have thought back in 2000 knowing everything in
store for berserks which he seemed to have thought were already quite good even at that time despite
all of the infantry buffs and loss of thumb ring though i suspect if you ask many players
they'll still say that vikings are competitively a crossbow and are blessed civ first though with
berserks as a very useful weapon in the late game albeit with some expensive unique texts to give a
rough sense where they stand at the moment vikings on open maps are comfortably above average with a
particularly strong early imperial age spike performing best in 35 to 45 minute long games
closed maps are always a bit trickier to gauge but at the moment they're performing around average
the general perception that i've seen these days is that they're still indisputably a strong
naval sif while being rarely if ever questioned as a very capable land civilization as well
but hopefully that was an interesting look back at the evolution of the viking
civilization in age of empires 2. thanks for watching and i'll see you next time