hey guys spirit of the law here a month ago i made a video sharing evidence that a new dlc for age
of empires 2 was almost definitely on the way i zeroed in on africa as the most probable location
partly because the dlc was using the codename porto and i also felt that was an area with some
room to explore it seems now though based on some new evidence the dlc is definitely not in africa
oops and instead is going to be in india if you're not regularly checking the forums the
big story today is some small puzzle piece screenshots are being quietly added to the
end of old official steam posts for example on the steam winter sale announcement from december 22nd
at the bottom they've added this picture there's only been a handful released at this point
but if we take the puzzle pieces and assemble them here's one possible reconstruction of how
they might fit together assuming it's all a single screenshot from perhaps a campaign
i won't completely overanalyze every pixel and i'm sure we'll get a ton of new information in the
next little bit but there are some pretty obvious and big reveals that jump out first of all this
is the indian architecture set so based on that alone it seems that region is gonna be the focus
we'll start with the red civilization here which we notice have the recognizable elephant archer
unique unit and are also gonna be given battle elephants this is something that people have been
requesting for historical accuracy and we can see they even have a brand new type of elephant which
doesn't have a rider and is obviously a melee unit attacking this tower whoever made the screenshot
strategically revealed only part of the unit to probably hide something about its function
there also appears to be a new chakron throwing infantry unit for red and appears to be the same
unit for cyan as well now these could be campaign only or scenario editor units and not unique units
which is hard to tell at this point especially when elsewhere we see two more candidates for
unique units one cavalry and one a variation on a spearman there's easily enough variation here for
three civilizations especially given we haven't even seen the imperial camel here yet there's one
last very interesting reveal as well which is this elephant archer at first it may not look
like a big deal but this is a much less armored version than the regular elephant archer that
we've seen before typically unique units don't change in appearance when they're upgraded to
elite whereas units at the stable barracks etc change in appearance with each upgrade
battle elephants to elite battle elephants are much more armored for example whereas elephant
archers previously didn't change with their elite upgrade the fact we're now seeing a less armored
version has led to some speculation which i completely agree with that this implies the
elephant archer is now going to be a regional unit for all of the indian civilizations at the archery
range and no longer a castle unique unit we've seen this type of thing before with the eagle
warrior being shared by the american civs meaning the new indian civilizations may now have both
battle elephants and elephant archers at their stable and archery range on top of of course
unique units at the castle remember currently indians don't have access to knights and there are
no knights in the picture released so far so that may continue to be a theme for balanced purposes
i've seen a suggestion as well that this is bengal architecture and could be their castle
and wonder which seems plausible to me but given how wrong my last speculation video turned out to
be i'll be careful about jumping to conclusions here personally i think it's a great choice to
break up india into a few different sieves and i assume the current indian civilization will
be overhauled and renamed to something more specific either way we get more elephants a
regional theme for the dlc and it also corrects a pretty big historical criticism of the expansions
where indians were missing battle elephants and had arguably too many cultures squeezed together
under one umbrella certainly when compared to europe where things were much more fleshed out
so that's all the dlc news that we know so far and of course there was also a big
patch for age of empires 4 today as well so lots of age of empire stuff going on at the
moment that'll do it for this one though thanks for watching guys and i'll see you next time
you