@@felipesuarez6564 brain love to solve fairly complex patterns. If they are too easy they not feel like innovative, and if they are too complex they are feel like too resource-wasting and just plain semi-random. And our brain long ago evolutioned to not throw off patterns as "useless" from the first glance because they actually may become relevant later so yeah brain capacity, apparently, expanded mainly to hoard information trash because there is no sure way to tell useful in future information from completely useless. Now humanity have better situation with this but motivation system inside our brain still rewards us for learning patterns that seems like potentially useful but not waste too much energy on their learning
Late 90s games and rounding down to an integer for floor detection, name a more iconic duo. Only, in one game, it leads to funky looking buildings, and in the other, it leads to parallel universes.
This is what I love. Proposing a theory, testing it against several tough examples, and formulating a conclusion. It's the scientific method at its finest, and it really is quite undefeatable.
@@FullOilBarrel you don't need one though, if you can test a theory and it always works out, there is no need to assume it would suddenly or eventually change, that's why it's called scientific "theory" and new theories can always show up and defy what we knew
@@FullOilBarrel A rigorous, well-tested and undeniable theory as far as we're aware is almost as, if not as strong as any singular proof of a concept you could provide. Do you think we wouldn't use theories if they weren't as solid as proofs?
What's really cool as well is when he says "I don't think this is how it's actually implemented, but it explains every observation". Yea, that's quantum physics right there.
It makes sense that the game would only be looking at tiles along the bottom edges because those are the "front" edges in the Isometric perspective from which a player views the game, and presumably what a player primarily sees. That line of thinking also might explain why farmers only use the top left four tiles; it gives the perspectives that the farmer is in the middle of the field more often, ostensibly being more productive. In much the same way you can give the appearance you are working harder when your boss walks by, developers made farmers appear more productive when the player happens to see them.
It doesnt make sense, that they only use the southern edges of a tile to detect elevation change though, as they seem to already have a perfectly suitable mechanism to detect elevation change, that is used for calculating the hillbonus. They could have just allow only for an elevation of 2, and therefore get rid of the different placing between the bottom and the top of a hill.
@@ucallmeschnitzel It makes perfect sense since their goal probably wasn't to only allow for a set amount of elevation change but rather to allow the player to place buidings anywhere it wouldn't look stupid.
After Spirit of the Law did show which parts of the building are relevant for the calculation I immediately understood it. Even with other buildings than town centers, too much elevation change would mess up the graphics. So for an isometric game with only one camera perspective that's 100% reasonable.
10:07 The Southern Town Center raises its head high, trying to make itself look larger to intimidate its opponents. The Northern Town Center however, wisely tucks its head down and raises its arms, protecting its vital points as it squares up with its opponents.
I think there is an in-game rationale to this. I've noticed that after constructing some buildings, the terrain tiles around it will "flatten" out to match the elevation of my building. If there are more than 2 units of height difference, the game may consider the "flattening" process impossible since it may lead to an artificially created cliff around the building edge. However, the building tiles that do not belong to the southern ridge are ignored, since most buildings are tall enough that the graphic details hide those tiles so the cliff issue won't matter.
@fahimhoq3166 South side of the building looks worse when of slope than northern, thats why also to question aesthetic tastes of the kings is dangerous behavior
Great work man! Some additional points: 1) As far as the game is concerned the building exists at the forward facing corner tile, regardless of its base size. If you were scripting a random map, for example, and you wanted to create a patch of berries adjacent to a mill/folwark, the game will always put them somehow touching the front corner, but the patch might snake away from the mill. This makes the creation of efficiently placed drop-off buildings in Empire Wars very challenging (thankfully there are esoteric workarounds). The research you did for this video demonstrates that for most buildings the game checks edges intersecting the "true" point and allows the building to be placed only if both are within elevation difference of 1. 2) Building elevation restrictions could be bypassed for random map scripts as well. You can create an invisible placeholder without elevation restriction, and then place the building over it as a "second_object". This also has the effect of centering the building over that placeholder. If you have any technical questions you think would make for a good presentation, the RMS server is a great place to ask. It's always nice to see content related to map creation, thanks for the video! :)
One more comment id like to add is that it's probably not rounding down. It's probably that every tile has a single hight value and that afterwards the tile checks if any of it's neighbours are taller than it and move the respective corners up to meet it. You can tell this is the case because you can have sharp valleys but no sharp hilltops.
All hail Spirit of the Law! I really like how scientific your approach always is. Hypothesize, test it, only publish results when you’ve tried your best to find a counter-example but just couldn’t. People should take note of this and apply it in their own lives more often!
I just want to highlight how useful this video is as an educational tool. More important than just what is being is asked (how does elevation affect building-placement?), is the method taken. The real gem is that is makes explicit the process of accumulating relevant observation, noting how these pieces of data are difficult to make sense of in a unified way; to then seeing the mechanism that accounts for all of them in one sweep as privileged in virtue of its playing this role. This because, intuitively as well, we know that there are many many more "explanations" that can't account for all. In this 12 min video on AOE, we are being treated to a short lesson in concepts as important as explanatory power and the scientific method. Cheers!
The question then, is that when considering a building's elevation bonus when attacking/being attacked, does it take into consideration the elevation of the lowest tile the building is touching? Or would it be the tile at the centre of the building that's considered?
That is likely because AoE3 was made using a different engine (also used for AoM, Engine: Bang!) compared to AoE1 and AoE2 (Engine: Genie). So the limitations are completely different.
@Spiritofthelaw, you're such a genius for figuring this out! I'm more than impressed! That's why we all love you here, apart from your smooth voice and humor~
That shot at ~9:04 made me think it'd be a neat scenario trick to have a cathedral over a hole in the terrain, which when it gets destroyed reveals something "hidden" in the rubble in the cavity beneath. I'm sure someone's probably already done this.
If we look carefully it seems the system was created specifically to combat the confusion and distortion that would be created by 2D buildings in a 3D isometric plane, in most of the invalid cases, building's graphics would outright 'swallow' several tiles that they weren''t actually occupying.
Interesting question, and is something I also looked into. Units seem to be able to track their height perfectly, where even being slightly higher on a slanted tile gives the uphill attack bonus. Placing buildings is the only case I've seen where elevation is rounded so much.
2:11 The game actually allows for more than 7 elevation levels, even though the editor in DE let's you place only 1 through 7. Elevations are 1-indexed in the editor but 0-indexed in map scripts. If you create generations of the AoC Arabia map script, you'll end up hills at elevation 8 (since they're spawned at elevation 7 in the map script).
Love how much niche knowledge you have about these games. Is that a DE-specific quirk? It sounds like the sort of curiosity that results from two different programmers working on the same script years apart from one another.
Great video! I would like to say that this might give a very slight advantage to players starting in the northern part of a map, since you have less problems to place a castle facing the opponent downhill.
This is so much more complicated than I could have ever imagined, and this actually has strategic implications about using the terrain to maximize hill bonuses too, wow
I don't know how you can dig up so many content. I always feel you have taught us all of the game, but at the begining of each video I am like "hmmm yes, why ?"
This channel just keeps exciting me. Not in a million years would I have questioned this problem, nor tried to figure out why it behaves like it does - yet I am thrilled for the answer to it.
That was a fascinating analysis. I'd never played around with elevation that much in Aoe2, but it's interesting to see just how much nuance there is to working with it. Thanks for the video!
I love your videos because you do science and I love science. You ask a question, come up with an idea, then test it. If it turns out to be wrong, you try again until you find an answer.
My jaw dropped, this must have been a lot of work to figure it out for knowledge you don't really need to know (but fascinating to watch!) Thank you sir!
How does this interact with the elevation damage bonus? When a building is overhanging from the top or the bottom of a hill, is it at the top/bottom or somewhere in between?
That gives players in the south a slight advantage, right? Because they have more freedom of where to place buildings in terms of range, and also just more real estate to place buildings on in general.
I had a similar thought but does this give the northern player an advantage/incentive on the attack as they will be biased to building on the southern/attacking sides of terrain. And does this dis/advantage either player in any other way...
@@sandmaster4444 That's interesting. I think it depends on playstyle. So it would be an advantage for a more aggressive player, but a disadvantage for a more defensive player. But maybe it could also be argued that being either aggressive or defensive is generally better no matter your preferred playstyle, but that would probably depend on elo rating I think, if that's the case
Playing "Hall of the Mountain King" while listening to this really captures the mounting complexity and confusion I felt watching this video. Excellently explained as always but... wow does the game overcomplicate this or what?
Imagine the original developer of this mechanic watching this video more than 20 years later, grinning, and thinking: "Yep, that’s how we did it. You figured it out!" :D :D AoE II is such a crazy game in terms of its unseen mechanics. Thanks SOTL for being such a nerd and testing this stuff until you can explain what’s going on! I really enjoy that! =)
I think us veteran AoEII builders have intuitively figured some of this out and it's one of the reasons I prefer to have my civ in the south side of the map. It just makes it easier to use the hilly terrain than for the northern civs. This was a great investigation though and I'm very happy you did this one Spirit! 🏯🧐🏰
Excellent sleuthing. Interesting that it actually means there are balance issues depending on whether you start on the south or north side of a Golden Pit type map.
Awesome research! Based on what you said in the conclusion, it sounds like you suspect the Town Center is checking to make sure each of its four component parts is on the same elevation, yeah? That would explain why it's uniquely restrictive, since to my knowledge it's the only building that is comprised of separate "sub-buildings."
Professional game dev here. Make sure you *play* classic RTSs so you can avoid the mistakes of the genre. * Age of Empires 2 & 3 * Command & Conquer * Warcraft 2 & 3 * StarCraft 1 & 2 * Total Annihilation * Rise of Nations You’ll also want to watch WinterStarcraft’s reaction video: _The next major RTS will fail. This is why_ Good luck!
@@MichaelPohoreski yea i played all of these and watched the video already :) thanks for your input! do you have a feature you definetly want to see in an rts game? :)
@@marv8107 Yes, several! ALSO, pretend a user has carpal tunnel. How could they play the game? * Auto-group joining. Why do I manually have to keep adding a soldier when he gets sent to the front line? They should automatically join their buddies * Free-to-Play to make it more accessible * CO-OP maps. Archon mode in Starcraft 2 is great but LACKS MAPS. * GOOD replay tools that let viewers always see the important stats * Easy to find and watch replays. Path of Exile had a large amount of success due to it being an early adopter of Twitch integration. * Fine grained AI difficulty. My group of gaming buddies usually default to Starcraft 2 for PvE because we can control the individual level of difficulty for each AI. This allows for more granularity to match AI to each human player's skill. AoE3 has an all-or-nothing difficulty which is horrible. * No stupid dichotomy of campaign having X units but multiplayer having Y units. /me glares at SC2. * Ability to customize our colors. * Multiple monitor support. Let me use my 2nd monitor to see the ENTIRE battlefield * Allow me to have "sub-windows" and assign "Camera Follow Unit" so it is easy to keep a bird's eye view on the important events * Allow more than 8 players total. I want to play 6 humans vs 6 AI with my buddies. * Custom max population. 200 max population is piddly. There are times we want far less, and far more. * Training modes where I can focus on a specific build order. Let's say I want to focus on streamlining building 3 barracks. Give me a game mode that times and rates how well I do. * SHOW me my build order as an overlay * Show me a one line from my build order
Before this video I thought you were a data enthusiast but now I think you deserve to be promoted to data maniac! Fantastic job, man! All that testing must have been a lot of work.
I prefer the way age of mythology works, if there's a slope or uneven terrain, once the villagers start building the terrain below the building will even out, so you can place your buildings pretty much anywhere, I feel like this is something that can be achieved in 2d as well
the buildings in category 3 actually do that in Age of Empires 2 - once built the terrain is flattened to whatever the game thinks was the building's elevation.
To have done some cosmetics modding, town centers is separated indeed in 3 parts for DE. It's probably to help the fact we can walk under each wings, but not the small square in the center
this vid reminds me of a topic i always wondered about: hill bonuses. how much of a building has to be on a hill part to get the bonus. At what point does the bonus stops for units partially up a slope etc. a followup video to this would be great with allt he little nitty gritty details of hills and how they work for units and buildings on small constant slopes or uneven up and down ones.
i think you missed the chance of a great title of the video with that awesome line on red tape for building permits in AOE2 at the end :D well done figuring this one out haha
I always had a theory about this, given the psychology of fighting upward vs downward, but with this? I wonder if there's a real statistic advantage to being in the south of the map, versus the north? I think it might be as high as 5 or 10%
Depends on where the elevation is. I guess if the elevation is around the bases, one of the players should have the advantage of having more TC spots in front of his base to grab more map control. On the other hand, the other player may have an extra spot to fall back on if he gets pushed. The elevation is super random though so this would be incredibly hard to calculate. Spawning to the north might give a really tiny chance of giving you a god forward TC though, so I guess I’d pick north, but really depends on the map and defensive/aggressive playstyle.
@@edwardblom2661 It'd be interesting to see the data. At least in terms of the TC, because it's so restrictive it should be pretty fair, but having castles naturally have more positions on the south side of hills may favor... the south I think? On golden pit or any map where elevation goes up or down towards the center of the map, the south player should have more places for a slightly forward castle on their side, since the 'V' shape might match the south ring of elevations more. (it might be too negligible to notice, except in a huge sample of matches though)
@@Clairvoire You could be on to something, given the winrate delta for blue (southwest) vs red (northeast) side in League of legends is ... not huge, but far from zero.
@@bigsmoke4592 They use the center vertex, not the tile. As it can be seem on SOTL's video, each tile has 4 vertices, of which each one has its own height.
This is such a huge aspect of game development. It's one thing to make a set of systems that interact in fun ways, but handling the edge cases is really difficult. Eventually you have no choice but to start making hard rules to ensure that it holds together.
That must mean that the TC has its own elevation checking algorithm, because if it were using the normal building one, it could be planted on the foot of the hill. The building one rounds down, so the TC would think 'alright I'm level'.
I guess sometimes you need a good place for your villager to live. Quite understandable Wow actually a good finding, can be useful for some people who want to place down buildings without going over terrain 1 by one That's one mystery solved. Math is always useful to solve mysteries all along 😂
surprisingly this is exactly how real world investigation of Physics is suppose to work. You make observation, make theories, update theories until all observaations can be explained.
Some questions: 1. If a TC is on an elevation, you have to be careful to use less villagers/shots to weaken the boar with it, right? 2. How does elevation determine damage of arrows from a TC or castle? Does it compare elevation of the closest tile of the building vs elevation of the target, or uses some other method to determine the elevation of the building and its arrows?
Sort of makes sense, as if you consider the visible bottom of the building the "visible foundation" then it makes sense to have the building built on the ground and into the hill, but makes a lot less sense to have it built coming out of the hill hanging off the ground. Basically it works for visual consistency even if it seems logically inconsistent.
I've always wished that buildings placed on uneven terrain reflected that in the art style. It'd be so cool if buildings incorporated columns or mounds or split level designs (like the weird TCs at the end) in each specific building depending on elevation changes. I wonder how many different variants of each building would need to be drawn to account for every scenario...probably a lot, but not an impossible number.
Great analysis. This asymmetry has horrifying implications for the fairness of maps with substantial elevation which have been used in competition over the past two decades, and I hope it is somehow rectified ASAP by FE.
From a game design standpoint, the thing with checking only the sides makes sense as the player will only see that side so it doesn't really matter how the backside is placed
![Let's build the most over-powered civs possible! [AoE2]](/img/n.gif)
What a beautiful piece of reverse engineering! Fascinating video.
didn't expect to see you here
ur channel is amazing btw
Science!
Exactly. I don't even play anymore but also found this beautiful. Funny how the mind works why is something so "useless" beautiful?
@@felipesuarez6564 brain love to solve fairly complex patterns. If they are too easy they not feel like innovative, and if they are too complex they are feel like too resource-wasting and just plain semi-random.
And our brain long ago evolutioned to not throw off patterns as "useless" from the first glance because they actually may become relevant later
so yeah brain capacity, apparently, expanded mainly to hoard information trash because there is no sure way to tell useful in future information from completely useless. Now humanity have better situation with this but motivation system inside our brain still rewards us for learning patterns that seems like potentially useful but not waste too much energy on their learning
Every time when I wonder what other not so well known game mechanic SotL could come up with, he finds something.
I only ever play the campaigns yet I still show up for every video like learning the most minute mechanics will somehow help me
@UA-camG How Ironic that someone with that username does not understand how youtube works.
Yup, agreed on that
@UA-camG He has a patreon. The names mentioned at the end are just a few of his patrons.
Wonder more often please
Late 90s games and rounding down to an integer for floor detection, name a more iconic duo. Only, in one game, it leads to funky looking buildings, and in the other, it leads to parallel universes.
Beautifully said.
Age of Empires II in .5 a presses.
*"Fixed Point" Integers* was another staple of 90's games due to floating-point performance being non-deterministic at the bit level.
@@MichaelPohoreski they also just make sense in general, because you normally have a pretty limited range of values that a number can have.
In which game did it lead to parallel universes?
This is what I love. Proposing a theory, testing it against several tough examples, and formulating a conclusion. It's the scientific method at its finest, and it really is quite undefeatable.
It isnt a proof though
@@FullOilBarrel you don't need one though, if you can test a theory and it always works out, there is no need to assume it would suddenly or eventually change, that's why it's called scientific "theory" and new theories can always show up and defy what we knew
@@FullOilBarrel A rigorous, well-tested and undeniable theory as far as we're aware is almost as, if not as strong as any singular proof of a concept you could provide. Do you think we wouldn't use theories if they weren't as solid as proofs?
What's really cool as well is when he says "I don't think this is how it's actually implemented, but it explains every observation". Yea, that's quantum physics right there.
Same.
Its the main reason i watch SotL
"Forsooth, I could'st not place a 3x3 building on the north side of mine hillock. No wonder thou wert victorious!"
It makes sense that the game would only be looking at tiles along the bottom edges because those are the "front" edges in the Isometric perspective from which a player views the game, and presumably what a player primarily sees.
That line of thinking also might explain why farmers only use the top left four tiles; it gives the perspectives that the farmer is in the middle of the field more often, ostensibly being more productive.
In much the same way you can give the appearance you are working harder when your boss walks by, developers made farmers appear more productive when the player happens to see them.
> farmers only use the top left four tiles
This was fixed recently. It no longer matters what side of a TC you place the farm.
It doesnt make sense, that they only use the southern edges of a tile to detect elevation change though, as they seem to already have a perfectly suitable mechanism to detect elevation change, that is used for calculating the hillbonus. They could have just allow only for an elevation of 2, and therefore get rid of the different placing between the bottom and the top of a hill.
There has been a video about the farm thing I think
@@ucallmeschnitzel It makes perfect sense since their goal probably wasn't to only allow for a set amount of elevation change but rather to allow the player to place buidings anywhere it wouldn't look stupid.
After Spirit of the Law did show which parts of the building are relevant for the calculation I immediately understood it. Even with other buildings than town centers, too much elevation change would mess up the graphics. So for an isometric game with only one camera perspective that's 100% reasonable.
10:07 The Southern Town Center raises its head high, trying to make itself look larger to intimidate its opponents.
The Northern Town Center however, wisely tucks its head down and raises its arms, protecting its vital points as it squares up with its opponents.
I think there is an in-game rationale to this. I've noticed that after constructing some buildings, the terrain tiles around it will "flatten" out to match the elevation of my building. If there are more than 2 units of height difference, the game may consider the "flattening" process impossible since it may lead to an artificially created cliff around the building edge. However, the building tiles that do not belong to the southern ridge are ignored, since most buildings are tall enough that the graphic details hide those tiles so the cliff issue won't matter.
5:34 I appreciate that Spirit Of The Law decided to appear in person to give this explanation.
Villager: "Hey, can we place this building on a slope?"
King: "No"
Villager: "Why not"
King: "Because it looks bad"
In all fairness, this probably happened a lot irl. Still does actually
Yeah a town center needs to be practical, so level ground is mandatory.
But just from this perspective tho
@Fahim Hoq🎉 King: Do you want the Normans to kill us all???
@fahimhoq3166 South side of the building looks worse when of slope than northern, thats why
also to question aesthetic tastes of the kings is dangerous behavior
Love your dedication to the game and uncovering how it works :)
Great work man! Some additional points:
1) As far as the game is concerned the building exists at the forward facing corner tile, regardless of its base size. If you were scripting a random map, for example, and you wanted to create a patch of berries adjacent to a mill/folwark, the game will always put them somehow touching the front corner, but the patch might snake away from the mill. This makes the creation of efficiently placed drop-off buildings in Empire Wars very challenging (thankfully there are esoteric workarounds). The research you did for this video demonstrates that for most buildings the game checks edges intersecting the "true" point and allows the building to be placed only if both are within elevation difference of 1.
2) Building elevation restrictions could be bypassed for random map scripts as well. You can create an invisible placeholder without elevation restriction, and then place the building over it as a "second_object". This also has the effect of centering the building over that placeholder.
If you have any technical questions you think would make for a good presentation, the RMS server is a great place to ask.
It's always nice to see content related to map creation, thanks for the video! :)
One more comment id like to add is that it's probably not rounding down. It's probably that every tile has a single hight value and that afterwards the tile checks if any of it's neighbours are taller than it and move the respective corners up to meet it.
You can tell this is the case because you can have sharp valleys but no sharp hilltops.
All hail Spirit of the Law!
I really like how scientific your approach always is. Hypothesize, test it, only publish results when you’ve tried your best to find a counter-example but just couldn’t. People should take note of this and apply it in their own lives more often!
So that's why hills bother me so much while I'm looking for a TC spot.
Thanks for thoroughly explaining elevation effects on building.👍🏻
I just want to highlight how useful this video is as an educational tool. More important than just what is being is asked (how does elevation affect building-placement?), is the method taken. The real gem is that is makes explicit the process of accumulating relevant observation, noting how these pieces of data are difficult to make sense of in a unified way; to then seeing the mechanism that accounts for all of them in one sweep as privileged in virtue of its playing this role. This because, intuitively as well, we know that there are many many more "explanations" that can't account for all. In this 12 min video on AOE, we are being treated to a short lesson in concepts as important as explanatory power and the scientific method. Cheers!
The question then, is that when considering a building's elevation bonus when attacking/being attacked, does it take into consideration the elevation of the lowest tile the building is touching? Or would it be the tile at the centre of the building that's considered?
Also, what about units that are attacking or being attacked on a tile that has elevation difference?
Good sleuthing Spirit! It's interesting that the TC multiple parts design was abandoned for AOE3; must have been too hard to implement without a grid.
That is likely because AoE3 was made using a different engine (also used for AoM, Engine: Bang!) compared to AoE1 and AoE2 (Engine: Genie). So the limitations are completely different.
In aoe3 the tc is just 1 building, while in aoe2 the tc is 4 buildings all together, he kinda showed this at the end of the video
I like how for the most part this video is about every building but the TC
This might be one of your best videos yet. What a great feat of deduction!
@Spiritofthelaw, you're such a genius for figuring this out! I'm more than impressed! That's why we all love you here, apart from your smooth voice and humor~
That shot at ~9:04 made me think it'd be a neat scenario trick to have a cathedral over a hole in the terrain, which when it gets destroyed reveals something "hidden" in the rubble in the cavity beneath. I'm sure someone's probably already done this.
This is the quality content I come here for. Perfection.
If we look carefully it seems the system was created specifically to combat the confusion and distortion that would be created by 2D buildings in a 3D isometric plane, in most of the invalid cases, building's graphics would outright 'swallow' several tiles that they weren''t actually occupying.
Do units use the same rounding down logic leading to visible elevation but no bonus (since both would be height 1)?
Interesting question, and is something I also looked into. Units seem to be able to track their height perfectly, where even being slightly higher on a slanted tile gives the uphill attack bonus. Placing buildings is the only case I've seen where elevation is rounded so much.
That's fascinating and a a wonderful insight into the game design process. I love this Frankenstein's monster of systems and design ideas we call AOE2
@@justsammy2023 Lol
@@SpiritOfTheLaw How about the hill bonus for buildings? Which tile decides the elevation of the building, i would guess the tip of the v?
@@erikssonown I always wonder this when placing castles on lumpy terrain!
2:11 The game actually allows for more than 7 elevation levels, even though the editor in DE let's you place only 1 through 7. Elevations are 1-indexed in the editor but 0-indexed in map scripts. If you create generations of the AoC Arabia map script, you'll end up hills at elevation 8 (since they're spawned at elevation 7 in the map script).
Love how much niche knowledge you have about these games. Is that a DE-specific quirk? It sounds like the sort of curiosity that results from two different programmers working on the same script years apart from one another.
@@billdewall6152 It's like that in the original game.
The real question is how this will help in the next episode of AOE2 pacifist
Great video! I would like to say that this might give a very slight advantage to players starting in the northern part of a map, since you have less problems to place a castle facing the opponent downhill.
This is so much more complicated than I could have ever imagined, and this actually has strategic implications about using the terrain to maximize hill bonuses too, wow
I don't know how you can dig up so many content. I always feel you have taught us all of the game, but at the begining of each video I am like "hmmm yes, why ?"
I haven't played with the scenario editor a lot, so I never even noticed that the Town Center is made up of several sprites!
I always thought it was the upper squares instead of the L, 2x2, but your theory is more in line with reality, congratulations!
the reason it's the V is because those are the tiles that are actually visibley the rest is covered by the 2d graphic of the building.
This channel just keeps exciting me. Not in a million years would I have questioned this problem, nor tried to figure out why it behaves like it does - yet I am thrilled for the answer to it.
This is so fascinating! Thanks for putting in the work SotL.
That was a fascinating analysis. I'd never played around with elevation that much in Aoe2, but it's interesting to see just how much nuance there is to working with it. Thanks for the video!
Incredible work. This is your best video in my opinion
I love your videos because you do science and I love science. You ask a question, come up with an idea, then test it. If it turns out to be wrong, you try again until you find an answer.
Wow that's a really interesting video you've made in a while, I was really invested thru the investigation you made. Good job.
How does this affect hill bonuses attributed to buildings? I.e. does it matter which part of the castle is on the hill to get the hill bonus?
Spirit of the Law: Answers to questions I've never asked myself! Love you!
10:38 nice, I never realized the builders had to dig tombs below monasteries. and there is also already a box for all the precious relic gold!
And a AoE 1 relic “Easter egg”
I've never seen such thorough and diligent research on something I care so little about
My jaw dropped, this must have been a lot of work to figure it out for knowledge you don't really need to know (but fascinating to watch!)
Thank you sir!
How does this interact with the elevation damage bonus? When a building is overhanging from the top or the bottom of a hill, is it at the top/bottom or somewhere in between?
I think he did another video on hill damage, and if I remember correctly only the middle pieces/piece matters.
@@edwardblom2661 Thank you.
That gives players in the south a slight advantage, right? Because they have more freedom of where to place buildings in terms of range, and also just more real estate to place buildings on in general.
I had a similar thought but does this give the northern player an advantage/incentive on the attack as they will be biased to building on the southern/attacking sides of terrain. And does this dis/advantage either player in any other way...
@@sandmaster4444 That's interesting. I think it depends on playstyle. So it would be an advantage for a more aggressive player, but a disadvantage for a more defensive player. But maybe it could also be argued that being either aggressive or defensive is generally better no matter your preferred playstyle, but that would probably depend on elo rating I think, if that's the case
Playing "Hall of the Mountain King" while listening to this really captures the mounting complexity and confusion I felt watching this video.
Excellently explained as always but... wow does the game overcomplicate this or what?
I think this is my favorite of all your videos. It's such a mundane question, but you led us on a wild ride.
What incredible patience you have - thank you for explaining this!
Dude, that must have been so much work but man is it cool to see you explain it
Imagine the original developer of this mechanic watching this video more than 20 years later, grinning, and thinking: "Yep, that’s how we did it. You figured it out!"
:D :D
AoE II is such a crazy game in terms of its unseen mechanics. Thanks SOTL for being such a nerd and testing this stuff until you can explain what’s going on! I really enjoy that! =)
I think us veteran AoEII builders have intuitively figured some of this out and it's one of the reasons I prefer to have my civ in the south side of the map. It just makes it easier to use the hilly terrain than for the northern civs.
This was a great investigation though and I'm very happy you did this one Spirit! 🏯🧐🏰
I'll admit I had lowish expectations for this one, yet I remained interested throughout. Nice job.
I noticed that you used the original middle eastern architecture for the byzantines in the intro when showing the wonder, tc, and castle. Touché
Awesome analysis. You're an amazing software debugger/investigator/presenter!
Excellent sleuthing. Interesting that it actually means there are balance issues depending on whether you start on the south or north side of a Golden Pit type map.
Awesome research! Based on what you said in the conclusion, it sounds like you suspect the Town Center is checking to make sure each of its four component parts is on the same elevation, yeah? That would explain why it's uniquely restrictive, since to my knowledge it's the only building that is comprised of separate "sub-buildings."
Production value is insane. Bravo!
dang as a new rts-developer this video is extremly interesting and insightful. Thanks Spirit Of The Law!
Professional game dev here. Make sure you *play* classic RTSs so you can avoid the mistakes of the genre.
* Age of Empires 2 & 3
* Command & Conquer
* Warcraft 2 & 3
* StarCraft 1 & 2
* Total Annihilation
* Rise of Nations
You’ll also want to watch WinterStarcraft’s reaction video: _The next major RTS will fail. This is why_
Good luck!
@@MichaelPohoreski yea i played all of these and watched the video already :) thanks for your input! do you have a feature you definetly want to see in an rts game? :)
@@marv8107 Yes, several! ALSO, pretend a user has carpal tunnel. How could they play the game?
* Auto-group joining. Why do I manually have to keep adding a soldier when he gets sent to the front line? They should automatically join their buddies
* Free-to-Play to make it more accessible
* CO-OP maps. Archon mode in Starcraft 2 is great but LACKS MAPS.
* GOOD replay tools that let viewers always see the important stats
* Easy to find and watch replays. Path of Exile had a large amount of success due to it being an early adopter of Twitch integration.
* Fine grained AI difficulty. My group of gaming buddies usually default to Starcraft 2 for PvE because we can control the individual level of difficulty for each AI. This allows for more granularity to match AI to each human player's skill. AoE3 has an all-or-nothing difficulty which is horrible.
* No stupid dichotomy of campaign having X units but multiplayer having Y units. /me glares at SC2.
* Ability to customize our colors.
* Multiple monitor support. Let me use my 2nd monitor to see the ENTIRE battlefield
* Allow me to have "sub-windows" and assign "Camera Follow Unit" so it is easy to keep a bird's eye view on the important events
* Allow more than 8 players total. I want to play 6 humans vs 6 AI with my buddies.
* Custom max population. 200 max population is piddly. There are times we want far less, and far more.
* Training modes where I can focus on a specific build order. Let's say I want to focus on streamlining building 3 barracks. Give me a game mode that times and rates how well I do.
* SHOW me my build order as an overlay
* Show me a one line from my build order
This is actually amazing! I'm extremely impressed you figured this out.
the effort, the attention to detail, the logic. I love it all. Stay awesome dude
Spirit is the Newton of the game. Asking questions about how world works and finding answers with imperative way
Before this video I thought you were a data enthusiast but now I think you deserve to be promoted to data maniac! Fantastic job, man! All that testing must have been a lot of work.
So glad that I came across this channel... lovely analysis as always! 👌🏻
I prefer the way age of mythology works, if there's a slope or uneven terrain, once the villagers start building the terrain below the building will even out, so you can place your buildings pretty much anywhere, I feel like this is something that can be achieved in 2d as well
the buildings in category 3 actually do that in Age of Empires 2 - once built the terrain is flattened to whatever the game thinks was the building's elevation.
@@rcillo you get a plain surface where the building used to be
@@mathewperryfan yeah that was good i remember that, looked a bit weird though haha
Leave it to Spirit of the Law to answer kne of the most underrated questions of AOE2
To have done some cosmetics modding, town centers is separated indeed in 3 parts for DE.
It's probably to help the fact we can walk under each wings, but not the small square in the center
I'm now more enlightened than ever on building infrastructure on AoE II. Thanks, SotL!
this vid reminds me of a topic i always wondered about: hill bonuses. how much of a building has to be on a hill part to get the bonus. At what point does the bonus stops for units partially up a slope etc. a followup video to this would be great with allt he little nitty gritty details of hills and how they work for units and buildings on small constant slopes or uneven up and down ones.
I love waking up to a new SotL video. :)
i think you missed the chance of a great title of the video with that awesome line on red tape for building permits in AOE2 at the end :D
well done figuring this one out haha
This reminds me, In "Popular 3," workers level the ground and build a building on it. They build in a very unique and realistic way for an old game.
"Populous 3: The Beginning"
panheathu
I would love to see a video of the original developers critiquing your findings to see how accurate you are.
I always had a theory about this, given the psychology of fighting upward vs downward, but with this?
I wonder if there's a real statistic advantage to being in the south of the map, versus the north? I think it might be as high as 5 or 10%
Depends on where the elevation is.
I guess if the elevation is around the bases, one of the players should have the advantage of having more TC spots in front of his base to grab more map control. On the other hand, the other player may have an extra spot to fall back on if he gets pushed.
The elevation is super random though so this would be incredibly hard to calculate. Spawning to the north might give a really tiny chance of giving you a god forward TC though, so I guess I’d pick north, but really depends on the map and defensive/aggressive playstyle.
@@edwardblom2661 It'd be interesting to see the data. At least in terms of the TC, because it's so restrictive it should be pretty fair, but having castles naturally have more positions on the south side of hills may favor... the south I think? On golden pit or any map where elevation goes up or down towards the center of the map, the south player should have more places for a slightly forward castle on their side, since the 'V' shape might match the south ring of elevations more. (it might be too negligible to notice, except in a huge sample of matches though)
@@ClairvoireBut If the height of the V determines the hill bonus of the castle it would be bad to place it on the south side of the hill.
@@Clairvoire You could be on to something, given the winrate delta for blue (southwest) vs red (northeast) side in League of legends is ... not huge, but far from zero.
That's an incredible observation indeed, not gameplay wise but dev wise, helps a lot to understand how the game engine was designed.
If partially placed on a hill when is a castle( or krepost or donjon ) getting the elevation bonus?
Buildings only consider their center for calculating elevation damage.
@@vagnerseibert1748 how do 2x2 or 4x4 buildings consider their center?
@@bigsmoke4592 They use the center vertex, not the tile. As it can be seem on SOTL's video, each tile has 4 vertices, of which each one has its own height.
That's an amazing research, such an in-depth analysis.
This is such a huge aspect of game development. It's one thing to make a set of systems that interact in fun ways, but handling the edge cases is really difficult. Eventually you have no choice but to start making hard rules to ensure that it holds together.
Mate you to about absolutely anything and I would watch it. Love your voice ❤️
That must mean that the TC has its own elevation checking algorithm, because if it were using the normal building one, it could be planted on the foot of the hill. The building one rounds down, so the TC would think 'alright I'm level'.
Damn , this was some crazy genius deduction (probably painstaking too)
There is one more level - God level - Spirit of the law !!
I guess sometimes you need a good place for your villager to live. Quite understandable
Wow actually a good finding, can be useful for some people who want to place down buildings without going over terrain 1 by one
That's one mystery solved. Math is always useful to solve mysteries all along 😂
that's the most spirit of the law video in a while
Wow this was crazy, figuring this out took some real intellect and outside the box thinking
Fair work! Must had been so tedious! Thanks
That was incredibly well thought out!
That's some deep research, SOTL. Good job!
surprisingly this is exactly how real world investigation of Physics is suppose to work. You make observation, make theories, update theories until all observaations can be explained.
This whole video felt like watching an indecisive person failing to commit to placing a structure :D
Good use of sandboxing to figure out how it works!
This is the content we are here for! Amazing video.
Some questions:
1. If a TC is on an elevation, you have to be careful to use less villagers/shots to weaken the boar with it, right?
2. How does elevation determine damage of arrows from a TC or castle? Does it compare elevation of the closest tile of the building vs elevation of the target, or uses some other method to determine the elevation of the building and its arrows?
Sort of makes sense, as if you consider the visible bottom of the building the "visible foundation" then it makes sense to have the building built on the ground and into the hill, but makes a lot less sense to have it built coming out of the hill hanging off the ground.
Basically it works for visual consistency even if it seems logically inconsistent.
mind absolutely blown, this video is GOAT contender
thanks for answering a question i have to assume crossed my mind for a minute 20 years ago
good job! You know this probably better than any person on the world now, even not the AoE2 developpers.
I've always wished that buildings placed on uneven terrain reflected that in the art style. It'd be so cool if buildings incorporated columns or mounds or split level designs (like the weird TCs at the end) in each specific building depending on elevation changes. I wonder how many different variants of each building would need to be drawn to account for every scenario...probably a lot, but not an impossible number.
This is incredible work, well done!
Great analysis. This asymmetry has horrifying implications for the fairness of maps with substantial elevation which have been used in competition over the past two decades, and I hope it is somehow rectified ASAP by FE.
From a game design standpoint, the thing with checking only the sides makes sense as the player will only see that side so it doesn't really matter how the backside is placed
This was WAAAY more interesting that I expected it to be.