Age of Blocks v1.2: every unit and building redrawn

After v1.1, two complaints came up more than anything else: signature units didn’t stand out from regular soldiers, and the colours looked washed out. Both were valid points. So v1.2 changes nearly everything you see in the game: soldiers, horses, buildings, walls and the main menu.

Units, redrawn

Every soldier, villager and horse now shares one drawing style. Heads are smaller, legs and bodies longer, so they read more like painted miniatures than toys. I swapped the pastels for earth pigments: madder red, indigo, ochre, linen, bronze and iron. Light comes from one direction on every part, with a shaded side and a thin outline.

Skin tones vary by region. Team colour used to be a little patch on the chest; now it’s on the dyed tunic, the face of the shield and the horse cloth, so you can tell armies apart at a glance.

Each of the 65 civilizations has its own helmets, armour, shields, swords and bows. Egyptians wear linen headcloths and carry cowhide shields, Assyrians have pointed helmets and scale armour, Athenians Corinthian helmets and owl shields, and the Qin lacquered armour and straight swords. Horses got bigger too. They walk on jointed legs, and riders actually sit in the saddle.

Signature units

I wanted the signature units to be visually distinct from the regular army. Pharaoh’s Spear Guard wears a striped nemes and carries a spotted cowhide shield. The Kushite bowman has a feathered headband. The Spartan has a sideways crest and a Λ on his shield. The Immortals wear tiaras and carry spears with pomegranate butts, and the Jurchen “Iron Pagoda” rides an armoured horse behind a masked helmet.

While redrawing them, I also found a few historical inaccuracies. Babylon’s wall archers were carrying crossbows; they now draw composite bows, with the same stats. The Greek-fire bearer holds a bronze hand siphon spitting flame, fed by a pressurised jar on his back. The Cretan archer fights bare-headed with a small bronze shield slung behind him. And Assyria’s siege tower and Chalukya’s fire engine finally have machines of their own.

Buildings and walls

I redrew the buildings with the same outlines, textures and colour palette as the units. Each one flies a standard in its owner’s colour.

I also changed the mills to better match their historical periods. Windmills only show up in the medieval Islamic world, Delhi and the Latin West. Watermills belong to Rome, Byzantium, the Hellenistic world and China after the Han. Everyone else gets domed granaries and a hand quern.

Wall tops vary by region as well: stepped merlons in Mesopotamia, rounded ones in the Islamic world, pointed kangura in India, tiled caps with a pavilion over the gate in China, and a cavetto cornice in pharaonic Egypt.

Starting a match

Matches now open on a loading screen that shows the players, the sides, their civilizations and signature soldiers. In single player the game begins when you hit “Start the game”. In multiplayer it starts for everyone at the same moment, once all players have loaded, and each player who’s ready gets a tick on their card.

The opening sounds better too. Before, everything kicked in at once and turned to mush. Now the match horn plays on its own, effects and ambience fade in, and the main theme comes in last.

Main menu

The “Age of Blocks” wordmark moved under the crest and doubled in size. Long news headlines no longer stretch the menu, and the news stays visible, folded down, on short screens. I redrew the town in the background in the same style as the in-game buildings, and the townsfolk are the game’s villager miniatures. The building that opens the support campaign is now a Treasury.

Fixes

• Music and sound: On the live site, no music or effects played at all. The deploy step was skipping the audio files. That’s fixed, and the build now fails if it ever happens again.
• Building panel: The pointless collapse button is gone, and building names sit in a single, clean strip.
• Civilization picker: No longer shows up empty the first time you open single player.
• Speed: The menu opens faster than before.

Have fun.