Design tricks by Lennart van Beek

How to make Appletrees

The first thing you should do is placing some trees close together (e.g. Spruce). Pine trees work best for this trick, but don't use forest rendered from the terrain option. Place them in such a way that they line up together.

.

Then, place down the equivalent number of berry bushes and move them behind the trees. The result will look like this:

Sometimes when you start the scenario the berries will appear in front of the tree instead of behind them. To solve this problem, just move the berry bush a little bit more behind the tree. There you have it! But they look a bit dull with only grass around it. So place something like Desert patches or some elevation, and then use the move button to move the trees and berry bushes on them. Villagers can gather from them and cut down the tree too! Two recources in one bite.

How to make a Palisade Wall

I came up with the idea looking at the palisade walls in AoK, but i wanted them in AoE!!! So i played a bit with the scenario editor and saw that you can make tree stumps. So here is how to do it: Go to the Gaia menu and select the first tree stump (the first one is best cause he places them even more together then the other 2 do). The next thing is to place them down right next to each other to form a wall. But then you might get a problem. They sometimes jump into other places then you want them to be. But that doesn't matter yet. Just place them down until you form a wall. Make it look somewhat like this:

The next step is to remove all the unwanted stumps. Just use the delete button to remove them. Now comes the tricky part: How can i make them solid? Well this is nothing to be worried about. After you have removed the unwanted stumps, select the "Tree Forest" unit in the Gaia menu. Press CONTROL+A to see the grid line (this is needed to see where you place the tree forest). Now carefully put down some tree forest units in front of the palisade wall. Remember to put them close together. Here is an example:

Press CONTROL+A again to put the grid line off. There's only one problem about this great eye-candy: Its is not fully solid for villagers and priests. They are only solid for all of the combat units.

REMEMBER TO PUT THE TREE FOREST UNITS CLOSE TOGETHER! Otherwise, the combat units will also walk through the palisade wall. You can make a palisade wall in any direction.

How to put a ship onto a rock

This is a very simple trick, not hard at all. Make some water and put a boat (e.g. Trade Boat) on to it.

Next, draw a cliff under it and you're done!!! this trick can also be used with docks or other boats.

Making a thick wall

Also very easy to do. Put a small wall down and put a medium wall next to it. Something like this:

To see the full effect you MUST start in the iron age, otherwise it won't work. Here is the final result:

Instead of a low wall, you now have a thick wall!

Trees on a Building

A nice trick to do. Very easy indeed. Got to the Gaia menu, and put down some trees(don't use trees from the terrain option, this doesn't work). Then put a building you like (e.g. Town center) next to it.

Next, use the Move button to move the town center into the trees.

You can use any building you want. But this ONLY works for GAIA. Other civilisations cannot do this. If you try and start the scenario, the trees will just disappear. A nice effect is to make some trees and move a Watch tower(other towers can be used too!!!)into it. This will make the tower more realistic.





Overlapping buildings - The original way

This is another cool elevation trick you can do. The biggest advantage of overlapping buildings this way is that it allows different stages of overlapping depending on the elevation height used. It can create some unique overlapping effects;



Create a hill of at least elevation 3 and make sure you have plenty of room to place your buildings. In this example, I used elevation 7;



Cover the surrounding terrain with e.g. grass patches, and add some trees if you like. This will hide the downward elevation which does the actual overlapping. Now create some downward elevation 1 in the dead-center of your buildings. If you did it correctly, your buildings should now be overlapping each other.

Snow

Basically, snow in AoE is utilising all white graphics, without overdoing it. Beach article shells and white rubble are excellent for placement on normal terrain, as they don't drop a stupid flag like a Discovery does. It looks best when you mix them together and spread the objects equally. Make sure you cover up the center of the white rubble, this hides the squarey bricks and gives it a more natural look.

Campfires

Lay down the smallest destruction rubble, and place some rock 8 in a circle underneath it.



There are 2 types of campfire you can make. Either place a Dead_Hunter (fire will last 5 minutes) or a Catapult Stone Fire (fire lasts entire game) in the center of it.



Add a Gaia invisible forest tree on top of the fire to prevent units walking on it.

Custom Shadows

Did you know there are two hidden shadow units in AoE which allow you to form your own shadow/black terrain on the map? No, they're not some kind of hidden beta units.

There are two very cool gaia trees which render an additional small shadow consisting of 3 pixels a few inches away from there original shadow graphic slot. They are:



As you can see, I encircled the extra shadows as they are quite hard to notice. By grouping multiple of the same trees together, you can create awesome shadow effects on the terrain as seen below:



They can be used for practically everything, as long as you don't overdo. Don't create a bigger shadow than 4x4 tiles or heavy lag will kill this lovely eye-candy.

There is one small disadvantage of this trick, sometimes the shadow "disappears" when moving your cursor to another part of the map. Don't worry, they'll re-appear again. Also, keep the sun direction in mind when creating shadow, it's always faced northwest.

Making cliffs disappear in-game

Place an Invisible Demon (any other unit will do as well, but a Demon doesn't have a graphic slot so it won't show on the cliff) in the center and render a cliff under it. Now place a Saint Francis in sight, and make sure it's diplomacy is set to enemy towards the unit standing on the cliff.



Once Saint Francis attacks with his lightning bolt from the sky, the cliff you put your unit on will disappear! This weird but cool bug only removes the graphics of the cliff though, the cliff area will still be impassable (too bad!) and the minimap will still show the area as being a cliff.

Arches

This trick is for advanced scenario designers only. It requires a certain feel in isometry and precision to accurately create a beautiful arch. You'll need a lot of patience for this one as it will take you several times to get it good.



Fill the sides of the arch by drawing 2 straight lines of objects.



Now comes the really, really hard part, forming the actual bow that defines the arch. To get this to look good, create more anchorpoints that will eventually form the whole like so:



When you're satisfied, fill the empty outline spaces, surround the arch with cliffs and trees, and finish it further with some terrain features.



You can also use this method to create Caves, Aquaducts, etc.

Bridges

Requires the "Arches" trick and may also take several tries to get something pleasing. Create some shallow water and delete the shallow patches, leaving passable water. Create an arch in the center of the water.



Create the anchorpoints for the bridge. Keep the bridge curves in mind when doing this, you don't want something that looks like one solid block of objects. I like to use Rock 5 and 6 for my bridges as they show as black pixels on the minimap, indicating there's a passage over the water, and their brown color is just perfect.



Carefully form the curvy outlines of the bridge.



Then, fill the "body" of the bridge by using horizontal or vertical lines of rocks.



Now we have to create the top of the bridge. Place down roads (e.g. Desert path) alongside the outlines and make sure no water is visible anymore.



You're almost done. To make the bridge more realistic, add some depth to it. Do this by placing down Rock 23 underneath the arch, like so:



Finally, make your bridge solid by placing Invisible Tree Forest alongside the bridge outlines. Add some terrain features to finish it. You can also choose to add some shadow which makes it look even better.




Back to Top

Back