Design Tricks by PhatFish

 This Article consists of two pages. The second page includes some tricks that can only be achieved using Zapdotep’s Enhanced Editor.

How to make Fruit trees

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 resources 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.

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.  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.

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