That gold mine is pretty cool. More realistic than the end-version’s.

Wow...
I am speechless. Congrats to Litude for his discovery.

Amazing.

I like the water. It's clearly better than the 0,0,255 water AoE currently have :/

The foot soldiers remind me of the legions and javelineers of Ceasar III!

Wow! no matter if the arrows look massive, that is indeed a great discovery. I wish this version was available somewhere. I love how the minimap looks as well! sweet!.

Incredible discovery, I believe those brown tiles in top right corner were left in the .drs files. The minimap, interestingly, looks very smooth.

The water-land borders are smoother, too. It makes some kind of little cliff... they should have kept them.

Very nice finding! Somehow they still amaze me. Who knows what other beta/alpha material is undiscovered?

The horses look great.

It's so weird. It reminds me of starcraft in a way.
Its interesting, but I prefer every end game graphic, please.

[This message has been edited by local boi (edited 04-23-2012 @ 02:06 AM).]

I just wish a lot of these would still be available as placable objects, even if non functional like the Trade Workshop. It would make scn design just so much more awesome and diverse!

I don't really like the unit and naval graphics in this shot. Only the chariots looks reasonably good.

However, the minimap looks really great. I also like the idea of the gold mine, but it could have used an update.

But the best might be the land/water border. No automatic beach that you need to cover up if it's a river. But of course that creates a problem for beaches. I think they should have made 2 types of water, river and sea instead of water and deep water and based on that render the border with land.

How long before release was this screenshot?

That screen shots looks pretty early, more likely from the early prototype (~18+ months before release) than the final game.

As for the beach borders, they serve an important function of not allowing building placement (except for docks) to allow for until travel.

But surely ES would have been able to code river banks to also not allow buildings except docks, so that river banks and beaches only differ in graphic.

Nice to see you here Matt! I know you're busy, but I hope you can answer some of the questions our forumers have from time to time - everyone would greatly appreciate it

What do you guys think of the trees? They look somewhat larger than in final. Were they scaled down to make loading faster? I can recognize 2 trees which have survived, one being the yellow Ash tree and the tree just above the red ballista near the right upper corner, which is the scaled down bonsai-like tree from the beta (which can also be found in the trial).

[This message has been edited by PhatFish (edited 04-25-2012 @ 07:35 AM).]

The one in the bottom right corner looks like the end-version’s beech tree (except for the colour).

I don’t like them. The end-version’s trees are pretty good although I wished they were bigger.

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I’m also glad they removed that modern stop sign. How deplorable!

[This message has been edited by Crossbowman (edited 04-25-2012 @ 06:00 PM).]

The tree size is nicer than the final version, however the aspect isn't, just like I don't like much any trees besides AoE's/RoR even though they look more like trees and less like shrubs.

i saw this and went into the site, quite interesting it worked out quite well i copied the files into the real game an it works also copied the Age of Empires Rise of Rome Expansion Trial campaigns an multiplayer scenarios into the full game an they worked as well.

I'd have still played it back then if it looked like that.

It's pretty much hands down the best one in the series.

However I feel like AoM had the best system out of them as far as balancing the counter units goes.

Why do you think RoR was chosen?

[This message has been edited by Sublimistri (edited 05-05-2012 @ 03:46 PM).]

The one thing that stands out most for me is the interface. How the mini-map is located on the left side rather than right and how the resource indicators are paired with the rest of the elements on the GUI bar rather than located at the top by themselves. GUI is definitely easier to look at.

Best part for me is the bit where they have chariots and ballistas in the ICE AGE!

So historians were wrong after all... Tribes rose before or during the Ice age already! Also, if I'm not mistaken, the white UI still can be found in the graphics.drs file, so this was a playable build for sure.

Alpha builds usually are. I'd love to get my hands on one.

Lol I just noticed the Ice Age indicator, lol!