Don't think that's such a good idea.

Why 'charm' a unit temporarily at the cost of ur favor when you can convert him fully using a priest for free.

Even if 'charming' happens quicker than converting, would you actually want to spend resources to do it? especially a resource as important & limited as favor?

I'm talking about as a replacement for conversion, which doesn't exist in AOM.

there is no concept of conversion in AOM

all u ppl want is to have every MU at once

So why isn't conversion in AoM? We've heard a lot of people mention it w/out realising it's been cut out, but who can blame 'em? Why the #$%@ did ES take it out? The calculations and codes already exist from AoE and AoK, so it's not like it was a programming burden. Was it that not enough ppl said they WANTED conversion? If we all hate it is one thing, if not everyone uses it as THE core of their strategy is another thing. I mean, it's just ridiculous! Or mabye it will be a feature in an expansion pack that will contain stuff that should have been left in the original game. I don't get why ES would load AoK and The Conquerers with new conversion techs (although I didn't like heresy) only to kill the entire concept in their next RTS without any reason. And so what if we want all the MUs at once?! HAHAHAHA, it would be really cool. But they could have MUs harder to convert based on favor cost (also already programming for that: scout/light cavalry). I think conversion is a great supplement to the game experience and would be infuriated to see it taken away with either some half-rate excuse or (as the current situation is) absolutely NONE AT ALL!!! DANG IT, ES, I'M GONNA SNAP AND IT'S ALL YOUR FAULT!!!!! NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Beep! Beep! Beep! -Warning: Blood pressure at 1000% above max tolerance; meltdown imminent-

KaBLOOM! (The entire forum is shaken by the explosion)

I guess if you *really* want to convert your enemies, you'll just have to use Osiris' Mummies! I rarely used my monks for non-healing purposes anyways, so I'm less prone to spontaneous combustion when it comes to this topic

[This message has been edited by Maroon_Marauder (edited 05-07-2002 @ 11:48 PM).]

apparently the use of monks by players range between the two extremes; many, like me, never use monks except create, say, one, to pick up the relics. many, still, like halfawake, use conversion frequently and it is one of the core aspects of their strategy. Nobody knows why ES took it out, and we can only speculate; balancing issues, couldn't be bothered, Eggies already have priests.. who knows?

but about developing conversion in AoK, the Age series is not to be related, really, just that the previous game is something ES learns from. Maybe they thought conversion wasn't very important, or it shouldn't be in.

ES could have lots of reasons. Ask them before you blow up the forum.

The_Avenger772 is pretty close. Some players loved Monks in AOK and some hated them. Since we were positing the Priest as the way Egyptians dealt with MUs, we just could not afford to have a significant number of players not want to play a third of our civs.

No matter how long it takes to convert a Mountain Giant, it still sucks when it happens. Not only do you lose an expensive unit, but now it is coming to get you! Our testers just wouldn't play MUs when fighting Egypt.

Conversion has a lot of problems that we never really solved in AOE and AOK. It was often hard to find the Priest who was converting you in order to kill him in time. It gave a huge benefit to players who could micromanage individual Priests. Because of the micromanagement, it was very sensitive to pop cap. In a game where armies have 20 units, you could control your Priests. In a game where 50 Paladins came calling, the Priests were useless. Then there were the techtree issues--if you convert an Ulfsark, can he build? Does he get your upgrades? What if you convert an archer, but don't have any upgrades that can affect him? What if you convert an Academy? Can you then train Hoplites out of it? Soon you could have the units of all 3 cultures all for the cost of a few Priests.

Don't get be wrong--we could have solved all of these problems, given enough time. However, there are more exciting features we would rather have spent our time on, like God Powers and supporting 50 units on a screen in a 3D engine. You can't take a game as huge as AOK and bolt all of AOM's features on top of it. You end up with a titantic mess. Something has to give, and conversion seemed like an easy candidate.

...but we didn't delete the code, because we needed it for something else.

I said good riddance. I hated conversion!

Whoah... you couldn't find the attacking monks? The trick was to find the monk that was in convert animation. Big MUs, I thought, would be like AoK heros: try to convert, and an annoying message would appear at the foot of your viewing window that tells you "you can't do that," then lingers there for about five minutes.

In AoK, most of your list issues were resolved: converted builder guys could build only what your builders could; a converted enemy archer, or any unit, would keep techs it already knew, but could not gain any more; converted buildings could only train what your equivilent buildings could, given there are any: i.e.: Playing as the Mayans, I convert a Celtic stable. The Mayans can't build stables, so I can't train any units there. I convert an archery range, I can train archers and skirmishers, but not cav archers, which the Mayans can't get. It's all in the AoK manual.

And losing through priests alone: It was probably possible in the nutty AoE (Eggy priests with 16 range!), but AoK fixed that very well. I've never seen a 20-man army lose to conversions. I only use it in city defense where the unit would die anyway, or against an AI-style single-unit counterattack. Sorry about your testers, but wouldn't "banish" also discourage them from building MUs? And, like in your (really funny) other thread, the guys should have enough defenses to protect them anyway... Conversion wouldn't have been the only way to get MUs, after all. This fix is sort of delaying the inevitable. Plus, countering priests is easy, so long as you have ranged units.

So you kept the code in but took out the feature? Are you hiding something? (Of course, you guys wouldn't ADMIT it, but it's worth a shot!)

Four months isn't enough time to manifest some code that's already there? Even if you use MS Office to do it, you still could fix its "suggestions" by September. I'm sure that this has gone on far enough, so if you're still reading, 1) you have too much free time, and 2) I can solve your priest problems without major fundamental changes in the game.

Edit the priest properties and set "range" to 4(-ish).

I think that is good reasoning ES_DS. I personally was all about the bloody conquest. Converting? Naw... Monks were for getting relics and getting relics only, that is unless they happened to be near my damaged army... I admit monks are not my specialty...

As for this "charming" idea...

In RA2 yuri did something like this... I didnt like it because good players ketp..taking... my... units over!
There were counters though. Air units could not be converted as well as, in the w-pac, things like robot tanks etc.

Now picture this: you take all of your monks and rush the enemy... Say you rush with 50 monks... You take over 50 units and what does you opponent have now? And myth unit charming!

If it doesnt take time I bet it will be misused. However, maybe... certain... units, like the terror drones in RA2, would not be able to be converted. I'm not talking just heroes, cuz that wont be enough... Probably all myth units/siege weapons...

But DS has told us about converting anyway, so it doesnt matter...

And hahahahah... I have made a sig...

-Vladimir87

Charming....hey that might not sound useful in a long term look at things but here, an army is marching on you right? your packed withj riests and your fave is doing quite well, you decide to turn the enemy front liness against their own army. Now this would probably only be done to save time but iI think it would be quite useful DURING a battle, after u would have to take the time to kill the poor guy off, why not let his old friends do it for you?

Don't mummies convert enemies into Minions? That's why the code was kept....

conversion is for unit-hungry freaks...like me

Maybe there is a GP that will do conversion of an entire army .

or mayb a GP that makes every thing in the game under ur control...that way u automatically win...its called the Cheat-O-Rama GP

Boy, am I glad to hear that, DS! I always hated monks, never used them except for relics and healing (missionaries!), but they were always annoying whey they tried to convert your units, usually unsuccessfully. In EE, priests (monks) are too powerful, converting much to fast for a response.

thanks, Deathshrimp! MWAHAHAHA I AM RIGHT... er, or was close.

Halfawake, banish is NOT supposed to be as common as AoK conversions, not something your everyday priest can just hop up and wave his staff around and hope it'll work. In terms of AoK, I guess it'll take MUCH more "power" and maybe even something else, otherwise priests will be even more powerful than AoK.. we dont'want that do we? (well, not me)

The thing is, if you have 20 monks trying to convert your teutonic knights, they approach.. kill a monk. approach.. kill another monk. turn around.. kill the converted teut. approach.. kill a monk. turn around.. kill the converted teut.
Anyway priests were severly altered besides the conversion in AoM, like Eggies only and banish. As DS said, they had a good reason for taking out conversion; it was unbalanced, monks weren't a universal unit anymore and they didn't like it anyway. And from what I can see in this forum a very big majority didnt'like monks or didn't really use them.

You know that really would stink. You have a six-headed hydra on the warpath, but no! Monks! Suddenly the hydra has 9 heads, because he has killed your nearby units! I applaud Ensemble's decision to remove converting. Having super-powerful units makes converting very unbalanced...

The only other option I think is possible, is to have myth unit invulnerable agaisnt conversion... Anubites would then be the anti-monk super weapons...

-Vladimir87

@Gluteus Maximus: That would be the Curse god power. It is the Greek GP that turns all enemy units in a certain area into pigs.

Question to all: Does the Curse GP include super-powerful MU's or is it limited to regular units?

If it includes MU's, then that should be a lot of incentive to keep your high-priced MU's away from each other. Imagine sending in your massive army of MU's and *poof* they turn into pork dinner for the enemy. He gobbles them up and uses the food to build regular units to use against you.

it does it to MUs too...theres more strategy then

First_Timothy...the Curse GP doesnt convert it just turns enemies into pigs...i think other ppl might b able to get the pigs...and i think Gluteus Maximus meant just a regular conversion not like changin the units

[This message has been edited by Hairy Scary Man (edited 05-10-2002 @ 09:49 AM).]

I guess I was thinking in terms of scenario design. To change units to pigs would require converting them to the Gaia player. This would necessitate leaving the conversion code in the game that Deathshrimp talked about, since whether you are converting the units from Player1 to Player2 or Player1 to Gaia the engine still has to update the database. However, you are correct that I didn't address what Gluteus Maximus meant, because he wanted to convert them to his control. It sounds like that won't be in the game.

well, not much for me to say...

CONVERSION IS OUT DUE TO BALANCE ISSUES THAT ES NEVER OVERCAME IN AoK.

CONVERSION CODE REMAINS, and I think it's used for banish... look in "Banishing Myth Units" thread by TSD.

LETS NOT CRY ABOUT CONVERSIONS.

Ooooh, looks like SOMEONE's ticked off. Heeheehee. Hating a particular tactic just because you don't want to bother to develop a counter to it isn't really a good excuse... The only way the 50 monk thing (assuming your enemies happen to have 5,000 bucks laying around) would EVER work is if the defender had NO towers/castles/walls/etc. whatsoever. Otherwise, it'd be a priest slaughter. And there's no excuse for a poor defense by the third age (when you can train priests). You have your heavy fortifications available by then, and it's too late for feudal age rushing (obviously). Don't blame the enemy because they outsmarted you.

And did ANYONE read my proposed solution? It would make all these ridiculous scenarios COMPLETELY impossible. Even if your city defenses are haybales, ultra-short range conversion wouldn't be useful in battle as more than self-defense (and then unlikely to work). You still could use it to take doomed units left behind during a disordered retreat or a group of villagers. Why would the villies stand around to be killed anyway?

I know I brought up the subject of charming/conversions, except I always did hate straight up conversions in AOE and AOK considering that they were supposed to be straight up historical RTS games without a fantasy twist. It always seemed silly to me that some priest could just "convert" some rampaging swordsman.

Personally, I would have preferred to see conversion completely removed from AOE and AOK. However, considering that AOM has a supernatural (mythological) twist to it, it could have something akin to conversion. I think charming, mass confusion, etc. could be a toned down version that would not be as potentially cheesy.

Perhaps mass confusion could be a GP. It could make an enemies troops within a certain radius attack everything near them, whether it be an allied or enemy unti, for X amount of time. It would have to be cast intelligently and directed at a key point in the enemy defense.

[This message has been edited by Newbie (edited 05-10-2002 @ 10:51 PM).]

oh, i'm not ticked off, halfawake. It'll take much more than that to tick me off... even Questionaire's ramblings about beef sausage and macbeth didn't. (makes you think, doesn'it?) I'm just starting to get bored of saying things again and again. Anyway...

Conversions were:

-unrealistic. Which rampaging swordsman would suddenly look at a half-witted bald priest waving a staff and making annoying noises and think "hey, i think i'll instantly change my clothes to another colour and start killing my mate Jimmy the swordsman."
-unbalanced. priests were relatively cheap, and could heal AND convert. If you had a couple of trebs, about 10-20 priests, and some melee backup, you'd destroy everything that outranges the priest, and convert everyhting else. Anyway, I'm just thinking this now, I only said it was unblaanced because Deathshrimp said so. I don't hate monks, never have I been defeated by an army with monks. Anyway i'm a brit fanatic and longs outrange priests.

and, maybe villagers were there to pick up weapons from dead bodies and sell them for some money...

conversoin isn't htere in AoM because:

-DS said it was unbalanced in AoK, but usually people would live with conversion. In AoM, with SUPERSTRONG units like MUs and Heroes, conversion as just too good.
-only eggies get priests, and they already have banish. Do you want priests to become sme kind of angel?
-having conversion just to pick off a couple of villies after a full-on battle is pointless, they're using thje conversion code for something mor productive (maybe banish).

exactly The_Avenger772

why do you always agree with me?

i do?

yes, you do... and it took you 7 hours to reply "I do?" lol

EDIT: why did i use lol when they have smilies?

[This message has been edited by The_Avenger772 (edited 05-11-2002 @ 06:52 PM).]

it took me so long cuz i was sleepin and the next time u post and i have sumthin to say ill have to disagree

[This message has been edited by Hairy Scary Man (edited 05-12-2002 @ 01:15 AM).]