Porting Maps to Return of Rome

Welcome to this guide. With this method, the basic layout of a scenario, it’s terrain, and most of it’s units and buildings can be ported to Return of Rome.

Please be aware that this method excludes any unit or building ID not mapped/assigned by GenieEdit, or units/buildings that are non-existent in Age of Empires II: Age of Kings, such as the Chariot. You will have to manually add any missing unit(s), and update the messages and AI/PER manually and set the victory conditions using triggers. You may also need to change some additional settings.

Also, please ask permission from the author before porting any custom works and publishing them as your own.

Tools and things you need:

Original game, AoE2DE and Return of Rome (duh)

AoE to AoK map converter (GenieEdit) for Wololoing (converting maps to AoK)

RockNRoR (Not required, but useful for getting the exact map size).

For porting campaign scenario’s:
Campaign Manager 3 for extracting scenarios

For porting .Ai and .PER files:
AOE1 to AOE2 AI Converter for porting both the .AI and .PER files

Let’s start porting!

I recommend creating a near-blank map as a starting point.

Extract any scenario from a campaign using Campaign Manager 3, save the scenario (doesn’t matter if it’s .scn or .scx), or use your own custom scenario.

AoERoR directory:
C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft Games\Age of Empires\scenario

In this example, I will use the Bronze Age Art of War scenario from the trial version of the original Age of Empires.

Converting AoE scenarios to AoK scenarios

Copy Bronze_Age_Art_of_War.scn to the GenieEdit directory, and then launch GenieEdit using the command prompt (type CMD in the Windows search bar, then hit Enter).

Make sure GenieEdit can read your custom scenario you just made (Bronze_Age_Art_of_War.scn in this case, do not use spaces but underscores) and the aoe2x-Empty.scx, or the conversion will not work. If you have everything in the correct place, use the CONVERT command to convert Bronze_Age_Art_of_War.scn into an AoK scenario, like so:

Be sure to specify the full path to your own scenario, where you want the converted one, and the aoe2x-Empty.scx scenario:

C:\Users\my name\Desktop\GenieEdit\bin\Release\GenieEdit.exe convert C:\Users\my name\Desktop\GenieEdit\bin\Release\My_Scenario.scn C:\Users\my name\Desktop\GenieEdit\bin\Release\My_Scenario_AOK.scx C:\Users\my name\Desktop\GenieEdit\bin\Release\aoe2x-Empty.scx

or, place the scenario you want to convert and the aoe2x-Empty.scx in your own user directory, so C:\Users\MyName\ folder, which would be the easiest way.

Please note that in the above image your own username in Windows is used.

Once converted comes the next step. Copy the now converted scx, Bronze_Age_Art_of_War_AOK.scx, to your default AoE2DE (NOT ROR!!!) scenario directory;

AoE2DE:
C:\Users\USERNAME\Games\Age of Empires 2 DE\ABUNCHOFNUMBERS\resources\_common\scenario

then launch AoE2DE and open up the scenario in the editor, et voila, it loads and works:

But you are not done yet! Because of compatibility issues with Return of Rome at the moment you cannot simply copy and use the scenario in the Return of Rome scenario directory, because Return of Rome will not read it! However there is a simple workaround.

The power of Map Copy

Here comes the fun part! In the AoE2DE Editor, under the Terrain tab, use the Map Copy tool as seen in the above image, copy the entire map (simply drag from the top-left corner to the bottom-right corner and select the whole map). Now exit the AoE2DE editor and switch to Return of Rome and open the RoR Editor, create a blank scenario, and make sure the map size is big enough to accomodate the map you just copied from AoE2DE. Go to the Terrain tab and use the Map copy tool to paste the entire map on a blank scenario, and there you have it!

Again, please note this method excludes any unit or building ID not mapped/assigned by GenieEdit, or units/buildings that are non-existent in Age of Empires II: Age of Kings, such as the Chariot. You will have to manually add any missing unit(s), and update the messages manually and set the victory conditions using triggers.

Jan DC adds: Nice! It’s also quite easy to have custom map sizes in RoR so you can have the same map sizes as in the original game. You just need a random script that generates a map of the size you want in the editor: override_map_size 48 (command example).

You can download my Bronze Age Art of War ported example scenario here.

What is amazing about this is that you can even port (map copy) AoE2DE scenarios to Return of Rome this way, and vice versa. As mentioned, the Map Copy tool just became a lot more powerful and is an amazing feature.

Save the scenario and you’re done.

You can find your ported scenario in the following directory:

Return of Rome:
C:\Users\USERNAME\Games\Age of Empires 2 DE\ABUNCHOFNUMBERS\modes\Pompeii\resources\_common\scenario

I hope this guide is useful to anyone wanting to port over original scenarios/maps to Return of Rome. In the future, I hope someone will have all the unit and building IDs mapped for a proper 100% correct port.

Thank you for reading, and have fun porting!

PhatFish

5-6-2023