Reynolds: We'll talk more about the details of the specific civilizations later on, but one thing we've tried to do with the Asian cards is to give slightly different twists even to the "standard" cards to make their build orders feel more unique. Up until now, for example, pretty much every civ has had a "3 Villagers" card which most players tend to send at the very beginning of the game. The Chinese instead have "migration" cards, which allow them to spawn a Villager at each of their Villages and Town Centers. This rewards sending the cards later rather than earlier. The Japanese only have a "2 Villagers" card, but they are allowed to send it twice even though it only takes up one slot in their deck. And the Indians have no dedicated villager cards at all, but every Indian card sends one villager as a bonus. This leaves the early Indian build order wide open for all sorts of strategies.
GameSpy: Are the Europeans or native Americans getting any new toys to play with?
Reynolds: Not as much. One of the tricky parts of doing a second expansion is that we want it to be compatible both with players who have only the original game and players who also own The WarChiefs. Ensemble Studios and Big Huge Games both agreed that adding directly onto the Europeans and Native Americans would endanger that goal and likely fragment the multiplayer community too much.GameSpy: Having created your own RTS franchise with Rise of Nations what's it been like for the team to work in someone else's universe?
We do think players who want to stay with their European and Native civs will have a great time with the expansion because they'll be able to play against these radical new opponents on all of the exciting new maps, many of which implement new features not seen before in Age of Empires IIImaps. For example there is a map themed on the Great Silk Road and on that map you don't need to build Trading Posts on the Trade Route Sites. Instead you go and capture them from the guardians or from the other players.
Reynolds: I've personally had a great time working on it! Ike Ellis, our designer/programmer of Conquer the World fame has done the hard work of actually leading the team so that I can come in and do the fun stuff -- brainstorming game mechanics, playtesting multiplayer maps, helping John Hawkins think of new cards and, of course, "making hard level really hard." I feel guilty about what a complete hoot this has been for me. The whole team has done a great job bringing this together and we've all had a lot of fun in the process.
