Culture of buildings on the Battle Map - Baroque in the Middle East?

[Faris ad Din]

Towns and farms in the European areas have apparently European buildings a la Baroque style. Native American villages have their primitive huts. Buildings in India - farmhouses, town halls - all are in recognizably rural Indian/Indo-Saracenic architectural styles. However, towns seen on the battle map in battles in the Middle East are largely in European baroque style.

It just doesn't make sense. You would expect sandy mud-brick structures with flat roofs in rural areas and Persian/Turkish architecture in the cities. The distant city outlines of when you fight in say, Istanbul and Baghdad show the proper minarets and domes of mosques and cubical flat-roofed buildings one would recognize as more indigenously Middle Eastern in style, but the towns themselves have many of the same exact buildings one would find in Flanders or Brandenburg.

Please hold any objections of "stereotyping" or historical inconsistency - all I am suggesting is that if CA is continuing to bring major updates, I would like to see new building models for Middle Eastern regions - if battle maps in India are already all properly localized. I know that the Ottoman Empire started adopting some baroque architectural styles in their mosques like the Ortaköy Mosque, but that was half a century after this time period and is much more the exception than the rule.

It really is odd seeing Viennese opera houses and French hotels and otherwise baroque-style gabled and glass-windowed multi-story buildings in the middle of a burning desert with sandstorms.

Among the many fixes that have to come - new building set please!

[mandalore9]

Check out this thread: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=248894

One person said that the strategic and battle map are not correlated. The game pretty much just takes what type of map it is(ie river, mountain, etc). Next it selects one pre-made map of that type. Finally, it adds some random things into the pre-made map.

[Faris ad Din]

Somehow I knew I was going to be misunderstood - I should have worked to get these screenshots first. A lot of starting up game/battles and Alt-F4 to skip them without getting unit losses tallied on my Steam profile.

Check out this thread: http://www.twcenter.net/forums/showthread.php?t=248894

One person said that the strategic and battle map are not correlated. The game pretty much just takes what type of map it is(ie river, mountain, etc). Next it selects one pre-made map of that type. Finally, it adds some random things into the pre-made map.

I understand what you are saying, and I well know that the strat and battle maps often do not match up like they did in RTW and M2TW, and that the attacker/defender orientations are reversed, etc., - but that is really not what I am talking about. That's a completely different topic.

I am talking about actual building types on the battlefield, and in the rest of the strat map, there is evidence to show that there IS consistency in culture of buildings. The European theater has baroque Western European style-buildings and you'll never find an Indian mud-and-straw hut or Indo-Saracenic palace there. Battle maps in the Indian theater are set with buildings that most people can recognize are from somewhere in the subcontinent. The Middle East is not as fortunate.

Again, I am not talking about locations and strat-battle map correlation vis-a-vis the thread you linked - I am talking about region and culture of buildings. I am raising this topic in the hope that it will be considered and addressed, after, and in addition to the many other fixes and improvements CA is working on.

THIS is fine:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Screenshots from a battle in Goa, India, with examples of Indian architecture.

The whole town on the battle map:





A close-up of some of the farm buildings from the foreground in the screenshot above. I recognized the mud-walled thatched hut with the wall decorations as specifically reminiscent of farm village buildings from the west Indian region of Kutch in the state of Gujarat, although I could be off and it could be exemplary of a wider variety of Indian farm buildings.





A view of the town hall - exemplary of the renowned "Indo-Saracenic" architectural style - that crosses mainly Persian architecture but is built throughout India by Muslim rulers, and later adopted by the British Raj (British colonial rulers). Some of the smaller surrounding buildings, including the ones in the foreground, are also apparently exemplary of this style (pointy domed roofs).





This is all fair and good. Battle maps in India portray INDIAN buildings, and not Scandinavian or Spanish or Slavic.

European town:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Screenshot taken from a battle - attack on Munich in Bavaria in winter:



Most anyone can recognize the multistory, framed-glass windows of the 18th century northern and western European architectural style, and at least the steepled church and bell tower. Got that so far?

THIS is not cool:

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Screenshots from a battle - defense of Baghdad. In Mesopotamia, in Iraq - everybody heard of Baghdad by now.

Overview of the town. We see some flat-roofed mud-brick buildings in the foreground, which is more recognizably traditional lower-class Middle Eastern architecture, but it is the buildings in the center of town in the background I am concerned about:





Close-up of the buildings near the center of town. Closest to our perspective, we see a building with archways - a possible exception? Probably still not.





A screenshot of the town hall. It just screams European Baroque architecture. In Baghdad? In Mesopotamia? In 1705? Some of the battles in this region feature sandstorms.



Show me a building like this in the Middle East.



Lastly, a close-up of some mud-brick buildings sometimes seen on battle maps in the Middle East. Some appropriate buildings made it in - but they still clash with the fancy gleaming European buildings when they are right next to each other.



This is the style I expect more of in this region. For a town hall, something that remotely resembles the Pasha's Palaces we see pictures of via the strat map, or something featuring Islamic pointed arches, pointed domes, geometric tiling, floral design or even calligraphy.

A picture is worth a thousand knuckles. Am I understood now?

[AlphaDelta]

I know this sounds weird, but I really don't think CA ever intended for us to fight in the Middle East.

The bulk of the Ottoman holdings are in Europe, Persia is a non playable clone faction. And that's all there is in the ME.

Cheers

[MehemtAli_Pasha]

I know this sounds weird, but I really don't think CA ever intended for us to fight in the Middle East.

The bulk of the Ottoman holdings are in Europe, Persia is a non playable clone faction. And that's all there is in the ME.

Cheers

well..if it's not so important(which i can assure u it is not the case), i don't think CA would have included it in the first place. adding to that, NTW2 the Napoleonic mod for Rome had town building better than this. at least they got the architecture right, even though it's not as fancy as in ETW.

any way i agree with Faris. 18 century architecture for the middle east didn't have the baroque style. it's not until the mid 19 century, places like Egypt begin westernizing and adapting some European architecture to some very exceptional buildings like the kings' palaces. houses where no more than 2 to 3 stories high, and the highest buildings in any middle eastern cities were mosques.

[Big Pacha]

I know this sounds weird, but I really don't think CA ever intended for us to fight in the Middle East.

The bulk of the Ottoman holdings are in Europe, Persia is a non playable clone faction. And that's all there is in the ME.

Cheers

With all due respect I disagree on that. If that was true then why put the Ottomans and Marathas as playable factions? And BTW the coolest ones IMHO! Battles in th ME, the East and even further were expected, especially since the first AI opponents in the Ottoman campaign is Dagestan and Persia. That means guerilla warfare between Iran / Iraq. Quite cool. It was in the open so no building, except when I took persian cities: yes, the building style was very odd, not to say out of topic.
Note: Russia makes peace even if you take back Crimea from them (note: I've finished the Prestigious Victory campaign goals). So that's not "all there is" I had also fights vs. Morocco with the same inaccuracy.

The Indian theatre seems much more realistic in that matter: I found the Indian buildings quite accurate with the Marathas: red bricks, indo-persian style, the famous "red forts" etc. And those Domes! Any of you who haven't seen the Taj Mahal for real haven't seen the beauty of the world. Unforgetable...

Don't remember any european style building there, but this campaign is on hold since I crushed the Mughals. Note that Persia is a clone of the Mughals so It's quite a good NP faction with a full roster, buildings, techs etc.

A small thing easily corrected by a patch, along with many other more important things such as the Sound Bug (grrrrr!)

[Haakon]

Cities in Kingdoms looks better than the cities in Empire.

[nosey aka lord welington]

there are also greece ruins in the carribiean http://s598.photobucket.com/albums/t...4-41-17-75.jpg and i also found bamboo in america(maybe there was bamboo in the americas but i am not shure)

[Faris ad Din]

there are also greece ruins in the carribiean http://s598.photobucket.com/albums/t...4-41-17-75.jpg and i also found bamboo in america(maybe there was bamboo in the americas but i am not shure)

Wow... some minor regions got some good attention. This reminds me of the Greek/Roman ruins one finds on RTW battle maps in the Mediterranean area. The Italian region gets church ruins on the battle map. I'm sure at least today, there is plentiful bamboo in the warmer regions of the Americas.

I feel AlphaDelta's comment actually concurs with my point - this clear inaccuracy of architectural styles is an oversight on CA's part, and is a case of an unfinished part of an overall unfinished game. I partially disagree that we were not meant to fight in the Middle East, because they did include the region - although I can reason that they put less priority on completing a Middle Eastern Turkish/Persian/Arab building set BECAUSE there is only one playable faction in most of this area (half of which is in Europe), and a few minor factions that other factions would take a while getting to. Although (again), one of the required victory regions for Great Britain (long campaign) is Egypt. Imagine having to take a fleet to Egypt (pre-empting Napoleon's own historical invasion of Egypt in 1798) and finding baroque European-style buildings there already! Bah.

For ETW to be deemed acceptably complete, these building sets have to be completed and fixed - I'm pretty certain it is a relatively simple affair (besides modeling and skinning the actual buildings) of adding a few specific building files and updating a text file controlling the type of building in each cultural region in a future patch. Indian buildings were very well done. In addition to the at least hundred other complaints and fixes, I want to see "Middle Eastern" buildings fixed.

Let's presume that the game development period (as the game was probably released too prematurely) has not ended yet - and CA is getting the "extended" game development timeframe it needs to give us a game up to expectation. I'm still awaiting this content - and I'm raising the issue to help make sure that it is remembered and not forgotten.

[alpaca]

I guess they didn't have enough time to finish them so they left them out. Just another little bit of immersion-breaking but by far not the worst.

[cherryfunk]

I guess they didn't have enough time to finish them so they left them out. Just another little bit of immersion-breaking but by far not the worst.

I wish you'd stop spreading that awful slander. As CA has said, ETW was not rushed at all, and was released exactly as they intended.

[TheBlobThing]

I think AlphaDelta is partly right. It is most probably because of design priorities. As the Middle-Eastern theatre is not the most prominent, or widely "used", they only made a handful of buildings for it. It's a pity because it's very cool to actually get some different backdrops to your battles when you fight in a different theatre.

If it is design priorities I don't think it will be addressed in a patch.