Age Of Empires Online -- Celeste Fan Project

Hello there Celeste players! We are back with another Dev Blog.

We've been busy with lots of new content recently and we're going to showcase them for you here today! Have a look below:

Advisors let you adapt your civilization to your preferred playstyle and tailor your gameplay experience to your liking. With tons of different Advisors already existing in the game, we thought that now would be the perfect opportunity to let players further enhance their Advisor loadouts by introducing Advisor Upgrades: This feature allows you to upgrade your existing Advisors for even bigger and better effects.

There are two types of Advisor upgrades available: one for Legendary Advisors and one for non-Legendary ones.

• For Legendary Advisors: Collect the original...

Hello there everyone!

March 15th marks the first anniversary of the Roman civilization's release. It's been an awesome experience for us in the Project Celeste development team this year, and to celebrate this, we are adding a gift bundle for everyone who logs in to the game starting today - a one-time gift for each of your civilizations, including a huge bonus gift for your Roman civilization!

Note that the gifts will be unlocked for Level 25+ civilizations.

Hey there everyone!

A few weeks ago, we asked you to help us by participating in a survey. The number of responses we got from the survey were much, much higher than ever before and we are very thankful for everyone's contribution to helping us set our priorities based on you guys' responses and feedback.

There are a lot of responses for us to go through, and we are reading responses one by one. But, as promised, we would like to share with you some of the more interesting results from the survey. Have a look below:

Today we are continuing to reveal various Indian units and buildings as they roll off the conveyor belt.

Civilizations in Age of Empires Online generally have about three brand new buildings that move the civ into its own thematic direction. The Indians will be no different, and we have already revealed to you their Plantation (an oversized Farm) and their Shrine (a resource generating, monkey spawning religious building). Their third major building will be arriving later.

Their Town Center, however, will be fairly standard, though it will train something other than the Villager, which we will discuss in the future.

Today we are revealing how the Town Center looks in the early game.

Over the lifetime of Celeste, bugs and exploits have been discovered from time to time, which of course need to be fixed. Sometimes they are only visual, sometimes gameplay technical. However, it is interesting in what way these bugs happen and what the background is. I would like to explain the origins of a few of these bugs (which are now already fixed).

For a long time, critical damage was not counted for attacks that did splash damage. This refers not only to those units that are indirectly affected by the splash damage, but...

Hello there Celeste players! We are back with another Dev Blog.

This time, we will be having a look at some of the new additions to the game with tomorrow's patch!

We are excited to announce that we have more than 10 entirely new random maps available to play in both PvP and Skirmish modes! Most of these maps were done by @RekiemOne and one of them (Grasslands) has been done by none other than RecoN. Read more about each map here:

Today we are continuing to reveal various Indian units and buildings as they roll off the conveyor belt.
So far, we have mostly revealed Age 1 and Age 2 military units and buildings. Today, we are jumping around the Tech Tree a bit. Even though it’s a little disorganized, this since we don’t create things in a particular order, this format allows us to keep our blogs on a regular schedule.

Max began working on the Market way back in March right after the Romans were released. It’s worth noting that he took a fair amount of time with the various goods available on its tables. A close inspection will reveal that the Indian market is vegetarian, which doesn’t impact the...

Hello there Celeste players! The Winter Event is finally upon us and it is the biggest Event we've had in Project Celeste so far!

To access the event, go to your Empire Store in your Capital City and find all the new quests for the event. Alternatively, you can access the Event content by going to Sparta. More detailed instructions below.

You can find every detail regarding what's new in the event in the attached graphics! We hope that you all have lots of fun playing with friends during the event.

This year, we are bringing you guys a complete set of 35 login gifts for the entire duration of the Winter Event. These rewards will...

Today we are going to spend some more time with the Indians in Age 2. The Indians are designed to spike around Age 3, and to do so, they need a powerful Age 2 to get them into position.

By Age 2, AoEO civs have on average about 11 units. There are about 7 shared units -- five basic units (Villager, Scout, Fishing Boat, Merchant Transport, and Caravan) a Spearman, and an arrow Ship (Trireme, Galley, Swanship, Bireme, Longship, Liburnian). Then every civ usually has about three more military units and possibly a priest and/or a unique unit (Ox Cart, Sacred Deer, Engineer, etc.).

With 12 units each, the Norse and Babylonians presently have the most units in Age 2. The Indians, however, will have 14. Having that many units to choose from will...

Hello there Celeste players! We are back with another Dev Blog.

This time, we will be having a look at some of the new additions to the game with tomorrow's patch!

As one of the most sought-after Light Armors of all time, Athena's Golden Gorget has historically been a fan favorite and one of the most requested items for a Legendary-version upgrade. Initially, we put this item in Bahram's Lottery, however based on players' feedback, we decided to make it more accessible to all players. To this end, we slightly adjusted the stats on Bahram's Beloved Battle Armor (see below for more details) and instead added...

Rather than fully describe a few specific units or buildings, this time we want to zoom out and discuss our approach to a general aspect of the Indians civilization – religion

Religion is a large consideration in Age of Empires Online civ design. Unlike civilizations in AoE1, AoE2, and AoE4, our civs are asymmetrically designed and replete with many types of priests, religious buildings, and other religious/cultural features specific to each civ. This is perhaps best demonstrated with the Egyptians (three Temples and three kinds of Priests), the Celts (offensively-minded Druids and Augurs who perform rites with Sacred Deer), and the Norse (Seers spawning Ravens)...

After racing towards Pataliputra this spring, we ran into a slow patch this summer, but we’ve caught our breath and are back in gear.

Broadly speaking, we have most of our 3D models for buildings and have turned our eyes onto the complex world of units. To give you some perspective, for every Indian building in the game (including Capital City buildings and decorations), we need 59 models and 38 animations. For the Indian Units, however, we need a total of 230 models and 140 animations.

At this point, no single unit is completely finished. But we do have the basics for many of them and pulled a few off the shelf to show you today. So let’s get at it.

We will talk far more about the gameplay decisions and design theory of the Indians later (why we gave them the units, buildings, and technologies we did, etc.) and look forward to dissecting...

Hello there Celeste players! The Halloween Event is finally upon us!. (Well, ALMOST!)

Once the Event starts (00:01 UTC 2021/10/23), go to your Empire Store in your Capital City and find all the new quests for the event.

You can find every detail regarding what's new in the event in the attached graphics! We hope that you all have lots of fun playing with friends during the event.

Hello there Celeste players! The Halloween Event for this year is almost upon us and we would like to show you a quick preview of what's headed your way this October 23rd!

Alongside the previous Halloween Event Legendary Quests are two new Legendary Quests! Return to Haunted Isle and go to war against the evil Headless Horseman, Emerald Guardians, Soul Guardians and more minions of the evil tyrant Zahhak.

This year, we have the help of the talented @RekiemOne who together with @Kire designed...

Hello there Celeste players! We are happy to announce that the Rostam in Zabol content pack is finally here! Without any further ado, let's get into the details:

While this content pack has quests for players of all skill levels, not just Legendary Quests, you still need to be level 40 to access it. It is available for all civilizations that are level 40.

Here are the credits for the Team...

Since we are between seasonal events, we'd like to update you on the Indians. Our team is just large enough now to allow one group to work on the events without having to distract those working on our new civilization. In the last couple of months, our 3D and 2D teams have continued to work through their lists, though at an admittedly slower pace (travel, real life issues, and various other stuff have slowed us -- both Hans and Cain (previously known as Raider) have had drawing tablet problems, etc.).

We are still way ahead, but our breakneck progress has slowed. We expect to get things moving again now that the summer is winding down.

Whereas with the Romans we had a single dedicated team that essentially moved from one project to the next in a linear fashion, with the Indians we have a larger group that is trying to create everything at once. (Though we also have more things to create.) In that spirit, we...

Hello there Celeste players! We are back with another blog.

As you might have seen on one of our previous blogs, we are currently working on the Rostam in Zabol content pack which will bring New Quests, New Region, New Gear, and more to the game!

Today, we have more updates for you about this content pack, as well as a quick sneak peek at the upcoming Indian Civilization Developer Blog which we expect to publish this Sunday!

We've heard your feedback and are excited to announce that every main Quest of this content pack will be available in Legendary, Champion and Repeatable modes, meaning that you can enjoy these quests no matter what level of difficulty you enjoy the most!

Legendary...

Hello there Celeste players! We are back with another Dev Blog.

This time, we will be having a look at some of the new additions to the game with today's patch, as well as a preview into the near and far future content we have planned for you.

Not too long ago, we added variations for the Water Well editor asset that was introduced to the game with the Roman civilization. Now, due to popular demand, we have made these Water Wells available as Capital City Decoration! You can find these Water Wells in Vanity Island.

We have come a long way from the original game to improve the PvP experience of players, especially in Ranked Mode:

• Frequent PvP Balance Patches
• Online...

Hello there Celeste players!

As promised on our latest Discord announcement, we are bringing you a quick sneak peek at our upcoming content pack, Rostam in Zabol!

Travel back to the ancient lands of Persia, and to the city of Zabol, the birthplace of Rostam, the mighty Persian hero of myth and legend.

Thanks in great part to @Kire we are going to have an entire new Region, new Gear and many new Quests coming soon!

• New Legendary Quests
• Unit Micro Arena minigame Quests (both vs the AI and against a human opponent!)
• New Champion Mode Quests (more details below)
• New Custom AI

Coming with this content pack, we will be having 7 new Legendary Quests, all set...

Hello there Celeste players! The Summer Event is available right now!

This year, we are bringing back most of the fan-favorite content as well from previous years, as well as all-new content!


You can find every detail regarding what's new in the event in the attached graphics! We hope that you all have lots of fun playing with friends during the event.

So let's break down the details of the event in a question-based list:

1. How do I access the special event content?

2. What are the new contents available in the event?