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

As we develop the Romans, each week we will be revealing the Romans to you building by building, unit by unit, and technology by technology. We are not just showing you what the Romans will be, but showing you how we are building them, who is building them, and also why we are building them the way that we are.

This week we are revealing two Common Buildings, the Age 1 Town Center and the Market. As discussed in more detail in our Building Design blog, these Buildings are 2 of the 13 buildings included in every Age of Empires Online civilization by default and that always appear in a specific age. These 13 Buildings are identical in every civ except if they are an Improved Building or Advanced Building.

If you would like to start with our first post on Houses, you can find it HERE.

Town Center
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Every civilization in AoEO has had exactly one Improved Building, and the Romans will be no different. Their Improved Building is the Town Center. As an Improved Building, the Roman Town Center has a special technology or other attribute that improves it a little (such as the Greek Guard Tower, Egyptian Armory, Persian Storehouse, Celtic House, Babylonian clay Wall, and Norse Fortress.

However, as we are showing you today only its Age 1 version and as its feature does not exist until Age 2, we are not yet revealing what makes it Improved. But fear not, we will be spending plenty of time on those details soon enough. So let’s talk a little about architectural design.

In designing the Town Center, we had concept art for all four Ages. However, when translating them into 3D models, something about them felt a bit awkward, causing Happy Smurf and Chaos to go back to the drawing board.

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Specifically, the way that the square building is oriented forces the building itself to be smaller than most other town centers. We looked closely at the Babylon Town Center, which has the same orientation, though has thick walls stretching to the corners of the footprint. And since we want the Romans’ TC to have the same footprint, it created a lot of open space.

Here is an image that helps show how much open space the original concept art provided:

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After many drafts, we ultimately arrived at the following.

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As you can see, we also chose to remove the curtain and make some other aesthetic changes.

As the very first building players see at the beginning of a match, it was very important to us to make sure it fits in well with other Town Centers and gives players a good "Roman" impression. Here you can see the Roman Age 1 Town Center next to other civilizations' Town Centers:

Market
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Like the Town Center, the Market is another Common Building that so far has not had an Improved or Advanced version. However, because we found no indication that the Original Developers intended to buff the Roman Market and because we have other Buildings we want the Romans to specialize in, we decided to give the Romans a standard Common Market. Again, in order for our civs to continue to feel similar to each other and remain balanced, we cannot have every building or unit do something extraordinary. We will, however, be giving the Roman Market enough techs (including a new one) that will make it one of the stronger Markets in the game.

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As you can see from the concept art, the Market originally had a tent for a roof and some fairly blocky stairs as well as some kind of swimming pool at the top of the stairs. Chaos took the lead on this Building and made some adjustments to bring the building a little bit more in line with the Roman branding. The camera angle really highlights the top of the buildings, so we wanted to give it a more traditional Roman roof.

As is tradition, here's a picture of all the revealed Roman Units and Buildings in one small little town:

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Is that... the Roman Caravan?! Yes it is! We will be revealing this unit in greater detail in one of our upcoming blogs. Stay tuned!

Thank you for reading, and we will see you all next week!

Project Celeste Development Team

What do you think about Roman Age 1 Town Centers and Markets? What would you like to see next? Let us know in the comments below!

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Missed the Roman Civilization's announcement? Find out about it HERE.

Project Celeste is completely free and always will be. However, we gladly accept donations for our overhead costs, which are larger than we have budgeted. If you want to support us, you can do so HERE.

Read every Romans related blog HERE.

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