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Part 20: Enneris and Roman Warehouses

As we develop the Romans, each week are revealing them 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 finally revealing the final ship of the Roman navy, the mighty Enneris. We will also reveal the first two Roman Warehouses.

Enneris
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Roman Enneris with Epic Gear​

The Roman navy gave us fits, and we have discussed it at great length. So if you would like a deeper dive, here’s a link to Blog #12, when we revealed the Age 2 Liburnian.

You will recall that the original Roman navy included up to six different Ships (Fishing Boat, Merchant Transport, Age 2 Trireme (Basic Warship), Age 2 Liburnian (Small Warship used for Scouting), Age 3 Quinquereme (described as an anti-ship Ram Ship), and Age 4 Enneris (Siege Warship). Because no other civ has more than five ships and because the Roman navy was historically pretty middle of the pack, we knew we needed to make some cuts.

We arrived at cutting the Trireme and going with the weaker Age 2 Liburnian. We also cut the Quinquereme but turned the Enneris into an interesting kind of hybrid ship that appears in Age 3 and counters ships with low range fire and then in Age 4 upgrades to give it a ballista that it will do siege damage at long range, effective mostly against Buildings.

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This mechanic will be almost identical to that of Sessrúmnir, the unique warship featured in the Realms of the World Quest Pack. So the Romans will end up with a Siege ship, but in a very Roman way that will keep their navy from being too overpowering.

With that said, you have now seen every ship and boat in the Roman Navy. So let's take a look at all of the together, shall we?

PF2K's sidenote: Notice a new building here? It will be showcased in another blog soon!​

Because the Roman navy was originally designed to be supremely overpowerful, we are pleased to tell you that we had a chance to present our revised design to the original designer of the Romans, and he agreed with us on these judgment calls. In his words, “I think trimming down the navy is a good call […] I think we can both agree that when we think Romans, we don’t associate them with naval superiority.” He also liked our decision to give it a ballista-trireme style of upgrade later.

Now, this may be just the opinion of one person. But to us in our quest to bring to you the Romans as close as possible to what the original Developers had in mind, you can imagine how nervous we get when tinkering around with those designs. So it is an unspeakable relief to have the guy who set those designs in place bless our decisions and agree that some of his own units would not have made it into the Romans. We owe the original Devs so much, and so we sleep a little easier knowing we aren’t letting them down.

Ships are about as complicated of 3D models as we have. Not only are they large and complex, but we also do multiple versions of the ship for each level of gear plus multiple sails. At any rate, we are pleased to announce that we have finished the last of our ships and can move on to other things.

To wrap things up with the Roman Navy, here's a lineup of all of the ships and boats available in the Roman Dock, divided by the Age they're available in:

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Vault Versa and Praetorium Emporium
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Every civilization has five unique warehouses. The largest is a floating ship called a Grand Warehouse that has 24 slots. Then there are four buildings that range in size from 8, 12, 16, and 20 slots. As you have almost certainly noticed, they all have a very strange, playful naming system. Fortunately, we have great concept art for all of our Roman Warehouses, so Happy Smurf and Chaos had a great head start. The challenge here really was not to come up with compelling 3D models, though our boys did tremendously as always in that department.

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The challenge, believe it or not, ended up being the naming system. AoEO warehouses all have incredibly cheesy names. The names are always some kind of play on words regarding the concept of treasure or storage or something like that. Meanwhile, their names are somehow obviously tied to the civilization. And they are just kind of goofy in that way only Age of Empires Online is.

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So finding that perfect zone of clever-but-cheesy can be harder than it looked. Some examples of existing warehouses whose flavor we were trying to match: Storagorium and Lotsastuffopolis (Greeks), Ra's Basement, King Tut's Attic, and Storecauphagus (Egypt), Perstockolis and Repersiatory (Persia), Storehenge and Boudicca's Bounty (Celts), Gilgashed and Nebuchadepot (Babylonians), and Lokeep, Storagnarok, and Vaulthalla (Norse). You can see what we were up against.

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Making puns about the ancient Romans and storage feels like the nadir of AoEO nerdiness. But we did our best and came up with more than we care to list and then narrowed it down to about 14 before arriving at the final four. Actually, that is not true. PF2K almost instantly spouted one off that we quickly assigned to the 20-slot granddaddy warehouse. So really we were just on the hunt for three more. They were elusive.

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Here are some of the names we came up with but ultimately we cast aside: Storage Quo, Inventorium Emporium, Ad Infinitum, Imperial Materials, Caveat Emporium, and Vault Populi.

We made our list way back in February -- we had a lot of energy and knocked out a ton of miscellaneous projects early. It may seem trivial for us to spend so much time on silly details like this, but we see our spending so much time on trivial details as what may end up being the difference between the Romans feeling authentic and not slapped together by volunteers. At any rate, we set to work, made tons of terrible puns, came up with our final names, and moved on to the next task. Then about six months later deep in the files we stumbled on all of the actual Roman warehouse names that the original developers came up with. For a minute there we considered throwing away all of our hard earned terrible Roman storage puns and just adopting theirs. But we sincerely think ours are better, and we are going with our guts.

For those who are curious, the Roman warehouse names from the original Devs were the Lootorium, Collectorius, Massokoles, and Caesarium.

We like our final four better, so these are the ones that will be in the game: Vault Versa, Praetorium Emporium, Add Nauseum, and Caesar's Palace. We will show you two largest ones, Add Nauseum and Caesar's Palace, later. But for today, here is Vault Versa and Praetorium Emporium!

Thank you so much for your support,

Project Celeste Development Team

What do you think about this week's blog? 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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