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 returning to the Capital City and revealing the Roman Gear Hall and the two largest Roman Warehouses.

Gear Hall
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Unsurprisingly, the Gear Hall is the Capital City building players use to edit their Unit and Building Gear. However, since the main screen has a set button to open the same window, the Gear Hall is a bit redundant – similar to the Treasury. Nevertheless, our Capital Cities would look incomplete without them, so Happy Smurf and Chaos took care to make the Romans one. We had concept art, but we made some changes, too. Overall, it fits in very nicely.


We had concept art, but we made some changes, too. Overall, it fits in very nicely. You can still click on the Gear Hall to access your gear, but it is not necessary. These Capital City buildings are probably about as close as civ design gets to drudgery, but Chaos and Happy Smurf always have a way to find something interesting. Here, they fussed about the statue in the concept art and decided that it didn’t look right and went instead with those handsome hedges.

Speaking of them, we can’t take details like bushes for granted, either. As you may have noticed, every civ has its own small and large bush in a tub, and the Romans will be no different. There are decisions about civ identity almost everywhere we turn. Stay tuned for a developer stream when we answer more questions than you ever dreamt possible about Roman horticulture. Got today, though, we will allow the Gear Hall to give you a little taste. And don’t worry if you liked the statue. We have more statues coming at you than you will be able to count.

But for now, soak in the Gear Hall. Chaos was fussing with it all week. He donated way too many hours troubleshooting a nagging issue with its destruction animation. Now, remember unless we place them in quests, Capital City buildings are never destroyed and so you’d never even see that animation. But we pride ourselves on meeting or exceeding the level of care our forbears took, and so that means some days Chaos wrestles with hidden problems. Along similar lines, when I asked him if he had any background info for you on this building, he said something about tangents and shaders. Basically he needed to shade those shields so the inner part was brighter than the outer part to give them an obvious concave shape you’d never notice unless you looked. We are so darn lucky to have these guys. They are experts, and they improve everything they touch.

Roman Warehouses: Add Nauseum (16-slot) and Caesar's Palace (20-slot)
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As mentioned in Week 20 when we revealed the 8-slot and 12-slot Roman Warehouseshttps://forums.projectceleste.com/threads/weekly-blog-20-enneris-8-slot-and-12-slot-warehouses.4379/, though we named the Roman Warehouses months ago, the designs themselves hew closely to the concept art. Again, the job of most Capital City buildings are to look both civ-specific and role-specific while otherwise blending in and getting out of the way. Nothing too fancy -- the Romans do not need to be over the top on everything.

But we know you’ve all been bubbling with anticipation about what they look like, so we did not want to leave you hanging much longer.

Here they are with their cousins!

An Update about PF2K
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As you may have noticed, this is the first blog we’ve ever done out of Andy’s account. We have some solemn news that arose this week and hadn’t wanted to mention it until now. PF2K is of course the single most important member of the Romans team. While it is true that a project of this ambition would be impossible but for the contributions of many of our members, for PF2K, this is true many, many times over. We don’t call him our Executive Producer for nothing. He has done everyone’s job and often is the only person doing some of them. From researching the original Roman designs, blueprinting their final tech tree, balancing unit matchups that only exist in his mind, creating 2d art, to helping with 3d modeling, to everything else. We sincerely believe that PF2K is the only person right now capable of building the Romans. The man is a walking encyclopedia of AoEO and the Age franchise. He plays the game at an elite level, and he knows how to do much of the backend stuff. And he has endless energy. Some days he spends 14 hours a day on AoEO. There are plenty of us who are experts in many of these areas. Only one is an expert in all of them. And all of this was true before we pile on everything else he does around here beyond the Romans: the holiday events, the PvP patches, the questlines, the new gear. Almost every piece of substantive game content runs through his fingers in at least some large part, if not exclusively. He's an amazing guy, and few know how important he is to this community, and even to the greater AoE community.

This brings us to today. P lives in Iran, and last Saturday in the middle of nationwide protests, its entire internet service was severed without warning and without any expected end. He just disappeared from us in the middle of a conversation. Once we started reading the news and realized what was happening, the Lead Devs and the rest of us began scrambling to figure out what to do and where it leaves us. He has everything organized in his head and god knows how much stuff on his computer. Project Celeste is fine. Almost everything Roman is backed up. I am talking about our future content and untold miscellany. I am also talking about our friend.

We went through the Project Celeste equivalent of a surviving a mine a cave-in. One minute we are busy chipping away at dozens of different projects. The next minute he's gone and we are shouting in the dark checking our pockets for supplies and making lists of what we have and what we are missing and trying to figure out how on earth we can bridge the two. PF2K does so much around here that we haven’t been able to even identify it all, let alone figure out how to get it done without him. And that’s before we realize what’s on his hard drive that we don’t have. Do we have all the hi res Roman portraits? Do we know the final details on that Unit we were just tweaking? What about milestones, does anyone other than P know those stats? What about that new game mode -- what did he finally decide about it? What about the Winter Event, can we even do new quests without him? The list is endless
The days stacked up. We heard nothing. Then Thursday he was suddenly there. He said he’s good. He’s safe. He’s not sure what’s going on, but things seem calmer. He was able to send us a bunch of stuff, including the graphic templates so we could publish this blog without him. We quickly exchanged mailing addresses and phone numbers. Not only that, but when he blipped back online, he had a ton of new work. He spent all week hunkered down at home, tirelessly churning out as much as he could on his own — Roman artwork, UI, plans for game content and secret game modes we haven’t announced yet. Of course he did. He's a machine. Even our Roman discord servers had shiny new icons. He's pinging me a dozen times in a dozen places asking me to look at stuff and get him some more information. He’s reading every conversation he missed and chiming in with ideas. And then just as abruptly as he returned, he disappeared again. He was with us just a couple hours. Radio silence ever since.

Obviously we don’t know anything, and we blindly hoped that writing this tribute would magically make him return before Saturday morning and make fools of us all in vain. But here we are, he’s not with us, and we want to let you all know what’s going on.

Hopefully his return will be swift and permanent, but nobody can say, and some news articles really make us wonder. So we are hoping for the best and preparing for the worst. When P and I first committed together last November to take a run at the Romans, we knew it would be full of unknown obstacles. But this was not one of them.

Until we know more, we are one day at a time. Happy Smurf, Chaos, and Phillus are still cranking away on the Romans. (And thanks to Happy for making the blog graphics this week — P will be so proud when he sees them!) Kev and Ryddag have us under control as always up at the helm. Meanwhile we have no idea what this means for the Winter Event, Bahram, and the dozens of other things on P’s desk. But I guarantee you all that he's not just sitting around wasting time. As soon as he gets back, he'll dump another wheelbarrow full of new content on all of us. We all look are looking forward to it. Roma Invicta!

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.

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