Trying to make this a regular monthly thing going forward - this one was fun as we just leaned into the Crash Bandicoot boulder music influence we were listening to just before starting the track and let it go wherever.  It actually ended up sounding a lot like Dune at some parts, so we explored that as well and added low choirs to emulate the throat singing and all.  We even have two versions, as we couldn't decide whether we liked the more serious tone or the beach/coconut vibe more.  Enjoy!

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I realize I've never explained how Fort Wars was made or the code trickery needed to get around AOE3's trigger system, so I've written a deep-dive with samples of the code. It covers everything from XS injection to kb queries and should be very interesting for #AOE3 / #AOM developers and maybe even #gamedev in general.

Read Here: The Code Behind Fort Wars

If anyone has further questions or want to know how other parts were done, feel free to ask.

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After ten years since the last update and #AOE3 coming back from the dead, I've taken some time to revive #FortWars, so it now works on the Definitive Edition.  This also marks the 16th year since the first official release on January 28, 2006 and is a nice anniversary/send-off for the map.  Thanks everyone for their support over the years.  This (and the original Norse Wars game) made up a significant part of my childhood growing up, and there have been many good memories.

Download Fort Wars 5.0 for AOE3 DE below (or by going to Tools > Mods ingame):
https://www.ageofempires.com/mods/details/50510

For those unfamiliar, the gameplay is based on Matei's Norse Wars from Age of Mythology, sort of the opposite side of the coin to games like DotA back in the day that existed as mods before League of Legends.  Fort Wars is the AOE3 adaptation of Matei's game but arguably is unique in its own right as well given years of development and refinement.  For those curious, I've added a deep-dive on the code as well.

We'll be having a kick-off event Saturday Jan.29 2022 2:00PM PST on live-stream to get everyone playing again and will hopefully make that a regular occurrence. Check out NorseWars.com and follow @NorseWars on Twitter for updates.  I'll probably be hosting games and hanging around online even before then, so feel free to add me.  It helps that AOE3 is old enough now that it is cheap (only $7) to download and install - if only just to play Fort Wars. The ladder doesn't work on AOE3 DE yet, so DE can be treated as unranked while formal ranked matches can be played on the older Fort Wars 4.1 for AOE3 (2007)/Complete on Steam (yes it still works!).

Lastly, I will also be working on turning this into a standalone game starting this year, so be on the lookout for that too.  Feel free to follow the progress at NorseWars.com and @NorseWars on Twitter, and I welcome all the help I can get to get that off the ground.

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New koto track as a collab again with Waterflame from our new company.  This song takes the older Koto Cutter song I made a little over a year ago and basically kicks it up into high gear (while still keeping to koto as the source of all the sounds as much as possible).  This track actually started way back in 2020, but the production process was an absolute nightmare and dragged out for over a year.


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First new track in a while and a collab with Waterflame as one of our first tracks as a company.  Funny enough it's just pure coincidence that this was actually uploaded on the winter solstice of 2021.  Happy holidays!

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