This changes the Conquistadors into mounted wizards that fire lightning not bullets. Its all here, even the character face. You need to change the name via triggers though cos Im no good at Hex editing.
Anyway, criticism wanted and needed, use the file as and how you will. Change it, swop it, use it and abuse it. No permission needed or asked for. Just make sure you make use of it if you like it. Enjoy or detest! Its up to you.
Another hidden gem from the depths of the Blacksmith. The Horsewizards by Theodred is a new unit which is intended to represent a magical wizard or mage riding a horse.
Usefulness/Novelty: 4
Despite being a medieval game, there have been countless fantasy scenarios designed for Age of Empires which featured magical characters and heroes. There have been a number of wizard and mage characters designed to help make these fantasy scenarios come to life with more realism and uniqueness. However, this is the first, and currently only, wizard character that I have seen riding a horse. This makes this new unit unique and quite useful in certain aspects. The unit attacks with a lightning bolt which is painted onto the attacking fronts of the unit. Whilst this certainly looks really cool and very much like how a wizard does attack, it also causes some problems. The lightning bolt is a set size and doesn’t change depending on how close the unit that you are attacking is. This makes it look silly as if you attack something a close range, the lightning bolt will hit something behind it instead. A way around this is to use data editing to adjust the units range to exactly how long the bolt is, but the. You’d also have to make its minimum range the same so I couldn’t attack anything closer which would be annoying. Alternatively if you’ve got the ability you could also try and edit out the lightning bolt of each frame and use and alternative projectile through data editing.
Quality/Instructions: 4
The unit is a copy and paste unit which taste the priest from the pro gal Age of Empires game and places it onto the Conquistadors horse. This is a good attempt at a copy and paste unit and they blend together reasonably well, however a little more work could be done to make the premiers look like its sitting on the horse more realistically. Overall the frames were designed well and the animations when the unit moves and attacks are very smooth. Besides the problems with the lightning bolt I spoke of earlier, it was painted on well and looks realistic, some great skill shown here as a whole. The unit also come equipped with player colours and a custom hero icon of a wizard, although a unit icon would also be a welcome addition too.
The unit was created back in 2001 and was therefore submitted as an AKX file, which means it needs Mod Pack Studio to open. Back in 2001 MPS was a popular modding tool but it doesn't function with newer 64 bit operating systems. Most people now use Turtle Pack which edit SLP and DRS files, not AKX files. However, if you're desperate to use this file there is a way to extract the SLP files from the AKX, and I will post a link to the guide at the end of this review.
Additional Comments:
Overall this unit is an awesome unit to use in your fantasy scenarios. A recommened download if you're willing to extract the SLPs from the AKX yourself.
Link to guide: http://aok.heavengames.com/cgi-bin/forums/display.cgi?action=ct&f=26,41382,,30