The Packed Town Center is an untrainable wagon unit in Age of Empires II. It is essentially a mobile Town Center, as it can be turned into the building with the player's choice of location. It does not function like a Town Center in the packed form. It shares its model and icon with Ox Wagon.
The unit is only available in the Scenario Editor and a campaign scenario.
Description[]
The wagon has no form of attack, and can only move. If enough space is provided for the building to exist, any location can be chosen for the wagon to unload and transform into a fully built Town Center. It takes roughly one minute for the building to finalize. The percentage of missing health on the wagon will transfer over to the Town Center once completed, just like the Trebuchet which uses the same mechanics. However, a deployed Town Center will still only have 1,950 hit points instead of 2,400, even if the wagon is completely unharmed.
While an ordinary Town Center occupies a 4x4 space, a Town Center unpacked this way tends to take a 5x5 space since it is impossible to align perfectly.
The unpacking of the wagon can be stopped, reverting the unfinished building into a wagon again, by ordering it to attack outside its range or ordering it to move. Once the Town Center is completed, it can no longer revert to its wagon form unless Resource 95 is set to 1.
Even when unpacking, the unit can queue Villagers indirectly. Using the "Select all Town Centers" button (if the player has at least one unpacked Town Center) and queuing Villagers will make this unit also queue Villagers. However, the queue will not be visible unless the unit has fully unpacked.
Civilizations with Town Center-related bonus (such as the Chinese, Inca, or Maya) do not get such bonus when their first Town Center is unpacked. They must build their first Town Center to get their bonus.
The wagon has extremely high pierce armor, making it almost impervious to arrows.
In The Age of Kings, the packed Town Center was a hidden and unfinished unit labelled PTWC (internal name). It could only be controlled by Gaia and the Celts, the latter being one of the planned raider civilizations using packable buildings, an early concept that was cut.[1] The unit had the appearance of a packed Trebuchet and the icon of the Town Center. Unpacking was only possible by selecting it together with a Trebuchet. The packed Town Center only became a fully functional unit in the Definitive Edition.
Campaign appearances[]
Victors and Vanquished
- Gaiseric: The player (Vandals) starts with a packed Town Center.
Gallery[]
See also[]
- Covered Wagon, a similar unit in Age of Empires III.
References[]
- ↑ AGE 2 Design Document at the Internet Archive
