Thanksgiving III

Description
Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Over the river and through the woods, to the enemy village we go!

Thanksgiving III is a fun new random map for Single-player or Multiplayer use. NOTE: this will only work in TWC, and you must have the first patch 1.01 installed. This map represents a \'New England\' fall with lots of turkeys for the harvest, with a few deer or moose, plenty of forest and silver. The map is a bit larger than most of the original, standard ES maps. There are 1-4 crossings across the river that lies between the teams. See below for diffeences from the prior version.

The striking new features of the map are the new items inserted by ES in the latest patch into the scenario editor, for a new ES map specially made for the holiday to be named Plymouth - like they did for Christmas last year. For my map, each player gets a few additional villagers called Pilgrims, dressed in traditional \'puritan\' black and white. There are identical in stats to the normal Settlers or Native Settlers except for a few more hit points. Even the native civs will get these units - hey, at the original Thanksgiving the natives and pilgrims sat down at the table together! Each player will also get a few extra crates of food - special food for the Thanksgiving feast. There are also a few spare crates scattered about the map on special pumpkin patches. The nuggets or treasures on the map are special for the holiday theme as well, most of which are fairly easy and yield more holiday food or Pilgrims.

NOTE: the Thanksgiving II version released originally does not allow saloon units to be made, even though the saloon itself could be built! Well - the original Plymouth colony forbade alcohol so how could you expect mercs to hang around a bar without alcohol! Anyway, this version will allow saloon units to be created and also includes a few more of the various new treasures, generally food or Pilgrims, so gathering these quickly allows faster advance!

There are a couple of random variations in Trade Routes, but there is always one per side. There are a few variations in placement of the Native villages, which can be Huron, Iroquois or Cherokee.

Gameplay is going to be a little different - faster to war with the extra villagers and extra food. And most civs are \'housed\' at the start so you will want some settlers gathering wood immediately and building that first house right away. This was not created to be a RMS masterpiece, just a lot of fun!

To play this map, the two files (Thanksgiving III.xs and Thanksgiving III.xml) must be placed in the folder: My Documents\\My Games\\Age of Empires 3\\RM2. Please do not place them in the game\'s install folder - that will not work. When you start up a skirmish game in Single-player or Multiplayer, use the small blue \'Custom Map\' button, which allows you to then select one the random maps in that My Games folder from the drop-down window.

Last year I made a different Thanksgiving map just before the holidays for the original AOE3. This year courtesy of ES we have some decorations for a different but better map!

Note - I tried to also add a few Native Settlers to the European civs - they needed Squanto and company at their feast - but these appeared on the map as the normal settlers, except they still had the Native Settler icon in the UI. Weird, so I deleted that.

Thanks to ES for the ability to create custom RMS.

Feedback appreciated!