This is a Serious Problem...
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 4 ก.ย. 2024
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#Ageofempires2, #AoE2, #Hera
Hey Hera, I'm the OP from Reddit. Thanks for making this video. I think I was the voice of the silent crowd and it made me feel a little important 11. First of all, thanks for starting this discussion. While it is easy to complain as a player, we also need to remember the overall balance of the game and help the devs/decision makers or at least keep a healthy discussion going. I love this game and have been playing it since day one and still enjoy it. My fear is that people will say "enough" and half the games will be steamrolled and the player base will slowly disappear to the point where no one wants to play.
I am quite sure that when/if this gets the attention of the developers thanks to your efforts, they will definitely address it. I think it is serious enough to be discussed among the player base in any community. Looking forward to the future brother!
friend may i ask what is your elo? i am 1300 and don't see that many ppl tryharding with this strats, my bet is it happens in higher elos
@@miguelbahamonde6321 I am between 1150-1250 most of the time. I play 4-5 games a day and 1-2 of them are like this. I now can defend many of them, especially wagons as I go to gold and redemption with 10 monks. But in some case, like defending against Mongols in Yucatan, I still fail miserably.
@@miguelbahamonde6321I am 1050, and everyone's on Yukatan has been doing phosphoru all-ins, with Mongols, Koreans and Britons.
@@EnesKaraboga 1500 eloyum 1v1 de sicilian rush da yaptım savundum da nasıl karşılık vereceğini bilmiyor çoğu kişi sorun orada serjeant yıllardır değişmedi buff yerine sürekli nerf yedi ona rağmen böyle. youpudding veya redphosfour'un stratejisine karşılık fast castle yapıyorlardı ikisi beraber feudal de kalırsan yeniliyordun çoğu zaman
I hear you and understand for some players this might be quite frustrating. However, I chose to regard those strats as challenges to overcome and even though I lose to them often, it's fun for me to figure out where their weaknesses are. And boy does it feel satisfactory when you beat someone with their cheap ass strat.
If, as you say, there are so many players who gain advantage by blindly following build orders, I think there is a great opportunity to disrupt their system by scouting and reacting properly, especially at your elo where people tend to do mistakes under pressure. Trust me, there are lots of players not willing to do everything by the numbers. So either you will be elo-pushed to their rank, or learn to keep up with the try-hards by doing smart decisions. Either way, I think you're gonna end up in the right spot.
These videos are what makes the AOE2 a better gaming community than the others: ladder leaders do not think only about bragging (for example, in COD), but they really think before doing something.
Kudos to Hera to proactively decide to spend a video on these issues.
❤
Apart from this, from a game theoretic point of view, these strategies (youpudding, phosphoru) are very interesting because they dominate most of the other strategies, independent of the civ and map.
A more interesting question is "Is there a counter-strategy that we have not discovered yet that counters those all-in ones?"
Maybe we should spend some more time on this, and the MS should actually finance more efforts to produce a superhuman AI in AOE2.
This would definitely grease the friction to find dominant strategies.
@@edupignatelli Are there counter strategies? Yes, but they all revolve around going all in to castle age yourself. There is simply nothing that can be done to stop unique units when you are in feudal age.
I do really like the idea of superhuman AI. It would be really fun to see an AI be developed that no pro can beat. Machine learning would be the way to do it.
@thomas1644 Walling is OP. How often do you here T90 and others comment on Hera always being Full walled or near it.
Scout your opponent and pressure, if realize too late (but you know the civ so should've checked earlier if he was going meta or not anyway) wall up and go to castle. You have to castle anyway and someone's always going to be 1st to it, get over it, then do better next time.
@@thomas1644 These are the strategies that we know already. What I am referring to is a strategy that takes finding as much time and dedication as it took to find youpudding or phosphoru.
Yes! I do think that superhuman AI is the way forward in game design, especially in games as complex as AOE2.
But that requires big investments, probably MS doesn't want to commit to that right now, given the market of language models.
I use to think a lot like the reddit poster. But what you need to realize is that once you learn the build orders it gives you a lot more freedom to be creative. It's like saying learning openings in chess ruin the game. Once you understand them, it actually opens the game up to being much more complex imo.
Holy fuck it’s Willy Mac. Great content sir. But you don’t wanna catch these hands on Arabia
Agree completely! Without a BO or standard opening, I feel like I'm always struggling to figure out eco or what unit comp to go with.
Well the person from this post definitely wants to improve, thats why these people come to chats etc and ask for help. The feedback for them then should be advice not toxic gatekeeping
Every single PVP game got pushed from "fun" to meta or lose.
League of legends, heartstone, Call of Duty, tarkov.....
It is frustrating but the fact that Your opponent is in ur ELO means that it is stoppable with Your skill. Otherwise meta players would not play against You
Well even Bobby Fischer thought the possibility of learning openings in chess was bad for the game, as it favors the player who knows more of them and not the one with greater actual strategy and tactics developing skills. That's why chess 960 exists.
The whole point of a strategy game is to develop tactics and strategies. If you go in with a memorized strategy you aren't actually playing the game. And you can only actually create strategies if you know everything about the game and its strategies.
These kind of games have a massive entry barrier. Even if you play with people who are roughly at your same skill level, you will not be able to actually play the game until you are a top player. That's also why mechanics like villager auto-queue and automatic farm placement are actually good for the game no matter how much people complain about it. These mechanics allow not-so-skilled players free themselves from some of the mechanic complexity of the game and focus on the real strategy, like eco distribution, military production and battles. Also if someone's at a skill level where farm auto placing makes so much of a difference they feel the need to complain, they probably need it the most.
Make the barracks a prerequisite for the castle.
Lots of other good ideas, but this is one I haven't seen mentioned yet. It has exactly the effect Hera was suggesting, of making the all-in more expensive to get going without hurting unique units in the mid-game.
Or even just make it so you need the barracks to produce any military units at all
Spanish conquistador spammers on arena will be in shambles 11
What about water maps?
@@benithisraelm do you build ships from a castle?
@@Squablicious why do U need a barracks in water maps?
What a healthy, constructive way to discuss game balance. So refreshing compared to other games and communities that so often devolve into screaming and reactionary cries for buffs and nerfs. Props to Hera, other pros, and chat for all contributing healthy analysis. I’ve got to imagine, if you’re a dev for AOE2, a quality discussion like this makes your job balancing so much easier to do.
Elo is for people who are competitive, if you are here to enjoy it than not maxing out your advantages will help you settle where you are supposed to be in the competitive part of the scene. These is a huge elo range of people who are just there to have fun 😊
It is borring to play against people with low skills
not quite. You'll be playing against people roughly as "effective" as you. At an extreme, if everyone but you were cheesing and cheesing was very effective, you'd end up playing against people who are in general consistently worse than you and are just fumbling their cheeses. It's as if you were playing against people with handicap on, only in a sense even worse because there isn't much back and forth, it's just their push and then you either survive or not.
Of course the situation is not as extreme, but I do think it has some element of this.
This is really a point. TOO MANY people are obsessed with Elo (also note that today we live in a society where everything is ranked......and its value depends on the ranking....!) People should go back to playing while enjoying it !!! Follow mechanics and calculating every move DON'T make you a Pro, but only gift you the stress that Pro players feel (it's their job, they put all their energy in it - - - you have another job).
Problem is that sometimes you are lucky and have 5 arena games in a row, your elo goes up and then it matches you with someone at 1000 elo on arabia. You get steamrolled bigly and then maybe you're forced to play yet another (unknown) map and your experience is very bad.
Players should have option to only play the map they choose so they can organically improve on a certain map, without getting smurfed on due to their higher elo on an unknown map.
Imo the easiest wins (but also the worst losses) are against the people who do the 'one-trick pony' kind of strategies. You just need to defend and even if you are in a worse position, you can generally come back since they often have poor macro and poor lategame.
I would also like to note that this isn't uncommon among strategy games. Often at 'amateur' level chess (under around 1800 elo), people will do openings purely because of a single trap your opponent has a chance to fall for (ICBM opening is a pretty popular example).
Yeah but it's so unsatisfying that way.
For a completely different game, but in Yugioh master duel, you either lose magnificently against the meta deck, or you interrupt their strat and they surrender immediately.
It's such garbage. Idk how it is in AoE2 cause I basically only watch you guys play, but I can relate to the redittor.
I'm a noob that has been playing since 2002, but I think making Castle 800/500 might be one of the best ways to change ridiculous FC allins.
I think it's interesting I read your post and it reminded me exactly of pre nerf tower rush games. And with that example you can see it only needs a slight adjustment to fade away
I totaly agree, but being a chess player myself I woud say that I found way easier to refuse that crap in chess that in AoE.
With these all ins they don’t even need macro or late game. I garuntee you would die to these rushes from anyone who practices it around your elo. It’s way too strong.
Another possible solution, which could generally help with the fast past of the game and a defense against any type of rushes (including scout and archers), is towers and castles close to your starting TC have a significant damage bonus.
- I think this makes sense, there could also be a technology for this (like loom) which might be called guerrilla (people usually fight better in their homeland, where they know the area)
- It would also prevent players from using stronger towers to just tower rush
- the towers could have something like +5 damage for 12 tiles from your TC
maybe instead of having more damage, they could just negate some pierce armor, or cap it? Maybe give bonus damage against siege. Like, you don't want a single stray tower to be the bane of scout raids on feudal or something like that for example. Also, a plus 5 damage would kill tower rushing which I don't think should be the case.
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p good suggestion with negating armor. I wasn't settled on the execution, just wanted to bring up the general idea. Negating armour probably is better than increased damage. Also scout rushes still would not be totally ineffective since in feudal you can only afford 1 tower first anyway and scouts and archers still could make damage but maybe not totally overrun you.
I really like this idea. What do you think about having faster firing speed instead of more damage or negating armour? This could be fine tuned to where it's strong against a small number of feudal age units but it gets weaker against a larger number. Sort of like a first defence untill you get your own units out on the field.
“if everything is broken then everything is balanced” does work for Starcraft Brood War but I think the key difference between that game and AoE2 is the number of playable factions. It’s a lot easier to make three factions feel powerful in their own way than it is to make 50 factions all feel powerful
No, it doesnt work like that, look at clash royale
How can everything be broken? That doesn't even make sense.
@@kooroshrostami27 In Starcraft all the factions play significantly differently and have different timings for everything, a group of lategame zerglings can tear down an entire base in seconds, a well-placed psionic storm can kill an entire zerg army in seconds, and a pair of Terran science vessels can clear an entire mineral field of workers also in seconds with the eraser trick while the tanks are killing things from 2 screens away. Zerg's Dark Swarm literally invalidates ranged units. Somehow with all of these insanely powerful things, the game is extremely well balanced, a lot of that because of how good the map makers are.
@@RandomMagus Ah, okay. I get the point. I was just confused, because usually when we say that something is broken, we mean that it is overpowered relative to other things, then there is no way everything can be overpowered.
They also remove a lot of the randomness that AoE 2 has to achieve this. Competitive maps are all standardized, no random generation.
If the opponent goes fc into knight there is an feudal answer, if the opponent goes xbow there is a feudal answer. If the opponent goes Husite or war wagons. They can literally sit underneath the tc vs someone all in feudal army . Maybe giving tc's and towers an attack bonus vs certain UU would work.
This idea is cool and fresh!
yeah, "cheap" tank-like units are the bane of my existence. Also, wagons shouldn't need redemption to convert.
@@user-sl6gn1ss8pdo they!? I did not know that, that’s crazy
What's the feudal answer to fc into knights tho?
@@julianxamo7835 Spears I think. FC knights player doesn't have much economy to produce expensive knights so you should be able to make enough of them to defend.
I really think deer need a nerf. It’s tedious, not fun, and allows obnoxious build orders to work. Also it’s terrible gameplay for new players.
I couldn't agree more. They even made the deer walking pattern more reliable to further enable the deer push meta. I think if there is a nerf, though, it should only effect the deer push mechanic. Deer should run back to their spawn zone when they get pushed out of it.
I am a (basically) brand new player. Played League of Legends for 7-8 years, and started playing AoE2 this month casually with my friends. Am hooked on the game, but see what you mean entirely.
One thing I specifically agree with is INFANTRY! Infantry seems so outmatched compared to what most civs have to offer with UUs and archer-scout. I think infantry needs adjusted for sure to be at the level that archer scouts are.
Yea I agree. I’ve been watching some theory crafting videos, and there’s a lot of interesting ideas (some definitely not ever going to happen), but I do think they should buff infantry somehow.
I'm not sure people know exactly what they want. When I play cheese people say I'm boring. When I play meta people say I'm boring. I think both are fair. What we want is something that is neither cheese or meta. We want some dynamic real time decision making. It's just hard to articulate what that is exactly. Build orders I think are an nb part of coming up with "strategies". It's just the all in one's that kind of suck.
As for what to nerd, I think you fix the phosphoru by just removing 2 straggler trees. No game change only map.
Other all ins, yea the deer need a nerd I think. I like the suggestion to have more deer with less food in each. Means that milling them becomes best option.
Imo I think the real problem is simplification of the game in DE. Dark age used to be hard. Finding your starting sheep was hard. Drushing was good etc etc etc. More RNG and unpredictability. Everything now is just formula/execution because it always plays the same. But I'm not sure. I need to think about it more.
Very interesting take imo
for your very last point, the reason why theres so much dark age simplification is because of your favourite streamers/youtubers like Hera teaching you how to dark age step by step. back in the days, the good ole days of msn zone, you dont get these youtube videos demonstrating dark age builds and what not, you had to watch recordings that other players hopefully release and figure it out from there. they even show you the way of how to practice dark ages, and now it extends beyond dark age and into feudal where youtubers/streamers even teach you how to feudal, what the goals are in feudal, how to achieve it and common scenarios that you might see and how to deal with that.
theres so much information out there that as long as you have the will, the intent and the time to go out and practice said things from your favourite youtubers/streamers, youll get to a decent point.
@@TheRealBruceLouis Map scripting was changed in such a way to make dark age more predictable.
Thats true. In the Voobly days, for me having a good start was not losing a vil yo boars. Luring deer was nowhere near to be done and maa or drush was much more effective (towers too but too op and got nerfed). I like your take a lot
I think that this discussion is a fundamental misunderstanding of how difficult RTS games (or any difficult video game ) are played. For instance, if we look at other games like Chess we see that beginners are focused not on vague ideas of "strategy" but on memorizing and practicing efficient tactics. A lot of the high-level thinking in these games is moreso a result of answering a strategy or developing a form of micro and practicing it until it's usable in real games. This is seen in all high performance activities whether it's TheViper's innovation or an NBA team figuring out a method for dealing with an opposing superstar. Similar ideas are present in other "esport" titles whether like studying options in fighting games or patterns of play on a map within an FPS. At the end of the day, strong fundamental technical skills (such as those built by practicing BOs) can and will always beat weak players in every game.
Notably, I find it odd that this player hates thinking about build orders and such as that is often a highly stimulating and research/strategy intensive aspect of AoE2. In short, I do not think that this player understands that most of the "strategy" of games is often something to be studied, researched and practiced.
That said, the above was to primarily answer the point about the game not being about "strategy and adaptation" as though to discredit those using builds which favor early aggressive timing attacks, like it's not a viable method for winning games. I do actually sympathize with this player however. Frankly, practicing BOs can feel repetitive if you don't really see the excitement in seeing how the evolution of each step relates to army production/resource production or developing variations on a BO for answering certain tactics from opponents.
In all honesty, I get the feeling that this person is at a point where the only way to win more games in the ladder is to start playing in a way which is technically sound. Unfortunately, the only way to truly develop these skills in a quick manner is to copy a BO and I'd argue that most players (including me) don't necessarily find the idea of developing variations on an airtight build order to be the most fun thing when you're just trying to queue up in your spare time.
In other words, I would tell this person to enjoy more game modes and frankly, care less about winning (it's hard ngl).
Exactly. Basically this is a generalized problem for almost any game with this sort of complexity. It's the way complexity interacts with the human brain. As long as the game is complex (can't easily find right move with time constraints), and has patterns (certain inputs correlate with certain outputs), then there will always be a favor for memorizing "one trick" openings and build orders. They basically find the optimal line of play from a vast space of possibilities and then through practice capitalize on its near-perfect execution, in order to beat someone who has to figure out these decisions in real time without practice. There's always going to be some flavor of this, and you shouldn't take at face value any complaints that say "There used to be strategy, but now it's just memorized builds!" Because I feel like that complaint has been said about many different things at various different phases of the game's meta-development. The only difference between the people saying them is when they specifically get frustrated by a specific thing and give up or make that complaint. It's more like that the person who complained just happened to have encountered something that frustrated them for the first time, not that the game really had a fundamental shift in design from before (e.g. by not playing ranked seriously until now, or newly developed a sour mood for the game, etc)
There is something missing, in chess we have soft refutations for those who do not want to study a lot of theory.
Let me give you a practical example. I have been playing Sicilian defence (~1900 elo) for about a year now and every now and then some player tries to play the Smith Mora Gambit (1. e4 c5 2. d4 cxd4 3. c3). As a player I am faced with two choices: accept the pawn and enter a game where I am objectively better, but the game can become very complex (if you don't know the position). Or not take the pawn and continue the game on more ordinary tracks and with a more balanced evaluation.
This is possible because objectively speaking the best strategy in chess is to play slowly, develop your pieces, bring your king to safety and so on. So any pre-emptive attack is objectively sub par.
it kinda feels like the reddit poster is attacking the wrong target. their complaints to me read more like a dissatisfaction with the current meta, which is fair, I don't like the current meta either (as a lifelong infantry player who can never run what I want), but that isn't a problem with "build orders ruining strategy" or "soulless competition" because as far as I understand, build orders ARE strategy.
The only nerf I would agree with is making deer un-pushable. Make Feudal more relevant
I agree. Pushing deer gives more advantages to high APM player or better mouse equipment player, I played aoe2 more than 10 years ago, I never seen people push deer at that time.
Personally I disagree. Yes it gives benefit to more skilled players, but there has to be some things like deer pushing which people can do as they become better/faster. Also if you make deer unpushable you're also indirectly buffing civs with cheaper mills and making the random deer spawn more important. If the deer spawn close to the berries it's a completely random benefit vs if they spawn further away and they need a second mill.
@MrMsr13 While i agree that it gives higher ceiling, but at same time it affects game in a weird way. Pushing castle age time faster is one. But its so good that even top players often sacrifice better scouting and just playing their own game with pushing deers. At this point at least to me its quite a boring chore. Worst part is if there are no deers then laming boar would be even better advantage. Thats the only thing im concerned. Maybe as someone mentioned, make double of deers, but half the food, so you wont even attempt to push them all idk
@@Lokalo1 the issue is players don't "sacrifice" scouting. There is no strategic decision to be made. Pushing deer is so strong it's a no-brainer. So basically you have players at all levels doing chores for the first five min. It's terrible. Envision trying to show your friend the game and how fun it is, and having to explain that this is what you do the first 5 min. Add a couple deers in the pack and now you have a legit strategic decision. Do I mill the deers and send my vills unprotected? Do I make more army to protect them? Or do I stay "home" but lose on the deer income?
@goncal7099 understand that, but then the random deer spawn becomes super important. If they happen to spawn close to the berries you don't need a second mill or to sacrifice 3-4 villager idle time whilst walking there and back. Together the difference is 100 wood + 50-80 food (villager idle time), or around 150-180 resources depending on distance. That's too big a difference to leave to pure spawning chance, alone it could make the difference between win or loss at a competitive level. If you tried to fix that by saying deer had to spawn either within or away a certain distance from the berries, that means you get scouting info for free when you find one because you know where the other has to be. Making them push able means there's a way for the deer spawn chance to be reduced, without giving away resource location info before it is scouted.
Hey, I have the feeling that everything which is out of meta (i e. towers, old inca rush, bereber rush in dark age, etc) is always seen as something to be nerfed, and I do not think this should be the case. We all just need to learn how to defend from that. As a suggestion probably they should scout more rather than pushing 2 or 3 deer...
There are a lot of people doing the youpudding.. but there are way more people doing scouts or archers or just skirms... And I do not see any pro saying anything about it for example..
Let's just enjoy the new strategies and learn how to counter them!
We love diversity!
allin rushes are never fun in any game. because the game is always the same and if you manage to fend off the attack, the opp insta resigns and you don't even get to be on the offence. if you loose it still feels cheap.
problem is, that for a proper defence you need more knowledge about the game than the attacker. the attacker just needs to memorize the buildorder and proceed to micro his units while remembering to build more. the defender need to know the attackers buildorder to even recognize the rush and since there are many forms of allins, he need to see them all. on top of that, he also needs to know the correct response for those attacks and how to execute the response. if this response includes something like monks or mangonels, you add another layer of complexity for new players that they need to tackle with more intense micro over the normal archer/knight blob
@@calronkeltaran493 i agree, they are very stressful, but on the other hand it gives you the chance to play something different.. otherwise you end up always going 19/20 pop scouts or archers and from a player and viewer perspective I don't think it's the best for the game. The more strategies the better. Same with the maps, the more variety the better (even though the map pool is always full of open maps.. we barely see hybrid or a water map)
Meta changing is ok, buffing infantry is a good idea.
Great video! I think these new strats are quite fun to face tbh! At my elo (1,3k) people still make some mistakes executing them and you can cripple them suficiently in feudal so that their rushes are manageable to defend. I can definitely see these rushes to be deadly at higher level though... I think that balancing the market could be the solution so you "reward" the player that develop its eco properly... Remember to rebalance saracens in this case!
Sounds like how i felt as a new player getting into it. If you don't watch guides and just want to play the game normally you barely learn anything and the game is bad at teaching practical strategy
I think this is part of the problem: most of the single player campaigns don't actually mirror the skills that it takes to be good in multiplayer. There's overlap of course, and I'm not sure that I know how to fix the problem, but it just seems like you could pick up the game play through several of the campaigns and think "Oh, I'm actually getting pretty good at this" and then in a rather demoralizing turn, get your face punched in the second you jumped on multiplayer.
@@PeterFendrich Even art of war doesn't stress things like how important farms are, or almost everything you build should be part of a wall.
It's really weird the AI is programmed to play well but these lessons aren't given to the players! (btw, despite saying this i'm somehow 950 elo which is baffling to me, feels like I'm trash still xD)
What you said about losing morale after thinking you get the hang of something has happened to me several times in learning AoE2. My gf is actually really good at it so I want to do 2v2 games without feeling like slotting in a bot would be better
Well, tbh, idk if that's Aoe 2 being bad or just something about RTS. I played a few others, especially Starcraft 2, and I wouldn't have gotten anywhere if a friend didn't teach me.
An idea to help with that would be to get the game linked to a website with build orders, maybe. Or get something like art of war, but a bit more developped, like having a tutorial using a very basic Archer/Scout/Something BO, against an AI, starting from Dark age until you reach some kind of "Make 5 archers" goal.
Then, you'd have to play the game on your own, with some general tips during the game, like having a line to remind people the possibility to go castle at the 25 mins mark, or keep growing your economy/military.
Side note, it's only my opinion, but I don't like the menu. Probably because of the colors, and the way it's organized, but why is everything in the corners, or the side? There isn't even anything in the middle of my screen, why is the settings button an icon? What are you trying to gain space for?
The drawing is cool, but for some reasons, this game menu is the only one I know which feels uncomfortable, even after 100h now. I understand if you don't wanna be flashy, but there's a reason why games nowadays add different colors for important buttons like PLAY. This Xbox logo, even if useless, is the first thing I recognize everytime, now.
I think we need to add "shields" to infantry as a barracks upgrade to make them viable against archers. This way we break the scout and archer meta a bit
To add to this, I think the shields should be a micro mechanic that you can manually use to block all archer fire. More hotkeys! On a cooldown of course.
Gambersons were introduced for this exact reason. Hasn't made much difference though.
just make gambesons available in feudal
The elo matchmaking system only works well if a player's performance from match to match doesn't vary too much. You make a few better decisions one match, a few bad micros the next, it's a few small changes that decide whether you play well or poorly. What these all-in strategies offer is a "+200 elo for this game" button available to pretty much any player if they have the right civ, and I think the main issue is not simply that they can push it, but that they can *not* push it. They get to decide which matches they all in, stomping their opponents, and which matches they play conventionally and probably lose, bringing their elo back down. Their elo stays fairly stable, but their matches become one-sided, either they all in and destroy or they don't and they get destroyed. Players that all-in every game are probably not actually causing any issues. They get pushed up 200 elo, they get matched against players with better micro, better macro, and they settle at a 50% winrate. That's what the elo matchmaking system does. But a player that all-ins only sometimes is a big problem, that's what the reddit OP is likely running into. And there really is no fixing the issue without taking away the +200 elo button.
This brings it to the point. And with the way mapbanning works noone can onetrick all in everygame since there are maps wich dont allow you to onetrick as easy
I agree with this and I might even be this person. I like Cumans and am probably pushing my elo 2-300 points higher when I just main them and 2 tc boom. They are my favorite to play but sometimes I don't feel like playing so intensely as that build demands. Sometimes I just wanna try something new and relaxed but now I'm too high so I get smacked in a lot of games without Cumans. I almost need 2 accounts based on my mood
@@JohnSmith-tk7nt maybe a general elo + a civ modifier would be nice?
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p That sounds like a good idea to me
the thing that killed the game for me ranked wise is seeing the same 20 maps out of the 100 we have seeing the same stuff oooover and ooover again, 0 variety
I think the perfect change is to slightly improve militia-line, militia and man at arms mainly, because:
1- It'd make the dark age/feudal action more attractive, partially fixing the problem of "no adaptation, just memorizing an opening" and also giving more variety and so room for adaptation.
2- In general, going infantry (militia-line) is just underpowered compared to going archer or scouts, and this usually remains in later stages of the game.
As proposals, I'd say:
A) Militia-line velocity: +0.05. In dark age, I find it hard to make any damage because vils can escape them easily. In feudal age, they die too easily to archers, and they make low eco damage compared to scouts. This would improve their performance at damaging eco.
B) Attack rate: +10%. A soft but effective way of making them being able to taking a 1v1 on vils with telar on dark age as it should be imo. This would improve their performance at pressing and punishing walling and going FC-all-in rushes.
C) Food cost: -10. Dark age theory revolves around being able to have the TC always working and clicking up as fast as possible, and this is hardly ever compatible with making militia. Cheaper militia makes them an option to press harder in the earlier stages of the game. This would improve their viability and so their performance at every aspect.
I was talking to a friend the other day about the queue. I pretty much always leave random open and still have my civ as random in case the enemy picks.
It would be nice to have an option in, lets say the loading screen, that points out if you are playing Random Civs or its a picked match up. That way you would at least see the all-in rush coming
Enabling 3 civ bans after you match on the ladder would be huge. There's a reason all tournaments have civ bans... so things don't get stale.
I'm low/average elo in the 900-1100 range and while I did play a little many years ago I consider myself mostly new. I'm trying to improve as a player, but I have no dreams of reaching some high elo number or anything. Mostly just wanting to have fun playing.
My issue with the all-in strats is that there are so many different ones I see regularly. I have to learn how to defend against seemingly dozens of different all-in possibilities, and cover for the potential of a longer macro game. Most of my opponents are using some form of all-in build. I've learned how to defend against a few of them if I can pick up on what they're doing early enough. I have learned a few all-ins myself, but I struggle to have any fun doing it even when it succeeds. At this elo getting a tower up on someones gold or FC castle dropping is often enough for an insta-resign. I've pretty much ignored playing these all-in strats as I find the victories to be a bit hollow and I don't feel like I'm actually improving while doing it.
This has led to me playing games for a 2-4 hours (real time) and usually having 1 or 2 games that are well fought and enjoyable. While having like 3-5 games that end in 15 minutes (real time) and are not much fun win or lose. I know people are very defensive about any criticism of the "state of Aoe2" past or present, but as a newer player I think it has a rather poor time to fun ratio. The 1 or 2 good games a night keeps me coming back, but the 3-5 all-ins make me feel like I'm wasting my time. I get more dynamic games against the AI than against a lot of these players.
The problem is not with build order memorization per se. If you don't want to fall below 700 ELO you need to know basic build orders, even if not timed to the second, but now even 700-1000 ELO uses some basic build orders. And even at higher ELO, if you perfect your build order down to the millisecond, it should give you an advantage. The problem is when this does not only gives you an advantage, but decides the game on itself. And starting from 1000 ELO (which is stronger than 1400 was a few years ago) people can consistently follow build orders without any major mistakes. So now the game goes in the direction of picking a civ, and when the game is started, you pick what build order you want to do, and that pick already decided the game, as if it was a rock-paper-scissors game. Imagine that as soon as the game starts, both players get to pick a strat from a list, and then the winner is instantly declared without even playing it out. This is the direction the games seems to be going these days for anyone who is not a complete beginner or a professional.
Well perhaps even making the Castles cost, a bit higher of stone, would make it already harder in meaning of timing to rush with a forward castle. Perhaps even such small change could solve a all in problem for ablot of people
Another problem with "if everything is broken, everything is balanced" is that everything is balanced so long as you're exploiting the way things are broken - if you're not looking to do that, then you need a huge handicap, which is not all that fun. Sure you can just loose a while and drop elo, but then you'll tend to go up against a mix of people who are just plain worse than you and some people who are "exploiting" the brokenness but mostly fumbling the execution, which is also not ideal at all. I think this is especially bad for people who want to play competitive but not like a job, or don't have the time to play dozens of matches a week but still enjoy the competitive aspect.
Also, I wonder if you could choose a "force random" option which only matches you with people willing to go random civ, if that would lead to a much longer queue time, because I'd definitely try that out. Someone in the chat also mentioned a draft system for the ladder, so you can ban and then pick, that might also be nice and would be simple enough to implement - you could also have an "opt out of draft if the other player also opts out" button, so it would be a very safe change to make.
I have thought about this and the first step needs to be nerfing double bit axe upgrade to 15 percent. Also drop 1-2 trees from around the TC. Even doing everything you said you can still do 20 knights with khmer in 20 minutes. I saw a rush on T90s channel over a year ago titled Your walls won't save you,were the attack was just archers and MAA.
I don't like only random because if I want to start expanding the civs I use, I want to be able to practice, without having a 2.4 percent chance it shows up.
If you were to wall and explain whyit could be helpful.
I know you say it all the time but scouting is very important, but keep saying it.
I HAVE A FIX (for UUs rushes):
UUs start with -30% hp, but you can research a very cheap tech in the castle to get them back to their initial HP, however this tech takes a pretty long time to research, which slows down UUs production. That being said, once it's researched, this tech would make UUs creation time take 30% less time, which would buff UUs plays in the long term.
As for non-UU rushes, like steppe lancer rush for example, I think this has to do with the arabia meta (laming, luring deer, taking berries fast, towers being useless, resource walls on stone, etc.), so you can change the map generation for that.
You could also nerf the market prices in feudal, and leave it untouched in castle age, but imo this wouldn't matter a lot. By the way I'm 1k5 and I think devotion has close to no impact under 2k elo.
Optimization will always bring huge advantages and even the lower elos (speaking as a LEL) will eventually learn over time.
The bar will always slowly creep higher so if you're not improving slightly yourself, elo will reflect that.
This isn't a bad thing (unless you're conflating self worth with elo) and itis simply the system working.
I think this guys problem is more a frame of mind/perspective
Couldnt agree more. Of course if these all in strats are too op they should get nerfed. But then thats a balance discussion
probably adding some building requirement for castles could help too
Yes, require a barracks
A few ideas:
Require some token research at the castle to be able to create UU - something that won't be much of an issue if you're playing normally and have a reasonable economy but will significantly hamper degenerate strategies - cost in the order of 200 food, time 30-60s. We used to have to research BBC and HC and we lived :P
For infantry, first armour upgrade is kind of pricey for what it practically gets you - maybe it should cost just 50 food instead of 100? MAA will still get countered by archers and (out)matched by upgraded scouts but at least it won't as much of an investment/waste. It would also slightly help using infantry in the castle age.
What if we nerf... the castle age upgrade? Make it 900-300 to get up to castle age? Would also make it much harder to 'skip' feudal age.
I actually really like this idea. One of the issues is the fast castle into anything, even knights can feel broken. Adding a little more effort to get there would drastically change the meta for fuedal age.
This. Hera didn't include this idea in his "two solutions" and I want to know if he just didn't think about it, or if he doesn't like the idea.
This is a very interesting idea. My take is that it could really spice things up, but the problem is that it would make ‘meta’ feudal options like scouts and archers even better.
If you do this change, it would need to come with a buff to infantry, enough to spice things up in feudal age. In that case it can be an insanely good idea.
Definitely a big change that i dont think we will see though, generally speaking it seems like the devs are quite conservative with what changes they make, which makes sense considering how bad it would be to ruin the game with modern changes that end up backfiring
The advantage i see of this compared to some of the other possible changes is that it will make fast castle worse in a way that doesn't damage unique units too much which seems hard to do otherwise. And I kinda like the fact that unique units are a lot more viable than they were in the past because it creates some extra variety.
I agree that it's not too likely (i understand it would be a pretty big change) and that you would need to buff infantry in feudal as well then, but that seems like a pretty decent idea anyway!
Maybe worth it for the test servers sometime tho? If it doesn't feel great than they can still track back and not implement it in the real game
Yes feudal is so much fun but full wall into castle just completely counters it
I think there are two options to address this but we need to answer some questions first. What do we want the ladder to be and look like? Before, ladder was the default match making, even if you weren't playing competitively you'd use ladder to get a fun game. Now across a wider range of the player base, people are trying to win and get the highest ELO they can however they can.
What do we want the ladder to be moving forward and how do we enact it? Do we want it to be a primarily fun match making system or primarily serious highest ELO possible?
Regardless of what we choose the other group of players will need a viable alternative, the lobby browser isn't very fun or utilised so I don't think that's it. I also think skill matters for fun as well, a 900 vs a 1500 isn't fun for either player. So two ladders one with a hard rigid ELO system and another match finder with a soft ELO system, something like SBMM in COD, players are close in skill but not on the ladder designed to be sweaty.
The other question is, what do we want our sweaty ladder to be, is it strict build orders or is it adaptability and deeper game knowledge? When you pick one, how do you implement it?
I agree with you, too many straight forward unit options that need nerfing, one of the downsides of the DLC model, devs need to give a reason to buy it and a lot of the time it's something very strong and borderline OP. We've also seen nerfs (overall) to xbow and knights, and it might be bad to say but the building and wall HP nerfs have also made all ins more viable. Relative power creep in a lot of areas needs to be addressed.
Go all in, break in easily and your opponent can't react if they're not going all in too.
Edit: How do you buff infantry without turning them into knights? Personally I wonder if massing infantry is the trick, instead of buffing the individual unit, buff the creation and massing of the unit (even more). Cheaper, easier to upgrade, faster to make, leave militia alone though they're fine for dark age.
I like this format.
I feel like certain techs need to change as well. I would divide Husbandry into two. Husbandry 1 and 2. H1 will be available in Feudal, adding 5% more speed for Cav units, and H2 - available in Castle, will add an additional 5% more for a total of 10%.
I would also rework Monks, decreasing conversion range but adding more movement speed.
In addition, I'm also thinking of adding Mercenary Camp. It's a building that's available for every Civ to build. This building allows players to train units that are not available to their Civ of choice. Unique Units are still inaccessible. These mercenary units DO NOT benefit from any Unique Tech and Civ bonuses, not even from the Civ that hired them. However, they can still benefit from Blacksmith, and Military building upgrades.
Essentially, if a Franks player opted to train Merc Camel Riders for whatever reason, the Merc Camel Rider will not benefit from Chivalry and the +20% hit point bonus.
Although, Merc Units have better stats than their counterparts: If the standard Camel Rider has 100 HP, the Merc variant will have 110 or 120, so on and so forth. Merc Camps will also have technologies that improve training time and will not benefit from Conscription and any other Civ bonus or Unique Tech that changes its value. Merc units are a little bit more expensive too. If the standard Camel Rider costs 55 Food and 60 gold, the Merc variant will cost 60 Food and 65 gold. Of course, the amount can be tweaked for balancing purposes. The cost is also fixed and will not benefit from Civ bonuses and unique tech upgrades.
In my opinion, this alleviates the pressure of always choosing a certain Civ in order to win. It's also an attempt to prevent players from feeling like they'll immediately lose because their fave Civ is not in the current meta. I like the Britons and Byzantines, but I don't wanna be like, "Fuck, I'm against a Civ that completely steamrolls me at every age, I might as well resign now. Bye Elo."
What if mining gold/stone was slower in dark age/fuedal age. To balance it out make the upgrades stronger but also more expensive. So if you decide to put 15 villagers early for stone and gold to abuse the market, you will take much longer doing so. The more expensive mining upgrades will make you think twice about using it for a rush, but if you know your fuedal will take longer it might still be worth it
One potential idea on how to improve this is to allow civ picking in ranked only below a certain elo (eg 1100). Or for example make it random where the civ you pick will actually be your civ in only some % of games (like every other game for example).
I like the idea of a random civ ladder RM. I think people should have the choice to choose their civ on other ladders.
I'm just a slightly above average player with an ear to the ground, but wouldn't increasing creation time of unique units in Castle Age help mitigate this problem? Most UUs have quicker production times to mitigate the fact they are made from a castle, but if Organ Gun was only slightly faster to make than a Ram it would make the problem a lot less overwhelming.
Just a possible solution that doesn't tinker with unit stats directly.
Thats really interesting. I think it would fix quite a few unique units for sure, keeping them strong, but hard to all in with using only 1 castle. I like it!
@@HeraAgeofEmpires2 Thanks for the feedback!
@@montauk1684 issue with it is, that it nerfs non all in UU usage. In my opinion main issue we are talking about is getting to castle age with no eco and being able to snowball, cuz of much faster castle age/weak eco so counter units not being as good. Basically if we manage to push castle age time with no eco a bit it should solve the issue. If that all in thing comes in a minute later or something, you would have way better setup to defend it and proper eco has more time to work too. Market overall became quite an issue, so would look into it and probably removing this dumb deer luring every single game like a bot could help a lot, though need to fix laming then. As now if you get lamed boar you can still push deers, without deers you are kind of dead. Though laming boar should have been removed long ago or at least implemented some proper mechanic where it would be possible/much easier to stop it. Sometimes even pro players just cant stop the laming even if they see it and try, makes no sense.
@@Lokalo1I feel like laming (especially boars) is very rare, but maybe I’m wrong. I myself have not had my boar lamed for a very long time.
@@Lokalo1 that's fixable by intelligent game design though. For example they could nerf UU production times globally by 15% (or individually based on current strength for more tuning at the expense of a little more dev time), but have every castle owned apply a 2.5% production time buff to UUs. That way someone all-in on a single castle is producing 12.5% slower than now but someone investing into them deliberately over time gets value for doing it. They could even have the effect double once in Imperial Age to give incentive to move beyond the all-in.
Idea:
Market can be built in feudal age. cost unchanged
food sales/purchase available immediately (b/c u have a mill)
wood and stone sales/purchase available upon university built
Thoughts?
This is a very serious topic. The game is becoming more and more one-trick with "a right way to play" rather than a game with a free playstyle that I enjoyed more when I was young. A great way to solve this would be to add more randomness in the map generation, even if it is partially unfair, so that the adaptation part is more important. I would like to hear your opinion about it
What I learned in Hearthstone is that the more randomness you force into a competitive environment the worse it gets. It may sound good and fun on paper but the reality is that the game is worse off for it
@@AkeNo_H I mean, yeah, but no one is talking about units generating random units when they die you know : p Just making sure you don't always start off with the exact resources you expected, but in a limited way. I think it should at least be tried, maybe in a few maps, to see how it goes.
@@user-sl6gn1ss8p you get the point :)
In AOM (before retold) the maps were more random. It was less competitive, but way more fun in my opinion and also more diverse
First of all, really like the discussion format!
To the point, I like the idea of another poster here. Namely increase the Castle Age upgrade a bit.
My partner and I had a discussion yesterday - it's encouraging dominating strats which attract a lot of toxic players. Things that require little to no skill but are incredibly difficult to defend. It's attracting a different type of player which I'd play COD if I wanted to deal with that. They are making the game far more easy, automated and it's just diluting the beauty of the game and the reasons why I began playing.
Great discussion. Just an idea, but if all unique units can be converted by generic monks, would that not already solve quite a bit as well? Or maybe make a small food cost to each unique unit, so that you need some eco behind it.
I think Castles are strong all on their own as a baseline. They project your sphere of power significantly, even if you couldn't make unique units out of them right away.
So, the quickest way I see to balance these all-in strategies is to gate Unique Unit creation behind a new initial tech for each Civ. So instead of being able to make the units as soon as your castle is up, you need to both get the resource cost and wait the research time. This gives two very easy knobs to turn to make these strategies still viable but harder to implement before they can be opposed.
This is similar to an across the board unique item rework, but as a one time cost, the changes are much less impactful across the states of all games where there could be 5 of a unique unit or hundreds of them over the span of the game. Even a small combat change like +1 or -1 armor can have an enormous impact across a game with hundreds of that unit.
I liked how starcraft had it back in the day (not sure about today). Defense against rushes was easy to execute but costly early game investment. What that lead to was that the success of the rush strategies depended on whether it was scouted or not. In large portion this was enabled by maps not being wide open as they are in AoE. Situation when defense is way harder to execute than the attack is as terrible.
I absolutely love this.
In fact, I can't watch streams all that much and even reading socials and discord takes sometimes hard to reach time, but I often can listen on the side and it makes me feel a bit more involved. Since I follow aoe2 community from 2012 on, it does matter to me.
A good nerf could be to make castles require a prerequisite building. It could require a stable/archery range or both.
Regarding the deer pushing on 1v1 arabia. Maybe we could have 1 or 2 deer spawn super close to the tc and the remaining 4-5 deer spawn extremely far away?
With this change I think people would be able to consistantly execute powerful drush,MAA or tower rushes with proper scouting. The power level of scout and archer rushes would probably remain unchanged and the FC phosphoru starts would be nerfed (I presume phosphoru strats more than 2 deer to work properly, also if they try to push in the far deer , we could reasonably expect the other scout to be annoying and interfere with the deer lure? )
What effect would increased map size have on all-ins? I think it would nerf all-ins considerably, at least on standard start maps.
This would nerf early aggression and basically buff cav wich is already in a very strong position. It would also help the fast castle all ins we have seen become more popular because it would give players more time to set up their build unbothered.
Town centres should have upgrades, like you research "town garrison' or something and it will give the town centre an extra tower. Can do this upgrade at every age.
Also, any decent strat, if u practice it, is gonna feel broken for someone that doesnt practice that much, I remember how broken a good scts into kts rush feels, it can be stopped, but one or to mistakes and its over, or a good xbow timing, a good maa rush, a good skirm spear, any player that puts time into a strat is gonna make that strat feel way more strong that it actually is, at least under pro level of course
My suggestion: double Unique Unit build time in Castle Age ... it then returns to normal build time in Imperial Age.
it would make hardly possible to play UU in castle age and its already quite rare. Like doing conqs without fc is fine. massing up genoise would be even harder etc. Need a solution which doesnt ruin normal play and in my opinion that has to be nerfing market/making harder to get to castle age, so better macro has some time to shine
@@Lokalo1, doubling the build time is definitely too extreme, but some kind of % increase is a relatively easy way to slow the FC Unique All-In.
I definitely found that letting my elo slip from ~700's to ~600's made the game way more fun for me. I love unique units and don't love the scouts/archer meta. So I choose to pretty much FC castle drop in UU each game. Sometimes it wins, sometimes it doesn't but it's always a little different. Having such a long history there are players who get used to playing a certain way and then don't want that to change because they would have to re-learn the game. This is the nature of strategy games, the meta changes, if it doesn't then it get's boring. The only thing needed for the Reddit poster is to accept a lowering of their ELO and then continue on like normal.
All that being said it sounds like nobody likes luring deer so removing just making deer/huntables not run from military units could be an easy fix that most people would enjoy.
I sympathize with the Redditt OP. I am playing at 900 elo and I now regularly come up against players that do specialized strats that are very hard if not impossible to stop at my level. I literally played my first game of the week 5 minutes ago on Arena and faced a Turkish fast imp. Now I know some players will say "your eco is better...just defend" etc. Let's face it - when you are 900 elo you have some deficiencies in your playing and decision making. You are most likely not going to have the right response to an all-in strat, and you will lose. Every time. The worst part of this meme-strat phenomenon is that if your goal is to improve as a player in general, meaning you want to be a well rounded player on all maps (open, hybrid, closed, nomad), it will take you a very long time just to get to 1k which is barely "average". Which is incredibly frustrating because you run into players that last played 1v1 ranked 2 years ago that tell you 1k is so easy to achieve. One thing that I am sure of is that 1k from 12 months ago is not equivalent to today's 1k players - the community has improved dramatically over the last 24 months.
I honestly see this issue in AOE2 and also in chess, I am 12xx player in AOE II & 18xx in chess. and recently I see chess is less fun for two reasons:
1. the same reason that this dude is talking about: memorizing build order/youpudding/early drush. etc... I know chess openings is part of the game- if you want to open with e4/d5/c4..etc... but I feel like it's more theoretical/by the book than strategic and critical thinking... and it's like you mention above. 15xx player who perfected the traps vs a regular 15xx chess player, nine out of ten times it's gonna favor the guy who perfected the traps... since if he wants to rush and go all in while you are trying to castle and put your king safe, it might take a couple of minutes since it's new to you and your under pressure and your clock is ticking (((when your opponent perfected the attack and memorize it by heart)))... again it's my opinion. but it's kind of less fun.
2. the other reason is because people now a days they don't resign when they are in a losing position (how pathetic these players are). they have a lonely king and the only thing that they do is run with their king for stalemate SMH... Please no one tell me this is strategic play to earn point for stalemate with 1800 elo, this is pathetic and waste of time, and the same shit they do in AOE II they run with 3/4 vills in the coroners behind the trees just to waste time and make you search of them (in a rated game so I can't quit the game or I'll lose points), where is the fun with that? Unfortunately, in the past few months I stopped playing rated games either I play with friends or solving puzzles or only play with AI.
I am happy that chess & AOE II community is growing, but these people needs to STOP!!
Again, this is my personal opinion and everyone might disagree and reply with different opinions.. and I am happy to see everyone's thoughts
18xx OTB? Or online?
Might be unpopular opinion and im only like 1.2k in chess, but I never understood why stalemate exists in chess. Like you have queen and 2 rooks vs a king and boom, you can still get stalemate(in a sense lose a game). Like it never made sense to me that you have to think if opponent will have a move even if you super ahead, like why should you care that he is getting destroyed and cant even move? Still weird to me even if played quite many games of chess
@@Lokalo1 I like stalemate. It shouldn't be blundered (outside of Blitz) but it allows for "crazy rook" tactics to be a thing.
@@melissagrenier2200 OTB, 2000 online in Classic. 1750 in blitz
On the unique units - maybe a similar system as scouts would be good. In castle age unique units could be weaker, and automatically become stronger in imp, and then you can upgrade them to elite. So it would be 3 steps instead of 2.
Make it like eagle scouts into eagle warriors:
You build a castle as mongols, you get access to Mangudai scouts with lower stats. And you get an upgrade to normal Mangudai. Upgrade is cheap, but it takes two minutes
I thought I'd queue up a game for the first time in a while and got greeted by a Korean all in strategy. The thing that kept me away for a bit was a new game and a little bit of the villager pathing as well. The all in strategy is pretty OP and I think wood/gold unique units need a rework.
Unranked player here, been playing a month, and I remember being where the OP of that post was at. I mostly main the Romans and Celts on quick play, the vast majority of my 1v1s end somewhere in Feudal, early castle at best because all I do is MaA/maA tower rush. There's truth in what he says, but I've noticed plenty of times that a good way to counter a rush is simply to be in the process of a rush yourself. AOE2 is one of those games I've seen where the amount of fun you have goes up, in proportion to how committed you are to learning the game. I don't think we should entirely base our view point and game balance on players like this one's, since there is bound to be people in any elo game that can't keep up with the competitive ladder no matter what you do to accommodate them.
I do however, believe, in opening up the competitive scene, and thereby the casual scene as well, with multiple game modes that the game already has. More objectives other than simply eliminating every opposing villager. We have Regicide which would be perfect if you got rid of the starting castle as a starter, we have king of the hill which I've been playing recently ATTACHED to regicide, because needing to ensure a monument in the center is captured opens up multiple ways for victory WHILE also being fun to play and far more entertaining to watch (especially put together, meaning someone who thinks outside the box could for example sneakily take out the king if the monument is possessed, and vice versa) if you fixed the way the capture timer works, and even capturing relics can work differently with enough tweaking.
That's in addition to the maps doing unique things to already change up modes that shake the game around, with maps like hideout burying the monument at the center of the cross shaped woods, placing importance on villager economy. Maybe you could shrink the tree amount, and make it a viable path with a modified capture timer to hold onto while being sieged on the other end. And that's just one map out of many. If a rigid build order is a casual player's concern, these multiple existing modes (and new modes in further updates) could change everything if done right. Someone who is completely used to booming on arabia, would be forced to adapt if they had to maintain a monument in feudal, and often times when I've played with even seasoned players who have played for years, they had difficulty adapting to the changes that other modes bring. If you wanted to get even crazier with the gameplay diversity, you could also have mode specific exclusive bonuses and penalties for all the civs that could reset the game balance partially or entirely without having to roll something back in one area.
AOE2 seems to be on an upward trajectory in popularity, and doing this could solve many problems without sacrificing dedication to navigating the skill curve.
A lot of your arguments apply to FC --> knights too, would you also want to address that in the same set of changes?
I'm assuming what you are talking about is a player going 1 TC all in knights when they get to castle age. While it is certainly a dominant strategy at lower elos, its not quite the same thing. What hera is talking about is a very fine tuned build that sees the aggressor entirely skip feudal age and get a castle down before opposing feudal age pressure even has a chance. The knight play you are referencing comes from standard feudal age play, and takes long enough to set up that it does actually have counter play.
Part of the reason this strat is so much weaker is you don't have a castle to defend yourself and knights cost food. The UU strats pretty much all use units that don't need a difficult to set up food eco. If you end up against it, just make a few spears, make sure you have your walls down and go up yourself. Assuming you scouted and attacked appropriately, you should be ahead in eco by the time you hit.
Personally I think this brings more life to the game. This is a Phase we have to just figure out and adapt to, and if it is still broken after like lets say 2 months, THEN we should think of nerfs
well mongol steppe lancer rush was OP for super long until it got nerfed, though it is still very strong. Issue with those strats is that it sometimes feels very frustrating, when you feel like you were doing counter units, having much better eco, doing mostly correct decisions and you still do vs a guy who still has 25 vills and zero eco, but you cant do anything. And hera is talking about it. It's much easier to do, when you making 0 vills basically and just controling army while other has to macro way more. I remember having like 20 skirms vs 15 ratha or something and pathing did some nice things and my skirms became scattered under rathas, those guys in melee mode like 3 shots skirms, they dissapeared in like 5 seconds max. When you have bigger eco as in conventional game, you can spam way more skirms than your opponent and usually you can disturb his eco at home, but not when 1 castle protects all wood/gold he needs. Not saying you cant beat it, but it just has very little downsides and a lot of good things for that strat going, being safe, not needing to macro pretty much, basically just enjoying controlling army while other guy has to play good and not make mistakes to be able to defend.
the thing is that at higher ELO, it is executed properly and possibly anticipated after just a few uses. At lower levels it takes a larger sample size before the other player adjusts, assuming the ALL-IN is executed properly. ALL-IN strats REQUIRE precision and the understanding that WITHIN the strat, you need to understand how to MANEUVER. If you look at any high-level all-in.. they are all slightly different is final execution 7:54
You can't even defend even if you expect that if you don't have the tech. For example, if I'm playing Franks and the guy is coming with wagons, I don't have redemption to convert them. I can stay in feudal maybe to spam scouts to address it, but if the guy throws couple of pikes, I'm dead.
@@EnesKaraboga look at what I wrote below. I agree. If the strat cannot be defended against even with advance notice, it is clearly pointless to play against
Anyway we could incentivize building stone walls, towers, or more defensive play across the board? Turtling used to be really effective back in the day.
as for one method of buffing infantry, I was considering that in AoE2, infantry being a cheap massed unit doesn't really work out that well. In the early game, they cost a lot of food, so until you've boomed your economy, or at least until you have provisions(not even available to every civ) they actually aren't very affordable. Perhaps infantry could simply be buffed by making it cheaper to build barracks and get the infantry upgrades
What if things were changed so that all-ins were easier to punish? Make buildings harder to use as walls, make it slightly harder to defend without army etc.
the thing about your pages and others on YT with quality content is that strategies and concepts are to be used as a viewer finds best fits their style. In addition, they are not only applicable for ranked or even multiplayer alone due to the techniques that are involved. Some of the grouping suggestions and such are helpful even when playing the most difficult possible custom campaign level with 5 hours of grind. At the same time, techs such as murder holes are IMPERATIVE to get playing those missions, and a huge advantage in multi if done correctly as you showed recently. People need to take advice and pick and choose what best fits THEM. That has been WHAT YOU always suggest and is definitely what I say myself. There are many ways to play the game, and many more which have YET TO BE UNLOCKED. So I think players need to chill out and appreciate everything the community has built since AOK, but more so since Forgotten and ESPECIALLY with AOEII DE. The possibilities are not quite infinite, but extremely large give the capacity of one's computer and the code
I love the game but I don't have time to invest into learning all build orders and such things. The way I've learned to enjoy the game is play team games with friends vs the AI. So we can make our strategies, have a beer and talk without worrying about ranking and stuff.
The only problem with this is that the devs usually prioritize ranked games so when there a bug that affects only our kinds of games it gets longer to be patched
I do like the idea of a slight nerf to the market and unique units. What I'd love to see is limitations on how many times you can play a specific civ on the ladder below, say 1200-1500. So any given civ you can only play 20% of the time. If someone wants to learn 5 solid all-ins or unique unit civs, then fine, but at least people will not feel like one civ is steam-rolling them. Then above say 1500 ELO, make it random with a set number of civ bans
I think the cooler way is to buff the militia line, from the man-at-arms onwards.
They could be specialized as a pierce damage sponge, by increasing their pierce armor a bit.
To be even more interesting, they could have the same ability of the Hussite wagon: absorb the projectiles aiming targets behind them, but with a lower radius than the Hussite wagon. They would receive bonus damage from the knight-line and other heavy cavalry, hand cannoneers and scorpions.
The Hussite wagon should be rebalanced to be better as a support unit.
In my opinion there are two ways to prevent metagaming in RTS (or in video games in general):
1. Frequent balance changes
2. Increase randomness
Hey, enjoying this video. One thing I feel we could add into the discussion is the difference between balance and fun
I think losing to these all in "cheese" strats is one of the least enjoyable ways to experience the game. Its incredibly frustrating, and I think thats because when one loses to an all in strat it can feel like the player on the receiving end can't do anything about it - they have no control and no agency. Losing to being outplayed, or in a long game with lots of little decisions, thats OK, that is part of the game, whatever. Even losing because you opened the wrong thing and they killed me with archers or something, thats fine. But when one doesn't have agency it feels really shit.
So considering that, even if these all-ins are "balanced", so they only work 50% of the time, it can still be horribly unfun, and if you play a couple of games for a bit of fun after work or whatever, coming up against these strats can be really, really crappy and put you off the game. So perhaps that needs to be considered too. Its not about making them perfectly balanced, but maybe make it so it feels like there's a bit more that can be done against it so you aren't sitting there going "well, I don't know what the hell i'm meant to do in this strategy"
The best solution I can think of this and a way to really balance so many things going on in rank is to remove the scout deer push mechanics. This will address alot of issues:
1. It will bring back Strategy into AOE2 DE. You will be using your scouts to scout the enemy or the map. Find your secondary resources, find enemy base.
2. If you still want deer you will have to long distance or mill it which both are a RISK. Right now deer are literally FREE with 0 risk.
3. It will slow down the insane Timeup that many civ like mongols are doing and even for other civ it will slow it a little which is GOOD. For new players they literally have zero chance unless they are following build orders and doing all of this and that is just to overwhelming. Like 2 on wood is literally pretty common now in low elo.
I am not sure why dev havent done this yet.
it's always funny when these conversations come up. people who play the game longer (this is for multiplayer games) will win more. And the thing is, it's not a flat line up its a curve. if you are just 10 percent better, you'll kill the guy who is 10 percent worse most of the time. It can be demoralizing, but people need to understand that games like this aren't for casual players, sounds rough, but it's true. There are plenty of games for you to relax and play 2 or 3 times a week, this probably isn't one of them. You can't manage games/strategy/balance for people who just want to play casually.
I agree to a certain point. I feel like about five years ago there were a lot more strategy options with a larger variety of outcomes.
Idk at the same time I spend 3 weeks mastering a strat and a build order. Only for me to get berated in chat from my opponent for “using a cheese Strat” and “not actually being good” but I put in 30 hours just to be able to beat someone at my ELO with it. My ELO went up over 100 and then I started hitting players who could deal with it and that forced me to learn how to be even better. Now I’m doing non cheese strats but staying up at the next tier. I think they’ve helped me master aspects of the game. Only scout or archer or spear skirm gets boring after a while.
An alternate to nerfing the market would be to make Castle Age more expensive. I think the improvements to villager collection rates over time have sped up our Feudal age times (which made the game more fun to me) but also the speed we can get to Castle age, which I don't like so much. Increasing the cost seems like it targets the main issue, without removing some of the fun mid-game strategy.
The phenomenon is called power creep. It's pervasive over live service games. Id start by saying one of the neatest things in RTS games is when new innovative strategies and the variety in gameplay. But i cam understand the feeling of powerlessness and waste of time feeling like you lost at the loading screen.
As for fixes, The "rebalanced the whole game" is unlikely. There are a whole host of other options. Making infantry viable hasn't really worked, but adding a sprint function would help imo. But there are two solid ways to keep the meta varied and fun. 1.Buff defense. Give the ability to defend if effectively scouted by investing resources. Or 2. Force followup. Don't let the rush knock the player out. Make it put them behind by either reducing the impact on the defender, increase the cost of the rush.
The most reasonable suggestion i have heard is to make a tech that allows you to start making UU. that tech can be adjusted for each civ and it doesnt affect the scale of the unit further into the game like creation speed. This is only a reasonable suggestion because there is no possible way to nerf organ guns or hussite wagons without destroying the unit. Making a barracks a prereq for a castle would have too many unpredictable consequences on other maps like for example arena, where people are going to have to relearn their entire arena muscle memory. None of this addresses the FC full siege strat with romans or celts, which is maybe less of a problem because there are more direct blanket nerfs or buffs to be done. Even putting the FC all-ins aside, i think the market should be nerfed a bit to reward proper macro play. There is the argument that the market allows a losing player to pull themselves out of a hole, but even at current market rates that basically never works once you're at the point of marketing yourself out of death. You always just die a bit later
One idea i had is to increase the cost to get to the castle age. Increase food cost by 100 and gold by 50. I beleive doing that would nerf the market because of the deminish return per trade and more time needed to get the res. But i think/hope that it isnt to big of an increase, because i want fc to be a strat still. But in normal aribia game. Normal FC strate into spanish unique seems to easy.
I think you're on to the right track with looking at infantry, as it hits earlier than any other aggression, and typically with FC + UU strategies the main issue is the opponent doesn't have enough time to react after they figure out what's going on. If more people are going for infantry openings then at the very least the FC player will be under increased pressure early and be interrupted/delayed.
Another option I'd consider is nerfing stone collection rate in Feudal Age, just to make it more painful to the eco to get the initial castle up (also makes tower rushing worse which isn't a bad thing either). I don't think we want to nerf stone collection in castle/imperial age though.
I'm around 800-900 elo and pretty much only play team games with friends on the weekends (played around 115 games so far). I can definitely relate to what OP said. Feudal rushes, donjon rushes, etc., still catch me and my friends out and it completely ruins a match. I've learned to expect those strats, especially on open maps, but when it's nearly every single game, the game is very frustrating to play. I want to have fun with my friends and gradually improve my skill and elo along the way, but getting stomped by cheese strats or outplayed by people at 900 elo with 5000 games played is just not fun.
The all in strategies are still strategies. That's still a strategy.
i agree yes these strategies are really strong but the other side of the coin is every small mistake can cost you the game right away because every thing is really tight and you are on a timer to make damage
The most poignant thing I think Hera said here is that it's become a game of preparation rather than execution. The idea that the game has been lost from the start. it feels a lot like the downfall of Hearthstone,, everything was slow and fun at first, slowly with more and more crazy cards the game can be over within 5 turns. But that same 5 turn winning deck will 100% lose when there's a bad draw and it goes for more than 6 turns.
I feel like it's the same here, games too quick. You've either lost by the 20 minute mark or stabilise and boom your way out of it.
Most common are the All in knight rushes. Many many players are doing this. Specially with Mongols/ Khmer (without buildings up), etc.
Format is great. Discussion is also good as long as the community behaves.
The devs are probably looking at the statistics purely and may not get the "how it feels" for players part of it, which is ultimately very important.
The solution is very simple:
-Increase militia movement speed from 0.9 to 1 so they can chase archers better but still be slower than eagles.
-Reduce militia attack reload speed a little bit so they can hit and run towards archers faster without increasing their dps too much to become op.
-Add and increase militia damage bonus against walls and buildings since dark age to prevent walls and buildings to become an absolute defense until castle age and transform militia into an early siege option.
This changes will balance the game without having to nerf archers, unique units or market.
Also all in rushes will still be possible, but players will have to manage extra pressure to reach castle age.
Finally, the game will gain an extra playable unit for all civs that was always there but was completely useless.
I have a small idea to nerf the market in Feudal and Castle Age without making it useless in Imperial Age, you could make the normal rate of the market lower and then make Hand Cart in Castle Age return it to the current level (and Guilds in Imperial Age still doing the same.) It would also make sense from a historical perspective, as the idea of a cart making logistics of goods easier would reduce the cost of transport and thus the end price of the goods purchased. It would not completely solve the issue, as it might just switch the meta towards certain other civilizations with different economic bonuses, but it will make up the *really* Fast Castle times for all-in pushes. All-in should not be the base strategy, normal Fast Castle is build on shock but not completely throwing the game, these strategies are real all-in pushes, that when pushed back causes their users to instantly resign more often than not. That kind of gameplay should not be the meta, not even in the most competitive games, StarCraft II in its hayday would not have allowed this kind of meta to exist for long.
Thankyou, Hera, I really appreciate your response to the AoE2 issues. I have been playing since the conquerors days (only started playing online in 2019, mostly CBA lol), and playing DE black forest with my discord friends almost nightly for just over 2 years, with the odd Oasis, megarandom and arena sprinkled in there.
I did feel some standard (pretty intense) frustration starting out when I was losing, which is evident looking at my AoE2 insights profile. It is evident that I have improved, even though I still feel the frustration when losing and grinding through, also based on my insights graph. However, the rise in difficulty seems quite sudden. All my friends have noticed it. We lose about 4 of 5 games, to perfect optimised builds that are just... utter clownery. Every time we see a Turk player ok BF, we try and prepare for the rush... but we're really just preparing to fail. I've started doing more single player than multi as a result, because I don't learn anything from those losses to clown builds.
Thanks Hera! You're a treasure to the community x
I used to host my own "community games" on a discord and IRL LAN's with friends and it was always good fun, FFA diplo 1 winner and king of the hill. So skill level wasn't much of an issue, and as a better player, help the lower level ones with knowledge, strategy, counters in the game. This has always been what AoE is for me, I've never played a ranked game in my life 😂
One of the things that modern games forget with constant patches is that meta will shift over time. All in is popular now, but evetually people will either learn to counter it or get better vs it and it will become one strategical option again. But finding and learning the counter tactic takes time. Sometimes nerfs jump the gun too quickly and re-doing the unique units means we will never see them (it's often been a lot of knight/archers already because UUs are harder to produce via castles.) Could up training time. Could do things, but in this case I think they should let the hype die down a bit. If it's still prevalent in a few months then maybe adjust accordingly. For a while FC was a thing, then it almost completely died and now it's had some resurgence, but things can change again. I doubt this is "the ultimate" way to play. My vote is to give it time and see how meta develops. And as you said, enjoy the game in other ways if ranked 1v1 isn't fun for you.
It's funny how pros take into account how balance affects low league players more than many commenters do on reddit.
These rushes work because the rushing player is able to plan his build up to a very far minute mark in the game. If the there were more randomness these rushes would not work nearly as well. Thats why you dont see these rushes on nomad or mega random. Getting more maps with high randomness or increasing the randomness of existing maps will help better against all in strats than balance changes.
This is me too. I used to enjoy AoE 2 for all the fun differences it had - Byzantines with strong buildings and amazing cataphracs, english longbowmen that shoot across the.. plane (as we know, the world is a flat square in AoE 2), etc.
Then I "got good", and realized that the game, at a higher level (not that high, just medium difficulty AI), is incredibly bare. Fast castle into knights. Civilizations don't mattery anymore outside of what stats they give to your rushed-out unit. Cataphracs? Expensive Imp Age techs don't win games.
I was better, yes, but I was playing a shittier game. It had no charm nor spirit. Just a soulless build order simulator. In my seek of a challenge, I optimized the fun out of the game.
I made a post about dealing with the Goths as a Mongol player a few weeks back but this I think it the core issue. It's that as a Mongol player I'm basically dead if I can't kill him before he gets to Huskarls. On the flip side if you're the Goth player going up against a civ with Hand Cannons then they loose and it's the same but worse with Meso civs, they can be completely shut down very easily by just going into a bad match up.
Like I get that there are going to be lop-sided matches and to be fair the game balance in terms of win rates it's pretty good right now but I want to be able to have a chance in a bad match up and the same for my opponent. If the game comes down to do this before X or your dead or get to Y point and you win without really the ability to do something about it consistently then it's not good overall.
i think deer pushing is part of the problem here. there is so much food that's been injected into the early game and the acceleration of dark/feudal with no mill investment or even vill walk time. biggest change in the meta over the last few hears
So will they change the market and boars?
I think nerving the things is also not the right play, cause you just make proplay less entertaning to watch. I hate these strats in 1v1 games myself, but i really love to see them get played on tourneys to break the fudal archer/scout/sperm meta and make the tourney games more watchable and rewards players for preparing strats
I see many people (Hera included) providing guides and build orders for many kind of rushes. However I don’t see anyone taking about how to defend against them.
It took until limited viper to understand how to stop a Turks fast imp.
If you play random civ (like me) I think your elo is mostly determined by how well you defend against these kind of pushes.
Hera: "If everything is broken then everything is balanced"
Syndrome: "If everyone is super, then no one is"