You forgot to mention that all AoE4 civs have at least one unique water bonus and one unique technology at their docks, which helps further in making an interesting water play. That might be hard to translate to AoE2 tho, where there are too many civs and little room to new unique techs for this to be easily implemented.
For a quicker transition here you could group the civilizations into region and give region specific dock techs and bonuses. And for water civilization they get their bonuses instead of the region specific ones if balance is an issue.
@@sevret313 I immediately thought the same thing, you could even deliberately not give a few civs anything because they were landlocked. although maybe the mongols could get a huge cost reduction in the imperial age. (But transports only have 1hp hehehe)
I think the reason water maps are avoided is because some civilizations will only thrive on water maps while others just suffer on water maps. Generally land battles tend to have more balance.
True to some but degree, but it's also about build orders and stuff. On land you have different build orders and strategies. On water you add fishing ships in dark age, always, then fight for their protection. If you lose water it's very hard to come back. Landing is risky strategy, so it's kinda thing on it's own.
Also for normal player game is hectic enough, now if you add water in to the mix there is double the amount of micro. It is very much possibility to win water and be in a much "better" position to just get landed and beaten. That is not possible in land maps.
@@laurivaisanen6918 - Kinda strange because one would think more micro would be required for hybrid maps as both a water and land army have to be managed. Yet hybrid maps are still more popular than pure water maps due to navy micro not being an absolute necessity or nearly as important as land micro. Funny how things turn out in practice.
A big part of the reason a number of civs were so terrible on water maps is the naval combat balance was so awful. I think the idea of blowing it up, staring all civs almost the same and then adding variation over time makes sense because of how bad it was. And getting rid of the tedious "spin to win" crud.
Nah, it has got nothing to do with balance or gameplay, the reason is not even related to video games. It's just that Human beings generally prefer land battles, be it in real life or video games.
New water update for AoE4 is genuinely amazing. It must have been difficult for the developers to scrap everything they had worked on for years and replace it, but really, it's significantly better for the game! The hardcoded bonuses really make a big difference IMO
I think game devs should be ready to scrap things, I read the valve's raising the bar book on how they made half life 2 back then, they remade many things over and over again to make it better and they wrote how important it is to give up on things.
You are acting llke it took effort to implement the dogshit water gameplay aoe4 had before. Water combat wasn't even supposed to be in the game until very late in development.
No doubt it must be, or at least feel, much harder to apply radical changes to AoE2 because it's a much older game and therefore has a meta more set in stone - especially in regards to the original Age of Kings and The Conquerors civilizations; modifying them would surely upset much of the playerbase. In comparison, AoE4 is barely over one year old and is less symmetrical.
Water maps are not being played not because of the water balance, but because water is boring. On land you have lots of types of units to pick and change your strategy acordingly, on the other hand, you get three (sometimes four)... I actually think that forcing the game into hard counter would makes things worse for AoE2, as one of the main features of AoE2 is that there are a lot situational counter units, which flips when under different context, giving the game more strategic depth. Making X beats Y, Y beats Z, and Z beats X, is only going to make water more boring than it already is. If I was one of the devs, I would add a few new ships for water for every civ, completely changing water game, instead of giving it a bad coat of painting.
@@masafromhell but if you don't have a Rock Paper Scissors dynamic then you'll just have a "who clicks the fastest" dynamic and personally I'd never a play a game that rewards apm over strategic Rock Paper Scissors decisions
I think water warfare just needs more 'stuff' to make it interesting. When every civ has the same stuff outside a handful of unique units (most of which are just slightly tweaked galleys), winning on water seems to be all about getting a deathball first and/or having a water bonus to make doing so easier for you than for your opponent. It's also 90% hidden bonuses, which might make it unintuitive, and makes them feel weird when interacting with land units (fire galleys do basically nothing vs. land, while galleys do a lot less than they look like they should). Maybe add a set of "naval unique techs" and focus on giving a lot more civs a naval unique unit and/or a specific bonus for one ship type. I'm not sure more hidden bonus damage is the way to make the counter system 'harder', but I think some stat tweaks could do it; give fire ships more health and armor while giving galleys more base damage (which also helps them play a role as light artillery vs. land units), and maybe give demo ships more AoE to dunk tight-packed galleys. Fire galleys winning the 1v1 more cleanly helps them push through mass galleys, while more damage helps galleys snipe demos. Maybe give cannon galleons AoE damage like a mangonel so they're something you want in a naval battle as well.
The funny thing is, in Age of Empires 1, the Galley equivalent (the Scout/War Galley/Trireme line) was actually a pure trash unit - only taking wood. And with Definitive Edition, a lot of Civs do actually get Fire Galley as a Trireme counter, and before that a lot of Civs also had the alternative of the Catapult Trireme to counter masses of regular Triremes - both of these Gold units. It's funny how things come in a full circle.
I could swear that in the original AOE2 Age of Kings release, the expensive Imperial naval tech Shipwright (it reduces wood cost by 35% and training time also) - I could swear it used to remove the gold cost entirely making galleys only cost wood again. So they cost gold normally and that tech made it more like AOE1. But reading the patch notes it seems Shipwright always just decreased wood cost and never removed the gold cost?
Instead of one time use demo ships being part of the triangle I think the third ship type should be one that kind of boards the opponent. The problem with demo ships is that in a 1 on 1 they are only ever cost effective if they cost less in the first place since they get destroyed. Making them a defensive 4th unit makes more sense where they are good against all ship types but only if you can get them into a mass of enemy ships.
I agree. Demo ships feel like Age of Empires, but I think they should be an emergency measure to defend a dock or surprise an enemy. With a "melee ship" in the triangle, we have something similar to land. Archers take out melee, melee takes out siege (Springald ship), siege takes out archers.
Empire Earth had a 3 ship system: frigate, battleship, and galley. It was still boring... until you could throw aircraft and subs into the mix. The problem is, where land has countless different interactions with terrain, height, walls, and all the different infantry and siege and cavalry and so on, water has 3-5 ships. And stuff shooting at them. And basically nothing else.
I like the idea. Could then even have, say, viking longboats work that way. Though then again, the vikings that made it down that far certainly saw no light against the byzantine navy.
"Soft" counters (such as fires vs. galleys) is a big component of AoE2 - take the current debate about whether pikes counter knights for example. I don't think that the RPS nature should be made stronger. It's a key point of the game that some units have advantages against others - sometimes even large ones - but they are not absolute. With a stronger RPS, that would mean that being first to Feudal water aggression would actually be a DISadvantage, since your opponent can just choose the counter when they reach feudal and immediately destroy any mass you had produced. I know there would probably still be SOME tipping point in the new AoE4 system where a certain mass or skill level could overcome its counter, but I like that element of the game and don't want to see it reduced. Execution still needs to matter, even when producing counters.
SotL : *"That in some ways have a lot of similarities on the surface to Age of Empires 2"* TH-cam : *"Age of Vampires 2"* If the naval combat is better, why not? Both games are still being updated, so it won't hurt to try
Big problem is that in both games water was an afterthought. Sandy Petersen has said in his videos where he talks about the development of AOE2 that noone at Ensemble liked water maps and fights. They didn't even understand how strong fishing ships where until they saw some good players playing and making good use of them. AOE4 didn't originally even have water, it was added really close to release, that's why none of the campaigns have water maps.
The real problem is that water control only adds some food economy and the potential to raid shores. But the transport+ load unload troops is very unwieldy and in general the way the military ships works is very simplistic often resulting in mass galleys Vs galleys with occasional demos for defense or sniping stacked fishing ships. Overall the lack of things to do in the water makes it uninteresting. I would like the ability to terraform along the coasts and in general. In aoe3 and aoe4 it doesn't feel as if the map is as empty as it often does with aoe2
@@zachariastsampasidis8880 If they ever start having AoE for 21st century, they can add oil platforms and gas pipelines to water maps, which will spice things up.
@@Jen-Yueh_Hu Rise of Nations has oil platforms, but even before you reach the modern age, you had the whale resource you could send ships to, which gave you a different bonus to food (I can't quite remember what it is at the moment). Something like that could also help make water maps more interesting as you have more resources to fight over.
@@punic4045 Yeah Rise of Nations in general have way better water battles than Age of Empires. For one, as you said, whales and fish are both extremely valuable resources. But I think what makes it better is that land units automatically transform into transport ships when moving on water. It cuts out the transport ship loading and unloading part, which imo is what makes water maps so annoying in AoE.
I think the "issue" of water maps in aoe2 is that military domination does not translate into map control (and therefore resources control), and, in a similar way, ships cannot really raid the enemy economy onces the fishing ships are out. So, I don't think it has anything to do with the balance (although the different resources idea looks interesting)
sea towers would make water better. Also there really isn't much of a way you can "come back" after getting stopped on water. Even worse getting to imp to finally win water and the enemy has a large island you can't reach everything with Cannon gallon and they have bombard towers and Cannons to stop your landing so no finish there.
Yes, 99% of all of AoE gameplay is land-based. Water is a little extra quirk, where you can only build ships to play with other ships. Ships have next to no interaction with the rest of economy; you cannot wall ships, you cannot build castles in the middle of the water, there are no monk ships etc. Water is fundamentally a niche thing, fine to play sometimes but won't be mainstream
amen, this is was what Command & Conquer realized and made many units amphibious in Red Alert 3. the main resources were also available in the water, or at shorelines, making them vulnerable to offshore strikes And Dedicated navy was also promoted by making them superior at sea and litoral combat than their amphibious counterparts. Examples where the torpedo ships that where cost efficient in water combat, and the capitol ships that OUTPERFORMED ground based artillery. In AoE, naval artillery is much worse than trebs and bombards. The capitol ships alone meant that whoever ignored the seas would lose map control over everything but deep land, allowing the sea player to expand at the shores under the bombardment umbrella of battleships, aircraft carriers and missile cruisers
I think this was done very well in aoe3, where ships were more powerful, had more range any many resources were near land, so you could actually raid with them.
You're exactly right, and it's just even more boring because there isn't enough variety in the combat when it comes to ships. The "rock, paper, scissors" concept in early Feudal age completely dies by castle age and then it's just a race to see who can field the most war galleys.
I've always thought that the AoE2 ship counter system was messed up by the demo ships self destructing to do damage, and them not being costefficient as a result. Instead demo ships role should be filled by a melee boarding or ram ship that has very high armor against the fire ship damage, but very low pierce armor against the galley line and even take bonus damage from them. Age of Mythology did something similar with the Pentekontor type ships.
I like this idea, maybe the blowing up thing is still an option that requires a charge up (i.e. you can't ram repeatedly then blow-up). Late game with large groups of ships the demo is the defacto damage of the heavy demo still since it'll get gunned down too quick in ram mode.
Indeed I felt like Age of Mythology did the water balance very well. Throw in a few sea myth units to spice it up and God powers that could be used on water and you were in for a good time
@@robertlewis6915 Well, you could have fireships exclusively deal melee damage and give the boarding/ram ship high melee armor. The armor would not even need to be that high because fire ships deal low damage to begin with. On the other hand the boarding/ram ship could have low piercing armor against he galley lines attack. To show that visually the boarding/ram ship could have wet animal skins draped over the bow, or something like that, similar to what capped rams have to prevent them from catching fire.
Thats how I would rebalance AoEII Water::::::: Split the Dock into three buildings - Dock, Shipyard and the Port. the Dock available since dark age only beeing able to build: Mechanics: Fishingboat Tradekog (III) --> Tradecarack (IV) The Tradecarrack got more goldcapicity than the Tradekog and it can defend itself with arrows. Transportship (II) --> Large Transportship (IV) Large Transportships are able to enter enemy ships and convert them if you have Troops loaded. The more soldiers you got on the Transportship than faster the enemy ship will be taken over. Fishingtechs Transporttechs Advanced Storaging (III) Tradekogs and Fluyts will gain 33% more gold by trading with other Ports The Shipyard availeable from Feudal Age: Galley (II) --> Wargalley (III) --> Carack (III) --> Caravell (IV) Galleys are arrow shooting ships, fireing 1 arrow at the beginning, gaining a additional arrow for each Arrow upgrade. The Carack upgrade will Add an additonal Scorpionbolt Porjectile adding additional Damage against Ships. Firegalley (II) --> Fireship (III) --> Advanced Fireship (IV) Firegalleys are smaller but faster ships that will set ships on fire. They gain Bonusdamage against Galeons and Holks. Demolitiongalley (II) --> Demlitonship (III) --> Heavy Demolitionship (IV) A with Gunpowderbarrels packed ship ready to launch carnage within Shipbattles. Payed Rowers (III) Galleys, Fireships and Demo-Ships move 15% faster Warnavy (III) Galleys, Firegalleys and Demolitiongalleys will be upgraded to their Shiptypes. Navy Taxation (IV) Gold-cost for ships 33% lower The Port availebale at Castle Age does give acces to advanced Ships and upgrades: Siegegalley (III) --> Onagergalley (III) --> Heavy Onagergalley (IV) Siegegalleys are Rammingships that gain a charged rammattack simmilar to the coustillier ability. The Rammattack disables hitet ships moving for 5 seconds. And it deals High damage on Impact. How ever the Siegegalley got no range attack until you upgrade it to a Onagergalley since there it will gain a Onagerattack that deals Bonusdamage against Lighter Ships like Firegalleys and Demolitionships. The Rammattack can still be used. The Heavy Onagergalley gains advanced shiparmor. This shiptype deals Bonus damage against Buildings also. Holk (III) --> Canonholk (IV) --> Warholk (IV) Holks are Gunpowder based Ships, they start fireing one Canonporjectile linear towards targets. Projectiles are Highly effective against Galleys and Fireships, but Holks receive additonal damage by Demoships and Firegalleys duo to Gunpowdermagazines on the ship. The projectiles are not effective against buildings. And Holks have a longer loading time than Galleys. Every Upgraded version adds one more Canonprojectile the ship is firering. Galeon (IV) --> Imperial Galeon (IV) The Galeons will start with Three Canonattacks that it does shot linear towards targets. Upgraded it fires Five Canonattacks. Galeons deal bonus damage against Wargalleys, Holks and Buildings. Galeons are the superior Imperial Warship. Fluyt (IV) --> The Fluyt is a advanced Tradingship that is able move faster and does have more HP than its little brothers the Tradekog and Tradecarrack. Also the Fluyt has a Canonattack with it i could defend itself. : Ship of the line (III) Galleys, Holks and Galeons receive +25 HP Advanced Ship Armor (IV) Holks and Galeons receive 30% less blast damage Three Mast (IV) Holks and Galeons move 12% faster Crownest (III) Holks, Galeons, Fluyts, Wargalleys and Tradekogs +3 LOS Tradeships the get sunken will left Wrecks, from with fishingboats can gather a amount of gold. Viking Longboats should get new mechanic like: beeing able to transport 5 Units(Foot units only). Gaining an additional arrow per Unit loaded and 2% moving speed due to rowing. Turtleships should be able to take on Holks, Wargalleys and Fireships but beeing smashed by Galeons and Demoships. Turtleships can Carry 10 Units (Foot Units only). Trading is only available with Ports. Docks and Shipyards will not be able to Trade but you can Drop off Resources at Docks. Another Unit the Galeass should be saved for some kind of Venecian Civ-DLC however it would be kind of a canonlongboat faster moving, canonprojectiles and able to carry some Units. I know its much new stuff, but i think it would lift up the Naval experience. There is much more to Navy than they gave us. I guess they did not as much research on Medieval Navys and shiptypes than needed.
You know, boarding ships with infantry units aboard would be a nice addition, instead of hearing the chanting of a monk, you are hearing the screams of men being slaughtered before a victory bellow confirms the ship has been captured
Nice idea, but so much to implement, i still waiting they resprite the units for each region/culture, and only the King received, this is rewrite entire naval game.
@@nathangamble125 I'm not objecting on historicity- I know quite little about medieval naval combat (though I can tell you boarding was still important in the early 1800s). I'm saying that ramming makes people think 'ancient' not 'medieval'.
The fact of the matter is that there just needs to be more variety in the naval side. For water maps to be embraced, ever civ needs to feel like it can do SOMETHING. I think the best way is to split up the docks into 3 buildings, for a start. The Dock is a pure eco building. Then there's a port that can build your "standard" ships that attack with arrows (and some "boarding" melee ships would be nice too). Then in a later age you can get an Arsenal, which is where you start getting ships with cannons and such. And giving all civs something to do on naval maps doesn't neccessarily mean turning them into direct naval powerhouses. Civs from mountainous areas, like Incas, could get more economic focus to represent that boats to them were more a way to tap into lakes and rivers. Civs that are more cavalry based like the Mongols could focus just more on transportation to try to get to the land battles that they want, though they'll have to sneak around civs with more directly powerful navys. For civs that ARE naval civs, they can try to focus more on specific types of ships as their specialty. The main problem with water maps is just by picking it you feel like you're slicing down the civs you can play as.
So basically almost like in Empire Earth, where you get another harbor building, for specific ships. Ok, in Empire Earth you get that new harbor relatively late, around the World War age, but you get new ship variants like submarines, aircarft carrier etc. , next to your normal Port, where you get fishing ships, normal attack ships etc.
In Age of mythology, there is no incendiary ship, instead there are arrow ships, long-ranged siege ships, and close-ranged ships(like a fire galley). They make a rock-scissors-paper triangle similar to AOE4's updated naval system and it was quite balanced I suppose.
and also all civs have at least one mythical naval unit which makes these battles more interesting. maybe AOE II just need some more variety of ships and a more robust counter system on water warfare.
Yeah, I liked AoM's water options. Demolition ships are kind of weird and off-putting for new players but you can get a rock-paper-scissors without them.
the resource costs changes are definitely worth trying. I would personally be against doing any damage balance changes until the resources are tried. There also needs to be a greater variety of naval units period. Every civ should get some kind of unique unit, or at least every region/archetype ala indian civs should all have at least a shared unique ship. Naval combat is boring because theres no variety like land combat.
Certainly in AoE 2 low and mid elo players really struggle with their water builds, I personally think having ships cost only two resources is the way to go to reduce the complexity of producing navy (AoE2 system). What I don’t understand is why we can’t get direct upgrades to the ships I.e galley to galleon (I know this is a little pedantic). I like the reinforced hard counters though but a little more variety would be nice.
@@ianmackie3305 On the contrary, I think it could make naval builds easier. The difficulty is not in producing naval units, it is generally in balancing an economy around fishing ships and docks instead of farms and berries. Making some ships cost food could actually simplify it for newer players much like how scouts are a simple land opener.
yeah the arrow ships were kinda garbage tbh. Only good for hunting fishing ships and transports. But then naval myth units really disrupted the balance
@@mikesully110 naval myth units were used to weaken arrow ship spam so that siege ships can take them out. Remember that fishing shoals have unlimited food and cannot be raided by land.
@@caiodias503 This is a huge issue. The reason the triangle doesn't work on water is because you need to get "lucky" with your demo for them to be cost effective. A ram-like ship is probably the best way to close the loop.
@@LuxiBelle Especially if they did some damage to surrounding ally ships... That would make demo ships actually be worth creating except for as a cheeky garrison strat.
I think the question we should be making is *How do we* overhaul the navy in order to make It *worth* it to play naval based maps? Because as It stands right now, you only make galleys, fishing ships and transports If you need it
AoEIV also have docks with tower and garrison space for fishing ships so they act as a Water Town center, all civs have at least one water bonus and one dock unique tech, and the trading poist that spawn on islands give you an incentive to take water because you can translate the water domination into map and resource control
naval battles in aoe2 has always felt very basic, and usually boils down to "whos navy has the largest amount/strongest boats". not a whole lot of tactics or strategy, and whilst a weak land-civ might struggle on land, a weak naval civ is absolutely demolished on water maps. its partially why i enjoyed naval battles in aoe3 so much more, with the only annoyance being ship limits, but even then that forced you to be more tactical. edit: also Computer players were dogshit at effectively using boats.
I feel like we need to see the results of the water change on the live servers before we make a more complete decision of it's merits, and I think that's what the devs may be doing as well in regards to a change like this coming to AoE2. Looking forward to Age Vampires 2 btw.
I think that the water balance needs more nuance to be better. What ai mean by that is expanded upgrades, and possibly a splitting of naval building. There could be a naval building that makes fishing ships and trade cogs and works as a gather point, and a naval building for military. Also, for upgrades, I mean having more small upgrades like careening that add small buffs and advantages to a civ’s water game. Stuff like slightly increased explosion radius on demos, maybe an hp boost for galleys, or an increase in anti-ship armor for fire ships (galleys would get more, not all, but more, of their bonus damage in on fire ships without the upgrade), and the point of these upgrades would be to give civs more variety in their strength on water, instead of just “do they get bracer and shipwright?” And before people say that this would make ships unbalanced, I think the best way to implement this would be that a fully upgraded ship with all the added upgrades added would only amount to what they currently are stat-wise now. They just start off weaker. Anyway, I’d like thoughts on such an idea, does the water tree need fleshing out? Because right now, to me naval wars are more or less equivalent in complexity to a single unit-making building. It’d be like if land battles only let you place archery ranges, and if you happened to have a bad archery range, you’re out of luck.
I like the idea of changing resources for the ships to make that part more impactful, but I don't usually like when something is so hard of a counter you can't do anything about it
Interesting idea, but nah, changing up the ship costs would just make it more snowbally and harder to transition into a navy that can deal with the ships you're seeing. We just need more stuff going on. The radical change I proposed was that a warship adopts the characteristics of whatever military unit was garrisoned inside of it. For example, an arrow ship has some garrisoned archers, a war-galley has a garrisoned scorpion, a cannon galleon has a garrisoned bombard cannon, etc. Maybe you could even have boarding ships too, with the possibility of capturing enemy ships as prizes. Kinda like what they actually did during the middle ages. Another issue is transport ship micro. If there were a way to automate the loading and unloading of units on to another landmass, then the boring stalemate of trying to win a foothold on the enemy landmass could be avoided. Making water play fun in AOE2 is going to require a lot more effort than changing some numbers around. New game mechanics will have to be created.
AoE2 needs some naval changes, but I don't think making it just a copy of the land system is a great idea. Even less so would I want to just play Rock-Paper-Scissors. I like that in the current system, fire ships are great early on but then it's sort of a race to reach the critical mass of galleons. Once someone has that, it's very difficult to take back water, but demolition ships can then be especially useful as a time efficient but usually resource inefficient way of taking it back. It feels different from land gameplay. That in itself may make water maps inherently less popular, but I think overall the uniqueness is a positive that they should try to keep.
I think it's more that it's monotonous. Make navy, keep going with the same simple, clunky, navy fight until one runs out of resources, the end. While I don't think AOE3 has it right, I think it's a better idea to have fewer more significant ships that are a means to taking the fight to land.
AoE2 needs more ship types and concepts. Here's an idea, the ram ship/trireme. It attacks at melee and has a charge bar for bonus damage like the Coustillier.
This reminds me a lot of the age of mythology ship balance the issue in that game was in feudal you only got the archer ships so the fight was usually decided before you got to the counter units.
Mangudai are the reason I've been maining Mongols since release. I know they're not the most viable, but it's just so fun to raid tree lines with a bunch of mangudai!
I come from a world where all units can attack while moving and it makes it hard to bare playing games where they cant and its all about stutterstepping
In theory I think the idea of a 'soft' rock-paper-scissors in 2 at the moment borne out not in enforced bonuses but in the physical way the ships interact in the game-space is really cool! But I guess in practice, clearly it's not enough for most players.
One way they could diversify water maps is to allow different ship types to thrive differently depending on what water depth. For instance something I would think was cool is make the galleys and longships exclusively able to fight in shallows/shallow water, war galleys and galleons would instead be alot faster on the sea and deep sea tile types. This alone would make different ship types thrive differently depending on water type and thus give the ship classes different purposes, it would also give a caveat to upgrading too early. In addition make coastlines always have both shallow water and sea tiles depending on how close to the shore you are. This would also make the water maps less snowbally since u would need cannon galleons to actually do shore bombardment, since war galleys and galleons wouldn't have access to the shores (which never made sense to me anyway) so the only remaining ways to invade from the sea to land would be by transport. Furthermore they could add checkpoints on the waters you needed to hold and it would give you a little trickle of food/gold depending on what and where it was to further shake up the water map dynamics, this way you can still go full water dominance but you can't use that dominance to lock people out of the game by killing villagers with war galleys or galleons which is a big reason why people don't like water maps, it's simply whoever wins water can bully the other player from the coast. Which isn't fun on the receiving end.
I think a way to help water be more interesting would be to make more water based resources and/or buildings. Like you could have shipwrecks that fishing ships can "mine" gold or wood from. Or maybe be able to build ocean forts which can act like towers on water terrain. I think it would make for a more interesting dynamic as it would make water domination harder while also pushing for you to try and dominate water more. It could also helps civs with particularly bad water if they can just go defensive to at least extend their business on the sea.
The shipwreck idea is fascinating! I love an idea that ships have a chance to drop "salvage" equal to their construction cost upon death that decays like deer/hunt. Fishing ships (or salvager villagers if it's close enough) now can choose to recoup that cost at the cost of focusing solely on food and exposing your ships to a place where a fight literally just occurred. Maybe chance to drop salvage increases as there are fewer total resources left in the game, in order to try and delay stalemate scenarios?
I had a few ideas around sea I wanted to share that I think could be added to AOE4 to help as devs re-work in future. trade ships should move slower when full of cargo. If thats the case you could have an option to dump cargo and flee with speed boost to ovoid being destroyed. If you kill a trade ship you should collect 50% of the resources it would of generated. Where you have boars on land could have a unique sea version, such as whale or crab with more food available than fish
Another factor that speaks for AoE4 is that there's no dodging arrows there, so you'll be able to really focus on the strategy rather than awkward galley micro. I'm super hyped for this update. I would love to see even more ship types in castle+ too so it feels complex like land does.
For me, water maps will always have the fundamental problem that you can't outright win from your navy. You can completely dominate the sea and deny your opponent any chance of building a navy or near the shoreline but you're going to need to build some land army and transport them to the other landmass to actually kill your opponent. So it becomes this weird game of: A) The more you invest in your navy the smaller land army you'll have B) The smaller your navy the less you can attack C) The larger your land army the better defense you have You can easily get into annoying stalemates where one player dominates the sea but can't kill the opponents land force and has to awkwardly transport a smaller army to the opponent over and over in an attempt to kill them. Its just not fun.
Not entirely true, I had a game where I dominated the sea and land locked the opponent to his island. All you to do is get the sacred sites and you win
Also, contesting water after you loose it is much easier than before because you need to produce ships that counter whatever the opponent has most of, so you need to spend way less resources and the opponent has to react. It's a dynamic system as we saw recently in the Beastyqt Vs Marinelord showmatch.
Yeah, I think something is needed to make water maps more popular, but balance itself seems okay to me? Maybe some shuffling around of wood to gold cost ratios? My main concern is unique ships. Any major balance changes could hurt them badly, especially the Vikings who don't get fireships. Their Longboat definitely needs a buff imo
You raised an interesting point. Beastyqt, a pro from aoe 4 said in his patch analysis that he would love to have fire ships in aoe 4. I guess it's a matter of balancing both positions out
I’d like to see some changes like this as AOE2 naval combat is pretty dire. However, one other major reason I find water maps so tedious (somewhat dependant on the exact water map) is the use of transports and how micro intensive they are, I personally think Rise of Nations had a better method of dealing with this and would really like to see something similar in AOE, that is to say research a tech and land units BTOB(bring their own boats).
The hard counter system would be interesting and in some ways can be done well (Age of Mythology) or very poorly (shutters in Empire Earth). What I like about Aoe2's water balance currently is that not all civs have access to the same techs, making for unique ways to counter units and I think the hard counter system works against that to some degree. Like with good positioning and micro, cavalry can still beat spearman. I think the problem with the water balance in Aoe2/4 is the demo ship. At the end of the battle, no one has map control and you don't have any much momentum. You are just rebuilding the fleet and preparing for a long game until a decisive battle occurs. I think a /melee/boarding vessel would be an interesting addition to demo ships
In the video, Spirit said that most people build demo with archer/galley ships. With the new changes in aoe 4 a demo ship cost 130 resources and creates in 15 secs compared to the fireship's cost of 360 resources and creation of 30 secs. Considering that demo ships can kill multiple ships at once, if a demo kills 2 fire ships, your opponent lost 590 resources more than you in that exchange. Hell even if it takes 3 demo ships to kill 2 fire ships your opponent still loses 360 more resources than you. Considering that you can create demos twice as fast and with such a high resource return rate for its intended target, your opponent would need a much larger economy to keep up with you and if thats case then you already lost. i would say that if the economy is even, demo ships create momentum by keeping your opponent's mass/bank low while giving your archer/galley ships room to do their thing.
honestly, i think just adding the ability to ships to carry tropps themselfs, and making that mechanism less clunky, might help a lot. Transport ships can still exist as a dedicated unit but it would just make everything a lot more dynamic. that would also allow making transports a lot more interesting as a unit, heres my pitch: 1. you give them an upgrade to make them significantly tankier, elite transport ship so to speak to allow them to act similarly to rams, as dmg sponges, though not AS extreme maybe. 2. you let them behave like towers where ranged units that are stored on it can actually fire 3. you give them melee attack, increased by number of melee units stored on it numbers ofc have to be tweaked but done right that could add A LOT of depth to playing water maps. i feel like its just too one dimensional and boring, and once youre forced off, you essentially resign because your opponent will eventually just outspend you.
Hi Spirit, i have a recommendation for you! Aoe4 scoring system is weird/broken at the moment. It looks like miliary score is calculating by how many military units is alive when game is over etc. I love to see your analysis about current scoring system and biggest differences for Aoe2 scoring system! Recommendations for fixing Aoe4 scoring would also be a good bonus. Thanks for reading, and see you next time 👏
I still think AoE2 should have different ship buildings to make naval maps more interessting. Like defensive buildings, a building for upgrades, economic buildings to make water more impacful etc.
@@bigdiccmarty9335 They did originally use seawalls in AoE 2 beta back when it first came out, but got rid of them when players started simply encircling enemy docks with them in the early game. If you bring back seawalls, there needs to be a way for docks to fire arrows (like Malay Harbours) from the get-go to prevent this from happening.
not only buildings but also other shiptypes, there is so much more aobut naval warfare than just plain stupid arrow shooting. There is Gunpowder, boarded Onagers, Ramming attacks and Entering. I wrote a little schedule in the comments, were i split the dock into three buildings, and added some shiptypes and mechanics on them.
There should be 2 different types of docks in my opinion or even a 3rd for “siege” ships(something like a water mangonel) also fishing ships being able to repair would make water a bit more spicy. Having to scout what type of dock/harbor your enemy has would make water much more interesting
The more barrier there is to building water units, the less people will go, because there is much less eco incentive on water. fishing units repairing would make them too obviously reskinned vills, at least in effect.
one great thing in aoe4 is that every civ has unique water bonuses that give them a chance in water and still fit the theme of the civ! i really hope that both games manage to maps full of water as fun and strategic as land maps.
i always dislike the demolition ships because it feels like a sunken (haha) cost. i would much prefer the age of mythology water balance where you had melee ships instead of demos. also water myth units made it so much more unpredictable and fun imo
Yeah it does not feel nice to beat an enemy army but your demo ships can't do much in return since any attack against docks or their eco eliminates your own ships.
Fully agree. Demo ships are punishing you for not looking at your units 100% of time and reward APM much more than good decision making. Melee ships would be much better.
The same thing goes for petards. But when you stop to consider it, ALL military units are expendable. How long does any given unit - especially trash units - last in battle? A minute or two at most, unless you are engaging in serious micro and rotating unit groups between front and monks to keep them up. In most cases they're being destroyed anyway. This is why I've often used petards as a way of quickly removing enemy castles. Send in a bunch of petards with some hussars and halberdiers scattered among them to draw castle fire and enemy units away from the petards, and you can potentially get rid of castles a lot more quickly than with trebuchets or rams.
@@Mystikan No, it's not the same thing with petards, very far from it. Petards are useless against units. Petards damage output does not scale up with higher APM of the user. Petards do not require high APM response from the opponent. Petards do not fail to return investments if used against a single target, forcing high APM from the user to put the opponent into the situation where their units are clumped. Argument "all units are expendable" is invalid, because it ignores the fact that units that explode on engagement lose many times more value from insufficient micromanagement than units that stay alive; and units that attack area receive many times more value from superior micro than units that hit single target. Which leads to the situations where 1 second of having your attention somewhere else will cost you the entire game, much more often than even lucky Mangonel shots, another problematic unit in that regard.
@@Mystikan My man, you must be one of those who trickle trebs, then x) Otherwise I have no idea why would you ever spend your gold on petards rather than trebs and/or bombard cannons When managed properly, long range siege is something you build once and then keep it for the rest of the match
as someone who just played the aoe4 pup today on water. one thing SoTL doesnt mention about water changes (several actually): 1. all docks in aoe4 have techs that help up the overall escalation of warships as you progress through the tech ups (ie springald ships turn into cannon ships). 2. all docks have unique techs and such that help define each civ on water. so i think if it were to be implemented in aoe2 it would have to have some form of escalation similar to this.
In some custom campaigns we saw a naval units that works as monks (convert ships by acting like they boarding ships), or onager ships (they do make aoe damage). That idea of extra units in naval battles would also refresh the water.
I'm not sure if that would really solve the problem. Enforcing a triangle even more feels a bit off, since it kind of takes away the choices you can make again (if the other player has Rock, you HAVE to get paper or you give up water entirely). I think what makes water so uninteresting, is just the general lack of variety compared to land. You can build on land, have more units, have more different buildings and techs, etc etc. Perhaps expanding what you can do on water, would make it more interesting. Some type of water-fence (like some missions have) would be super interesting. Transport ships behave differently depending on who's on them (similar to Red Alert 2 IFV's) - like shooting arrows if they carry archers, convert if they have monks, act as weak artillery with a trebuchét, or board ships if they carry infantry. Raiding ports could be interesting as well - perhaps with a new ship type intended just for that. Overall, more variety would probably help. Consider how we think about civs, when it comes to land: "its an archer civ", "its a cavalery civ", "its a monk civ", etc... or its just a "water" civ. There's no real distinction there, because water doesn't have many truly distinctive options. Imagine if we could say "its a water raid civ", "its a boarding civ", "its a water siege civ", etc.
In addition, the various civs all have unique ships on many classes (archer ship vs war junk for example) which can open up greater variety in the future. It might be the best aoe water system one day.
I think that many more ship types are needed to make water interesting. How about an armored melee boarding ship? It could convert enemy ships like a monk while both ships take damage in the process. A melee ramming ship could also be a thing, dealing huge damage on attack while also receiving some damage, maybe it's attack cooldown could be significant so you have to retreat them and charge again to be effective. Or a transport ship that has an increased attack depending on how many units it is carrying. It could be pretty strong when it's full as you are risking ship cost + cost of units. Maybe a raiding ship (viking longboat?) that can garrison villagers and convert them to raiders for an additional cost, also acting as a villager transport. It could be great for early raiding and starting colonies. And this is just off the top of my head, there could be so many more ship types.
Don't know how they'd pull it off, but one of the main advantages of water in history was speed. If you could move forces much faster on water than on land, and if there was more room to hide off shore (requiring patrols), water would get really interesting on the maps designed for it.
An interesting idea would be improving transport ship ease of use. Maybe by removing the pop cost, increasing capacity and tankiness, and make the boarding/deboarding quicker and less micro intensive.
Issue in AOE2 is only partially that massed galleys have no counter. Bigger issue even than that is the snowball, which could be reduced by letting all civs garrison fishing ships in docks and enabling fishing or worker ships to build barricades (ie walls) on water
step 1: give every single civ a water bonus that lets them compete. step 2: give more reasons to care about water, maybe water based resource nodes. step 3: a unit overhaul as suggested. the primary problem I would still say is that if I'm not playing a civ with a bonus to water against a civ that has a bonus to water I'm basically screwed and there's nothing I can do about it outside of meme landing strats. its not like on land when if the enemy has a better stable then me I still have options like strong archers or inf+siege.
I don't know about AoE4's design, but AoE2 I feel suffers from a couple major issues that can't be circumvented by simple unit match up changes. Water is not always present in games, but is rather optional, meaning that many players simply don't see as much water gameplay to get used to it. There is also less to do in water, since you can't build buildings except by the shore. There's also the matter of civilizations simply not being balanced on water in the slightest. Those missing the cannon galleon, for instance, have a significant missing part of the lineup, with no real alternative. Maybe some castle age siege ship could be made, but that's theoretical. It would require a much greater overhaul of navies overall for there to be some balance between civilizations. There's also the entire thing about sea walls but.... I don't know, maybe allow it close to land, or have two different tiles for shallows and open seas, and only allow those in the shallows? Maybe even some form of bridges? Maybe some new units like the aforementioned siege ships, but also boaring ships? I don't know, it would be a lot of overhauling the game design.
Honestly I think that the problem with water maps is the clear Rock Paper Scissors element. There are not enough ship combinations to make it as fun and dynamic as land combat. I have a couple ideas that might improve water combat in this regard: add a ship that doesn’t attack other ships but converts them when they get close. Another ship could attack via ramming into their opponent. Making the water combat more rigid is only going to make water maps more boring.
I read in an interview with one of the developers that they wanted to change its name from Age of Empires because it was too different, but Microsoft didn't allow it.
I think the devs can start fixing the pathing with the transportship (really a mess when you want to put units into them) and make something with the trade cogs (noone use them because are dificult to protect)
Would also recommend adding in some more interesting environmental stuff- maybe marsh areas that slow down ships, or random assortments of rocks that can create artificial choke points- giving players minor objectives on the water to fight over and rewarding strategic decision making
Reminds me of Rise of Nations naval combat. You had Fire, Light, and Heavy to choose from: Light hard-counters Fire, Heavy hard-counters Light, and Fire hard counters Heavy. Even the resource distribution is similar (somewhat), and what would usually happen is having a screen of Lights up front with Heavies behind and Fires in reserve for if and when the enemy's Light screen was taken down. All of this would be massively complicated once hitting Industrial when your Fires become Submarines which don't die after attacking and your Heavies Dreadnoughts with massive range. Light is also overhauled in that they can now detect (for countering subs) and can hit air, which hard counters Dreadnoughts and Subs. Once you hit Modern you also get Carriers which are expensive but pretty OP when massed. Plus land artillery deals insane damage to ships starting in the mid-game and you end up with pretty fleshed out naval combat.
They could also add mechanic which would allow certain factions for their villagers to build ships on any shore terrain. This would make sense for some factions which historically were not known for good navies (like Mongols) and would be denied a dock, but this way they could nevertheless mass a huge naval force very quickly and also fight for supremacy on water.
With land battles there is a really interesting and balanced interaction between army numbers, mobility/speed, upgrades, ability to micro, and unit type/bonuses. Currently with naval battles I feel like it somehow mostly comes down to army numbers.
I think if they did this + added a second dock building ie a Naval Dock would help add some more interesting dynamics to water battles. Just right now as you’ve pointed out you just kinda spam a unit that all cost the same out of the same building. Imagine if land units all also came out of the town center and also all cost they same resources - basically how water in AoE2 is right now (and has always been)
Wouldn't you just end up being able to predict which kind of ships each civ will likely go for? Cav civs will go food-intensive ships because that's the eco they have, for example?
I see this as a potential flaw too, but at the same time trying to predict what kind of ship your opponent's civ will go for is already requiring more strategic thinking than current water meta. How is anticipating that someone with a cav civ might go food-intensive ships on a water map, putting them at any more of a disadvantage than anticipating they might go cav on a land map? The competitive scene of land games already hinges on these kind of decisions, civ bonuses and mindgames
Okay, let's say galleys are wood-intensive and fire ships are food-intensive. Let's say galleys are absolutely hard-countered by fire ships (even more than now). RIP archer civs on water/hybrid maps. See the problem here?
I'm happy to see some serious effort to balance the game, AoE2 has always been lacking that. A large issue with water maps however, is that it's borderline impossible to make a comeback. I think the enforcement of counters help out with that, but I doubt it completely solves it. Perhaps the navy needs some sort of defensive mechanism? A way to turtle up, fish and build up a navy behind it? Faster transports would be good too imo.
One change I'd like to see is a unique demoship that looks like a fire galley or regular galley at first glance but not not upon closer inspection, this could be a way to make a unit's appearance something that actually affect's gameplay rather than something for flavor as you'd need to be able to recognize the difference before its too late
Not crazy about RPS balance being that heavy handed. Big fan of the resource cost changes though, that will have interesting cascading effects on the rest of the game. Increasing the available ships in feudal is a big plus, but I think they need to go one step further and start looking at water combat mechanics beyond AoE2 ship type copy/paste. I was sort of hoping, after seeing the changes to stone walls, that ships would be able to garrison archers to add missile attacks, or something along those lines. Might be too ambitious a change, though.
One factor to consider with this change is that if you make it harder to switch what naval unit you are going for (by forcing an eco transition) you are delaying the time in which each player can respond to the enemy's army composition - the problem on water is that if you lose control of the coastline, how do you re-dock to actually make your new navy? I love this idea in theory, but I don't think it necessarily solves the main issue of naval battles snowballing. I'm always open to new ways to make the game better though, so if it works in 4 then 2 should definitely think about shaking up the stale water meta.
I kept hearing about naval overhaul in aoe4, but you're the first person I've seen actually cover it lol aoe2 should definitely wait to make any major changes; let's see how well these changes work
I think its worth considering, but I think half of the problem with water maps is that they either go on forever or they are over in feudal age. Often feels like there is no in between. But by changing some resources around it could help allow certain civs, such as malay, to have more options going into late imperial. But one problem could simply be there are few to no options for boat types. I think every civ in feudal has access to 2 barracks units, 1 cavalry and 2 archery range units. 2 of them are gold units and 3 aren't. This also includes some rock paper scissor mechanics between them. Then when we get to castle most civs are not only able to upgrade most of these, but also gain access to additional units which can include an additional gold unit in the stable and archery range. As well as a unique unit from the castle, monk from monastery and 3 units in siege workshop. So the 5 units in feudal age is expanded to 12 in castle age. And then in imperial age many civs can gain up to 1 more from the archery range, 1 more from siege workshop and 1 from the castle. So up to a total of 15 different units. Now by late imperial not all will be able to be fully upgraded, but they still exist as an option of use throughout the game and depending on age. Contrast this to water. We have 3 options in feudal. In castle some civs get 1 more option so we have 3(4) choices. In imperial its still 3(4). There is no choice in army and not much for army variation. If anything there should be maybe more ship options and maybe do a similar thing with land and have some raw power gold unit ships and non gold counter ships. Another option is to make ships and land units more balanced towards each other so that in hybrid maps, where its possible for such units to clash, to have both be possible viable options vs each other. Or design new sea resources to allow for new water map, map designs and play design. Because another problem with water maps is that most of the map is land and most of all the resources are there. And most of that land can be ranged by ships. But what if water maps had less land and less resources on land? Another option would be to make sure every civ has some kind of bonus which directly or indirectly benefits or influences water play. Allow most every civ to have, in theory, water viability. Personally I think to make water fun it probably needs to be redesigned from the bottom up or be given some degree of flexibility and playability. To some degree a water map is a land map where your land units are useless (unless you land) and you most likely lose if you lose water. And even the process of transporting feels slow and laborious.
I think we mostly lack some big water maps. What we have is basically land maps with some rivers and lakes. That would change style of battles. And maybe bump damage or radius of demolishion ships a bit.
I feel as though that they'd need more ship types to make it even remotely worth it, even if they did have that sorta ship balance from AOE4. 3 main battle ships with a few civs having 4 (5 if they're really lucky with the Unique Units +Cannon Galleons) would definitely be nice to have in that balance, but compared to Land where you have like 5-7 different unit types specifically (infantry, archer, cavalry, camel, elephant, unique, monk) and in some of those branches: there's a trash variant mixed with the other styles: i do worry that Naval battles will still devolve to become boring and still lead to Map Dodging (even if you try and remedy it with penalties: I still really don't think it's gonna work unless the penalty straight up *terminates* your ELO, but then you're setting it up for new players to get rofl-stomped and no one's gonna be happy then). I imagine most of the ideas of ships that could be used would probably flop, but it'd be kinda cool to see them around. I did enjoy seeing Galleys with arrows, so maybe if there was a variant like the Viking Longboat where it shot multiple arrows natively, that'd be nice, and if you got Chemistry, like the Bombard Galleons of ye olde days of AOE2: you research this and it converts a ship that was like a Viking Longboat with the multiple arrows into effectively Naval Organ Guns that shot with it's Broadside instead. And if it had the kinda micro skill that in AOE3 had with it's cannons (AOE3 has kinda okay navy battles, even if the ships effectively all shot the same thing and were only different because size, health and expendature, as well as it's role in battle), where that particular ship can have a "pull all stops" ability where it fired literally all of it's shots in one volley instead of shooting in kinda a rhythm like the Longboats, firing as a straight up shotgun rather than a kinda medieval gatling gun? could be called "grapeshot" or something.
What do people think of the idea of being able to construct a flotilla on water maps? Like the equivalent to a castle drop. For use defending fish nodes or trade cog routes, but also to drop by the enemy docks.
A problem is that there is just not enough. Only three types of ships makes it mono dimensional, add that one of those counters is a self destruct unit that leaves no map presence is not gonna help. Especially if you are trying to do different economy focuses. Also end of the day is that with that triangle every one is going to fight near identically on the water. It is a very small subset modified by bonuses and becomes worse as the game goes on and missing upgrades becomes apparent. There is going to become one sole way to put things together pretty quickly and then it is an execution race.
Maybe we could get T90s idea with a eco and military dock! Dock for Dark age with fishing ships, transport, feudal with trade ships and water tower ships in feudal, heavy trade(half speed but triple cargo) in castle and upgrades through all ages. Military harbor with galley, fireship, demos etc… maybe ram ships as anti building…
i would like more different ship types, just having more variation would be cool. maybe a ship that can board another ship? like a watermonk? or a ship with lots of broadside cannons, that has an area attack with a long reload time, similar to a mangonel? (in early ages it could actually be a mangonelship.
Big discussion topic, I love it, and I'm gonna throw in StarCraft2 and even Advanced Wars so we can also talk about air, which is similar to water but not exactly. Touched upon in the video, I think the key problem is amount of interactivity, from a military and from an economic perspective. Economic: Land units are usually the most diverse bunch, with the highest selection as well as the most diverse costs. All ships are wood and gold, and usually cost more than land or air of different resources. Air units usually cost the same resources as land units, or are of a comparable cost of different resources. A ship economy is more "all in" and is more dependent on binary factors, like does the civ have a water or eco bonus or not, and little is left up to player choice to "outplay" the opponent. We could switch around the costs, but honestly I think they're fine due to the success of hybrid maps. As far as water based economy goes, you got fish and fishing ships. I think both AOE3 and AOM have more satisfying water economies. In AOM fish patches are much more limited, but they are infinite. Set your fishers and forget, and you can garrison in docks (which fire arrows like TCs) if you get attacked. In AOE3 the ocean holds both food and coin, so you can reliably base your whole economy in the sea while still being effective on land. If I remember the meta, Portuguese White Fleet card on the New England map is legendary. Military: Here's the kicker, ships can't go on land, duh, but all the important stuff is on land. The most you can do is destroy enemy docks, fish traps, and occasionally raid the shore. This is the fundamental difference between air and sea, air units are always superior because they can travel over any terrain, and more importantly can actually attack key structures. I think this is why hybrid maps are much more popular than pure water maps, it's still worth fighting over water but if you lose the water you don't lose the match. When it comes to fighting, ships generally have much higher stats than land units, but they usually don't have enough range to actually fight land units. I'd like to highlight the map City of Lakes, that map quickly becomes a mess and is frustrating to play because ships are so superior, but you have to lake hop often. This is similar to a problem that air units have in SC2 and Advance Wars, only a limited number of land units can attack air, so most battles come down to the presence of anti-air. In SC2 the land/air interaction is fairly balanced, with all civs having multiple options, and are rarely "ganked" by a surprise air force. Banshee raiding is quite effective, but short term. In Advance Wars, just build an anti-air and you're set. While this binary problem is similar to the ship problem, air can cover more terrain, so players aren't as affected by it. Suggestions: 1. The addition of more ocean resources. Gold from whaling is quite historically accurate for a lot of civs, and sea trade is the major form of commerce throughout most of the world. 2. Increased water options to click on. Garrison ships in docks. All ships can garrison some units (like the viking longship can), but there's still a place for transports. The option to build water structures. In some campaigns and in the scenario editor we have sea towers, walls, and gates. 3. Largely diversified fleet options. Let's get a trash combat ship that only costs wood. Hello canoes and slips. Catapults were often rigged to ships because they could be bigger than on land. Let's bring back boarding ships, perhaps they could be the new offensive transports. In AOE3 Galleons are a ship class that can train barracks/stable units when anchored at shore. In Advance Wars Battleships are horribly overpriced, but actually have the range and damage to threaten most land units. 4. Expanded sea terrain, let's get shallows that big ships can't go through, really deep water that small ships can't go through. The wetland terrain type that allows land, buildings, and ships to go on was a great improvement. 5. The ability for small ships to pack/unpack and be carried over land.
I think introducing more water resources would make it more popular. Right now it is only food but imagine if you could for an example mine gold on water (let's say there is an expensive trout or something). A lot of land maps replayability also comes from unit and tech differences. I do believe if there were more ship variants it would also help. Land maps have around 20 different units you can create. Water based units are 3 or 4 if you play Vikings or any civ with special ship.
I think it'd be one or the other take land for example: transitioning your tech costs a lot, so you often don't want to do so but at the same time, knights and crossbows are somewhat balanced towards eachother, 1v1 the crossbow lose but they mass significantly easier(both in resources and in creation time) and can win battles using that to their advantage if you make one hard counter while also having them all cost significantly different, it becomes an actual RPS, rather than a system based on that. Meaning if I chose rock and you chose paper, you win the match because it'll just take too long for me to resetup my eco to actually be able to deal with your unit. I remember that T90 once said something to the effect of "if you're on the losing side you don't tech switch, you gotta get the advantage with the comp you chose. the person who's winning can actually slow down the pressure in order to do a tech switch"
I think another factor that holds back water maps is the lack of resources and buildings for water tiles, making any naval development a *SUNK COST* that can never impact the enemy's base or economy (unless they build all of their TCs right next to the water). Plus at least from my experience, when the person you're fighting controls the water it's just a matter of skirting your army further inland, rather than it leaving any significant impact on the match. Unless you're both on Islands, in which case it's an annoying matter of building Transport and dealing with the balance between Transport capacity and population limit, and then dealing with the transport awful unloading-pathfinding. IDT I've ever seen a game make transporting people across different terrain types fun? The only way I can think to lighten this issue would be to make Trade and Transport ships the same unit, just with two different roles depending on the situation.
Not only the points you mentioned, but also having different naval techs across most civs makes each one of those both viable and interesting to play. A big plus in my book!
you could argue that fireships have large cettles with greek fire on board as ammunition for the "gun" making it weak to explosives ... you could increase the demoships lowest damage explosion radius but grant it a buff like 200 or something to fireships , making it blast whole groups of it
I think a "triangle" (rock paper scissor) is too little for a really fun and varied experience, especially when you compare it to the land combat, it would be interesting to see a 5 point cycle instead (so 2 more ship types)
All the ship stat and resource balance are a band aid. The issue with water is how easily fishing ships and fish farms are punished if you lose the water military fight even once. The fix is to make a "town center" dock that fishing ships can garrison in and fire arrows out of, a la town centers. Add a stone cost to the "town center" dock and perhaps lower fishing ship wood cost to compensate, and then add a separate military dock.
Idk, maybe there is some changes that could be considered, but 4 and 2 have different philosophies with 4 embracing a much harder counter system than 2. Its the same on land. sure cav counters archers, but depends on how much archers you have and upgrades, same with spears. It creates different opportunities and decision making, not good or bad just different. I like both systems. In 4 it can be easier to claw back from behind bc the hard counter system can let you recover from some bad fights if you transition properly. In 2 an army lead can be much more difficult to overcome from unit comp alone if you are behind. So the devil is in the details, and def open for tweaks.
I wish you could garrison units in galleys and fire ships and have a melee battle between two or more ships. That would actually make water interesting to me.
Maybe the demolition ship should just be a relatively cheap ship that can deal lots of damage against any other ship type if it manages to actually hit it without being destroyed first. Great for defending your dock or ambushing enemy ships, or as a diversion to divert fire from your main army. And the springauld / ballista ship can then take it's place in the rock-paper-scissors of AOE 2 ship battles. Would also be nice to get ram ships for some civs to use instead of demo ships. Sturdier, but can only destroy one ship at a time while taking some damage but not being fully destroyed itself? And if you really want water battles to be awesome, have different water depths and some ships can use shallower water to escape or ambush the bigger ships. Vikings and maybe Burgundians can be especially good at that, whereas Korean Turtle Ships are good at deep water but can't go on shallow water for instance. And cannon ships also can't enter shallow water, so you can have maps with water closer to bases without letting cannon galleons too close Big deep water ships could also have a slightly smaller scouting radius (but faster movement speed) to encourage naval ambushes with smaller ships
I’d welcome it. It would be nice to have extra civ bonuses thrown in. Land fights get more interesting due to the massive choices of land bonuses we get. We just don’t see much for sea bonuses. What could be nice is if each civ had a land bonus and sea bonus. However I don’t now how well that would work in with historic accuracy lol. Perhaps weak sea strong land vs mid both vs weak land strong sea. Either way, civ sea bonuses will make a huge difference when implemented
id like to see a huskarl-like ship that can easily absorb galleon projectiles. maybe it would be enough though to make fire ships a bit more huskarly, by increasing the armor gained from careening, which currently is a very situational tech
That chart is interesting. I'm left wondering why Bogland and Budapest are even lass played than water maps. Also very surprising to me to see Black Forest so low.
You forgot to mention that all AoE4 civs have at least one unique water bonus and one unique technology at their docks, which helps further in making an interesting water play. That might be hard to translate to AoE2 tho, where there are too many civs and little room to new unique techs for this to be easily implemented.
Good thing romans weren’t added to AoE4, cause they be drowning
For a quicker transition here you could group the civilizations into region and give region specific dock techs and bonuses. And for water civilization they get their bonuses instead of the region specific ones if balance is an issue.
@@simonnilsson8375 Izmir be like
@@sevret313 I immediately thought the same thing, you could even deliberately not give a few civs anything because they were landlocked. although maybe the mongols could get a huge cost reduction in the imperial age. (But transports only have 1hp hehehe)
Maybe regional unique techs at the docks, then?
I think the reason water maps are avoided is because some civilizations will only thrive on water maps while others just suffer on water maps. Generally land battles tend to have more balance.
True to some but degree, but it's also about build orders and stuff.
On land you have different build orders and strategies.
On water you add fishing ships in dark age, always, then fight for their protection. If you lose water it's very hard to come back.
Landing is risky strategy, so it's kinda thing on it's own.
Also for normal player game is hectic enough, now if you add water in to the mix there is double the amount of micro. It is very much possibility to win water and be in a much "better" position to just get landed and beaten. That is not possible in land maps.
@@laurivaisanen6918 - Kinda strange because one would think more micro would be required for hybrid maps as both a water and land army have to be managed.
Yet hybrid maps are still more popular than pure water maps due to navy micro not being an absolute necessity or nearly as important as land micro.
Funny how things turn out in practice.
A big part of the reason a number of civs were so terrible on water maps is the naval combat balance was so awful.
I think the idea of blowing it up, staring all civs almost the same and then adding variation over time makes sense because of how bad it was.
And getting rid of the tedious "spin to win" crud.
Nah, it has got nothing to do with balance or gameplay, the reason is not even related to video games. It's just that Human beings generally prefer land battles, be it in real life or video games.
New water update for AoE4 is genuinely amazing. It must have been difficult for the developers to scrap everything they had worked on for years and replace it, but really, it's significantly better for the game! The hardcoded bonuses really make a big difference IMO
I think game devs should be ready to scrap things, I read the valve's raising the bar book on how they made half life 2 back then, they remade many things over and over again to make it better and they wrote how important it is to give up on things.
You are acting llke it took effort to implement the dogshit water gameplay aoe4 had before. Water combat wasn't even supposed to be in the game until very late in development.
No doubt it must be, or at least feel, much harder to apply radical changes to AoE2 because it's a much older game and therefore has a meta more set in stone - especially in regards to the original Age of Kings and The Conquerors civilizations; modifying them would surely upset much of the playerbase. In comparison, AoE4 is barely over one year old and is less symmetrical.
Water maps are not being played not because of the water balance, but because water is boring. On land you have lots of types of units to pick and change your strategy acordingly, on the other hand, you get three (sometimes four)...
I actually think that forcing the game into hard counter would makes things worse for AoE2, as one of the main features of AoE2 is that there are a lot situational counter units, which flips when under different context, giving the game more strategic depth.
Making X beats Y, Y beats Z, and Z beats X, is only going to make water more boring than it already is.
If I was one of the devs, I would add a few new ships for water for every civ, completely changing water game, instead of giving it a bad coat of painting.
@@masafromhell but if you don't have a Rock Paper Scissors dynamic then you'll just have a "who clicks the fastest" dynamic and personally I'd never a play a game that rewards apm over strategic Rock Paper Scissors decisions
I think water warfare just needs more 'stuff' to make it interesting. When every civ has the same stuff outside a handful of unique units (most of which are just slightly tweaked galleys), winning on water seems to be all about getting a deathball first and/or having a water bonus to make doing so easier for you than for your opponent.
It's also 90% hidden bonuses, which might make it unintuitive, and makes them feel weird when interacting with land units (fire galleys do basically nothing vs. land, while galleys do a lot less than they look like they should).
Maybe add a set of "naval unique techs" and focus on giving a lot more civs a naval unique unit and/or a specific bonus for one ship type.
I'm not sure more hidden bonus damage is the way to make the counter system 'harder', but I think some stat tweaks could do it; give fire ships more health and armor while giving galleys more base damage (which also helps them play a role as light artillery vs. land units), and maybe give demo ships more AoE to dunk tight-packed galleys. Fire galleys winning the 1v1 more cleanly helps them push through mass galleys, while more damage helps galleys snipe demos. Maybe give cannon galleons AoE damage like a mangonel so they're something you want in a naval battle as well.
Oh, cannons with AoE damage sounds cool
next update should be focused on water civs and also add some gold source in the water
@@Booklat1 that's a pretty cool idea if there were gold sources on water people would definitely go after them.
There’s an interesting thread on the age 2 forums called “let’s talk about water” that discusses a lot of this
AoE 1 had a small area damage for the catapult trireme
The funny thing is, in Age of Empires 1, the Galley equivalent (the Scout/War Galley/Trireme line) was actually a pure trash unit - only taking wood.
And with Definitive Edition, a lot of Civs do actually get Fire Galley as a Trireme counter, and before that a lot of Civs also had the alternative of the Catapult Trireme to counter masses of regular Triremes - both of these Gold units.
It's funny how things come in a full circle.
I could swear that in the original AOE2 Age of Kings release, the expensive Imperial naval tech Shipwright (it reduces wood cost by 35% and training time also) - I could swear it used to remove the gold cost entirely making galleys only cost wood again. So they cost gold normally and that tech made it more like AOE1. But reading the patch notes it seems Shipwright always just decreased wood cost and never removed the gold cost?
@@mikesully110 no I still have the original disc version and I'm sure shipwright only reduced wood cost and speed up training time that's it
Instead of one time use demo ships being part of the triangle I think the third ship type should be one that kind of boards the opponent. The problem with demo ships is that in a 1 on 1 they are only ever cost effective if they cost less in the first place since they get destroyed. Making them a defensive 4th unit makes more sense where they are good against all ship types but only if you can get them into a mass of enemy ships.
Omg yes i was thinking this too
I agree. Demo ships feel like Age of Empires, but I think they should be an emergency measure to defend a dock or surprise an enemy. With a "melee ship" in the triangle, we have something similar to land. Archers take out melee, melee takes out siege (Springald ship), siege takes out archers.
Empire Earth had a 3 ship system: frigate, battleship, and galley. It was still boring... until you could throw aircraft and subs into the mix.
The problem is, where land has countless different interactions with terrain, height, walls, and all the different infantry and siege and cavalry and so on, water has 3-5 ships. And stuff shooting at them. And basically nothing else.
I like the idea.
Could then even have, say, viking longboats work that way. Though then again, the vikings that made it down that far certainly saw no light against the byzantine navy.
This. It's also how the Romans historically countered the naval supremacy of the Carthaginians, by turning a naval battle into a land battle.
"Soft" counters (such as fires vs. galleys) is a big component of AoE2 - take the current debate about whether pikes counter knights for example. I don't think that the RPS nature should be made stronger. It's a key point of the game that some units have advantages against others - sometimes even large ones - but they are not absolute. With a stronger RPS, that would mean that being first to Feudal water aggression would actually be a DISadvantage, since your opponent can just choose the counter when they reach feudal and immediately destroy any mass you had produced. I know there would probably still be SOME tipping point in the new AoE4 system where a certain mass or skill level could overcome its counter, but I like that element of the game and don't want to see it reduced. Execution still needs to matter, even when producing counters.
Yeh, thats the discussion of soft counters vs hard counters. Soft counters are generally way more interesting.
SotL : *"That in some ways have a lot of similarities on the surface to Age of Empires 2"*
TH-cam : *"Age of Vampires 2"*
If the naval combat is better, why not? Both games are still being updated, so it won't hurt to try
Big problem is that in both games water was an afterthought. Sandy Petersen has said in his videos where he talks about the development of AOE2 that noone at Ensemble liked water maps and fights. They didn't even understand how strong fishing ships where until they saw some good players playing and making good use of them. AOE4 didn't originally even have water, it was added really close to release, that's why none of the campaigns have water maps.
The real problem is that water control only adds some food economy and the potential to raid shores. But the transport+ load unload troops is very unwieldy and in general the way the military ships works is very simplistic often resulting in mass galleys Vs galleys with occasional demos for defense or sniping stacked fishing ships. Overall the lack of things to do in the water makes it uninteresting. I would like the ability to terraform along the coasts and in general. In aoe3 and aoe4 it doesn't feel as if the map is as empty as it often does with aoe2
@@zachariastsampasidis8880 Ottomans have a floating military school
@@zachariastsampasidis8880 If they ever start having AoE for 21st century, they can add oil platforms and gas pipelines to water maps, which will spice things up.
@@Jen-Yueh_Hu Rise of Nations has oil platforms, but even before you reach the modern age, you had the whale resource you could send ships to, which gave you a different bonus to food (I can't quite remember what it is at the moment). Something like that could also help make water maps more interesting as you have more resources to fight over.
@@punic4045 Yeah Rise of Nations in general have way better water battles than Age of Empires. For one, as you said, whales and fish are both extremely valuable resources. But I think what makes it better is that land units automatically transform into transport ships when moving on water. It cuts out the transport ship loading and unloading part, which imo is what makes water maps so annoying in AoE.
I think the "issue" of water maps in aoe2 is that military domination does not translate into map control (and therefore resources control), and, in a similar way, ships cannot really raid the enemy economy onces the fishing ships are out.
So, I don't think it has anything to do with the balance (although the different resources idea looks interesting)
sea towers would make water better. Also there really isn't much of a way you can "come back" after getting stopped on water. Even worse getting to imp to finally win water and the enemy has a large island you can't reach everything with Cannon gallon and they have bombard towers and Cannons to stop your landing so no finish there.
Yes, 99% of all of AoE gameplay is land-based. Water is a little extra quirk, where you can only build ships to play with other ships. Ships have next to no interaction with the rest of economy; you cannot wall ships, you cannot build castles in the middle of the water, there are no monk ships etc. Water is fundamentally a niche thing, fine to play sometimes but won't be mainstream
amen, this is was what Command & Conquer realized and made many units amphibious in Red Alert 3.
the main resources were also available in the water, or at shorelines, making them vulnerable to offshore strikes
And Dedicated navy was also promoted by making them superior at sea and litoral combat than their amphibious counterparts. Examples where the torpedo ships that where cost efficient in water combat, and the capitol ships that OUTPERFORMED ground based artillery. In AoE, naval artillery is much worse than trebs and bombards.
The capitol ships alone meant that whoever ignored the seas would lose map control over everything but deep land, allowing the sea player to expand at the shores under the bombardment umbrella of battleships, aircraft carriers and missile cruisers
I think this was done very well in aoe3, where ships were more powerful, had more range any many resources were near land, so you could actually raid with them.
You're exactly right, and it's just even more boring because there isn't enough variety in the combat when it comes to ships. The "rock, paper, scissors" concept in early Feudal age completely dies by castle age and then it's just a race to see who can field the most war galleys.
I've always thought that the AoE2 ship counter system was messed up by the demo ships self destructing to do damage, and them not being costefficient as a result. Instead demo ships role should be filled by a melee boarding or ram ship that has very high armor against the fire ship damage, but very low pierce armor against the galley line and even take bonus damage from them. Age of Mythology did something similar with the Pentekontor type ships.
I like this idea, maybe the blowing up thing is still an option that requires a charge up (i.e. you can't ram repeatedly then blow-up). Late game with large groups of ships the demo is the defacto damage of the heavy demo still since it'll get gunned down too quick in ram mode.
Indeed I felt like Age of Mythology did the water balance very well. Throw in a few sea myth units to spice it up and God powers that could be used on water and you were in for a good time
this is the best idea ever
A boarding ship as a counter to fires would need specific anti-fire armor, I think.
@@robertlewis6915 Well, you could have fireships exclusively deal melee damage and give the boarding/ram ship high melee armor. The armor would not even need to be that high because fire ships deal low damage to begin with. On the other hand the boarding/ram ship could have low piercing armor against he galley lines attack. To show that visually the boarding/ram ship could have wet animal skins draped over the bow, or something like that, similar to what capped rams have to prevent them from catching fire.
Thats how I would rebalance AoEII Water:::::::
Split the Dock into three buildings - Dock, Shipyard and the Port.
the Dock available since dark age only beeing able to build: Mechanics:
Fishingboat
Tradekog (III) --> Tradecarack (IV) The Tradecarrack got more goldcapicity than the Tradekog and it can defend itself with arrows.
Transportship (II) --> Large Transportship (IV) Large Transportships are able to enter enemy ships and convert them if you have Troops loaded.
The more soldiers you got on the Transportship than faster the enemy ship will be taken over.
Fishingtechs
Transporttechs
Advanced Storaging (III) Tradekogs and Fluyts will gain 33% more gold by trading with other Ports
The Shipyard availeable from Feudal Age:
Galley (II) --> Wargalley (III) --> Carack (III) --> Caravell (IV) Galleys are arrow shooting ships, fireing 1 arrow at the beginning,
gaining a additional arrow for each Arrow upgrade. The Carack upgrade will Add an additonal
Scorpionbolt Porjectile adding additional Damage against Ships.
Firegalley (II) --> Fireship (III) --> Advanced Fireship (IV) Firegalleys are smaller but faster ships that will set ships on fire. They gain Bonusdamage against
Galeons and Holks.
Demolitiongalley (II) --> Demlitonship (III) --> Heavy Demolitionship (IV) A with Gunpowderbarrels packed ship ready to launch carnage within Shipbattles.
Payed Rowers (III) Galleys, Fireships and Demo-Ships move 15% faster
Warnavy (III) Galleys, Firegalleys and Demolitiongalleys will be upgraded to their Shiptypes.
Navy Taxation (IV) Gold-cost for ships 33% lower
The Port availebale at Castle Age does give acces to advanced Ships and upgrades:
Siegegalley (III) --> Onagergalley (III) --> Heavy Onagergalley (IV)
Siegegalleys are Rammingships that gain a charged rammattack simmilar to the coustillier ability. The Rammattack disables hitet ships moving for 5 seconds. And it deals High damage on Impact. How ever the Siegegalley got no range attack until you upgrade it to a Onagergalley since there it will gain a Onagerattack that deals Bonusdamage against Lighter Ships like Firegalleys and Demolitionships. The Rammattack can still be used. The Heavy Onagergalley gains advanced shiparmor. This shiptype deals Bonus damage against Buildings also.
Holk (III) --> Canonholk (IV) --> Warholk (IV)
Holks are Gunpowder based Ships, they start fireing one Canonporjectile linear towards targets. Projectiles are Highly effective against Galleys and Fireships, but Holks receive additonal damage by Demoships and Firegalleys duo to Gunpowdermagazines on the ship. The projectiles are not effective against buildings. And Holks have a longer loading time than Galleys. Every Upgraded version adds one more Canonprojectile the ship is firering.
Galeon (IV) --> Imperial Galeon (IV)
The Galeons will start with Three Canonattacks that it does shot linear towards targets. Upgraded it fires Five Canonattacks. Galeons deal bonus damage against Wargalleys, Holks and Buildings. Galeons are the superior Imperial Warship.
Fluyt (IV) --> The Fluyt is a advanced Tradingship that is able move faster and does have more HP than its little
brothers the Tradekog and Tradecarrack. Also the Fluyt has a Canonattack with it i could defend itself.
:
Ship of the line (III) Galleys, Holks and Galeons receive +25 HP
Advanced Ship Armor (IV) Holks and Galeons receive 30% less blast damage
Three Mast (IV) Holks and Galeons move 12% faster
Crownest (III) Holks, Galeons, Fluyts, Wargalleys and Tradekogs +3 LOS
Tradeships the get sunken will left Wrecks, from with fishingboats can gather a amount of gold.
Viking Longboats should get new mechanic like:
beeing able to transport 5 Units(Foot units only). Gaining an additional arrow per Unit loaded and 2% moving speed due to rowing.
Turtleships should be able to take on Holks, Wargalleys and Fireships but beeing smashed by Galeons and Demoships. Turtleships can Carry 10 Units (Foot Units only).
Trading is only available with Ports. Docks and Shipyards will not be able to Trade but you can Drop off Resources at Docks.
Another Unit the Galeass should be saved for some kind of Venecian Civ-DLC however it would be kind of a canonlongboat faster moving, canonprojectiles and able to carry some Units.
I know its much new stuff, but i think it would lift up the Naval experience. There is much more to Navy than they gave us. I guess they did not as much research on Medieval Navys and shiptypes than needed.
You know, boarding ships with infantry units aboard would be a nice addition, instead of hearing the chanting of a monk, you are hearing the screams of men being slaughtered before a victory bellow confirms the ship has been captured
Nice idea, but so much to implement, i still waiting they resprite the units for each region/culture, and only the King received, this is rewrite entire naval game.
The problem is that ramming doesn't feel medieval, at least in my opinion.
@@robertlewis6915 Ramming is historically accurate. Ramming and boarding was how most naval battles were fought before cannons were added to ships.
@@nathangamble125 I'm not objecting on historicity- I know quite little about medieval naval combat (though I can tell you boarding was still important in the early 1800s). I'm saying that ramming makes people think 'ancient' not 'medieval'.
The fact of the matter is that there just needs to be more variety in the naval side. For water maps to be embraced, ever civ needs to feel like it can do SOMETHING. I think the best way is to split up the docks into 3 buildings, for a start. The Dock is a pure eco building. Then there's a port that can build your "standard" ships that attack with arrows (and some "boarding" melee ships would be nice too). Then in a later age you can get an Arsenal, which is where you start getting ships with cannons and such.
And giving all civs something to do on naval maps doesn't neccessarily mean turning them into direct naval powerhouses. Civs from mountainous areas, like Incas, could get more economic focus to represent that boats to them were more a way to tap into lakes and rivers. Civs that are more cavalry based like the Mongols could focus just more on transportation to try to get to the land battles that they want, though they'll have to sneak around civs with more directly powerful navys. For civs that ARE naval civs, they can try to focus more on specific types of ships as their specialty. The main problem with water maps is just by picking it you feel like you're slicing down the civs you can play as.
And making the dock UI more clear 11
I love your ideas, maybe you should try to write to the devs :)
They also need to add new techs where ship repair speed can be improved/ can be made less costly.
So basically almost like in Empire Earth, where you get another harbor building, for specific ships.
Ok, in Empire Earth you get that new harbor relatively late, around the World War age, but you get new ship variants like submarines, aircarft carrier etc. , next to your normal Port, where you get fishing ships, normal attack ships etc.
I can understand your point in a simpler way like creating a "dock unique tech" for each civ, and a "Water team bonus" for each civ.
In Age of mythology, there is no incendiary ship, instead there are arrow ships, long-ranged siege ships, and close-ranged ships(like a fire galley). They make a rock-scissors-paper triangle similar to AOE4's updated naval system and it was quite balanced I suppose.
and also all civs have at least one mythical naval unit which makes these battles more interesting. maybe AOE II just need some more variety of ships and a more robust counter system on water warfare.
Yeah, I liked AoM's water options. Demolition ships are kind of weird and off-putting for new players but you can get a rock-paper-scissors without them.
the resource costs changes are definitely worth trying. I would personally be against doing any damage balance changes until the resources are tried. There also needs to be a greater variety of naval units period. Every civ should get some kind of unique unit, or at least every region/archetype ala indian civs should all have at least a shared unique ship. Naval combat is boring because theres no variety like land combat.
Certainly in AoE 2 low and mid elo players really struggle with their water builds, I personally think having ships cost only two resources is the way to go to reduce the complexity of producing navy (AoE2 system). What I don’t understand is why we can’t get direct upgrades to the ships I.e galley to galleon (I know this is a little pedantic). I like the reinforced hard counters though but a little more variety would be nice.
@@ianmackie3305 On the contrary, I think it could make naval builds easier. The difficulty is not in producing naval units, it is generally in balancing an economy around fishing ships and docks instead of farms and berries. Making some ships cost food could actually simplify it for newer players much like how scouts are a simple land opener.
@@tamerlane2951 Meh, agree to disagree on that one, more than one way to skin a cat.
The aoe4 naval changes follow the age of mythology formula of archer ships > ramming ships > siege ships > archer ships.
At least the ramming ships doesnt kill himself when attack. But the siege ship is the cannon galleon.
@@caiodias503 if the ramming ships kill themselves then krakens would make you ragequit every single time.
yeah the arrow ships were kinda garbage tbh. Only good for hunting fishing ships and transports. But then naval myth units really disrupted the balance
@@mikesully110 naval myth units were used to weaken arrow ship spam so that siege ships can take them out. Remember that fishing shoals have unlimited food and cannot be raided by land.
@@caiodias503 This is a huge issue. The reason the triangle doesn't work on water is because you need to get "lucky" with your demo for them to be cost effective. A ram-like ship is probably the best way to close the loop.
i would love trash galleons and fire galleys be an actual counter late game
Imagine if imp fire ships exploded like demos when they die
@@LuxiBelle too wild 11
In full water map, wood is what going to stop you from making more ships and not gold, so I don't think it is a good idea.
@@LuxiBelle Especially if they did some damage to surrounding ally ships... That would make demo ships actually be worth creating except for as a cheeky garrison strat.
I think the question we should be making is
*How do we* overhaul the navy in order to make It *worth* it to play naval based maps? Because as It stands right now, you only make galleys, fishing ships and transports If you need it
excouse me ? Have you ever played aoe4 ??
You absolutely loose the game the instant you loose water.
@@juretic6038 I am talking about AoE2
AoEIV also have docks with tower and garrison space for fishing ships so they act as a Water Town center, all civs have at least one water bonus and one dock unique tech, and the trading poist that spawn on islands give you an incentive to take water because you can translate the water domination into map and resource control
naval battles in aoe2 has always felt very basic, and usually boils down to "whos navy has the largest amount/strongest boats". not a whole lot of tactics or strategy, and whilst a weak land-civ might struggle on land, a weak naval civ is absolutely demolished on water maps.
its partially why i enjoyed naval battles in aoe3 so much more, with the only annoyance being ship limits, but even then that forced you to be more tactical.
edit: also Computer players were dogshit at effectively using boats.
I feel like we need to see the results of the water change on the live servers before we make a more complete decision of it's merits, and I think that's what the devs may be doing as well in regards to a change like this coming to AoE2.
Looking forward to Age Vampires 2 btw.
Age Vampires 11111
I think that the water balance needs more nuance to be better. What ai mean by that is expanded upgrades, and possibly a splitting of naval building. There could be a naval building that makes fishing ships and trade cogs and works as a gather point, and a naval building for military. Also, for upgrades, I mean having more small upgrades like careening that add small buffs and advantages to a civ’s water game. Stuff like slightly increased explosion radius on demos, maybe an hp boost for galleys, or an increase in anti-ship armor for fire ships (galleys would get more, not all, but more, of their bonus damage in on fire ships without the upgrade), and the point of these upgrades would be to give civs more variety in their strength on water, instead of just “do they get bracer and shipwright?” And before people say that this would make ships unbalanced, I think the best way to implement this would be that a fully upgraded ship with all the added upgrades added would only amount to what they currently are stat-wise now. They just start off weaker. Anyway, I’d like thoughts on such an idea, does the water tree need fleshing out? Because right now, to me naval wars are more or less equivalent in complexity to a single unit-making building. It’d be like if land battles only let you place archery ranges, and if you happened to have a bad archery range, you’re out of luck.
I like the idea of changing resources for the ships to make that part more impactful, but I don't usually like when something is so hard of a counter you can't do anything about it
"can't do anything about it". You build the hard counter to that.
Interesting idea, but nah, changing up the ship costs would just make it more snowbally and harder to transition into a navy that can deal with the ships you're seeing. We just need more stuff going on. The radical change I proposed was that a warship adopts the characteristics of whatever military unit was garrisoned inside of it. For example, an arrow ship has some garrisoned archers, a war-galley has a garrisoned scorpion, a cannon galleon has a garrisoned bombard cannon, etc. Maybe you could even have boarding ships too, with the possibility of capturing enemy ships as prizes. Kinda like what they actually did during the middle ages.
Another issue is transport ship micro. If there were a way to automate the loading and unloading of units on to another landmass, then the boring stalemate of trying to win a foothold on the enemy landmass could be avoided. Making water play fun in AOE2 is going to require a lot more effort than changing some numbers around. New game mechanics will have to be created.
AoE2 needs some naval changes, but I don't think making it just a copy of the land system is a great idea. Even less so would I want to just play Rock-Paper-Scissors.
I like that in the current system, fire ships are great early on but then it's sort of a race to reach the critical mass of galleons. Once someone has that, it's very difficult to take back water, but demolition ships can then be especially useful as a time efficient but usually resource inefficient way of taking it back. It feels different from land gameplay. That in itself may make water maps inherently less popular, but I think overall the uniqueness is a positive that they should try to keep.
I think it's more that it's monotonous.
Make navy, keep going with the same simple, clunky, navy fight until one runs out of resources, the end.
While I don't think AOE3 has it right, I think it's a better idea to have fewer more significant ships that are a means to taking the fight to land.
AoE2 needs more ship types and concepts. Here's an idea, the ram ship/trireme. It attacks at melee and has a charge bar for bonus damage like the Coustillier.
This reminds me a lot of the age of mythology ship balance the issue in that game was in feudal you only got the archer ships so the fight was usually decided before you got to the counter units.
Tbh I didn’t expect AoE to allow units to fight while moving. That’s why I love the naval combat in 4 and the Mangudai.
Mangudai are the reason I've been maining Mongols since release. I know they're not the most viable, but it's just so fun to raid tree lines with a bunch of mangudai!
Unfortunately they took that ability away from arrow ships for balance reasons. Now it’s only mangudai that can shoot on the run.
@@JimCullen warships can with their cannons. A massive improvement from AoE3
@@JimCullen they reintroduced it
I come from a world where all units can attack while moving and it makes it hard to bare playing games where they cant and its all about stutterstepping
I'm mainly an AoE3 player and in there everything has counters pretty explicitly hard-coded. I like that.
In theory I think the idea of a 'soft' rock-paper-scissors in 2 at the moment borne out not in enforced bonuses but in the physical way the ships interact in the game-space is really cool! But I guess in practice, clearly it's not enough for most players.
One way they could diversify water maps is to allow different ship types to thrive differently depending on what water depth. For instance something I would think was cool is make the galleys and longships exclusively able to fight in shallows/shallow water, war galleys and galleons would instead be alot faster on the sea and deep sea tile types. This alone would make different ship types thrive differently depending on water type and thus give the ship classes different purposes, it would also give a caveat to upgrading too early. In addition make coastlines always have both shallow water and sea tiles depending on how close to the shore you are.
This would also make the water maps less snowbally since u would need cannon galleons to actually do shore bombardment, since war galleys and galleons wouldn't have access to the shores (which never made sense to me anyway) so the only remaining ways to invade from the sea to land would be by transport.
Furthermore they could add checkpoints on the waters you needed to hold and it would give you a little trickle of food/gold depending on what and where it was to further shake up the water map dynamics, this way you can still go full water dominance but you can't use that dominance to lock people out of the game by killing villagers with war galleys or galleons which is a big reason why people don't like water maps, it's simply whoever wins water can bully the other player from the coast. Which isn't fun on the receiving end.
I think a way to help water be more interesting would be to make more water based resources and/or buildings. Like you could have shipwrecks that fishing ships can "mine" gold or wood from. Or maybe be able to build ocean forts which can act like towers on water terrain. I think it would make for a more interesting dynamic as it would make water domination harder while also pushing for you to try and dominate water more. It could also helps civs with particularly bad water if they can just go defensive to at least extend their business on the sea.
The shipwreck idea is fascinating! I love an idea that ships have a chance to drop "salvage" equal to their construction cost upon death that decays like deer/hunt. Fishing ships (or salvager villagers if it's close enough) now can choose to recoup that cost at the cost of focusing solely on food and exposing your ships to a place where a fight literally just occurred. Maybe chance to drop salvage increases as there are fewer total resources left in the game, in order to try and delay stalemate scenarios?
I had a few ideas around sea I wanted to share that I think could be added to AOE4 to help as devs re-work in future.
trade ships should move slower when full of cargo.
If thats the case you could have an option to dump cargo and flee with speed boost to ovoid being destroyed.
If you kill a trade ship you should collect 50% of the resources it would of generated.
Where you have boars on land could have a unique sea version, such as whale or crab with more food available than fish
Another factor that speaks for AoE4 is that there's no dodging arrows there, so you'll be able to really focus on the strategy rather than awkward galley micro.
I'm super hyped for this update. I would love to see even more ship types in castle+ too so it feels complex like land does.
For me, water maps will always have the fundamental problem that you can't outright win from your navy. You can completely dominate the sea and deny your opponent any chance of building a navy or near the shoreline but you're going to need to build some land army and transport them to the other landmass to actually kill your opponent.
So it becomes this weird game of:
A) The more you invest in your navy the smaller land army you'll have
B) The smaller your navy the less you can attack
C) The larger your land army the better defense you have
You can easily get into annoying stalemates where one player dominates the sea but can't kill the opponents land force and has to awkwardly transport a smaller army to the opponent over and over in an attempt to kill them. Its just not fun.
Not entirely true, I had a game where I dominated the sea and land locked the opponent to his island. All you to do is get the sacred sites and you win
@@sirp7394 that's not a very fun way to go for victory. I think everyone prefers victory through combat
The thing with water Maps is the micro and that if u Lose a galley minute 10, u are simply over, u cant come back from that
Also, contesting water after you loose it is much easier than before because you need to produce ships that counter whatever the opponent has most of, so you need to spend way less resources and the opponent has to react. It's a dynamic system as we saw recently in the Beastyqt Vs Marinelord showmatch.
Yeah, I think something is needed to make water maps more popular, but balance itself seems okay to me?
Maybe some shuffling around of wood to gold cost ratios?
My main concern is unique ships. Any major balance changes could hurt them badly, especially the Vikings who don't get fireships.
Their Longboat definitely needs a buff imo
You raised an interesting point. Beastyqt, a pro from aoe 4 said in his patch analysis that he would love to have fire ships in aoe 4. I guess it's a matter of balancing both positions out
I think they'll save the fire ships for when the byzantines are added to the game, since those ships are strongly associated with them
I’d like to see some changes like this as AOE2 naval combat is pretty dire. However, one other major reason I find water maps so tedious (somewhat dependant on the exact water map) is the use of transports and how micro intensive they are, I personally think Rise of Nations had a better method of dealing with this and would really like to see something similar in AOE, that is to say research a tech and land units BTOB(bring their own boats).
The hard counter system would be interesting and in some ways can be done well (Age of Mythology) or very poorly (shutters in Empire Earth). What I like about Aoe2's water balance currently is that not all civs have access to the same techs, making for unique ways to counter units and I think the hard counter system works against that to some degree. Like with good positioning and micro, cavalry can still beat spearman.
I think the problem with the water balance in Aoe2/4 is the demo ship. At the end of the battle, no one has map control and you don't have any much momentum. You are just rebuilding the fleet and preparing for a long game until a decisive battle occurs. I think a /melee/boarding vessel would be an interesting addition to demo ships
In the video, Spirit said that most people build demo with archer/galley ships. With the new changes in aoe 4 a demo ship cost 130 resources and creates in 15 secs compared to the fireship's cost of 360 resources and creation of 30 secs. Considering that demo ships can kill multiple ships at once, if a demo kills 2 fire ships, your opponent lost 590 resources more than you in that exchange. Hell even if it takes 3 demo ships to kill 2 fire ships your opponent still loses 360 more resources than you. Considering that you can create demos twice as fast and with such a high resource return rate for its intended target, your opponent would need a much larger economy to keep up with you and if thats case then you already lost. i would say that if the economy is even, demo ships create momentum by keeping your opponent's mass/bank low while giving your archer/galley ships room to do their thing.
honestly, i think just adding the ability to ships to carry tropps themselfs, and making that mechanism less clunky, might help a lot. Transport ships can still exist as a dedicated unit but it would just make everything a lot more dynamic.
that would also allow making transports a lot more interesting as a unit, heres my pitch:
1. you give them an upgrade to make them significantly tankier, elite transport ship so to speak to allow them to act similarly to rams, as dmg sponges, though not AS extreme maybe.
2. you let them behave like towers where ranged units that are stored on it can actually fire
3. you give them melee attack, increased by number of melee units stored on it
numbers ofc have to be tweaked but done right that could add A LOT of depth to playing water maps. i feel like its just too one dimensional and boring, and once youre forced off, you essentially resign because your opponent will eventually just outspend you.
Hi Spirit, i have a recommendation for you!
Aoe4 scoring system is weird/broken at the moment. It looks like miliary score is calculating by how many military units is alive when game is over etc.
I love to see your analysis about current scoring system and biggest differences for Aoe2 scoring system! Recommendations for fixing Aoe4 scoring would also be a good bonus.
Thanks for reading, and see you next time 👏
I still think AoE2 should have different ship buildings to make naval maps more interessting. Like defensive buildings, a building for upgrades, economic buildings to make water more impacful etc.
Seawalls
@@bigdiccmarty9335 They did originally use seawalls in AoE 2 beta back when it first came out, but got rid of them when players started simply encircling enemy docks with them in the early game. If you bring back seawalls, there needs to be a way for docks to fire arrows (like Malay Harbours) from the get-go to prevent this from happening.
@AlHasan Sameh sea... gates....???
What about a chain between docks? That's historically accurate and could bring a kind of "seawall" but limmited
not only buildings but also other shiptypes, there is so much more aobut naval warfare than just plain stupid arrow shooting. There is Gunpowder, boarded Onagers, Ramming attacks and Entering. I wrote a little schedule in the comments, were i split the dock into three buildings, and added some shiptypes and mechanics on them.
I would be interesting in giving transport ships a melee attack if they are loaded with troops, making effective boarding parties possible.
There should be 2 different types of docks in my opinion or even a 3rd for “siege” ships(something like a water mangonel) also fishing ships being able to repair would make water a bit more spicy. Having to scout what type of dock/harbor your enemy has would make water much more interesting
The more barrier there is to building water units, the less people will go, because there is much less eco incentive on water.
fishing units repairing would make them too obviously reskinned vills, at least in effect.
one great thing in aoe4 is that every civ has unique water bonuses that give them a chance in water and still fit the theme of the civ!
i really hope that both games manage to maps full of water as fun and strategic as land maps.
i always dislike the demolition ships because it feels like a sunken (haha) cost. i would much prefer the age of mythology water balance where you had melee ships instead of demos. also water myth units made it so much more unpredictable and fun imo
Yeah it does not feel nice to beat an enemy army but your demo ships can't do much in return since any attack against docks or their eco eliminates your own ships.
Fully agree.
Demo ships are punishing you for not looking at your units 100% of time and reward APM much more than good decision making.
Melee ships would be much better.
The same thing goes for petards. But when you stop to consider it, ALL military units are expendable. How long does any given unit - especially trash units - last in battle? A minute or two at most, unless you are engaging in serious micro and rotating unit groups between front and monks to keep them up. In most cases they're being destroyed anyway. This is why I've often used petards as a way of quickly removing enemy castles. Send in a bunch of petards with some hussars and halberdiers scattered among them to draw castle fire and enemy units away from the petards, and you can potentially get rid of castles a lot more quickly than with trebuchets or rams.
@@Mystikan No, it's not the same thing with petards, very far from it.
Petards are useless against units.
Petards damage output does not scale up with higher APM of the user.
Petards do not require high APM response from the opponent.
Petards do not fail to return investments if used against a single target, forcing high APM from the user to put the opponent into the situation where their units are clumped.
Argument "all units are expendable" is invalid, because it ignores the fact that units that explode on engagement lose many times more value from insufficient micromanagement than units that stay alive; and units that attack area receive many times more value from superior micro than units that hit single target.
Which leads to the situations where 1 second of having your attention somewhere else will cost you the entire game, much more often than even lucky Mangonel shots, another problematic unit in that regard.
@@Mystikan My man, you must be one of those who trickle trebs, then x)
Otherwise I have no idea why would you ever spend your gold on petards rather than trebs and/or bombard cannons
When managed properly, long range siege is something you build once and then keep it for the rest of the match
as someone who just played the aoe4 pup today on water. one thing SoTL doesnt mention about water changes (several actually): 1. all docks in aoe4 have techs that help up the overall escalation of warships as you progress through the tech ups (ie springald ships turn into cannon ships). 2. all docks have unique techs and such that help define each civ on water. so i think if it were to be implemented in aoe2 it would have to have some form of escalation similar to this.
In some custom campaigns we saw a naval units that works as monks (convert ships by acting like they boarding ships), or onager ships (they do make aoe damage). That idea of extra units in naval battles would also refresh the water.
Age of Mythology also had this rock paper scissors system and it works pretty well! I'm actually excited for this in AoE4 and it looks noice :D
I'm not sure if that would really solve the problem. Enforcing a triangle even more feels a bit off, since it kind of takes away the choices you can make again (if the other player has Rock, you HAVE to get paper or you give up water entirely). I think what makes water so uninteresting, is just the general lack of variety compared to land. You can build on land, have more units, have more different buildings and techs, etc etc.
Perhaps expanding what you can do on water, would make it more interesting. Some type of water-fence (like some missions have) would be super interesting. Transport ships behave differently depending on who's on them (similar to Red Alert 2 IFV's) - like shooting arrows if they carry archers, convert if they have monks, act as weak artillery with a trebuchét, or board ships if they carry infantry. Raiding ports could be interesting as well - perhaps with a new ship type intended just for that.
Overall, more variety would probably help. Consider how we think about civs, when it comes to land: "its an archer civ", "its a cavalery civ", "its a monk civ", etc... or its just a "water" civ. There's no real distinction there, because water doesn't have many truly distinctive options. Imagine if we could say "its a water raid civ", "its a boarding civ", "its a water siege civ", etc.
Very cool!
In addition, the various civs all have unique ships on many classes (archer ship vs war junk for example) which can open up greater variety in the future. It might be the best aoe water system one day.
I think that many more ship types are needed to make water interesting. How about an armored melee boarding ship? It could convert enemy ships like a monk while both ships take damage in the process. A melee ramming ship could also be a thing, dealing huge damage on attack while also receiving some damage, maybe it's attack cooldown could be significant so you have to retreat them and charge again to be effective. Or a transport ship that has an increased attack depending on how many units it is carrying. It could be pretty strong when it's full as you are risking ship cost + cost of units. Maybe a raiding ship (viking longboat?) that can garrison villagers and convert them to raiders for an additional cost, also acting as a villager transport. It could be great for early raiding and starting colonies. And this is just off the top of my head, there could be so many more ship types.
Don't know how they'd pull it off, but one of the main advantages of water in history was speed. If you could move forces much faster on water than on land, and if there was more room to hide off shore (requiring patrols), water would get really interesting on the maps designed for it.
An interesting idea would be improving transport ship ease of use. Maybe by removing the pop cost, increasing capacity and tankiness, and make the boarding/deboarding quicker and less micro intensive.
Issue in AOE2 is only partially that massed galleys have no counter. Bigger issue even than that is the snowball, which could be reduced by letting all civs garrison fishing ships in docks and enabling fishing or worker ships to build barricades (ie walls) on water
step 1: give every single civ a water bonus that lets them compete.
step 2: give more reasons to care about water, maybe water based resource nodes.
step 3: a unit overhaul as suggested.
the primary problem I would still say is that if I'm not playing a civ with a bonus to water against a civ that has a bonus to water I'm basically screwed and there's nothing I can do about it outside of meme landing strats. its not like on land when if the enemy has a better stable then me I still have options like strong archers or inf+siege.
I don't know about AoE4's design, but AoE2 I feel suffers from a couple major issues that can't be circumvented by simple unit match up changes. Water is not always present in games, but is rather optional, meaning that many players simply don't see as much water gameplay to get used to it. There is also less to do in water, since you can't build buildings except by the shore. There's also the matter of civilizations simply not being balanced on water in the slightest. Those missing the cannon galleon, for instance, have a significant missing part of the lineup, with no real alternative. Maybe some castle age siege ship could be made, but that's theoretical.
It would require a much greater overhaul of navies overall for there to be some balance between civilizations. There's also the entire thing about sea walls but.... I don't know, maybe allow it close to land, or have two different tiles for shallows and open seas, and only allow those in the shallows? Maybe even some form of bridges? Maybe some new units like the aforementioned siege ships, but also boaring ships? I don't know, it would be a lot of overhauling the game design.
Yeah, if the enemy civ doesn't have cannon galleon, they effectively can't menace any shore buildings within a castle's firing range.
Honestly I think that the problem with water maps is the clear Rock Paper Scissors element. There are not enough ship combinations to make it as fun and dynamic as land combat. I have a couple ideas that might improve water combat in this regard: add a ship that doesn’t attack other ships but converts them when they get close. Another ship could attack via ramming into their opponent. Making the water combat more rigid is only going to make water maps more boring.
I love how aoe3 is such a different game, that it’s not even talked about
I read in an interview with one of the developers that they wanted to change its name from Age of Empires because it was too different, but Microsoft didn't allow it.
I think the devs can start fixing the pathing with the transportship (really a mess when you want to put units into them) and make something with the trade cogs (noone use them because are dificult to protect)
Would also recommend adding in some more interesting environmental stuff- maybe marsh areas that slow down ships, or random assortments of rocks that can create artificial choke points- giving players minor objectives on the water to fight over and rewarding strategic decision making
Reminds me of Rise of Nations naval combat. You had Fire, Light, and Heavy to choose from: Light hard-counters Fire, Heavy hard-counters Light, and Fire hard counters Heavy. Even the resource distribution is similar (somewhat), and what would usually happen is having a screen of Lights up front with Heavies behind and Fires in reserve for if and when the enemy's Light screen was taken down. All of this would be massively complicated once hitting Industrial when your Fires become Submarines which don't die after attacking and your Heavies Dreadnoughts with massive range. Light is also overhauled in that they can now detect (for countering subs) and can hit air, which hard counters Dreadnoughts and Subs. Once you hit Modern you also get Carriers which are expensive but pretty OP when massed. Plus land artillery deals insane damage to ships starting in the mid-game and you end up with pretty fleshed out naval combat.
They could also add mechanic which would allow certain factions for their villagers to build ships on any shore terrain.
This would make sense for some factions which historically were not known for good navies (like Mongols) and would be denied a dock, but this way they could nevertheless mass a huge naval force very quickly and also fight for supremacy on water.
With land battles there is a really interesting and balanced interaction between army numbers, mobility/speed, upgrades, ability to micro, and unit type/bonuses. Currently with naval battles I feel like it somehow mostly comes down to army numbers.
I think if they did this + added a second dock building ie a Naval Dock would help add some more interesting dynamics to water battles. Just right now as you’ve pointed out you just kinda spam a unit that all cost the same out of the same building.
Imagine if land units all also came out of the town center and also all cost they same resources - basically how water in AoE2 is right now (and has always been)
Wouldn't you just end up being able to predict which kind of ships each civ will likely go for? Cav civs will go food-intensive ships because that's the eco they have, for example?
Yes, but I think this could add more to the game if they end up doing something unexpected.
But I feel as though it will just put whichever civ who gets countered by their "natural ship" always at a disadvantage...
I see this as a potential flaw too, but at the same time trying to predict what kind of ship your opponent's civ will go for is already requiring more strategic thinking than current water meta. How is anticipating that someone with a cav civ might go food-intensive ships on a water map, putting them at any more of a disadvantage than anticipating they might go cav on a land map? The competitive scene of land games already hinges on these kind of decisions, civ bonuses and mindgames
Okay, let's say galleys are wood-intensive and fire ships are food-intensive. Let's say galleys are absolutely hard-countered by fire ships (even more than now). RIP archer civs on water/hybrid maps. See the problem here?
I'm happy to see some serious effort to balance the game, AoE2 has always been lacking that. A large issue with water maps however, is that it's borderline impossible to make a comeback. I think the enforcement of counters help out with that, but I doubt it completely solves it. Perhaps the navy needs some sort of defensive mechanism? A way to turtle up, fish and build up a navy behind it? Faster transports would be good too imo.
One change I'd like to see is a unique demoship that looks like a fire galley or regular galley at first glance but not not upon closer inspection, this could be a way to make a unit's appearance something that actually affect's gameplay rather than something for flavor as you'd need to be able to recognize the difference before its too late
Not crazy about RPS balance being that heavy handed. Big fan of the resource cost changes though, that will have interesting cascading effects on the rest of the game. Increasing the available ships in feudal is a big plus, but I think they need to go one step further and start looking at water combat mechanics beyond AoE2 ship type copy/paste. I was sort of hoping, after seeing the changes to stone walls, that ships would be able to garrison archers to add missile attacks, or something along those lines. Might be too ambitious a change, though.
One factor to consider with this change is that if you make it harder to switch what naval unit you are going for (by forcing an eco transition) you are delaying the time in which each player can respond to the enemy's army composition - the problem on water is that if you lose control of the coastline, how do you re-dock to actually make your new navy? I love this idea in theory, but I don't think it necessarily solves the main issue of naval battles snowballing. I'm always open to new ways to make the game better though, so if it works in 4 then 2 should definitely think about shaking up the stale water meta.
What about a chain between docks?
Historically accurate and plus would be a limited "seawall"
I kept hearing about naval overhaul in aoe4, but you're the first person I've seen actually cover it lol
aoe2 should definitely wait to make any major changes; let's see how well these changes work
Spirit, this is literally what rise of nations did for water maps...
Its not ground braking or anything lmao... RON is from 2004
I think its worth considering, but I think half of the problem with water maps is that they either go on forever or they are over in feudal age. Often feels like there is no in between. But by changing some resources around it could help allow certain civs, such as malay, to have more options going into late imperial.
But one problem could simply be there are few to no options for boat types. I think every civ in feudal has access to 2 barracks units, 1 cavalry and 2 archery range units. 2 of them are gold units and 3 aren't. This also includes some rock paper scissor mechanics between them. Then when we get to castle most civs are not only able to upgrade most of these, but also gain access to additional units which can include an additional gold unit in the stable and archery range. As well as a unique unit from the castle, monk from monastery and 3 units in siege workshop. So the 5 units in feudal age is expanded to 12 in castle age. And then in imperial age many civs can gain up to 1 more from the archery range, 1 more from siege workshop and 1 from the castle. So up to a total of 15 different units. Now by late imperial not all will be able to be fully upgraded, but they still exist as an option of use throughout the game and depending on age.
Contrast this to water. We have 3 options in feudal. In castle some civs get 1 more option so we have 3(4) choices. In imperial its still 3(4). There is no choice in army and not much for army variation.
If anything there should be maybe more ship options and maybe do a similar thing with land and have some raw power gold unit ships and non gold counter ships. Another option is to make ships and land units more balanced towards each other so that in hybrid maps, where its possible for such units to clash, to have both be possible viable options vs each other. Or design new sea resources to allow for new water map, map designs and play design. Because another problem with water maps is that most of the map is land and most of all the resources are there. And most of that land can be ranged by ships. But what if water maps had less land and less resources on land? Another option would be to make sure every civ has some kind of bonus which directly or indirectly benefits or influences water play. Allow most every civ to have, in theory, water viability.
Personally I think to make water fun it probably needs to be redesigned from the bottom up or be given some degree of flexibility and playability. To some degree a water map is a land map where your land units are useless (unless you land) and you most likely lose if you lose water. And even the process of transporting feels slow and laborious.
I think we mostly lack some big water maps. What we have is basically land maps with some rivers and lakes. That would change style of battles. And maybe bump damage or radius of demolishion ships a bit.
I feel as though that they'd need more ship types to make it even remotely worth it, even if they did have that sorta ship balance from AOE4. 3 main battle ships with a few civs having 4 (5 if they're really lucky with the Unique Units +Cannon Galleons) would definitely be nice to have in that balance, but compared to Land where you have like 5-7 different unit types specifically (infantry, archer, cavalry, camel, elephant, unique, monk) and in some of those branches: there's a trash variant mixed with the other styles: i do worry that Naval battles will still devolve to become boring and still lead to Map Dodging (even if you try and remedy it with penalties: I still really don't think it's gonna work unless the penalty straight up *terminates* your ELO, but then you're setting it up for new players to get rofl-stomped and no one's gonna be happy then).
I imagine most of the ideas of ships that could be used would probably flop, but it'd be kinda cool to see them around. I did enjoy seeing Galleys with arrows, so maybe if there was a variant like the Viking Longboat where it shot multiple arrows natively, that'd be nice, and if you got Chemistry, like the Bombard Galleons of ye olde days of AOE2: you research this and it converts a ship that was like a Viking Longboat with the multiple arrows into effectively Naval Organ Guns that shot with it's Broadside instead. And if it had the kinda micro skill that in AOE3 had with it's cannons (AOE3 has kinda okay navy battles, even if the ships effectively all shot the same thing and were only different because size, health and expendature, as well as it's role in battle), where that particular ship can have a "pull all stops" ability where it fired literally all of it's shots in one volley instead of shooting in kinda a rhythm like the Longboats, firing as a straight up shotgun rather than a kinda medieval gatling gun? could be called "grapeshot" or something.
Regional ship units would diversify civs so much in water though
What do people think of the idea of being able to construct a flotilla on water maps? Like the equivalent to a castle drop. For use defending fish nodes or trade cog routes, but also to drop by the enemy docks.
A problem is that there is just not enough. Only three types of ships makes it mono dimensional, add that one of those counters is a self destruct unit that leaves no map presence is not gonna help. Especially if you are trying to do different economy focuses. Also end of the day is that with that triangle every one is going to fight near identically on the water. It is a very small subset modified by bonuses and becomes worse as the game goes on and missing upgrades becomes apparent. There is going to become one sole way to put things together pretty quickly and then it is an execution race.
I'd be for trying it if it works out :) It might make spectating more interesting to have more map variety
Maybe we could get T90s idea with a eco and military dock!
Dock for Dark age with fishing ships, transport, feudal with trade ships and water tower ships in feudal, heavy trade(half speed but triple cargo) in castle and upgrades through all ages.
Military harbor with galley, fireship, demos etc… maybe ram ships as anti building…
AoE IV is looking really good and fun. I'm loving it.
i would like more different ship types, just having more variation would be cool.
maybe a ship that can board another ship? like a watermonk?
or a ship with lots of broadside cannons, that has an area attack with a long reload time, similar to a mangonel? (in early ages it could actually be a mangonelship.
Big discussion topic, I love it, and I'm gonna throw in StarCraft2 and even Advanced Wars so we can also talk about air, which is similar to water but not exactly.
Touched upon in the video, I think the key problem is amount of interactivity, from a military and from an economic perspective.
Economic:
Land units are usually the most diverse bunch, with the highest selection as well as the most diverse costs. All ships are wood and gold, and usually cost more than land or air of different resources. Air units usually cost the same resources as land units, or are of a comparable cost of different resources. A ship economy is more "all in" and is more dependent on binary factors, like does the civ have a water or eco bonus or not, and little is left up to player choice to "outplay" the opponent. We could switch around the costs, but honestly I think they're fine due to the success of hybrid maps. As far as water based economy goes, you got fish and fishing ships. I think both AOE3 and AOM have more satisfying water economies. In AOM fish patches are much more limited, but they are infinite. Set your fishers and forget, and you can garrison in docks (which fire arrows like TCs) if you get attacked. In AOE3 the ocean holds both food and coin, so you can reliably base your whole economy in the sea while still being effective on land. If I remember the meta, Portuguese White Fleet card on the New England map is legendary.
Military:
Here's the kicker, ships can't go on land, duh, but all the important stuff is on land. The most you can do is destroy enemy docks, fish traps, and occasionally raid the shore. This is the fundamental difference between air and sea, air units are always superior because they can travel over any terrain, and more importantly can actually attack key structures. I think this is why hybrid maps are much more popular than pure water maps, it's still worth fighting over water but if you lose the water you don't lose the match. When it comes to fighting, ships generally have much higher stats than land units, but they usually don't have enough range to actually fight land units. I'd like to highlight the map City of Lakes, that map quickly becomes a mess and is frustrating to play because ships are so superior, but you have to lake hop often. This is similar to a problem that air units have in SC2 and Advance Wars, only a limited number of land units can attack air, so most battles come down to the presence of anti-air. In SC2 the land/air interaction is fairly balanced, with all civs having multiple options, and are rarely "ganked" by a surprise air force. Banshee raiding is quite effective, but short term. In Advance Wars, just build an anti-air and you're set. While this binary problem is similar to the ship problem, air can cover more terrain, so players aren't as affected by it.
Suggestions:
1. The addition of more ocean resources. Gold from whaling is quite historically accurate for a lot of civs, and sea trade is the major form of commerce throughout most of the world.
2. Increased water options to click on. Garrison ships in docks. All ships can garrison some units (like the viking longship can), but there's still a place for transports. The option to build water structures. In some campaigns and in the scenario editor we have sea towers, walls, and gates.
3. Largely diversified fleet options. Let's get a trash combat ship that only costs wood. Hello canoes and slips. Catapults were often rigged to ships because they could be bigger than on land. Let's bring back boarding ships, perhaps they could be the new offensive transports. In AOE3 Galleons are a ship class that can train barracks/stable units when anchored at shore. In Advance Wars Battleships are horribly overpriced, but actually have the range and damage to threaten most land units.
4. Expanded sea terrain, let's get shallows that big ships can't go through, really deep water that small ships can't go through. The wetland terrain type that allows land, buildings, and ships to go on was a great improvement.
5. The ability for small ships to pack/unpack and be carried over land.
I think introducing more water resources would make it more popular. Right now it is only food but imagine if you could for an example mine gold on water (let's say there is an expensive trout or something).
A lot of land maps replayability also comes from unit and tech differences. I do believe if there were more ship variants it would also help. Land maps have around 20 different units you can create. Water based units are 3 or 4 if you play Vikings or any civ with special ship.
I think it'd be one or the other
take land for example: transitioning your tech costs a lot, so you often don't want to do so
but at the same time, knights and crossbows are somewhat balanced towards eachother, 1v1 the crossbow lose but they mass significantly easier(both in resources and in creation time) and can win battles using that to their advantage
if you make one hard counter while also having them all cost significantly different, it becomes an actual RPS, rather than a system based on that. Meaning if I chose rock and you chose paper, you win the match because it'll just take too long for me to resetup my eco to actually be able to deal with your unit.
I remember that T90 once said something to the effect of "if you're on the losing side you don't tech switch, you gotta get the advantage with the comp you chose. the person who's winning can actually slow down the pressure in order to do a tech switch"
I actually like that ships in aoe2 aren't hard counters towards each other. I prefer more "tactical" counters than hard stat based counters generally.
I think another factor that holds back water maps is the lack of resources and buildings for water tiles, making any naval development a *SUNK COST* that can never impact the enemy's base or economy (unless they build all of their TCs right next to the water). Plus at least from my experience, when the person you're fighting controls the water it's just a matter of skirting your army further inland, rather than it leaving any significant impact on the match. Unless you're both on Islands, in which case it's an annoying matter of building Transport and dealing with the balance between Transport capacity and population limit, and then dealing with the transport awful unloading-pathfinding.
IDT I've ever seen a game make transporting people across different terrain types fun? The only way I can think to lighten this issue would be to make Trade and Transport ships the same unit, just with two different roles depending on the situation.
Not only the points you mentioned, but also having different naval techs across most civs makes each one of those both viable and interesting to play. A big plus in my book!
you could argue that fireships have large cettles with greek fire on board as ammunition for the "gun" making it weak to explosives ... you could increase the demoships lowest damage explosion radius but grant it a buff like 200 or something to fireships , making it blast whole groups of it
I think a "triangle" (rock paper scissor) is too little for a really fun and varied experience, especially when you compare it to the land combat, it would be interesting to see a 5 point cycle instead (so 2 more ship types)
All the ship stat and resource balance are a band aid. The issue with water is how easily fishing ships and fish farms are punished if you lose the water military fight even once. The fix is to make a "town center" dock that fishing ships can garrison in and fire arrows out of, a la town centers. Add a stone cost to the "town center" dock and perhaps lower fishing ship wood cost to compensate, and then add a separate military dock.
Idk, maybe there is some changes that could be considered, but 4 and 2 have different philosophies with 4 embracing a much harder counter system than 2. Its the same on land. sure cav counters archers, but depends on how much archers you have and upgrades, same with spears. It creates different opportunities and decision making, not good or bad just different. I like both systems. In 4 it can be easier to claw back from behind bc the hard counter system can let you recover from some bad fights if you transition properly. In 2 an army lead can be much more difficult to overcome from unit comp alone if you are behind. So the devil is in the details, and def open for tweaks.
I wish you could garrison units in galleys and fire ships and have a melee battle between two or more ships. That would actually make water interesting to me.
Maybe the demolition ship should just be a relatively cheap ship that can deal lots of damage against any other ship type if it manages to actually hit it without being destroyed first. Great for defending your dock or ambushing enemy ships, or as a diversion to divert fire from your main army. And the springauld / ballista ship can then take it's place in the rock-paper-scissors of AOE 2 ship battles.
Would also be nice to get ram ships for some civs to use instead of demo ships. Sturdier, but can only destroy one ship at a time while taking some damage but not being fully destroyed itself?
And if you really want water battles to be awesome, have different water depths and some ships can use shallower water to escape or ambush the bigger ships. Vikings and maybe Burgundians can be especially good at that, whereas Korean Turtle Ships are good at deep water but can't go on shallow water for instance. And cannon ships also can't enter shallow water, so you can have maps with water closer to bases without letting cannon galleons too close
Big deep water ships could also have a slightly smaller scouting radius (but faster movement speed) to encourage naval ambushes with smaller ships
For a long time, AoE has been missing a monk ship (PRIVATEER) that converts enemy ships on contact. It can also be used to steal gold from trade cogs.
I’d welcome it. It would be nice to have extra civ bonuses thrown in. Land fights get more interesting due to the massive choices of land bonuses we get. We just don’t see much for sea bonuses. What could be nice is if each civ had a land bonus and sea bonus. However I don’t now how well that would work in with historic accuracy lol. Perhaps weak sea strong land vs mid both vs weak land strong sea. Either way, civ sea bonuses will make a huge difference when implemented
id like to see a huskarl-like ship that can easily absorb galleon projectiles. maybe it would be enough though to make fire ships a bit more huskarly, by increasing the armor gained from careening, which currently is a very situational tech
Isn't that just a turtle ship?
That chart is interesting. I'm left wondering why Bogland and Budapest are even lass played than water maps. Also very surprising to me to see Black Forest so low.