The line about being good against ranged soldiers is the current version. It’s also got mistakes in it. Those typos are copied from what’s actually in the game.
You have spread out formation for these very reasons, and regardless of the nerf there is still the escape radius, additionally as long as you have your economy together, you can pump out the dead troops near instant. I still dont agree but good points for a competitive perspective.
Spread formation works wonders for things like Uranos archaic god power. For implode not so much. Yes, theres and escape radius on implode, and heres where skill becomes a thing, its not just clicking it anywhere at anytime. But its also nothing impossible to set up, anything near the center will not escape, specially non calv units, if u garrison, it will take them out of the buildings, spread formation will not do much and that much we have seen.
About the economy thing, im sure in casual games you are pilling on resources and have buildings and army to spare. It isnt the case in more competitive ones, clashes happen faster and more often, you dont flood resources, you try to spend as quick as possible, since otherwise you are wasting potential army, eco upgrades or aging up, and loosing a full army to a god power with no real counterplay is devastating. Lets say you have 20 hoplites 20 toxotes, thats over 4500 resources gone to a single click. Theres not coming back from that when the game hasent reached the point where you just have buildings and resources to spare.
Also, having a good economy means nothing when your opponent has a full army melting down your base and your army is now gone.
Its always good to see a casual´s viewpoint since hey, they are not only the mayority of players but the backbone of the game, but sometimes things are done for reasons they dont really feel the burden off since at their level it isnt something that is exploited or noticeble. Im not at the level of playing tournaments, and i also didnt see how broken somethings could be, like the heroes for example.
Im sure bellerophon (the weakest of this 3) or Nezha or john wick arent strong if you just send them to the enemy army to dive in head first, but with good micro and attention they really do havoc on your opponent. A unit that costs barely more than a colossus shouldnt wipe 20-30 archer armies as fast as a titan, specially because you can just rebuild it if it dies, an it pays many times over.
Im always open to try a skirmish or sth to show this kind of scenarios. Its not a matter of who wins since its irrelevant, just showing how different games can be played.
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Huh?
Their multiplier against Archers is 1.5
One of the issues with old Implode was that it was better when your opponent tried to escape, as it stayed active for longer and thus dealt more damage.
Yeah that was my bad. For some reason I thought they were missing a multiplier.
This update finally fixed the issue with deity portraits defaulting to the new ones over the legacy ones whenever I started up the game again so I am very happy about that.
Making AoM Retold the next Starcraft won’t work. Balancing the game to be “fair” like Starcraft multiplayer will destroy the core of the game. I don’t understand the drive to make every Age of game into a heavily competitive multiplayer scene. This is not what made Age of Games popular in the past, but you can prove me wrong. I also buried AoE4 for being a bad modern interpretation of AoE2, after I played the open beta, and it is still around and even gets more players these days.
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Been busy with work and finals this week. If your free tomorrow we can do a skirmish if you still want to prove your points
Sure, hit me up when you are online we can do that
Regarding the “overbalancing” thing. My opinion is that small numerical buffs or nerfs arent really gonna disrupt the game for a casual player. On the other hand abusive strategies will reach down all levels of play, it will just take longer as elo also goes lower but it will happen, specially if they are easy to pull off. If its some 300 apm opening or strategy then sure that will never affect most of the player base, but lets be serious, clicking the screen twice (one to select the god power and one to use it) and winning the game on the spot isnt really “good gameplay” Im sure its fun versus AI opponents but being on the recieving end not so much.
Creating 3 myth units (azure dragon) disabling the auto special, pressing q and clicking 3 times to wipe most units in that area isnt also “top level play”. While i do agree games shouldnt disregard the casual aspect of a game, its also important to adress the multiplayer aspect of it.
Also dont think is good to say “This is not what made Age of Games popular in the past”. We are not in the same age as when those games came along. Now gaming took a turn where people look for the “best strat”, “top civ tierlist” and will use and abuse (if they can) what they find. Its not like in the more classic era of RTS that strategies took longer to be known and implemented. Something abusive pops up and people dive head first to sploit it. Take loki myth unit bug, a lot of people began spamming loki on anything but custom games. We have an example of what happens to Age of Mythology when developers just leave things be. We got that on Extended Edition.
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Ok add me on social. Same name as here. I have a valkeryie as my profile picture
where community pin up event?
The community event for week 1 is underway now. I completed the goals in a single game. I assume you don’t get the profile rewards until the event is over with the goal achieved because it didn’t unlock the Ares Profile Icon as seen below
hopefully that isn’t a bug because in AoE IV I haven’t been getting rewards for events there and would hate for the same to happen with AoMR.
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It isn’t that fun to log onto ranked multiplayer and almost exclusively face Norse every game. That is why game balance is needed. At my ELO I still never see Egypt (so I end up picking it a lot myself for that reason), but at least every game is no longer vs. Norse like it was before the patch (Although they still are showing up too much). That is a great accomplishment and does make the game a lot more fun.
To be perfectly honest, the units seem dumber now and more likely to get stuck, stop randomly, not obey commands (this seems to be an isse since EE).
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Like you telling 10 villagers to build farms with ctrl+click, and when you come back to check, 3 of them are standing still and 3 farms are empty.
Or when you send 12 villagers to build a warehouse next to the gold mine but 9 of them take a 5x longer trip to gather wood.
God powers are an important part of the game, particularly the age 4 powers. If you make them weak, the game will lose the feeling “of a divine intervention”. You don’t like something which is a core part of the game. It is not like the Titans, which were added with an expansion. Balancing needs to respect the core game, or it will remove these parts. Many players also play against AI and this should not be ignored.
In the past, RTS games were played for their story-driven kampagnes and the freedom of choice you had. How are you building your base and army and the different ways to complete your mission goals. Balancing was not more important than that.
In Starcraft 2, which was fairly well-balanced with even mirror maps, you had a clear meta how to play the game. You think because something is well-balanced, it will never become stall?
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Its not a matter of macking them weak, its making them fair. God powers and myth units are a core aspect of the game, and i love them and in no way im advocating them to be removed (just go play age of empires if you feel that way).
But giving the idea they are above tunning is just not the case. Earthqueake being “defendable” (Keeping your tc alive) if you have upgrades (fortified tc, arquitechs) while Blazing Prairie destroying citadels (before nerf) with full fortified and arquitects while also destroying farms and hitting human units doesnt seem fair. And you can take that from a chinese main. Fei beast destroying an entire army or 30 vills in a matter of seconds while locust just damages them is also quite unfair. This doesnt mean all civs should have the same “template” god power, but they should be somewhat similar in power. Specially if they are game ending.
You can have your opion that god powers shouldnt have a ceiling in power scaling. But imo and from what ihave seen, other players as well; winning/loosing a game beacuse of 2 clicks isnt really good gameplay. God powers were meant to cause and advantage to then play for a win, not to be the win by itself, specially if theres no counterplay. You can garrison units from lighting storm or tornado. Try that with implode and see what happens. Some gods where viable only because a mythic age god power while others unviable because of their weak GP.
I fully agree with you that hte casual player base shouldnt be ignore. However i stand by that number tunning does not cause much issue in those scenarios.
All RTS games have story driven narratives in the campaigns which is what catches peoples attention, but thats not what keeps them. The replayability mostly comes from either multiplayer (be it ranked or lobby and custom games) or skirmishes vs AI (which i do advocate should get new toys to play).
The campaign shoould work on a different “balance patch” as all else. Some levels become either a joke or really hard when some tunning chances are made and it shouldnt take away from the good campaign AOM has. As for the other aspects. Wanna keep you unbalance stuff to just cleave through AI? You should be able enable blessings (which i wonder why they arent a thing) theres also cheat codes, theres handicap you can place, extra resources and so much more. You can customize the gameplay difficulty you wanna have with AI so tunning is less of an issue in that aspect. Wanna villager rush your AI opponent? go for only infantry? How about only towers? Maybe just myth untis? Sure have a go at it. Its for sure fun theres so much variesty you can try in casual games. But you shouldnt be able to do that as succesfulyl vs other players. Macking just 1 unit type and winning because its that strong. Imagine a campaign level where you always loose, doesnt matter what you try, the civ/god you like to play will not beat the level beacuse the opponent´s units/ god powers simply wont allow you to (with similar skill level in mind, otherwise it becomes a “get good” solution). How fun would that be?
You talk about “freedom of choice” but fail to see that when something is so much stronger than its counterpart, part of that “choice” is taken from you (in anything competitive wise). You either pick the minor god that has the game winning god power (take atlas for example with implode) or go with the other minor god that you may like more because of flavor, the gameplay it enables or just plain cool factor (helios or hecate) but picking them will put you in a big disadvantage compared if you just went with the meta/correct choice. Balancing tries to make both things feel similarly strong and actually giving you a choice (if you want to win that is).
You keep referring to an age we are not in. We are not the same playerbase, the gaming culture isnt the same. Games dont work the same way either and gaming culture as a whole isnt going back.
You may have the wrong idea of balance, its not that seeking balance will keep things from getting stale. Its the constant ups and downs that shift the meta that keep the game fresh. People find new strategies, build orders, optimizations and with that meta shifts. Sometimes people discover new things that havent had a balance change in several patches but where simply ignored due to something else being stronger.
The dev team is in no way “disrespecting core aspects of the game” with balancing, they are simply tunning things. God powers are still strong, myth units are also strong and worth making and it doesnt seem is their agenda is to make either of them unsuable any time soon.
