No fighting in dark and fuedal age isnt the games fault… that’s your choice to not apply pressure.
If you don’t like seige wars (I get it, I don’t either) play the tactics that prevents the opponent saving up the resources for ageing up and fight in dark or fuedal age
I have not seen a wonder victory in the last 20 or 30 team games I’ve played (probably more… I can’t remember the last time I even saw a wonder or sacred site victory lol). Couldn’t look up your name and find your ELO but I’m guessing it must be pretty low?
No fighting in dark and fuedal age isnt the games fault… that’s your choice to not apply pressure.
Thats kind of situational sometimes spending resourses for this will put you behind.
If you don’t like seige wars (I get it, I don’t either) play the tactics that prevents the opponent saving up the resources for ageing up and fight in dark or fuedal age
Rhetorical question; How do you counter pro scouts and 8 minute Rus FC’s? Or a Mongol player that uses underpriced towers with spearmen support and then arrow slits forcing you to relocate vills that then goes fast castle behind this?
The tactics you put forward arn’t really a “fix” for siege. Siege itself is not necessarily OP because you can counter it with your own siege but that is not the point. No one wants wooden tanks, they want epic infantry, knight archer fights. Its all overshadowed by siege.
120/80 It’s too much, first I would change to 40 wood for 40 gold and fix the ROF bug, with that and with nerfing professional explorers in general, we can look into the future.
Of course, I understand your message and I largely agree.
Dude, you can translate it if you want. It is better not to write anything before saying nonsensical things.
Hard disagree, also Yellowaoe is right. Just watch any number of youtube videos of pro players playing on the recent patch.
Pro players complaining about siege as well, there are a thread opened by nanracingcat which is in top, 100 to talk about this specific point, pro player are agree than Mongol are total broken (there are a sort of agreement between them to not play the civ in the ladder right now), and pro player are agree than pro scout is too strong.
That plus all bug from everywhere, the next big upd will decide the futur of aoe4 i think. I wont play an other 3 month of the current statment of the game, that for sure.
I would like to see magonels have the same impact on the game as in aoe2, with friendly fire. I would like to see bombards being a little more expensive. I would like all ranged weapons to miss sometimes when shot.
However it still stands that fighting in dark or feudal is possible and done often at high levels and is always an option for you. And of course it is risky to some extent, as is every other strategy.
Fire Lancer: Press C to spread melee units and hold position. If you A+move, the units will clump up again.
Horse archers: basic archers out-damage them. They got the mobility going for them, but a critical mass of archers out dps horse archers. For one, a single unit of archer takes less tile space than horse archers, meaning more archers can shoot at things per square meter or map.
Team games are for fun, not balanced gameplay imo. No RTS in history is properly based around team battles.
Remember also that this game had e-sports in mind, meaning that certain civs might outperform at lower levels since the game is intended to be balanced around higher level of play (this is not to say that game is perfectly balanced, but it is playable… except Delhi).
Remember further that the game gives you the choice to choose civs after the map reveal. This is because some civs are better at some maps.
But HC can out run and out position your archer and they deal pretty well vs knigh, plus scout tank for absolutly no cost. It’s not like there are a consensus arround this unit and Rus overall.
Stats said at hight level (1400 elo+, it’s not litterraly hight level but we have nothing better) mongol have 62% winrate and Rus 55%. Against those 2 civ, it’s not playable, and both of them have more than 20% pick rate. So 40-45% of the time you will play againt Rus or mongol in 1v1. Not that great in term of balance perspective.
And i am not talking about shit maps and bug from everywhere. In the current stat, the amount of players is based on the hype and the game potentiel.
I don’t know how game coding work, so i wont judge devs but from a gamer point of view, in first state of an unfinished game, you need one update each 2 week at least.
So good, that aoe2 pros continued streaming aoe2. With some showmatches.
Secondly, TheViper wrote an article with 50+ suggestions how to change balance.
They just dont come to the forum, but wait or go directly to the devs.
But u can make any conclusion on their behalf.
It’s not on console.
Welcome to Lelic Entertainment. Enjoy your stay in the world of out of touch game development and terribly mismanaged projects.
The only game that was somewhat maintained after release was Company of Heroes 2 (mostly thanks to the community patches). Others were left in a more or less OK state, with Dawn of War 3 being their prime example of being completely out of touch with real world.
This game needed at least few months of public beta access without all the stupid secrecy for a game that should have been released without all the ridiculous bugs (that are yet to be fixed since closed beta/stress test) and maintained properly by a dedicated developer. The best course would be to take the game game from Relic and give it to a company like Forgotten Empires.
Maintaining an already released product is not what they excel at and I this is clearly hasn’t changed with AoE4. Even WC3 Reforged got more frequent updates with all the 2-3 interns working on it.
Rus and Mongols alone have around 2/3 pickrate in top 250 rn.
Check the egctv youtube channel.
Nearly 2 months ago the “winner stays on” series launched.
Ever since mongols got picked 13 times and won 11 of them (mongols vs mongols excluded here).
It was always the same:
Marinelord picking mongols = win, oponent picks mongols marinelord loses.
Hera picking mongols = win, oponent picks mongols hera loses.
Vortix picking mongols = win, oponent picks mongols vortix loses.
Hera made a jester type video how to become rank 1 with the simple introduction “I know it might be hard for you but just pick mongols”.
Ptitdrogo, in his interview after winning the castle cup with PiG as a teammate, was asked if he finally became more confident with french/chinese cause his ELO finally improved alot and his respons was:
“What? No? Are you kidding me, I just started to pick mongols again”.
Viper had a huge balance list for them to experiment with after the first tourney, and basically only the springald got touched so far.
It literally has dead landmarks as the abbey of kings that just don’t get touched since april (closed beta) for whatever reason.
And the fact that they don’t even seem to try to improve the situation, paired with some questionable changes like horsemen nerfs, it makes them just look uninterested and unengaged with their own community and game.
Heck they didn’t even unlock the Age Insiders profilepictures yet even tho pre launch it was announced that it’s beeing handed out at release date…
The game is really simple with basically no comeback mechanics due to a lack of micro potential with caster units/high impact units, and the most basic eco bonuses are just not balanced across the board which makes the civs feel really really really uneven.
You might’ve noticed it with the effect of only having 2-3 civs viable per map.
Some civs have a useful water game, some don’t.
Some have an eco boost, some don’t.
They should work on evening out these civ specific traits so no matter what happens, the civs have these bonuses to fall back onto and be useful.
Mongols and rus for example have eco boosts since minute 0 with increadible speedups by getting flat ressources into the bank (no houses, cheaper towers, double recruitment, gold for hunt), while other civs start to get a noticeable eco boost at minute 20 (french woth cheaper eco upgrades + slightly faster vil production, english with gathering boost on farms).
This is a conceptional issue, since the game is still majorily symmetrical when it comes to the general civ layout beside the economy boosts, meaning some civs are just more forgiving and enter the game with much more steam than others, which puts you automatically behind by multiple minutes without the influence of your own, no matter how good you play.
It makes the game feel to the core unfair, frustrating and on rails since this forces you into a predefined route of what to do to be able to have a slight winchance (english have to deal dmg with longbows or they’re behind, french have to get some knightraid done or they’re behind, abbasids have to play fast expand with foodstocks or they are behind) without diviation or room of creativity while other civs like rus or mongols are way more open since their unique civ bonuses create a gameplan they can actually fall back on.
Meaning it’s basically impossible to stop the general gameplan they have, while it’s quite easy for them to be opressive to the others.
The balance devs on twitch even said “we want every civ and every unit to be viable on any map and any time in the game”.
They just seem to marketingtalk to players that are not that deep into it without a will to notice some fundamental issues.
Their actions don’t back this sentiment up, since they become quite known for leaving the game broken for 1+ month before even trying to touch anything.
All these things just make this game look really abandoned/low priority.
Many of the issues that you raised are valid but I’m just repeating myself that it’s completely normal for an extremely complex RTS game in it’s first months after launch. It’s happened in all Age of games when they were launched.
When Age of Mythology was launched, out of the 12 gods available, literally every pro played Set, even though it was only slightly better than the other gods (AoM is an extremely well balanced game). A coincidence: just like Mongols and Rus now, Set in Age of Mythology was the God that required by far the most microintensive and creative playstyle and I think it’s pretty fair that the effort to play such civilizations are rewarded with a slightly higher chance to win.
Then Set was nerfed and 99% percent of pros played Isis, Oranos and Thor for the next 10 years or so. Again, even if they were only slightly better than the other gods. The top players will always be biased towards the civilizations that yield the highest chances of winning.
Age of Empires 2: Huns. I don’t need to say more than that.
The civilizations in Age of Empires 4 seem much more customized than even those of Age of Mythology (and probably 100x more customized than those of Age of Empires 2), and it’s gonna take a while until we get a better idea on how to react to certain strategies. Like you mentioned, it took a few weeks of learning to react and a small nerf to kick France from the S tier list. Same thing might happen with Rus/Mongols and it’s probably wise to not take decisions in the heat of outraged people. As you can see in this very thread, there are people who really have the impression that this game is all about siege,
Huns were the most fun to play.
But strats to beat them exits: storm rush, Byzantines could do skirms rush, teutos loved to tower rush, aztecs/brits/vikings - existed as they do now.
Just checked stats from old forum: 154Aztecs 84Teutons 75Britons 75Vikings 73Spanish 72Persians 72Chinese 67Japanese 64Mayans etc
Pickrate is x2 in comparison to avg rate, but in general situation not “critical” as now. Not even close to 20% pickrate.
In good old days u could choose to play hun mirrors or not.
As i provided stats, even on arabia you had options: aztecs/mongols(!)/brits etc. civs were playable.
Just to explicit something that was already said : the issue is not that siege is strong in itself, the issue is the siege superiority phenomenon. Once you have a critical mass, your enemy has to fall back until he is maxed out with siege. There needs to be a non-siege counter to siege that is relatively easy to mass. My experience is that it’s relatively balanced until imperial…than the bombard durby begins…
I like your optimism and some ppl will be fine when just the civ matchups are more balanced. But the game has quite a lot of balancing issues, way more than ppl now seem to see.
Water? Unbalanced
Siege, just need a big rework imo and also not balanced
Units? A lot of them dont work as intended and are too strong or too weak
Civs? Nope
The civ themself? Landmarks, technologies? Units? Does all feel similar viable? NOPE
Civs on certain maps? Again no …
Pick just one element and it would be ■■■■■■ to not have it balanced … But the number of things that are not balanced and to which degree, let you doubt it will be all good in the near future.
To the originial post, for me cavalry should be the hardcounter to siege not siege
Good suggestions!
Archers and rams push are definitely effective, especially at my low elo since most people try to FC and rush to Castle/Imp…it’s easier in 1v1, but it can work in TG with good communication between players.
That said, I find early agression more of a gamble than in AoE2. You either win the game or you are super far behind. I think it’s in part because defense is easier early game, resources gather more quickly and low tier units don’t transfer as effectively (since archers and xbows are 2 different lines of units for instance).
I don’t think anyone here is saying the game doesn’t require work (especially to late game siege) to be viable, but in the meantime there are ways to adapt your playstyle…or don’t, I’m not gonna tell you what to do with your life!
Going back to AoE3 and EU4.
Coming here to check again in 6-9 months, to see if siege, Delhi, Mongols, FL and HA been fixed at the very least.