Instead of fixed trade routes, I believe that your markets should be able to trade between themselves and moved around based on need. This would be a far better feature than aoe4’s fixed trade routes - let us build our empires with trade both in and outside of it.
Trade within the empire, for example could have a reduced income rate such as a 50% reduction in profits from trading rather than trading with another nation, and you might still trade with allies or opponent marketplaces, but more importantly without any of those available, your empire might still thrive by trading with your own marketplaces.
I find this method to be very good
Ways to nerf forward castles(castle drops) -
Decrease the time it takes to build towers and/or increase attack power and/or arrows per villager garrison.
Buff petards to have x2 dmg against building foundations.
Buff units in general to have x2 attack against buildings foundations, including petards and other siege units such as mangonels.
Monks may convert any building while in foundation stages.
There are likely a few other methods, such as building foundations under attack build at a 50% rate.
Or if a building foundations is under attack villagers building it stop building entirely until the attack stops - just like how when a farm is getting hit, not the villager, the villager simply stops which honestly makes no sense, but given that it’s currently already in the game might as well add it to the list.
And lastly, increase the length of time needed to build a castle.
Feel free to add your own ideas or comment on these.
Trading with your own market is perfectly fine. I don’t think it should be allowed in single player campaign games, since those are designed around having a limited amount of gold.
However, in 1v1 games, it is completely fine. However, I think some adjustments will have to be made. This amount should be low enough to not change the nature of the game too much, but not so low as to make any trading completely useless. This might be 50% of the current trade amount, 33%, 25%, or something else.
I think that this is also a good change because it will prevent the end game trash wars where the game is purely decided based on if you got the relics or not. This will reward having map control, and it is still an interesting process.
Also, this mechanic is already present in Age of Mythology and there aren’t any huge issues with it.
All that being said, I think this will also have to come with some changes to the light cavalry line. Hussars are already the top raiding unit and have a huge advantage in that area over civs that do not have a great scout line. With this change, that would be even more severe, as your trade route will span a large area and will be extremely vulnerable to hussar raids. Trade carts will need additional armour against hussars, or even allow halbs to garrison inside to counter them.
how to make sure every game plays out like the map “Glacial Lake”.
I dislike forward Castles more than anyone, being myself a defensive/boomy player who also hates the race to Imp to get Trebs out as a very limiting part of the game.
But forward Castles have their place in the game. They serve to force the issue in a way that Mangonels or Castle Age units cannot do. Not to mention vs civs with Redemption basically it’s impossible to maintain the aggro once Redemption kicks in so again, forward Castles serve a good purpose in the game. The 650 stone price (huge price) is the balancing factor in the forward position, you generally can’t forward castle in early Castle Age (unless you do an all-in strat which on Arabia isn’t very viable) and in late Castle if you are PURE booming without scouting you should always assume your opponent went to stone at some point and it’s a matter of “when” not “if” the forward Castle is coming.
this would make it so that dropping the Castle is risky and would reward a lucky target ground with a Mangonel, if anything. Don’t see this as a source of skill, if anything it would create frustration due to the largely random nature of the interaction of whether a Mangonel is in the area to kill the Castle in time or not.
by extension I assume repairing buildings being damaged wouldn’t work, either. What would be the point of playing an Archer civ then, every game would be Knights vs Knights trying to get into each other’s base to kill vills. Base trades are frustrating and not interactive because it’s largely random who comes out ahead.
Self trading is not a thing under the current mechanics.
When you are trading with other people, the carts always receive gold from their markets and deliver it to your own markets.
We will see whats wrong when self trading is implemented.
You have 2 markets, let me call them market A , market B.
You are making 10 carts at each of your market , and send them to the other for gold.
Market A is under attack, you deleted it and all 20 carts are recalled to market B.
The 10 carts which were made at market B, received gold at market A, can unload their gold to market B.
What about 10 carts which were made from market A ? They are supposed to receive gold at market B and unload it to market A which was deleted already, so they can never unload the gold at market B.
You need to build another market to unload the gold, The new market is called Market C.
Once they unloaded their gold at Market C, they can’t receive gold at Market C anymore, they can only receive gold at somewhere else. However, these 10 carts are not made at market C, they are supposed to be able to receive gold at market C. It pretty much messed up here. Not to mention people usually build many markets on each side.
No, the carts can’t drop off gold at the market where they picked up gold, they can’t pick up gold at the market where they dropped off gold either. There have to be an option that will let you throw away gold. In the current game, there isn’t a similar option, even villages can’t just throw away resources on purpose
It would work the same way it does with ally markets and your markets taking the two furthest markets into account and if you shift to a closer market the carts will either zero out and restart their loads with the newly selected market if you have another market available to trade to or it’ll simply trade at a lower rate or zero based on distance of the original market. If you’re picking up gold at market a and dropping off at market b but after picking up and market a market gets destroyed you may still drop off at market b, or in contrast if both market a and b get destroyed you might still drop off the gold but only at a further or same distance market either as far or farther than market b in distance from the original market a if a new market is placed closer than the drop off then the cargo will need to either be scaled down considerably or be zeroed out for the sake of a new trade route, or if further than perhaps scaled up or left the same. There’s definitely allot of factors to take into account, and my understanding of it certainly isn’t perfect, but it should work well if it works similar to the current system.
I don’t see why not. There are data mods for all sorts of things. Now, it might really be difficult because of some issue with the game engine, but you have to be a developer to know that. There is also a fairly easy way to work around this, which I’ll explain below.
There is a building called trade workshop which was initially planned, and then discarded. It’s still present in some campaigns and as an in-game building. Just make it so that you generate gold when you trade between a trade workshop and a market. Also allow all civs to build this building, but make it somewhat expensive (make it cost like 100-200 stone, in addition to gold/wood).
When you are playing campaigns, this building should be disabled. Now you can’t generate gold in that game mode, and you don’t destroy the balance.
Or, like in the Age of Mythology, make it so that you generate gold when you trade between a TC and a market.
All of these are technicalities that the devs will be able to find workarounds for. I think that the general question is the more important one. And that is, should there be a way to generate gold by trading with yourself? How it is done comes later.
There is absolutely no reason to nerf forward castle drops as that’s already a very risky endeavor but even you were to do this your suggestions wouldn’t contribute to that.
That’s more of a trush buff than anything.
That’s actually more of a buff for the aggressor. They can plan ahead and usually have less eco investment back home. In fact a forward castle oftentimes happens as a reaction to one player who just went 3 tc without having much military. If you didn’t invest into a lot of eco it’s usually way easier to produce petards.
Same thing basically. With that change you could just go for a lot of monks and if your opponent makes defensive castle you send all the monks in and chances are one will get the castle converted.
So one vil can wall itself in and single handedly stop a castle? God no. Btw this would be horrible for feudal openings as one scout could just prevent your range or stable from going up. So the player later to feudal has no chance to get their buildings up even if the vil is safe.
That last one was moreso a complaint, I hate that farmers stop farming when the farm is under attack, I’d hate if builders stop building or repairing just the same due to the same.
I think could work with a very low income compared with trading with another player. Like having 3 relics f.e.
Relics don’t mess the game balance, why something like this could do it?
Don’t forget that trading is more risky than ccollect relocs and requiere more investment and even cost you pop space
Because its either going to be useless for how much you invest into trade carts, or good enough to trade, buffing civs like aztecs and vikings in the late game.
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