Balance has literally nothing to do with symmetry. In chess, White has up to a 56% win rate. Does that mean White and Black are asymmetric? In SC2 the last win rates I checked were within 2%. Does that mean the races are symmetric?
This asymmetry debate is just another example why it’s impossible to have good faith discussions in this forum. You have people like TheAchronic who apparently don’t play either game claim AOE2 ‘feels’ more asymmetric for no specific reason (because of a counter triangle? Whatever that means?), make up fake examples to prove a point, and deflect and project when presented with counter-examples. It’s just completely divorced from reality and disingenuous to say Delhi, China, Rus, or HRE feel anything similar to each other.
I was watching Masmorra do one of his interviews, and I can really appreciate that he said (paraphrased) that there wasn’t anything specific about AOE4 he could point to, it just didn’t interest him". For most people still playing it, AoE2 is a comfort blanket. And I get it, sometimes you just can’t be bothered to play/learn a different game and you want to stick with what you know and what’s safe. It’s perfectly fine. But for some reason, cognitive dissonance (or just plain hate, which is sadder) causes some other people to have nothing better to do than still frequent a game forum 1.5 years after release, still having never played the game and making up reasons to justify holding on to their comfort blanket because they’re worried that otherwise it will be ripped away.
Apart from convenience, I think that the community’s intransigence in not changing anything in the game’s structure, or making it more intuitive, is out of simple selfishness, like not having the number of villagers in each resource for 18 years!, simply so that they don’t someone new comes and beats them… well I think Hera was new and beat them
Tricks like that, is what repels me, that not even the developers know, and they don’t change anything because the community, comfortable and selfish, doesn’t want to see someone who is new beat them, it’s that simple
here it literally says that he felt proud because he discovered a trick that he thought nobody knew, ridiculous! better contribute in the forum to make the game more intuitive, don’t be selfish
Where did I mention balance? I mentioned “symmetry” and “copy paste” and showed by using win rate vs game time that civs have certain moments within a game where they shine and are weaker in other moments which by definition is not symmetric. AoE 2’s not obvious asymetry comes from mainly having the same skin for units among civs which, as I also mentioned, is what many want to be changed. I also don’t like having European looking Swordsmen in my Aztec army.
Oh, I won’t say so, I’d rather think people saying that AoE 4 is a lot more asymmetric than AoE 2 should be aware that this asymmetry comes at the cost of having the same 2-3 game plans with each civ with Rus Hunting Bounty being the most obvious one. But in all fairness, I think unit bonusses and civ unique stuff in AoE 4 tends to be more extreme than in AoE 2 as opposed to what Achronic said, see Delhi.
That’s a good take and I wish more people would think like this for stuff they don’t know much about.
I especially noticed that on the Steam forums as there are 2-3 regular commentators who never touched AoE 4 apart from the Stress Test and think they’re the experts in it and having to “warn” others before buying it. This is just downright sad and you almost feel sorry for such a mindset. Don’t even get me started on AoEZone…
… which still is a minor point as you could literally cycle through mini map modes in old AoE 2 to see that you have x lumberjacks and y miners. This feature is still present in DE:
If not being able to see the resource distribution in the old game is what people try to bring up against AoE 2, it just shows in which spot the game is for over 20 yrs.
My Spanish is rusty but in case that refers to the TC trick - you can ignore and play without it and still be competitive. That’s just the same cherry picking as dodging arrows. And if it keeps new players out, when why do we literally have young players such as Hera who was born a month after AoE 2’s initial release? Or Sebastian2002, Mihai06 who are significantly younger than AoE 2 and still play it after in some cases only picking it up with DE’s release?
Ehm… where did he said that? Viper was just giving out a tip without feeling proud of it. 2 DE added a couple of new things not everyone is aware of and the two 30 tips videos Viper made just came out at the right time. Viper is anything but the definition of a selfish player.
I rather see certain pro players who have set their match history to private because they see their games as their property/content and the average player is supposed to learn from tournaments than from ladder games because they didn’t know it better from their SC background as selfish.
Exactly! The “bug” excuse is getting old. Aoe4 is a totally different game today & a much more stable game considering it’s complexity.
Let’s not forget that having ex-sc2 players coming to the Aoe4 scene probably didn’t make it easy for these Aoe2 pros that are used to a more “slower” paced game.
Doesn’t help much if YouTube only offers Spanish auto generated subtitles for me
As I’ve said - that’s ignorable as you can just order your villagers to attack the deer without garrision them. At the same rate, people who never touched AoE 4 could say certain aspects of the game don’t seem intuitive to them but I don’t want to go into cherry picking here.
To my knowledge the only AoE 2 pro that fully switched over to AoE 4 and now puts AoE 2 back into the mix as well is Kasva. From quickly checking his Liquipedia profile it doesn’t seem like he’s doing too bad over in 4. Viper and Hera also did quite good before they switched back to 2.
Regarding pacing in AoE 2 and 4 - they are much more similar than people may think. Don’t forget that AoE 2 runs at 1.7 speed, so 30 minutes in-game equal ~17:30 minutes real time.
As someone who has 35-40 eAPM in AoE 2, which is average, AoE 4 doesn’t feel slower or faster to me. But that’s just my opinion as a mid elo player and I also play Empire Wars and Deathmatch that are both faster than the regular RM mode.
The big difference between SC and AoE is that (also according to ex SC players) AoE is a lot more strategic and less about mechanical execution.
Firstly, dont say for devs. (they are aware ).
it’s named game DEPTH. Literally useless trick, which can help in 1 out of 10000 games.
But if you play game for months and interested in the game, you ALWAYS can find out some new stuff, which is awesome
sum up: not “game changer” feature.
btw, it’s a bug\feature was added since DE or may be since HD.
In original game you had different type of foods: fish\farms\boar+dear\sheeps.
There was NO trick 10 years ago…literally.
friend see the number of villagers was from 2019, 18 years later, and in the other video, another trick is shown that seems very relevant with the deer, and also a player must learn the tricks of the micro how to patrol so that no arrow I killed you (no arrow would attack you even all day xd), that is, full of tricks, not intuitive at all
The keyword is seems here because as in reality, it’s not that relevant. Unless you’re a ‘micro nerd’ as people love to call some of the pro players, you’re not in need to do that.
No, you don’t have to learn how to use patrol to be at an advantage. Most players either attack with right mouse button or attack move.
Just so we’re on the same page, I think you’re conflating ‘Strategy’ and ‘Symmetry’ a little bit. And those two things are completely independent. Strategy is based in execution and changes based on whatever is in the ‘meta’. Symmetry is inherent in design. You can use examples such as Chess or Go as perfectly symmetric games with mountains of strategy. And I’ve heard former players say that SC2, despite its asymmetry, started becoming too depending on mechanics and not enough dependent on strategy (I can’t personally comment on this having never played it). One can certainly have a valid discussion on the strategic merits of both games, although very few people, especially on this forum, would be actually qualified to have that discussion, because it would require significant knowledge of both games. Personally I think both offer their own interesting takes on strategies and I like them both in that regard in different ways.
Conversely, asymmetry is inherently something that manifests in every game. So I’m not sure what your comment about ‘Rus Hunting Bounty being the most obvious one’ means. Are you saying because they have to hunt every game, that’s not asymmetry? That’s inherently what makes them asymmetric. That’s how they get their gold. Just like China has to gather taxes every game, Mali has to build pit mines every game. Just like any civ in AOE2 has to build villagers every game. After that whether they FC, feudal all-in, 2TC, tower rush, (or scout rush, Drush, Archer rush, etc for AOE2) is where the strategy aspect comes in.
You are not going to tell me that it is not relevant, when the game just begins, an aoe2 player must know how many attacks to give the boar so that it does not escape, on the other hand, in aoe4 the number of attacks that the scout gave was modified, unnecessarily He gave three attacks when 2 was enough, that gave a minimal advantage to those who have a lot of apm; but now it will only give 2, so having a lot of apm, in this case, does not help, a casual player should only give the accumulated order with the shift and that’s it. That’s the difference between something intuitive and something non-intuitive. Take the liberty of declaring what tricks aoe4 has, and I will report it today, in the bugs section they have responded immediately, thanks
or you blame Microsoft, that they dropped the game for 18 years and did not update it? Did not fix bugs?
it’s CDs. It’s how game was released.
But i’m 100% with your blames… Why MS did not fixed bugs?!
Could be. I guess there seems to be a thinking that ‘symmetrical = copy paste’ and ‘asymmetrical = unique’ and I wanted to comment on that.
So can’t I, I’m just paraphrasing what I’ve heard.
That’s the ‘asymetry = unique’ take some people have.
For 50 % of the player base in ranked (which is 0 - 999 Elo, so Bronze to Gold in AoE 4), it indeed is not relevant.
Since 2 DE it’s just 1 hit to make the boar follow you.
Very much like AoE 4, AoE 2 also has the ‘Art of War’ missions and in the Early Economy mission, you learn how to lure your boar without being a high APM micro player. The boar deaggros when the villager leaves the LOS of the boar by either being faster or garrisioning in any building.
So the “non-intuitive” part is fixed.
Nacho made a video on the Early Economy mission:
I’m not that up to date with 4’s quircks right now, but do fish still disappear when placing a palisade? I remember that being quite controversial last year.
AOE games are at their best when they share their strengths with one another, smt we can probably all agree FE , tantalus and even relic seem to be doing darn well
I don’t think the “art of war” gives you the same class that Viper gave Grubby, about micro, and as a newbie is going to intuit that he must suppress his catapult to have an advantage?, the video is something recent
Of course it doesn’t because like in AoE 4, Art of War is supposed to be a tutorial to make you ready to play the game. The Grubby x Viper collab was something special between two pros that teached each other their respective game.
The video you linked shows outdated information. The ‘mangonel delete trick’ as it’s known to the community was patched out last year, so you don’t have this trick anymore:
