I think one of the aspects I like least about this game so far is the arbitrary mechanics of urban centers, and how limited the population seems to be.
From what I understand, the population in the original game was very limited due to CPU performance issues, but that was in the early 2000s, now it’s different.
The population should be based on that of SC-2 or AOE-3, where the most basic units cost 1 population, while the most powerful units cost 2 and up.
Wow, custom games are about to get a lot more wild.
I think this is partly due to the low population cap. You can’t create an army that can compete against 100 elite units
The person who uses it also completely gives up their economy. Similar to the Revolutions in AoE3DE, Ragnarök is a last-ditch effort that throws everything a player has into the fray. If the push fails, the player has literally no remaining resources to fall back on.
It’d be more thematic if it completely removes the ability to train Villagers/Dwarves entirely and replaces the button with the ability to train more Heroes of Ragnarök, ensuring that the casting player can’t use the massive army to stall until they can get an economy going together again if the push fails.
I know how Ragnarok works. You sacrifice your economy, but you obtain an enormous army of medium-high quality. In 1v1, even if you don’t manage to destroy your enemy, you can hurt them so badly that you gain time to recover your economy too
Ragnarök makes it harder to come back then a Revolution because the Heroes take up more population then the villagers they replace.
So you are overpopulated for a long time before you can start restoring your economy.
Before the heroes of Ragnarok leave the population free, you don’t need to create villagers. You have in your hand a large ELITE force that must be attacking continuously.
When heroes start to leave free slots to create villagers you start to create them. And by the time they manage to decimate your army (if them has survived) it is usually heavily damaged to automatically counterattack, leaving you time to recover.
If you can’t hold off the enemy and prevent them from destroying your base, ragnarok becomes pointless. In other words, you wont have enough space for a massive amount of vils because you’ll be too busy trying to fend him off. What would actually be broken is Loki with ragnarok. Sheesh, that would be a nightmare. As soon as there’s population space open, they’ll start spawning myth units everywhere.
I find this match interesting for several reasons.
So:
(I think addressing the two points mentioned above would be an indirect way to nerf the power of Ragnarok while improving the overall game.)
The new TRAILER shows us decent battles. I’d like to take this opportunity to refresh this point.
It’s nice to see how even the devs like it when battles have decent numbers. I just hope the population will be finally increased for the final game
*57 units here, late army in AoMr has no much more than 30 units
*Here there are too many units. But each one of those blocks has 32 units. Practically the total army in AoMr
*Helm´s deep reference. Obviously too many units for a normal game xd
Frankly just give plays game setting to increase the housing limit. AOE2 has the ability to change pop caps to up to 500
Regardless your idea (that should be implemented too), the competitive game needs larger armies.
Visually impressive battles are one of the biggest attractions of this type of game, and AoMr was (at least in the beta) well below the standard (Stormgate, Starcraft, AoE series, etc.)
(EDIT 1) Armies like these showed in the Xbox Games Showcase (160 pop. army) should be able to be created in competitive game
I think an issue might be also that AoM is a game which can be over really quickly. Many ranked games I saw ppl gave up around the first 10 minutes. You can’t built really big armies in classical and other especially archaic age.
But I saw in one game a quite big Atlantean turma army.
What I want to say is that if the game be might slower or less aggressive early game the armies would be bigger automatically
Here is the answer to why too games are extremely short: the complete destruction of defensive play through towers and the ‘ballistics’ upgrade, which allows defenses to hit moving targets.
However, the population limit is another problem. In the mid-game (before creating caravans) is when the largest armies are seen, and they rarely exceed 40 units (In other RTS games like AoE, they don’t drop below 60-80 at a minimum).
I discussed the problem in detail HERE if you’d like to read it.
The path finding is not really good enough to handle that many units reliably yet.
But anyway, they should just make the house limit a lobby setting and everyone would be happy.
I can see why increasing the house limit over all would impact the balance of the game negatively but the same is true with playing AoE2 with 500 population, but many people just love playing with high population and large armies so why not let them.
IMO it’s one of the worst balance decision they made. I understand where it came from, original AoM had pseudo miss-chance, where first arrow would miss, but all other would hit (or something like that).
AoM is already chaotic and fast enough, homing arrows would be completely fine gameplay wise. Ballistics make nothing better. If someone wants for flavor missing arrows, then added them just as VFX. And honestly I don’t believe anyone even wants to watch/play arrow dodging minigame, when you have myth units right next to it…
I’m interested in ranked play, both as a player and as a spectator. Ranked games in AoE, Starcraft, etc., can offer epic and thrilling battles in the mid-to-late game. However, the matches I’ve seen in AoMr are so poor in that aspect
Lobby options should allow you to customize the game as each player wishes. But beyond that, the ‘official competitive game’ needs a change in the number of units in battle
All RTS games need defensive elements as they provide the ability to defend areas when outnumbered. When these disappear (as happens in AoMr) the game turns into continuous fighting since there’s no point in planning a large attack to break enemy defenses.
And without safe zones to retreat to, there’s no reason to stop an attack (If you analyze current matches in AoMr, from minute 16 onward, the game generally becomes a continuous battle between a small number of units)
Yeah. They barely changed anything at all, or downgraded the look, even.
Is the population even same, or worse than b4?
I would’ve rather they like ‘redid it’, if they failed, or spent an extra year working on it.
‘Fixing’ aom:EE where it left off, and expanding that, would’ve yielded better result than this I think.
Hate to be all negative on it, but I am not even hyped, just checking in on the latest disappointment. 
Are you blind? Like for real. The game looks so much more detailed and so much better then AoM. AoM is technically extremely limited.
Do you know anything about Retold at all?
They increased the limit for houses by 60% (10 → 16 houses), increased the population for Fortified Town Centres by 5, removed the 300 population cap and reduced the population cost of almost all Myth units.
If you capture enough Settlements you can get up to 1000 population and in an average 1v1 game you get almost twice the population.
How can you think it failed if you don’t know anything about it?
EE was and is extremely unpopular while almost everyone loves Retold. Not idea what world you live on.
Almost no one would have preferred them work on EE instead.
