Traps don’t even feel like they’re part of a real strategy. Other than line of sight they’re so situational and underwhelming that most Aztecs games completely revolve around abusing overtuned mechanics or units/gp instead. They didn’t even buff spikes trap’s damage in the last patch for some obscure reason.
The Aztecs especially feel designed around broken units and oppressive god powers rather than interesting tactical choices. Instead of rewarding creativity or strategic choices, a lot of matches just become “spam the strongest thing and snowball.” That might be powerful, but, at least for me, it’s very boring to play with or against.
Traps are potentially the funniest mechanic out there but their execution is so awful that it makes me less likely to buy new content in the future.
At least ambush boosts jaguar rider’s attack speed for few seconds, i don’t know if it’s working on ocelotl too.
The problem with spike trap is also its cost, a building that has a good chance of not working at all for the entirety of the game should never cost 80 wood, but rather 50 wood at most.
i agree with that. i also kind agree even liking the stealth mechanic idea it feels more like a “gimmick” than being actually seriously useful but then on the other hand if it would be seriously useful it might give a too big advantage to the other civs (?).
I’m not a fan of giving a civ something that’s not really useful in PvP, especially since better traps is one of the bonuses of a major god (Tezcatlipoca).
If traps are not meant to be a major strength of the civ, then they should replace that bonus with something else for Tezcatlipoca, because it’s basically a useless bonus at the moment.
Traps need their autotrigger to be off by default. Traps aren’t that bad if you place them and disable their autocast, use them for their vision, then trigger them manually when the situation is ideal for it. For example if you place smoke traps around for vision, you can use them to escape from faster units when giving a run-around by running over them then manually triggering them at the right moment. Another example is triggering a spike trap on an archer backline. But this all comes at the extra cost of APM on top of the high-risk cost of resources.
They probably won’t disable autocast, because a lot of casual players don’t even know you can enable it with right-click. So they’ll keep wondering why their traps don’t work when enemy units walk over them.
Auto-trigger off would indeed be a useful tool, but the cost and damage output of the spike trap are still lackluster and need some improvement.
I don’t see the issue with traps currently. I’m fairly high ELO and they are incredibly powerful serving as flank protection for backline units, security to back off, providing LOS, quick to build, remote triggerable for no apparent reason (did the aztecs have kilometer long strings attached to their traps?). Genuinely, I feel peeps are just not using them.
THAT is totally fair and a necessary change which hopefully will come! Tezcat needs some changes desperately even the heroic age jaguar riders was a REALLY cool change and idea (right direction) but Tezcat needs more.
I assume he will be like Susanoo: at first he is the by far weakest and then after some care and slight buffs here and there he is the strongest of its civ. I personally assume same will happen to Tezcat over the next weeks (months?).
I personally think the traps and stealth are creative cool ideas. i can see stealth getting buffed/changed could cause some serious balance issues, but traps shouldn’t be a problem to adjust and buff them.
but maybe Tezcat should buff ocelot warriors and jaguar rider more or maybe smashers too?