The bastion walls have too much HP, and there isn’t any unit in the game that can effectively take them down. And even if you do manage to take them down, building them back up is insanely fast compared to the time it takes to tear them down.
Some suggested nerfs
Leave the HP as is, triple the wood cost.
Nerf bastion upgrade from +400% HP to +150% HP
Increase mortar, HC and similar late siege units damage against them (leave the rest of building damage untouched).
Bastions actually give 400%HP(!!!) on DE but the wooden walls have less base HP.
But yeah, I agree it should get nerfed in some way, I suggested a while ago that the wall segment should cost 2g-5w after the bastion research, and the research itself should cost +2g for every segment already on the map. It’s a minor nerf that wouldn’t kill the research or the walls, but the idea was not well received here on this forum, sadly.
Walls do need a nerf. Even the supremacy meta is slowly shifting towards multiple layers of walls with improved buildings shipment. I suppose people back then didn’t realize the full potential of the walls in the new meta of DE.
It’s either very early rush or very early wall off turtle wars.
I dont think they need a nerf. Right now they acomplise their purpose but if you nerf their HP they will be useless once you hit late game because not being able to stop the enemy enough time so you can do a proper response, even more in teamgames
With units having multiple pop costs, and people being limited to 7 towers, the game needs Walls to be strong, because armies in AoE3 are just tiny, and you cannot both attack and have a decent defensive force at home, to prevent your Eco being sniped.
If it was not for Walls being so strong, people would be complaining about Opris and Axe Riders just diving in and killing the entire Economy, Factories included, in a minute.
As unfortunate as it is, Walls do need their current strengths, because you cannot be everywhere, and have enough units to attack and defend.
This is because walls are strong and you need your whole army to break through them.
Sure, you can keep their HP, but you can increase their costs.
There is essentially no penalty to building walls now. And if you lose them, they are back up in literally a few seconds.
We have seen a huge increase in the amount of Walls in 1v1 ranked games. Whether or not pillarless walls need to be nerfed, or remove this trick alltogether (since it makes Walls way cheaper than they are supposed to be), is another Question.
But Bastion needs a huge nerf. Or rather building multiple layers of Bastion Walls. 5 Wood to rebuild a 7500 HP structure is absurd. But whats even more absurd is having 3 to 4 layers of 7500 HP walls. We have seen this in tournament already. It creates boring, drawn out games where players are attacking buildings more than attacking units.
Watch the ESOC TV Kynesie game playing Ports vs China
Building multiple layers of walls allowed Kynesie to drag out the game way too much. The game was simply won because China can never break through these walls without building 20+ Hand mortars.
Right here, we see another huge implication on balance. Since China does not have “normal” mortars with 40 range, but only 34 range, they can never siege Walls without having their mortars shot by culverins. But all other european civs can shoot buildings with mortars without having to worry about culverins, because standard Mortars outrange culverins.
This means that Portugal or other european civs can always use Culverins to snipe Hand Mortars due to having the same range, but shooting much faster.
Because of this, European civs can simply win the game by slowly building walls into the middle of the map, siege down China walls with their superiour 40+ mortar range and destroy any anti-mortar artillery by building Culverins. This is bad design and doesn’t create fun unit interactions.
Here are some suggestions (numbers are just examples):
Nerf Bastion walls to 4000 HP.
Increase Cost to 20 wood, 10 coin once bastion is researched.
Add a no-build zone like Torps, so that stacking walls as shown in this video is no longer possible.
Decide whether or not building pillarless walls should be no longer possible.
I think the nerf should be in cost and not stats(we don’t want then to be useless) so there is an actual penalty to turtling, which right now there is almost none…which is unheard of in any other RTS.
I said this before, differently from other RTS games where turtling will eventually end(since the resources are finite and the ‘turtler’ will have to leave the fortress to collect more) on AOE3 you can turtle forever due to the infinite resources mechanic so the penalty should be bigger for choosing this style since the benefits from it are also higher.
Right now they are just too cheap especially with the pillarless trick(PLEASE remove it devs), I suggested up there a 5w 2g price, but thinking about it, I think it’s just too little of a nerf, maybe 5w 5g as Noel suggested is better(increase bastion price accordingly by segment already built as well).
I (French) just finished a 1.5 hour game where the enemy (a Dutch) walled up, and I walled up in return (if the enemy walls up and you don’t, you’re at a huge disadvantage), and we proceeded to poke each other like in a tennis match with artillery shells. When he managed to break the wall I would simply build it back up under the cover of my army. He would do the same.
I ended up breaking the stalemate by building ~ 50 petards and blow his base to pieces. Not a fun game for sure.
Walls are 100% not fine.
In AoM they cost lots of gold (so building walls directly affects your army), have several levels of upgrades, damaging a segment usually translates to several others getting damaged as well, and gates are weaker than walls. Not to mention siege units are easier to come by.
in Age of Empires 2 they cost stone, and that’s the hardest resource to come by. Aoe2 also has M1 abarams tanks (siege rams) and that makes walls easy to break through.
The only disadvantage walls have in aoe3 is that they cost wood and are somewhat prohibitive in age2, once bastion is researched and all wood upgrades are finished, it is essentially free.
Another example of how Walls create boring games: Lukas vs Kaister as Ottoman vs Lakota
This game is incredibly drawn out. You can see that Lakota has the upper hand in open engagements. But as Ottoman builds more and more walls and closes off parts of the map, Lakota is basically “pushed off the map” .
This is what mass Wall games turn into. Layers upon Layers upon Layers of walls that are too cheap, build too quickly, have too much HP and dumb down the game into unit vs Wall while the other player keeps killing off a couple units from behind the wall. Its this really what you want to see in Lategame? Is this fun to play with and against? In my opinion, not at all.
Never had a game that lasted that long. Was this treaty? (i never play treaty 60min nor treaty 40 mins).
The obvious answer to the problem is not nerf wall, but inversely add preasure and, dont let your dutch opponent boom behind walls - especially against a civ like france)
In any case, walls or not, your eco as france is way better than dutch in the imperial age, so you can just swarm your opponent forcing him to spend ressources that he doesnt have.
I can actually go further and say that walls acted as an equalizer in that measure - to compensate for the dutch lack of good late game economy.
Maybe they should cost the same, but get progessively more expensive the more Wall segments you own.
It would also mimic the real life cost of maintaining walled fortresses, and why they were slowly but inevitably abandoned.
No, it was supremacy. This is what this thread really is about. We tried tearing down each others walls a few times, then we essentially gave up trying and just stood there thinking of a way to break it. We even joked a bit about it, and instead of a competition we decided to brainstorm ways to break the stalemate.
Again, this is the topic of this thread. How exactly do you add pressure and how exactly do you prevent a dutch from booming behind the wall? Dutch is probably one of the civilizations that benefit the most from turtling, along with Japan and Sweden, since their banks auto generate gold. A FF accompanied by a bastion wall off essentially stops any aggression until the mid to late industrial age. If they can defend an early cheese, and I assume ppl at my ELO do, then it’s on for the long ride.
I can actually ask the same for my opponent: how do you stop a french player from booming behind a wall? You can’t.
Dutch actually got a huge late game buff in the current patch. Their economy is up there with Japan, Sweden and France.
But even assuming one somehow gets the economic advantage, the walls slow you down too much and force you to invest in mortars and HC (which takes away part of your eco). Walls are so powerful that you need to severely outswarm and out eco your opponent, and that simply doesn’t happen when both players have reach maximum economy. I don’t know if you know, but once economy is maxxed out, there is no way to outspend it and tear down walls at the same time, simply because the opponent doesn’t need to take down 7500HP+ obstacles. That’s just how powerful walls are. The fact that neither me nor my opponent was able to do it shows just how badly walls need nerfs.
This can work as well. You shouldn’t be able to just rebuild a network of hundreds of segments within a few seconds with 200 wood. It would also encourage the use of natural choke points, just like in reality.
If this turns out that counter rushes or base trades are too powerful, we could very well buff towers instead and forts instead. At least it is interacting to destroy something that fights back.
