Tbh with the amount of rookie level players entering due to the release, it’s probably best to see how things go. They’ll probably not be the best at micro, and people will build their favourite unit rather than the meta 
what happens when you dont have enough gold anymore?
because thats totally possible, i had those kind of games too: some high level games where noone can beat up each other for an hour.
in those games chariot civilizations win easyly. it doesnt matter if cavs and camels perform better if you have no gold to produce them anymore. a chariot player can pump out chariots all day & all night. no resource problem.
if a good player is using chariots, you MUST finish them at tool & early bronze.
@“Cleglaw the mad” said:
what happens when you dont have enough gold anymore?because thats totally possible, i had those kind of games too: some high level games where noone can beat up each other for an hour.
in those games chariot civilizations win easyly. it doesnt matter if cavs and camels perform better if you have no gold to produce them anymore. a chariot player can pump out chariots all day & all night. no resource problem.
if a good player is using chariots, you MUST finish them at tool & early bronze.
But if you think of, all AoE games have some civs that turn out to be powerhouses on long games. Think about how Koreans (usually) wreck everything on late games on AoE 2, but are quite susceptible to rush/fast civs. Or aoe 3, where going against boomy Japan or Brit means that some civs more rush oriented (Ottomans or Sioux) should attack hard only (mirroring a boom without pressure is just not enough)
Anyway, people who played aoe 1 MP should talk here about what do they think, Im just a random newb lol. I actually more a campaign geek on aoe 1. This new balance on aoe DE seemed good to me though.
Units that require gold should have a massive defense against these chariot archers. They are seriously op and seeing as how most of the player base plays from the stone age, we all are dealing with these ridiculous units.
Lol, CA has always been broken from the beginning. Cavalry and Camel? Learn to wall-up, dudes. Unless you got a map with so few forest, you can keep the poor, bad eyesight and stupid melee units out of your base. You guys criticize people for being bad while you are actually bad yourself. There is no real counter to CA in Age 3 except Minoan Composite Bowman (but that take time and a lot of risk).
The balancing problem is ranged units scale too well in this game because they got range upgrade with Wood gathering techs. They shouldn’t get a range upgrade at all like other later games in the franchise.
@NonprofitChunk1 said:
Lol, CA has always been broken from the beginning. Cavalry and Camel? Learn to wall-up, dudes. Unless you got a map with so few forest, you can keep the poor, bad eyesight and stupid melee units out of your base. You guys criticize people for being bad while you are actually bad yourself. There is no real counter to CA in Age 3 except Minoan Composite Bowman (but that take time and a lot of risk).The balancing problem is ranged units scale too well in this game because they got range upgrade with Wood gathering techs. They shouldn’t get a range upgrade at all like other later games in the franchise.
Ranged units already have much fewer upgrades than melee units, since you can’t upgrade ranged attack in bronze and armor is much less important for them. In my opinion the problem is the opposite. Since there are so few upgrades needed to make archers fully upgraded, they are easier and faster to switch into and mass up. For example CAs only need wheel, wood upgrades, nobility and archer armor upgrades to be fully upgraded. Wheel and wood upgrades you always want to get anyway and archer armor is not that important if you have a large enough mass or some other units at front. This means that there is almost no investment needed to tech into CAs. For example for bronze age swordsmen, you will need attack upgrades, armor upgrades, bronze shield, broad sword upgrade and logistics to fully upgrade them and none of those are essential if you are not going to make infantry, so you will have a hard time switching into them if you start by making some other units.
A better idea would be to separate the range bonus into another technology so that you don’t get the bonus range automatically just be making the economy upgrades you are always going to research anyway. They could also decrease the attack of all archers by one and add a new technology that gives that attack back.
Having more upgrades for archers would make things worse and not better.
Having -1 AD, but Bronze Age Alchemy would make early game with Chariot Archers much weaker, but wouldn’t have much affect to late game Chariot Archer spam.
Having shorter research time for Wheel, but longer training time for Chariot Archers would do the opposite.
It would greatly increase the early power of Chariot Archers, but make the late game Chariot spamming less effective.
My favorite solution is still giving pierce armor to stone throwers in order to make them a more effective counter to massed CAs. I don’t think it’s necessary to make early CA rushing more powerful, but an increased creation time could be a good solution to making it harder to mass CAs.
@qweytr24 said:
My favorite solution is still giving pierce armor to stone throwers in order to make them a more effective counter to massed CAs. I don’t think it’s necessary to make early CA rushing more powerful, but an increased creation time could be a good solution to making it harder to mass CAs.
The Wheels current research time is 90 seconds. Dropping it down to 75s and increasing CA training time from 40s → 45s would keep the early power almost same.
I do think in Bronze Age land fights pierce armor for Stone Thrower is good buff, but for Land to water fight where Stone Throwers are shooting War galleys it might be too strong, or at Iron Age with Elephant Archers VS Catapults.
@qweytr24 said:
Ranged units already have much fewer upgrades than melee units, since you can’t upgrade ranged attack in bronze and armor is much less important for them. In my opinion the problem is the opposite. Since there are so few upgrades needed to make archers fully upgraded, they are easier and faster to switch into and mass up. For example CAs only need wheel, wood upgrades, nobility and archer armor upgrades to be fully upgraded. Wheel and wood upgrades you always want to get anyway and archer armor is not that important if you have a large enough mass or some other units at front. This means that there is almost no investment needed to tech into CAs. For example for bronze age swordsmen, you will need attack upgrades, armor upgrades, bronze shield, broad sword upgrade and logistics to fully upgrade them and none of those are essential if you are not going to make infantry, so you will have a hard time switching into them if you start by making some other units.
A better idea would be to separate the range bonus into another technology so that you don’t get the bonus range automatically just be making the economy upgrades you are always going to research anyway. They could also decrease the attack of all archers by one and add a new technology that gives that attack back.
You know, while archer lacks damage upgrade, most of the relevant units in the game don’t have piercing armor upgrade either, so it’s not really a big dis advantage. Bronze Shield might help Slinger a bit, but not for long because the huge range advantage of CA will soon kick in, and it’s too expensive for early Bronze and its bonus on mostly irrelevant units. The speed gap between infantry units and cavalry in AOE1 is too huge to make the Swordsman line useful in anything rather than Death Match, not to mention that Cavalry crush them so easily. Hoplite fares well against Cavalry but they will never be able to catch up with raiding CA, or cavalry (basically anything mounted), and they need a whole separated buidling for them. They might be useful if you are Macedonian and manage bronze shield, and build some Academy near your enemy base but that require luck to pull off.
So, my point stand, archers in general have too much advantage over melee units in this game, and lacking damage upgrade isn’t something important while having range upgrade every age making them scale too well with numbers. There are little counter to them until Iron Age. There is a reason that AoM, AOE3 and AOE Online dont have range upgrade every age anymore except special tech for some designated units, not every archers in your roster. Basically, no other RTS games other than AOE2 have, but Archers in AOE2 mostly have much shorter range.
AOE1 has a lot of balancing flaws in 200/250 pop caps scenario because as you might know, it was designed for 50 pops cap (the same way AOE2 was design for 75 pops cap). I believed ES didn’t even care about MP at all when they first make the game, just play through all the campaign and you will know why. However, a complete rework of the game might be too much to ask from Microsoft at this point
@NonprofitChunk1 said:
@qweytr24 said:
Ranged units already have much fewer upgrades than melee units, since you can’t upgrade ranged attack in bronze and armor is much less important for them. In my opinion the problem is the opposite. Since there are so few upgrades needed to make archers fully upgraded, they are easier and faster to switch into and mass up. For example CAs only need wheel, wood upgrades, nobility and archer armor upgrades to be fully upgraded. Wheel and wood upgrades you always want to get anyway and archer armor is not that important if you have a large enough mass or some other units at front. This means that there is almost no investment needed to tech into CAs. For example for bronze age swordsmen, you will need attack upgrades, armor upgrades, bronze shield, broad sword upgrade and logistics to fully upgrade them and none of those are essential if you are not going to make infantry, so you will have a hard time switching into them if you start by making some other units.
A better idea would be to separate the range bonus into another technology so that you don’t get the bonus range automatically just be making the economy upgrades you are always going to research anyway. They could also decrease the attack of all archers by one and add a new technology that gives that attack back.
You know, while archer lacks damage upgrade, most of the relevant units in the game don’t have piercing armor upgrade either, so it’s not really a big dis advantage. Bronze Shield might help Slinger a bit, but not for long because the huge range advantage of CA will soon kick in, and it’s too expensive for early Bronze and its bonus on mostly irrelevant units. The speed gap between infantry units and cavalry in AOE1 is too huge to make the Swordsman line useful in anything rather than Death Match, not to mention that Cavalry crush them so easily. Hoplite fares well against Cavalry but they will never be able to catch up with raiding CA, or cavalry (basically anything mounted), and they need a whole separated buidling for them. They might be useful if you are Macedonian and manage bronze shield, and build some Academy near your enemy base but that require luck to pull off.
So, my point stand, archers in general have too much advantage over melee units in this game, and lacking damage upgrade isn’t something important while having range upgrade every age making them scale too well with numbers. There are little counter to them until Iron Age. There is a reason that AoM, AOE3 and AOE Online dont have range upgrade every age anymore except special tech for some designated units, not every archers in your roster. Basically, no other RTS games other than AOE2 have, but Archers in AOE2 mostly have much shorter range.
AOE1 has a lot of balancing flaws in 200/250 pop caps scenario because as you might know, it was designed for 50 pops cap (the same way AOE2 was design for 75 pops cap). I believed ES didn’t even care about MP at all when they first make the game, just play through all the campaign and you will know why. However, a complete rework of the game might be too much to ask from Microsoft at this point
Range upgrades every age work perfectly fine in AoE2. It’s true that increasing the population limit has changed the game balance somewhat in favor of ranged units, but I’m not convinced that the problem is their range. Without range upgrades archers would be practically useless in iron. Just making it harder to mass them up would be better in my opinion.
If you are still not convinced on how impactful the range upgrade is. Try to see what happen when matching Egyptian Chariot Archer against Minoan Composite Bowman after both side have more than 20 troops.
There are many reasons that Archers aren’t that OP in AOE2, that doesn’t mean extra range per age don’t give them tremedous advantage over melee units. The reason are:
- There are more counter to mass-archer in Age 3 compare to AOE 1 (Knights, Skirmisher, Mangonel). They work much better than their AOE 1 counter-part (Cavalry, Slinger, Stone Thrower), the most notable is Mangonel compare to Stone Thrower. You also have Scorpion and Ram at age 3.
- Most regular archer cost Gold so they are less spam-able.
- Archers in AOE 2 have shorter range than AOE 1. They also have bad accuracy until Thumb Ring, a Tech that Briton Archers dont have.
- Mounted Archers have shorter range than foot Archers unlike AOE1.
- Towers, walls are much more powerful than AOE 1 and they are almost impervous to archers. We also have Castle and garrisonable Town Center.
@pate623 said:
@qweytr24 said:
My favorite solution is still giving pierce armor to stone throwers in order to make them a more effective counter to massed CAs. I don’t think it’s necessary to make early CA rushing more powerful, but an increased creation time could be a good solution to making it harder to mass CAs.The Wheels current research time is 90 seconds. Dropping it down to 75s and increasing CA training time from 40s → 45s would keep the early power almost same.
I do think in Bronze Age land fights pierce armor for Stone Thrower is good buff, but for Land to water fight where Stone Throwers are shooting War galleys it might be too strong, or at Iron Age with Elephant Archers VS Catapults.
then give boats +dmg to catapults to compensate for the pierce armor so the change only affects land ranged units
You need to wall your base, cavalry and camel aren’t the best counter them, because CA are easy to mass and easy to kill villagers.
Rush Iron-age. Build helepolis or elephants (elephants only cost 40 gold). But even the stronger swordsman civs can easily take out the stable-chariot (for only 15 gold!) As for the chariot-archer; those are pesky bastards, use walls to buy some time and kill them with iron-age units, or slingers.
However, in the Upatch version the CA only had a range of 6, and I liked that, since they were allmost always within tower range. Now, they’re a lot slower and the build time is drastically increased, and same goes for wheel, but I don’t know if it makes up for it.
Camels and Cav dominate early Bronze.
Archers dominate mid-late bronze.
Infantry start to become viable in early Iron with more shields and aristocracy.
I don’t have a massive problem with this to be honest. In the DE it feels the pathing is better that helps the melee cav.
Minoan compies are the best Bronze Age unit and retain usefulness in Iron but Minoan are a gold dependent civ.
I find that in the DE the one click farms and semi-intelligent villagers as well as the idle counter, allows faster ironing behind walls. Whilst you can argue that it also allows people to boom a bronze age army faster I think in practicalities sake because there is still the map to navigate and walls to get through the changes support a purring economy more. I think archers may train slower than in the original as well.
Strangely I don’t see many players bringing stone throwers with their Chariot Archers anymore.
Yesterday I came close to losing a game as I didn’t fully wall, expecting my ally to do his side and its fair to say Hittite Chariot Archers were an absolute nightmare even though I had composites at home. Problem wasn’t fixed until I finished the wall trapping the CA’s in my base where I finally whittled the horde down. Then I went Iron for phalanx with tower shield and walked to the enemies farming complex with aristocracy.
@“Mystic Taboo” said:
Strangely I don’t see many players bringing stone throwers with their Chariot Archers anymore.
That’s an effective tactic, hard to counter, especially when the CA’s are used as a suppressing fire. Or keeping em out of sight, until you get out with infantry trying to destroy those stone throwers.
But maybe they’ve spent all their wood on the chariots. 
As I was playing Oasis last week, I found out another tactic to deal with the chariots. Where wood is in low supply, those civs can get into real trouble. So forward walling or tower rushing to control a high percentage of the map can also be very effective.
Woodcutting is a kind of dangerous way of collecting resources.
For instance, villagers can accidentally cut a hole in the line of defense when you are not looking.
All the other resources; stone- and gold mines, and farms can easily be walled up with a town center inside to protect those resources, with a forest, such tactics are not viable.
And another thing to remember: when a player is heavily dependent on chariots, he will need a lot of wood, and woodcutters are quite vulnerable. A counter attack on his villagers might also be a good option to slow your opponent down.
I was browsing akc site and on their forums, i saw an aoe revisted patch.
AKC_Ephestion had made a patch and his suggestion was for chariots to cost 60f 40g.
check out the patch on the akc website.
yall might wanna check it out. not sure how much paytesting there had been. i dont agree with all of his suggested changes but maybe the chariot spam could be slowed down with the gold cost.
@“teutonic tanks” said:
@AvallachAOE
the thing is you can simply hit and run with your slingers vs axeman; also axeman have 0 pierce armor and slingers move as fast/ a tiny bit faster than axeman. Axeman can only win if you are very, very fast and immediately spot enemy’s barracks, but even then slingers have a decent chance. It’s simply way safer to go slingers, you need to invest less in upgrades as well (all you need is stone mining, while axeman Need attack up, axeman up and def up). The worst is that they shred towers/walls making defenses even more uselessAbout yamato i think they should be nerfed in general, the -25% for kts should be changed to -15%. Yamato is probly the best civ atm.
Giving stonetrowers pierce armor wouldnt be enough, since CAs have still an incredible mobility.
Slingers and axemen are equally fast. But you are right, slingers are more potent than axemen in numbers. This has always been the case. Though, you might be surprised, I have played a lot of AoE RoR on voobly and axemen and slinger rushes happen about 50/50. If you are fast, the biggest advantage of axemen is that you can strike significantly faster. This game for instance: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePly8X5cVME. The POV player uses axemen, the other is defending with slinger. The axemen managed to get the first strike and disrupted the slinger guy’s economy. He never fully recovered and the PoV player holds a significant advantage for the entire game. I also had one game myself which lasted over an hour in the tool age. It was 50+ axemen vs. 50+ slingers. It was extremely tense, but eventually I got the upper hand, by circling around his slingers and attacking them from multiple angles. The thing is you gotta be extremely careful when facing mass slingers with mass axemen. You can win it if you play smart and try to attack from multiple angles. In any case, don’t just blindly attack slingers with axemen. Unless you can really surprise your opponent. You are still very right though, in masses, slingers hold a decent advantage over axemen and you can be more reckless (but you are far from unbeatable). This should not be the case case though, as slingers already counter archers, walls and towers and also easily take down buildings.
Best solution here is to just give them 1 base attack and increase all their hidden attack bonuses by 1. This way they are still as strong against archers/walls/towers, but not can be countered by axemen.
When it comes to chariots, there is not much of an issue. Slingers with stone mining do 7 damage against chariot archers. It is surprisingly difficult to take down slingers that have the bronze shield upgrade with chariot archers. Camels also have increased damage against chariot archers, though this COULD be increased a little bit still, as some people already mentioned: they are not a true counter once the fights become more massive. I do agree that Scythe chriots could be nerfed in some way.
I have been part of the Age: DE council and mentioned pierce armor for stone throwers/catapults at some point. I do think this makes sense and is a good idea as well.
About Yamato: They are strong, but I would not consider nerfing their cav bonus. Cavalry are easily countered by camels, can be converted by priests, easily lose to hoplites. Plus, in the iron age they aren’t that great.
@HandSoloh said:
@AvallachAOE said:
@Penelinfi said:
Perhaps if they cost more, it will mean it’s harder to get a critical mass or keep it. They still need to be useful though. Micro’d fast archers will always be tough in random maps in this AoE.The problem is that this would make it harder in early bronze to defend against cavalry. Ideally there’d be something to weaken mass CAs without weakening them in smaller numbers. That’s why I liked the stonethrower idea.
a good cavalry player will usually keep mass CAs from happening. cavs and camels just eat CAs alive in equal numbers.
Well yeah, that is true, in 1v1 situations, it is quite risky to go for chariots if your opponent is making cavalry. Especially since they can also use slingers. I dare to say that the cav/camel guy holds an advantage in a situation like this. The real problem arises in team games. Suppose you are doing a 2v2, you go mass camel and beat your direct guy. The other guy on their team beats your partner with chariots. Now the game basically is your camels vs. his chariot archers. Say you have 40 camels, he has 40 CA’s. It will be difficult for your camels to beat his massive amount of Chariots, because ranged units hold an advantage over melee units. It’s just a general fact in any RTS game. You will still be able to win though, but with significant losses yourself. And here comes (in my opinion) the real problem: Camels and cavalry are significantly more expensive than chariots. You spent 2800 gold on that 40 camel army. He spent none. Camels are also more food intensive. This means that he has had time to save up for gold and food in order to go up the iron age quicker than you can, and simply kill you with his iron age units. Wood is also more easy to collect than gold. On top of that: it also is harder to get an equal number of camels in the first place. Not saying chariots are OP in general. Just some food for thought.