- Castle age upgrade too cheap
- Castle age is fine cost
First post/poll hope it works. Making this to see what ye think. Asking this one out to the very decent players who know the game well, all the build orders off by heart who know the ins and outs of this game NOT the new players as they won’t have an accurate feeling for the game yet.
Is castle age op? I think it is. there are so many options in castle age to dominate opponent: access to TCS is strong in itself as another guy pointed out in another topic dropping a castle instantly is very strong. Knights kill easily most fuedal age units easily bar spears it is a huge military spike. Siege is incredibly strong especially Vs fuedal units and bases. I think the issue I find is that castle age is a bit too cheap I would propose adding maybe 500-800 more resources so that people trying to avoid fighting in fuedal behind walls will have just a little more time they are vulnerable. The meta nowadays is wall and pick good civ with strong eco bonuses and get up faster your opponent is forced to either play standard and be at disadvantage if not have as good eco bonuses or play aggro in a game where fuedal doesn’t last long imo and rewalling us easy to do with not much drawback most of the time. What do ye think? Am I just a noob 11?
2 Likes
I think it’s a bit too big powerspike for the current cost / research time.
But not as much as 500 ressources or even more.
maybe more like 200-300 ressources or 50 seconds in research time.
2 Likes
I think cost is fine, it could take more time to research… but I really don’t know how really could impact in meta
I understand the point. Castle age is a big power spike, but i dont think we should change it. It is something too fundamental to the game to change.
8 Likes
Rather speaking about the Castle age, why not buffing Dark and feudal to make them stronger?
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Castle age is when things start to differentiate and become interesting.
Feudal age is so bland and uninspiring.
Scout, archer, m@a, wow what a nice and broad selection of units! 
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That’s what I was afraid of hearing. I know if it were ever balanced properly we would have to learn new build orders. There are other ways to nerf/ buff this overall state of the game. Others would say nerf walls others say nerf repair rate would lead to at least a better counter to the castle age spike.
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The phenomenon you’re observing is because the original developers chose to combine two upgrades into 1 which incentives players to exploit it.
All upgrades’ marginal values can be broken down into two sectors: unlock value and upgrade-existing-units value. Unfortunately the devs decided to have these two very distinct values be balanced by the same cost.
Since the devs don’t know exactly what amount if units people build in the age before they are balancing the game with a very low variance high bias model. This of course can be reasonably well balanced the same way a constant can estimate the data sometimes. Indeed they’ve done a decent job. However consider the following:
- Empire wars still has the maa upgrade despite its primary purpose being to balance militia upgrading.
- 1 TC knights is much stronger than 1 TC other things due to the fact that pikeman takes 2.25 knights worth of resources and occupies 2 spears worth of barracks work time.
- Siege and monk is stronger because you can produce immediately from forward buildings.
- Tech switches in imp are arbitrarily more costly and take longer for some units (e.g. two handed swords/eagles) than others (e.g. heavy camel).
- The other player is not informed of the enemy aging up and can be caught off guard at the age up.
I think the game would have been better if from the outset each new unit line had a free but time consuming research to unlock. Maybe 30-60s. It would have provided an extra way to balance things. I’m surprised they started removing the techs from like cannon galleon instead of just setting the cost to 0.
3 Likes
I had thought of this idea ages ago but the other day heard Hera saying that he really wanted for long time castle age cost higher (he said a lot more) and crossbow upgrade increased a lot and then seen that post lately and a lot of others in past saying to nerf palisade walls more than currently. I think these are all ways to fix the issue or at least give high risk to the high reward that is going castle age early.
Wow that’s a really good point about free researches. I know from games I’ve played in past there has been free upgrades / so low it’s almost free cost upgrades.
I think they didn’t think of how fc often plays out now. But it’s experience, so how they should know before hand.
The player going for faster castle uses his tech advantage to get the military lead and maybe some raids and then, when the opponent has set up defence he can snowball that lead with a boom.
That’s a combination of different bonusses you get in castle age. And I assume that devs originally thought only about balancing either of them and not the combination.
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Another issue I’ve thought of is there’s heaps of matchups where you can have the eco advantage and have for instance a good UU and due to current game balance you can wall up play safe avoid fuedal and get a relatively easy win. Other times you’ll be against Khmer and if you don’t incredibly hurt them in fuedal with a meh civ you’ve lost. If you watch pros play it’s very interesting to see this and makes you realise something needs to change. Civs like Burmese can suffer with gameplan if they don’t do early damage in fuedal Vs good civs same with Magyars who don’t have good eco bonus. Chinese is the definition of this issue they wall early as meta with more Vils and you can’t out eco them or pressure them maybe if we have another minute of fuedal action might help.
I wish there was a Castle is fine but… option.
I think making Castle Age itself more expensive would not be the right way to tackle such a problem, it would have too big, sweeping effects… I’d probably look into the upgrade cost of xbow for a starters.
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While I somewhat agree with the OP, I think it’s too ingrained to change now. On the other hand, maybe have a tech to unlock knights?
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I think the reasoning for knights being instant unlock is because they are competing with arch line in meta which can be produced all of fuedal age so in order to catch up with arch number and strength aswell as knights being more expensive in general with upgrades and straight up unit cost they left it immediately unlock to even the gap othwise it would be very tough to beat crossbow openings from a cost and time perspective. I guess they could increase the length of crossbow tech by a lot more and give knights a free but shorter tech time than crossbow to unlock them this would help one of the biggest issues of early castle age power spike: immediate production of the dominant knight which crushes almost everything in fuedal. Would help to improve the fuedal army time window what really should happen though is I believe be is we increase crossbow cost to a lot more and give the knight line a tech cost to unlock as when you get to castle age it’s so easy to spend resources on everything you need. A lot of the time I can afford all good eco techs, blacksmith techs, vil production and pump a few rounds of knights all in the first instant if castle age I think this is not good you already have access to powerful eco techs and instant military power increase and you can afford everything necessary at start of castle age. Like you don’t even have to make a big decision in castle age on what to spend your resources on. It’s not like drush FC with arch civs where you decide do I get bow saw or bodkin start of castle. I think it really shows how strong the power spike of castle age knights is when you are being attacked but your so close to castle age that you don’t make any any units because you know you can spend your Res better on knights soon. If you had a tech to research for knights you might be forced to make army during age up more often or suffer. These types of decisions would make the gameplay better you’d have to weigh up your options more. Also think having crossbow be longer to tech and higher cost would help stop the dreaded situation where you are behind due to early pressure and your opponent just hit castle age teched crossbow and you are ranged off all woodlines on way to castle age killing your boom and chances to retaliate.
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The cost is fine. Knights are a bit too strong, and so are Crossbows.
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This could work. Although the upgrade cost of xbow would need to be increased as well.
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That’s actually a great Idea. It wouldn’t take away the advantage of having the faster uptime if there is a race between the players about it, but it would somewhat flatten that powerspike if there’s a clash of different strategies.
Edit: but xbow should also take a bit more time and knights should be able to train even before the upgrade is completed (maybe a “ligh knight” or something) - otherwise if it was xbow vs knights the xbows would have a big timing advantage.
Not just the upgrade cost. The time too. Significantly
2 Likes
You could make it where upgrading the crossbow and knight tech disables all of their corresponding production buildings from unit creation temporarily. So players who are teching crossbow can’t just have three ranges building army on the side while knight production is completely halted during teching