Seems like this is the strategy 80% of the times and its so boring. Nomad? Castle drop. Arena? Castle drop. In both cases 95% chances.
But even on maps like arabia you see so many castle drops that this game just feels like age of castle drop. And it makes no sense either, as castles were primarily meant as defensive not offensive buildings.
I wouldnt mind if they buffed castles strength but they have to considerably nerf the ability to build up quick castles infront of the enemies base aka high damage bonus against castle foundations and a lot less bonus construction time from multiple workers.
Yea this is my least favourite part of this game, the logical way of fixing this would be to create limitations with how far from your base you can build buildings but that would fly in the face of AOE’s philosophy of building freely wherever you want and to implement it now would completely change the nature of the game and a lot of people would disagree with it… although I wouldn’t mind it.
Meh, i dont think it is only about castle drops. I dont see them every game. With a castle drop i mean getting up a castle in early castle age. Building a forward castle in late caste age or imperial isnt really a castle drop strategy, but more likely some ‘get out my game castle’ in which you already have won the game, but the enemy wont really resign.
I would even love to play against a castle drop more often. I think it is fun and something else as usual.
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I suppose it could take twice as long to build a castle that is over a certain distance from your (or your ally’s) town center. The logic would be that the stone resources are having to travel a long way from the town center storage. 
The advantages would be:
- You can still build a defensive castle at regular speed in your base or your ally’s base
- You can still build an offensive+defensive castle at regular speed in a contested TC area, such as when players from opposite teams are located near each other in nomad games
- If you want an offensive castle drop at regular speed, then you’ll need to place a town center nearby first (which requires time and stone)
- If you are already crushing the game, then a slower offensive castle drop will still be effective
- This would encourage using other game mechanics instead of castle drops
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I don’t know if it’s a super big problem, I do get castle dropped pretty frequently but it’s not in every game I play, and you do kind of have a ‘bonus’ to constructing your own defensive castle, you can grab a bunch more villagers than them to build it with unless they sent everything forward for theirs
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whats ironic is the dlc literally added a civ that is even better at castle drops… so clearly the devs dont think there’s an issue…
i know its tough, but if you cant beat em, join em. in the meantime, remember to take LOS upgrades, so you can see the drop before it lands, and while he is building(or even walking there) he is losing vil work time, so it is damaging to him before the drop, and once the drop happens he is usually still losing work time.
a lot of the time a good idea is to go spike his eco, since he is inherently weaker with vils tied up on the castle, any worker he loses at home hurts even more
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sorry i keep forgetting to mention: for the people that dont know, if you spam click your monks to keep trying to convert different vils that are trying to build anything, the vils will walk away from the construction, it is an incredibly useful way to delay construction and/or repairs
this can be countered by the vil controller spam clicking on the building needed to be built/repaired, it is much slower but at least prevents the vils from walking away as much