First AOE2 is a great game and doesn’t need many “big” changes. Nevertheless there are some things I want to discuss about, as for me it looks the meta becomes increasingly more stale cause some strategies are just generally superior to others. Especially at higher levels of play many strategic options are just not viable anymore as the counter mechanics are comparably easy to execute and elaborated so well basically everybody knows them.
It also turned out that the economic side very well synergizes with the meta options, meaning when you attempt something off-meta you will often run into trouble with your economic setup, floating res because you need to put vills on them earlier which you don’t need at that stage. The meta is set up in a way it synergizes super well with a “balanced” eco which then also allows for smooth transitions.
First I want to propose a quality of life feature:
Overhaul of the hotkeys
They are badly organized atm. But that’s not all, you often need several key presses and/or have to let go from your current selection of units to perform basic stuff like “Queueing vill form all your TC” or “Building a Farm/House/Wall”. And ompletely unnecessary. These basic actions done like 200x in a game could be bound to a simple hotkey. Especially the building menu hotkey for Vills is actually totally unnecesary when there are hotkeys set for specific buildings, as vills have very few other actions.
And then I would like to have a “simplified” hotkey menu like eg I only use one key all the time for “select all”. When I eg have the barracks at “a” I eg press “ctr + a” to select all Barracks. The same is for stables and so on. And I would like to have a better structure in the hotkey menuy that shows all the hotkeys avaialable when in one specific selection. The “base hotkeys” when you don’t have only villagers or a building selected in one sheet, the villager hotkeys in one sheet, the hotkeys when you selected a specific building. That would it make way easier to ensure to have no overlap with the hotkeys. And also a function that tells you when you have overlaps. This shouldn’t be too hard to implement. I possibly could even make a basic layout of the hotkeys and the structure. Also some hotkeys are imo completely unnecesary as they are basically never used anyways. Like most tech hotkeys are absolutely unnecsary, they may safe you like 1 second in a game, but they “block” space for potentially general quality of life features like access to the market to balance your eco for that tech you want without needing to jump to the market first. The 6 market options could be available whenever you are in a produciton building menu when we just get rid of the kinda useless single tech hotkeys.
Ofc there are techs that are very nice to have on hotkeys. But these are verylimited and mostly actually only the economic upgrades which build up on another, so you benefit several times in a game on having them. It’s also completely routine and therefore justified to be bound to a hotkey.
Stuff like supplies, arson, squires, bloodlines, husbandry, thumb ring, conscription… completely unnecessary to bind them to hotkeys if you only make them once. When we get rid of that stuff theres more space for stuff that’s actually useful like the easy market access.
Bring back “Expansion” as competitive strategic option, at least in open Maps
That’s a big one. And it comes down to 2 main problems in the current meta:
A) Knights are just too strong and with abuse of their mobility they can idle expanded eco way too good with basically no counterplay. Only condensed “anti-raid” bases can defend, but that turns arabia basically to a closed map, making lategame castle drop + treb pushes way too strong as there is no expansion you can run to. It’s just not that arabia we had some time ago where a lot of different strategies were viable. It’s heavily restricted now cause Knights lead to way too condensed bases which then can be sieged down too easily like the bases we have on Arena. And there’s basically no counterplay.Both players try the same which leads to “snowball” games. Ironically the anti-raid bases are even stronger against CA and Archers as it turned out, cause a single dive costs you way more with these units than it costs with Knights.
B) You don’t lose much eco when making these super condesned bases. You have basically every res and enough of it to get through the midgame. And there is almost no increase in efficiency when expanding. There would only be the long-term benefit of when you safe a bit of your starting res you get more to use later. But to get that advantage you would need to take these res, which becomes increasingly difficult when it boils down to a cat and mouse game: Knights run in to raid your expansion, you garrison, Knights run away. You ungarrisone. Knights run in. And the Knight just hands-down win this cause they cause a lot of idle time and lose almost nothing.
This makes expansion these days actually less efficient than the condensed eco, as with condensed eco the Knights can effectively only run in the peripheric stuff. Way easier to control.
There can be many ways to adress that issue, I list a few here:
A) Add a new tool that can be used against Knight raids. Something more interactive, something that gives small value each time when executed well, but what sums up over time.
B) Buff the existing anti-raid options, esepcially in the way that it makes them more viable to get a positive value when outnumbered. Possibly weaken these against other stuff like skirmishers or siege.
One thing that comes to mind here are actually monks. When monks become a bit easier to handle, they can be effective agains Knights even in low numbers. They even can jump in TCs when the Knights decide to dive. But I currently have o idea how to make the monks (in low numbers) easier to handle without making them no-brainers (auto-conversion). But in theory monks would fit the concept of “having a fwe of them with each of your expanded TCS to defend against Knight raids”. And it would be interactive.
C) Improve vision. That’s probably a “weaker” adjustment than the others, but it can help a lot when defending against Knights. When you are able to track the Knights before they actually arrive you can prepare some form of defence. like you can try to wall-off, move pikes in that direction or even preemptively garrison your most exposed vills. You still need to pay attention, but at least when you do you get rewarded. Doesn’t help against the cat and mouse game though. This can achieved by either directly increasing building LOS or making outposts more affordable and also a bit more durable, so the opponent at least loses a bit more time when killing them. We even could think of more sophistcated methods of getting vision like trainable hawks or something like this which can be used for that purpose.
D) Give direct benefits for expanding the Eco. Make it more revarding. This can either be achieved by “force”: moving out extra ressoruces more away from players so they HAVE to expand. Potnetnially even reducing the amount of Gold in the primary Gold Or by “encouragement”. Increasing the economic efficiency of an expanded eco. Like for each Gold pile you mine at a time you get a slow gold trickle “for free”, revarding when you put your 20 Gold mines on 20 different piles instead of 10. The benefitiary effect would be 2: A small increase in efficiency but also a small boost in the overall amount of Gold you can harvest by not oversaturating your piles. (This would also passively reduce the effectiveness of market abuse ecos)
Reduve the “Boomyness” on maps like Arabia.
TCs just give too much value for their cost atm. This leads to heavy usage of them even on maps which should be more focussed on miltary. Like Arabia. The main reason for that is imo that TCs have a very high Garrison capacity for their cost. Especially stone cost. So they are currently the best protection for your eco. Cause when you can’t really kill the opponent radiing forces, you at least can protect your vills.
The other options are Towers which offer way less garrison space and Castles which are super expensive.
And then TCs also give the option to make vills in addtion. And I say option, cause there comes up more and more a tendency of “overbuilding” TCs that you actually can’t supply with food or don’t want to. They are mainly for protection, not actually contributing much to the boom. This is ofc exaggerated. Most of the time the TCs are still contributing to the boom. But there’s this tendency of overmatking then. And when you already have them, why not using them to make more vills?
Long sentence, short takeaway: TCs give too much value for their cost atm. Other defences not. I would like TCs stone cost increased. Maybe to 200 (yes this is a lot). But increase the garrison capacity of Towers. It’s potetnially enough to double it to 10. That would be enough to protect woodlines, gold or stone that are a bit more away from your TCs. Potentially even farming space. This should lead to a necessary decision for the players whether they want to invest in the exoensive TCs. And whith that high investment they need to use them mainly for the boom or if they only look for better protection for their eco they can just make a few towers which are more affordable. I even think that the watch towers could get +1 attack in Castle age, just so they are useful against castle age units even without the need for a university and researching guard towers.
Summarized: TCs more expensive, to reflect their booming capabilities. Towers better for the protection of the eco with more garrison space. This should lead to more military focussed games on the maps that are supposed to be that.
Make Archers more “forgiving”
We see more and more tendency of players opting for the “easier” Knight line Which is totally understandable when everybody knows that. The issue with that is that it makes the community toxic. When players chose lines because there is that huge skill requirement discrepancy to “enable” the lines, the easier line they chose becomes the defendant. They chose it cause they wanted easier wins with them and they can’t stand it when they actually get beaten by the other options. We need to get rid of that. All power lines have to be basically equally strong at the entry level. So the choice is made by personal preference and curiosity. And it allows then also learning the other for curiosity as you don’t have to fear a heavy dropoff in your elo when switching from the “easier” Knights to the “harder” Archers. The main power units need to be basically evenly strong at all levels.
Otherwise we will witness what currently happens all the time.Whenever the Archers “overperform”, meaning they just do a little bit better than they used to, theres an immediate outburet in the community, demanding nerfs. Whilst the Knigths can’t be touched as too many Players would be completely outraged for “nerfing them to the ground”. It’s not a basis on which healthy discussions can emerge.
I have elaborated a few factors on which archers (and also CA) currently feel too “squishy” for entry players to use effectively. First, their damage to HP ratio. They have a disadvatagous one. They just die too quicly. But also they can dish out way too much damage for the investment when you actually keep them alive. I would just slightly increase the cost, but greatly increase the HP. This should already make them way more usable for beginners whilst actually even slightly nerfing them at higher levels.
Then we have the interaction with SIege. And as much people may like to see “Badabooms” in streams, it’s actually on of the main issues with Archers at lower levels. Cause microing archers vs Mangnels is a really tough task. But the main issue for beginners is the requirement to have a look on your archers at all time. Which they just can’t. It’s impossible without having like hundreds of games and built up routines that allow for that. I would like to see the raw damage output of mangonels against units reduced. Instead they could have bigger blast radii and higher HP, so the interaction is more “consistamt”. It would still be a huge difference maker to have good micro there. But it would at least take away the “completely wiped out army in a snap” effect we currently have. This would help beginners to get more into that line.
And for all of the “Badaboom” lovers I have that message: When you love badabooms, then we should add badabooms against cavalry too, no? Like what about mass converstion monks? MUAHAHA
Badabooms are always funny if it’s not you who is the victim… But doesn’t mean it’s good for the game to satisfy reactionary malignants who only want to see others suffer against imbalanced mechanics. Only because the very top guys can somehow avoid being badaboomed in many situations doesn’t mean the mechanic is balanced at other elo ranges. Even britons have Issues ant they actually have higher range and theoretucally could outplay this (effecively rarely).
Add a new utility to a new Infatnry unit
We have Arhcers with range, Cavalry with mobility. Cav Archers even have both. But Infatnry has no special utiltiy that can be used to get an advantage. In order to make Infantry an “interesting” option it needs to have something comparable. Doesn’t need to be that abstract, potettially more something mechanical. But it needs something. For that kind of power unit to feel “revarding” there must be somthing that can be used to improve. And there is currently nothing. The only options for infantry you currently have is the assessmsent of where they are potentially best used, cause in an actual combat istuation there’s very little you can do to increase the performance. They are slow, so you can’t run away when it’s disadvantageus and you also can’t use them for skirmishing or pressuring from outside, forcing the opponent to engage.
I don’t like when units like this (also like elephants) are just bluntly buffed by stat increases to become more “viable”. Cause it needs to be fun and interesting to play with and against them. When they are turned into stat monsters without any utility that can be used to get an advantage we have these “on/off” effects where the unit is either completely useless or totally busted in certain situations like when one side has already a nice economic advantage or even elos or maps, where the intended counters don’t function in the way they are intended to.
Like we now see with the Gambesons change. On low elo the game is now dominated by the strong infantry civs. And the archer civs fall of even heavier as without micro they now just get overwhealmed by Gambesons. What’s the goal? To make the militia line the default option for everybody below 1k elo cause everything else is just too complicated to handle effectively? And we still won’t see much use of them on pro level other than countering eagles and snowballing a lead to a win in the very lategame.
No, Infnatry needs something that scales with skill like the Archers and Knights. That’s what the goal should be. And just buffing random stats doesn’t make this. We need to thinkk about what this abiltiy can be. And if we don’t find a good one: IT’S BETTER TO DON’T CHANGE THE CURRENT INFANTRY MORE THAN NECESSARY!
Gambesons is imo the best example of what not to do to make Infantry more “viable” just for the sake of it. Viability should come from utility and fun to play with it, not by force.
Same is also for other units like Elephants. Yes you can make them “viable” by giving them more speed. But then they just become stronger Knights. Basically a reskin of an already existing strong unit.
These are for me the dreams to incrementally improve the game. Some of them are in very basic spots of the game we haven’t touched for a while. But I think we need to adress at least some of the initial design flaws that now lead to a very stale meta and also a division of the community, which is in my opintion heavily driven by the dominance of cavalry on all maps that aren’t super closed and as a reaction to that “anti-raid” bases as the intended counters don’t work anymore with an expanded eco. Leading to this mentioned divison of the playerbase into “arabia” and “arena” players and very little in between where the differnt playstiles can clash and compete with each other.
And I also think that every change that is intended to change gameplay should be explained first on “why”, then “what’s the goarl” and finally explaining how the interactions change so the goal is achieved. Allowing for the community to check if they agree with the “issue”, if the changes actually achieve what they supposed to. And potentially even open up a discussion wether the interactions that are observed and changed are actually the determining factors of that issue. Cause sometimes it might actually be completely different things.
For me I would be very interested to hear why devs decided to add that “Gambesons” tech. I’m not convinced this makes anything better. Right the opposite actually. Yes you made Infantry better against archers. But first, why? Aren’t archers not nerfed enough? And second, they don’t get better in anything useful. Like they are still terrible raiding units. They just become more annoying to deal with instead of giving them an actual purpose and incentive to go for them.
I like how the devs communicatred the organ gun overhaul. It’s even not necessary that they actually perform perfectly fitting with the narrated “supposed to be”. But when they perform similar enough it’s exactly what I which from the devs for bigger overhauls, so it’s understandable for the community. And if it doesn’t work it can just be reverted.
I will try.