It’s interesting cause in the very high level I currently see a different pattern. Ofc these timing etc are sill highly important, but the gameplay has become extremely macro-intensive.
Often there aren’t much direct military engagements and instead we have a lot of all over the place raiding which is (as we know from the goth flood) extremely hard to stop.
The different timings of the unit powerspikes are mostly used to force the opponent to get to equally strong upgrades cause he then often can’t really engage with the power units.
However here are some Ideas of mine how I think we could restore the game to a similar state as it was at it’s peak, where there was way more military interaction rather than technical and macro, often just completely ignoring each others armies.
A) Reduce the effect of small early raids: Starting from feudal, when a player lost villagers: At a speed of 1 every 100 s, there is a timer that enables to train the next villager with no training time (still costs 50 F). So if the opponent eg killed 4 of your vills, you get one “back” after 100s , the second after 200s, the third after 300s and the fourth after 400s. Making you lose 200 F + 1000s of Vill working time (Which is equal to about 400 F), so effectively 150 F per lost villager. If you lose 5 vills you would lose an equal of about 170 F (1 vill => 90 F, 2 vills => 110 F, 3 vills => 130 F).
Which means, the more vills you lose to these early raids the higher is the impact to your eco. So you still are very encouraged to safe as many of your vills as you can. BUT you can get away with losing a few vills to early raids.
This is to encourage taking some more risks early on, cause you can get away with losing only a few vills. At the same time it can reward players which decide to go for a longer feudal and therefore get more vill kills before castle age hits.
This feature could be named “immigration” or so.
Note that this 100 s time is intentionally long and for your whole eco. Therefore mass raids especially in the lategames are still as powerful as they are currently. It’s only smaller early game raids that aren’t as influential in the continuation of the game.
B) Then I would like to see a change to TCs. Imo TCs are currently too powerful in the midgame. As you don’t only can train Vills from them, but they also give the best protection for your vills with quite low stone investment.
I would propose to change the Stone Cost of TCs to 200. Yeah, doubling it. So you can’t also just add 2 TCs behind your agression in castle age. When you want to expand your eco, you need to go to stone.
I also think that it would be benefitial if ALL civs had access to the 2nd TC in feudal like the cumans. And the cumans could build it in standard time, whilst the other civs would need to build as long as the cumans do currently. The reason for this is to reduce the castle age powerspike a bit. Whilst currently one of the problems of a full feudal v faster castle age play is exactly that the castle age player can just make the xbow upgrade or some knights and then transition into booming. And there is very little the full feudal player can do against it. Yes he can try spam light cav for raids, but for this he needs a big eco, especially a lot of farms. Usually this just comes too late and it also delays his castle time and therefore the opportunity to add eco on his own even more. With the option to make a 2nd tc in feudal the full feudal player has possibly the option to just add that 2nd tc whilst the opponent is trying to go up. And can add some more eco behind his feudal agression aswell.
I would also recomment that for the 2nd TC in feudal there is the prerequirement of a blacksmith. (except for cumans possibly). This would help against the possible threat of fast feudal into boom gameplay.
C) Then I would also like to have a change to towers. Imo towers should be the main way to try protect your expanded eco from raids. But for that they currently have not enough garrison capacity AND their damage output against cavalry is too low. It’s too easy to manouver through towerfire currently.
I would give Towers 10 Garrison space, a bit of bonus damage against cavalry and free ballistics effect. Note that it still can only fire 5 extra arrows, so even if it has more garrison space, it doesn’t can burst through walls twice as fast.
Towers would still be quite an investment but now perform way better in raiding situations IF you have them up already… This is also some kind of compensation for the nerf of TCs.
D) I also would like to see a change to Walls aswell. I would make them more costly but more durable, so the decision of walling becomes a basic strategic decision again. And isn’t girded into the common meta gameplay. I still can’t decide in which way they should be more expensive. But currently I lean more into the building time aspect of walling. Cause if it’s just the cost there is again the rist of making walls kinda easily accessible for the one who is already in lead and too easy to add behind the own agression. Instead, if walls take longer to build it’s indeed a strategic decision that need to be made preemptively whether you want to go for it. Also makes it hard to “counter” walls with walls as when you scout the opponent walling you would potentially not be done in time if you react to that by walling yourself.
E) Small improvements to the counter units:
Make Skirms more actively counter archers with higher damage output but less armor
Make Spears more effective in chasing behind cavalry, potentially with just a bit higher movement speed. Also the bonus damage of archers could be slightly reduced.
F) A change to Gold income
I think gold gathering need to be changed a bit. I currently lean towards some kind of solution that encourages to expand the eco more, increasing the gold income if you spread your gold miners over a lot of different gold deposits rather than having like 15 on your main Gold or so.
The reason behind this is that Gold units are insanely powerful in the midgame. And going for a lot of Gold should put you at some risk. Therefore I want people encouraged to expand their Gold eco, so there is the ######le counterplay to raid the espanded eco for that gold income.
And who turtles would need to add some more trash units to his composition as he wouldn’t have as much gold income as currently possible.
I also refer with that to the current trend of how we set up our bases. Cause they are often very compact just because you can still have quite high gold income witht these compact bases, whilst being more protected against external pressure. They are kind of too easy to defend against that. Encouraging the players to expand their eco more would allow for more military pressure potential, forcing the opponent to react to the military threats.
I once made the proposal that basically just increases the Gold income for the very first vill on each gold pile by about 20 %. This could already make it more encouraging to try spread your vills more as you don’t even get gold faster, you also get effectively more gold if you do so.