Community Wishing Wall

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
81

Yeah the boarding ship was an attempt to basically be a water monk. The scout ship was basically a scout cavalry. good vs boarding ships.

While it’s not 200 IQ problem solving, Romae Ad Bellum team did realize that trying to copy the land counter structures would be a good starting point.

I will say tho, that I think the biggest thing that is needed, is just one more ship type that replaces the demo in the water triangle.

Lanchester’s square law says that units that satisfy a certain set of assumptions will have their offensive capability grow in a squared relationship to the number of units.

So if you and I have 10 galleys each, we patrol, nothing fancy, our navies cancel out.

Now if I double the number of galleys I have to 20 something interesting happens. You’ll still lose 10 galleys, but I won’t lose 10 galleys, I’ll lose maybe a 3-5.

Now no aoe2 unit PERFECTLY satisfies all the assumptions, but ranged units get pretty close. Units with short/no range still have their strength increase at more than a linear rate, but it’s not the full exponent of 2. usually around 1.5 - 1.7.

This is why knights and archers in low numbers favor knights, but at larger numbers the advantage goes to the archers. Archers basically satisfy all the assumptions, so their offensive capacity grows at an exponent of 2, but knights which don’t satisfy all the assumptions, only have their offensive capacity grow at an exponent of about 1.7. Beyond micro, the archers increase their offensive capacity with additional units at a greater rate than do knights. There’s a tipping point, and suddenly the archers are the stronger army.

Similarly with galleys and fire ships.

However we come to a big problem with demos. Their suicide area of effect attack kind of breaks the rules. When you do the math and the experiments, as SOTL did many years ago in a water triangle deep dive, demos basically trade 1 for 1 regardless of the relative size of the navies. A lot of variance can occur between encounters, but the trend is that a demo can be expected on average to destroy one enemy ship.

This a fantastic catchup mechanic. You try to build a new navy of galleys against your enemies galley’s and the expected value of your galleys is basically nil. Lanchester is favoring your enemy so hard that you’re just throwing away resources. But going for demos you aren’t punished the same way. If you can produce demos faster than your enemy can produce galleys, eventually you’ll win, and then you can transition to galleys.

The problem is, demos are a terrible investment if you’re already in the lead. because they trend towards a 1 to 1 trade regardless of the relative navy sizes, if you’re making demos, the offensive capacity of your demo navy grows approximately linearly. Whereas if you were to invest in galleys or even fire ships, the strength of you army grows exponentially, between an exponent of 1.5 - 2 depending on the unit.

So, generally speaking, the best time to make demos is when you’re already losing. You don’t want to make demos to win water, you want to make demos to stop losing water. So the unit that is supposedly there to counter fires, only provides that utility in situations where you’re already losing. Let the fire ships take water, then consider if it’s worth it to invest in demos.

To sum it up, aoe2 water is like playing rock, paper, scissors, but instead of rock beating scissors, rock only doesn’t lose to scissors.

If there was a third kind of ship that actually was the third part of a water triangle, then then fire ships wouldn’t be the only ship you saw on hybrid maps.

Yes there’s a lot more nuance that can go into it. civ matchup and bonuses, specify map type, micro ability, unit resource cost balance, etc, etc, etc. But presently the current water design doesn’t allow for a functioning triangle to even be among the set of possible outcomes.

1 Like
82

But the Venetians are just too important to be ignored. At one point they practically controlled all of the Eastern Mediterranean, and I believe they appear in the campaigns of this game as well (forgot which campaign). While Siamese / Tais did have multiple kingdoms in SE Asia, none of them were as influential as Venice.

83

Which is why the Italians are in the game.

4 Likes
84

Italians have a milan campaign about a mercenary not how venice sacked constantinople and made the latin empire.

Also Venetian origin is a slavic tribe not the lombards like other city states.

Teutons campaign Italian campaign.

85

Honestly, I agree with folks who are suggesting adding a little bit of Venetian flavor to the Italians civ (like Gallelaza (pardon bad spelling) and maybe replace the silk road tech with something that ties in to Venice, but beond that just leave them under the blanket Italian civ.

2 Likes
86

*Slovenes, you are getting confused.

The proto-Slovenians are the Veneti, pseudo-allegeldy. Vistula Veneti if you like, and those you speak of (?).

The reason that land is called Veneto, and the city is called Venice, stems from the fact that the ancient Veneti lived there. The ancient Veneti, who are a pre-Roman tribe, one of the many ancient Italic peoples incorporated into Rome. And the Romans called all friendly peoples they encountered Veneti or Venedi or other variations, because Veneti means friendly people.

Edit. Corrected some inaccuracies

1 Like
87

I think a simple melee warship like Tririeme of Chronicles is a much better choice than demos. Tririemes are still a bit weak. Really hope it receives some buff and you have a fine combo to mix. How devs will do it is yet to know. Base game docks at current level is just bad. I dont even feel like playing Hybrids even and the reason is obvious. I mean just look at this. You overspent on water. You have tons of ships which took tons of res to create. Now suddenly opponent made tons of land units and you have very little to do in land. How do you make a switch even? That’s why I hate water maps. Lost many games for this reason alone.

HOWEVER to address this, a separate water population can solve it. Along with Chronicles water triangle. Sure wont be as interesting as land maps but I would see less queue dodging than how it is right now. I cant even garrison fishing ships when attacked. I have no choice other than say good luck. I know there is one civ specific bonus and again that bonus shouldn’t have been civ specific to begin with. In past we had nonsense Portuguese Dark Age bonus and I am finally glad devs moved away from it and applied it for every civs. But point is with proper QoL, water can be actually interesting.

There is one last thing I want to address that is adding ferry system for transport ship. What it’ll do is auto transport units between points once its loaded enough. This way some river maps will have more faster paced game. Could be hard code wise but if devs indeed manages to do it then water games will be more interesting than ever. I also advocate Transport ships to become Mule Cart equivalents.

88

Venetians are Roman people (likely a romanised north Italian tribe) initially with a Byzantine ruling elite (Greeks in the exarchate of Ravenna and surroundings). Italians like Spanish, French etc did not exist yet in the dark ages. Nations didn’t exist until the late middle ages.

I could find a wiki only in Italian but it shouldn’t be hard to translate, about the moment when Venice was slipping away from Byzantine control although nominally it continued for centuries. One of these Byzantine generals is a name for an ai Italian player (still better than having Alboin I guess).

697 was when the first doge was elected according to legend but history seems to point more towards the early 8th century, specially after the fall of Ravenna.

89

Only three small wishes from me ;D

90

How will this work for people with the skin pack amd people without it?

91

They see in multiply games as what they saw in singleplayer games.

92

How will this work for people with the skin pack and people without it?

I propose adding four new On/Off toggles in the game settings that let each player control:

  • Whether they see their own purchased skins on themselves.
  • Whether they see their own purchased skins on opponent civilizations.
  • Whether other players can see their purchased DLC skins.
  • Whether they see other players’ skins (regardless of the other player’s broadcast preference).

This system allows everyone to tailor the visual experience to their own taste - ranging from a fully “vanilla” look to a battlefield showcasing multiple DLC skin sets.

93

this does not work because of the way Its structured the game code, you always look at the sprites you have locally

94

Yes, the new sprites need to be shipped to every player through a patch so that everyone has them locally. However, which sprites are actually loaded into VRAM during a match depends on each player’s local settings and preferences.

95

But it would be contrary to how they have always done it until now, both with events and HD textures. All optional user-only packages.

96

I’d be happy with it client side, but then the ‘check out my skins’ aspect has never really appealed to me.

I’d just like a dlc with a toggle, original skins or regional skins.

97

It’s free advertising, though. People see it, like it, and then end up buying it themselves. At least that’s how I ended up buying Battle for Greece: I saw a complete reskin for every unit, and it looked great.

98

Right, agreed they do look great but everyone’s Athenians look the same.

I meant unique skins per player choice, e.g. you wouldn’t be able to have two players playing as the Japanese but have different skins for the samurai. Unless they changed the code, if even possible.

You could separate the middle-eastern civs etc. into a chronicles like bucket and give them different skins, but everyone’s mid-east units would look the same as each others. Which I would be happy with, but some people like to show off unique skins from others

1 Like
99

Yes, that’s exactly what we’re talking about.

Sure, they’d just need to modify the code slightly. Every unit in the game has a sprite set (covering all its animations). For example, a Japanese Samurai uses a different sprite set than a Japanese Halberdier. Likewise, a Japanese Halberdier belonging to Player 1 may have different stats than one belonging to Player 2, because they don’t share the same researched techs. It really wouldn’t be too difficult to give them separate sprite sets as well.

P.S. Notice that you can even have two different sprites for a Japanese Stable if one was converted from another civilization.

100

If you have the skin pack and have it enabled, you can see the skins. Otherwise, you see the regular skins. I think it would work similar to the small trees options, but you have to buy a DLC to unlock it.

That said, I believe AoE3 got either civ-exclusive skins, or at least regional skins, as a free update – so the precedent has been set for this not being a paid DLC (and thus, good reason for the AoE2 playerbase to complain if it is).