Competitive Community Feedback to March PUP

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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FPL & ESOC Competitive players PUP Change list feedback,

Introduction

Hey, as competitive top players of Aoe3, we wanted to share our thoughts about the recent Public Update Preview - March Update. The list has been prepared among the agreement of FPL & ESO-C Competitive team players, with contributions from known retired top players such as Hazza aka haitch, diarouga have their confirmation to these changes. Please keep it in mind, this is solely written for competitive level balance and may not reflect all levels. As competitive players of Aoe3, we think It’s important to have those changes reverted to keep the balance of the game in a healthy spot, in the upcoming days we are planning to release a competitive community balance suggestions.

BRITISH

UNITS & BUILDINGS

Manor House: Cost increased to 140 wood (from 135 wood); Build+KillXP adjusted accordingly to 28 and 84 (from 27 and 81).

Manor house cost has already been increased to 140 wood in the previous patches, which was reverted, with 3 villagers also being removed from British, this will be potential to reduce the British playability to even lower levels at top level

ETHIOPIANS

Cards

[NEW] Hand Infantry Combat (III): Added to homecity, improves Shotel Warrior hitpoints and damage by 15%.

This is one of the most dangerous shipment added by this patch, Shotel Warriors have already been a balance concern for a long time with how good ROF they have which works against all infantry, while it’s more a unit that requires cost increase and other balance changes, this change will result shotel warriors be at the level of Sweden hakka in the previous patches.

British Firearms (III): No longer improves the damage of all heavy ranged cavalry but instead improves the ranged damage of all Ethiopian infantry and cavalry units armed with firearms by 5% (Oromo Warrior, Neftenya, Levied Gunner, Ras).

Ethiopia already has one of the best late game units in the game, this change will result the case to get to even worse while actual need of ethiopia is becoming to balanced stage

INCA

Chincha Raft: Range reduced to 20 (from 22) and now inflicts 0.25x bonus damage against villagers.

While we agree warships having lesser attack to villagers, adding a 0.5x for other warships would be a good appraoch

INDIANS

Rajputs:
Cost decreased to 90 food 35 wood (From 100 food 35 wood).
Building damage increased to 35 (from 25).
Melee damage reduced to 14 (from 18), but ROF improved to 1.25 (from 1.5).

One of the most dangerous buff among with shotel warriors change, Rajputs were already in a very strong spot and with this change, they will be way strong and spammable in many ways, a pike with 5.5 can’t be dealt by most of the units as seen by the Mexico Insurgente example, this change should be reverted completely.

ITALIANS

CARDS

[NEW] Sienese Financers (II): Deposit 1000 Food into your Lombards, which will grant you Coin and Wood over time.
[NEW] Luccan Financers (III): Deposits 1500 Wood into your Lombards, which will grant you Coin and Food over time.
Albanian Company (III): Now sends 4 Stradiots and 4 Bosniaks (up 4 Stradiots and 3 Bosniaks).

Italy was one of the most over-whelming civilisation and in the need of requiring nerfs especially to it’s age 2 politician where they get outpost, architects being able to build many outposts, this change will result an already strong civilisation to over-perform and make competition in a bad spot, ideally all of those changes should be removed and Italy should have additional penalties to not be able to go fast industrial age without requiring to make decent amount of units

MALTESE

Shipments: Added a 2% penalty to their shipment curve to balance the hitpoints per card bonus.

This is not going to fix the malta having over whelming units and artillery, a change that focuses at removing 2% from artillery is extremely essential to balance malta.

OTTOMANS

Abus Gunner: Ranged resistance decreased to 20% (from 25%)

While this is a good start, Abus gunners still need a further change

Technologies

New Order Infantry (III, Palace Intrigue): Now also sends 20 Nizam Fusiliers (up from 15).

This change results over-whelming buff for ottoman, it’s been unpopular to make Nizam soldiers but this change should be reverted as it has too much value

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When the new esoc patch for De?

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what does the pro player community think of the global -20% nerf for light infantry units against heavy cav?

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What you said is meaningless, in fact, every time devs is updated, high-end players will ask them for balance opinions

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Hi there, I appreciate the facts that your points have been brought respectfully, and with honest opinions.
However…
It has been less than a day, so one might doubt that your opinions were playtested thoroughly. For the sake of your high-elo community, bring facts, game replays, analysis of games, or even mathematical analysis, rather than opinions.

My fear on this thread is that high-elo opinions about the game will be seen as a balance feedback. high-elo analysis should be prefered.

At the end of the day, we all want a balanced game, regardless of elo.

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I suspect those retired players balance aoe3 in the same way as aoe2. They don’t understand what aoe3 is like now.

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aoe2 and aoe3 are two completely different rts games, aoe3 has more tactical options, I don’t think it is possible to jump to conclusions about the balance problem, it needs a lot of data as a reference。
I don’t want to listen to some retired professional players saying that this civ is too op, this civ is too up. These are meaningless.

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You hit the nail on the coffin, why should the past determine the future.

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With british the change will likely be reverted as it has been several times now but it will be interesting to see how they do without 3 villagers, removing 5 villagers in age 2 would have been a safer change imo,

The card for shotels is fine because they didn’t have any cards, plenty of strong units have multiple combat cards in other civs, javelin riders also got nerfed 20 HP so this is a fair trade imo. The 5% HP card is neither here nor there it’s a very expensive card to send which I’ve never even seen anyone send anyway.

The change to inca rafts ws unnecessary and the dock tech change was also unnecessary same with monumental architecture and the 2 war hut card, they’re beating a dead horse at this point. Just remove the civ from the game, none of the old inca mains use them anymore they’re a dead civ.

The change to rajputs is nice because they significantly nerfed sepoys vs cav so they’re trying to encourage the use of rajputs which I like, can’t remember the last time I saw anyone make them.

Italian changes are great, since they nerfed the shipments italy has been a D tier civ along with portugal at every elo level 1 of the lowest win rates, you can check the stats for them on sunbros discord civ grid.

Nerfs to malta were again too much, not at 1 elo level does malta have a win rate higher than 50%, usually slightly below average win rate so they nerfed the steel bolts, nerfed the whole eco 5% and nerfed the shipment xp 2%. A huge overreaction and I hope several of the nerfs don’t make it to the final patch.

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I don’t wanna talk about specific balance changes that are not mentioned as it might not represent the all competitive scene and the thread is focused at it, but can tell you in DM if you want

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Why the hate toward competitive aoe3 players throughout this forum? It’s not like they have been responsible for the random game-breaking bugs/changes that devs have put forth throughout DE leading many pros to counterintuitively leave the game.
No pro is against adding new stuff to the game, and in fact, they are the first ones to sniff out the latest meta, case in point being Garja, Aiz, Ezad, Kevin, etc. They are only against making auto civ builder civs that lower the skill ceiling and make it less fun for anyone, god-forbid that plays the game with half a mindset to win, deservedly.

Listening to the casuals (I’m a casual myself) put forth random arguments to support their imagined biases with no basis, or facts to back them up, and not playing their civs to their full tilt is a l2p issue and rather mid ngl. Git gud.

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I hope the manor house goes back to 135. Removing the 3 villagers card is interesting, devs are still trying to make GMT work but i think they should just give up and give bits some other flavor card for age 1.

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Funnily some self-proclaimed “competitive players” on this forum keep resisting new contents and claim they cannot learn/recognize/remember new units or new civs. And there are self-proclaimed “casual players” like this too.
So it is not really a casual vs competitive thing. It is how much you want to invest to get higher ranked score. Less research less payoff (and it will be healthier for those who do not want to gitgud to care less about ranked wins like I do).

I do respect the real competitive pros that are dedicated to mining the potentials of the game.

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I like what devs do ti shotel and rajputs i dont feel they Will overpower wee need test It firts if i feel them they are op so they need been Nerf bit devs do a good job beat patch ever 10/10

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Sure, i’d love to hear your opinion!

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What on earth are you talking about? Shotels are not at all a good unit and didn’t have any upgrade cards before. They do the same damage to infantry as Chimu Runners and much lower damage against everything else.

By age 3 you will have access to Oromos that now outclass Shotels in basically every way so the card hardly even helps.

What they should do is remove this new card and make the 2 Gascenya upgrade cards in age 2 also apply to Shotels.

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To each their own, and that’s fair. People can play the new stuff or they don’t have to. Kaiserklein was one such player, he simply refused to play non-Nilla civs competitively even from TAD, but he had a keen eye for noticing what was broken and what wasn’t, which was one of the reasons why EP had near-perfect balance with help of other top players too. It just helps to listen to players that have a deeper understanding of the game from time to time.

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Perfect balance is questionable, it was perfect on esoc patch if all you liked to do was make skirm/goon then yeah.

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4-5 pre de civs having the ability to actually “skirm-goon” doesn’t make the balance any less credible. The rest of the civs were anything but that.

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We all are aware by now I’d hope that the esoc patch just catered to the high level players. If it were truly about balance then we would not have had the same exiled prince politician untouched when no other politician was even used. The things the esoc crew liked got the green light whether unbalanced or not because it suited the most vocal minority. You can’t have players like kaiserklein which refuse to even touch a civ that’s not from legacy aoe3 deciding balance changes for new content they have no idea about and openly hate, there’s an obvious bias there against all new civs.

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