I’m really curious to see how it plays in the next patch. My biggest worry is that the deer will start to move back to their original position prior to being pushed again, but I have no way of knowing if that’s how it will work.
Ideally the deer are motionless after being pushed and only move back to their position once their ‘push’ cooldown is reached. Regardless, taking it from 1-8 seconds to 14-20 is a pretty big leap… especially since they halved the distance they travel when pushed by military. They’re taking it from roughly 0:45 to push deer to TC to 3:00+, while only changing distance would make it closer to 1:30 or 2:00. (using 1v1 dry arabia as a reference, where deer spawns are roughly 16-20 tiles from tc).
I would like to offer a way to visualize what this change will look like:
Take a villager and build a line of houses from your main TC to the deer pack you would be pushing to your base. A house takes 15 seconds to construct and occupies 2x2 tiles. The deer move 1.5 tiles on push and will be on 14-20 second cooldown. Pushing the deer post patch will take 1.25-1.5x the amount of time it takes for a single villager to build houses between those points, (pending terrain and human error during the push).
You’ve stuck with the “it’s tedious” argument but left out that it encourages a more passive and defensive game, taking much longer to leave the base for food and slowing down the action.
An example of a mechanic that was changed quite some time ago and some people complained about was that if you destroyed all the landmarks of a player in a team game, you expelled that player from the game and in the end it was removed and forced that you had to destroy all the landmarks of the team. Or a more similar example, the start of Rus reworked.
I repeat again, it’s good to reward more a player who does good micromanagement on land maps, but I think it should be approached differently with other options.
P.S: That said, perhaps the nerf was excessive and simply nerfing and make one-shot with a scout to counter would be enough.
I’m going to reword this, because I’m not sure if I’ve been misunderstood:
Nerfing deer pushing isn’t out of line.
My issue is with nerfs being so significant that it will make it unfeasible in the gameplay that I experience at 1500+ mmr.
I can’t speak for how it will alter experiences for people in other leagues, or how it will affect tournaments, I’m honestly more upset that they are removing gameplay to incentivize other gameplay (pro scouts in this instance). This isn’t like removing or adding features that are unique to Age of Empires 4. Being able to push deer into a base is part of the identity of this series. Removing or making it unfeasible feels like removing age of empires itself from this game.
The win rates of civilizations are very far from the win rates among professionals, probably due to mechanics that are difficult for an average player.
The thing that’s been sticking in my mind about this being a tournament level issue:
It could be resolved by having a tournament specific rule. Like stonewalls being illegal to build in feudal age.
If the entire reason to nerf gameplay for the entire player base revolves around tournament gameplay, and players on the ladder do not experience a change in win-rate based off of the mechanic, doesn’t that mean it makes even less sense to point to that as the reason?
Like, why do I need to think about how it feels to watch tournament games when it comes to the balance changes that I have to live with as well. They can just alter the circumstances of play in tournaments, like they do for countless other things. They even have custom tuning packs especially for those tournaments to ensure fair play.
Edit: I’m obviously pretty upset about this, so I’ll step away from it for a bit.
Even if they replace it or supplement the dark age gameplay with something new, it’s frustrating to have developed a skill only to have it become obsolete through patches.
I’m just adding something additional to the debate. The main reason has already been mentioned by others. The ladder has also been trending downward lately. These are other additional aspects.
It’s not as bad as I feared, they stay put until their push timer runs out, but I don’t think even a deer pack on hill and dale is feasible to push to main TC anymore. It really takes 3-5 minutes to complete a push from 18 tiles away (most are further than that).
I was, and it was mentioned as a potential in valdemars patch recap video.
Yeah I’m pretty upset about it still, this change effectively kills any kind of deer pushing. It is not reasonable to take 4 minutes to move deer from one end of the screen to the other. You can’t even lame deer packs anymore.
As far as improving the gameplay experience goes, all of my games have had pro scouts in it. Whoopee.
The effective removal of deer pushing signals a lack of AoE design understanding in development. I think the game has been going in a good direction but this is one of those things that erodes it all.
After 120 seconds, there is approximately 227 food remaining. My suggestion is to change the factor to 3x so that after 120 seconds, there is 175 food remaining.
