Developers,
Please increase Population Limit.
AOE2 DE has done so, so why not do the same for AOE3 DE?
This is a big issue.
Many Mods increase population limit, which is a good indication many players want more population for bigger armies.
Unfortunately, the last game patch from Feb 25 has disabled all mods.
None of the mods is working now.
I tried to play Skirmish 4v4 with the AI, and the game just kept going on.
It was not possible to win the game due to the small armies.
My resources just kept accumulating and went over 100,000 due to the population limit.
I was producing new units as fast as they were dying, yet my resources just kept accumulating.
You cannot beat 4v4 game when you have only 40-50 army units.
Keep in mind that Falconets take 5 population and Mercenaries take 2-4 population, while settlers take 99 population when you max them up.
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I am pretty sure they have considered that, but increasing the pop limit would just break the balance in unimaginable ways.
Imagine having to deal with 100pop worth of gendarmes among other issues that this could cause.
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it would be more reasonable to lower the villager caps. and still, neither change could ever happen because of the game-altering nature and the history of the community.
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They can add an option for higher population for only Skirmish games with the AI.
That won’t affect Multiplayer and therefore balance is not an issue any more.
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That is a good point.
Or for casual games too
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They can add the option to change the population ceiling before starting the game. Add a 100, 150, 200, 250 and 300 pop ceiling options(scaling building limits and population bonuses like China’s accordingly) and let each player choose what he or she want to do.
Changing the population limit in AoE3 is not as easy because of how some houses work.
You can’t let Japan build more Shrines. So you can’t just do the same thing you can in AoE1/2.
My simple idea would be to add an Imperial Age technology that requires Immigrants to be researched and increases the population limit by 100.
It could be split up into multiple technologies that each give 10-50 population.
Because the villager limit doesn’t change you can’t just spam that many units.
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Off course you can allow Japan to build more Shrines.
You simply increase the shrine limit in the protoy.xml file.
The same can be done for houses.
Each population limit option will use a different protoy file, just like mods work.
If Japan gets more Shrines, they will just become even stronger, to the point taht no other civ will be able to fight them and their super economy.
The issue with Japanese, Swedes and Incas, is taht their Houses generate resources, so they have to be limited, and the game has to be limited to 200 pop because of that.
Talking about balancing not technical possibility.
Inca can’t even get 200 population by just building houses they have to build additional TCs because their houses produce Food.
The technology option has the advantage that it doesn’t change the balancing.
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I think the population is perfect as it is. As some said above, there’s no way to increase it because of some mechanics on AOE3.
There’s many people playing AI 1vs7 all the time. So population is not a problem at all. If u don’t suceed and get more and more ressources, the problem is the way you’re massing troops and microing them.
I don’t see the problem in adding the option to single-player or unranked games.
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That’s easy to fix, just make houses give more population.
This will still break balance and will make early rushes extremely powerful.
Another option could be having a tech on the tc that increases tc population once researched.
Pay a certain amount of ressources and tcs have more pop space.
Again, that should be only done on casual games or single player though.
Either way, I dont think it would hurt the game to being able to make more houses, even if japan gets more shrines and stuff like that as long as the game isn’t ranked.
Most players that go for casual games are there only for the fun of it anyway and are not into competitive game
Higher pop limit should come with larger maps.
Because AOE3 maps are already small, it would be very crowded otherwise.
Then the tower limits, etc. should also be increased accordingly.
I have been playing AOE 3 (legacy version) since 2005 almost every day.
I play 3v5 single player Skirmish with the AI with higher population Mod where settlers take no population and almost all military units take only 1 population.
My games take usually one hour and they are a blast where I have 200-300 army units in late game fighting all over the map.
This type of large scale war is very fun.
I suggest everybody try that with the legacy version where modding is easy.
Again, this is for single player only where game balance is irrelevant.
We should be able to have the freedom to play our games as we like and AOE 3 DE should allow us that.
2 Likes
You guys are really over-complicating this.
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No one is arguing that the Population Ceiling should be altered for competitive games. It will remain 200 pop. because that’s what the game was balanced for. Increasing, and decreasing, the Population Ceiling would be a feature for casual matches against friends or the AI.
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If everything is properly scaled, then balance won’t be completely destroyed. Yes, Japanese with double shrines sounds OP, but you need to consider that they will also need to support double the amount of units against an enemy that will also have double the amount of units and double the amount of settlers.
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Even if the balance does get really messed-up because of Shrines, or banks or blockhouses or whatever other building or unit being spammed, there is nothing preventing the Devs from adding special rules for games with 1.5x or 2x the population ceiling.
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One simple way to increase army size without increasing the actual population, is to set all villagers to take zero population, and all military units to take only 1 population.
That is what I did to Mod my game.
That will increase army size by 3 or 4 times depending which units you recruit.
The developers can simply introduce official Mod for only single player which will then be maintained by the developers when they release new patches.
That will insure that this type of Mod doesn’t stop working.
Again, I am bringing up this issue because the latest patch from February 25th broke all the Mods.
None of the mods are working right now.
I think it might be possible to make a custom trigger in a random map that just gives a player 100(or more) additional population when reaching Imperial Age.
That would be the simplest way to get that working in the game right now.
And Random Maps don’t breake with updates. Plus they are not mods so you can easily play them with friends in private lobbies.