The developers are going all out because marketing is still important. Naked chicks riding giant jaguars are cool, that’s why they added them to the game, not because they needed cavalry unit. That’s what sells.
Just like the men in horned helmets with giant hammers.
In some ways that is what AoM is about, isn’t it? It kinda fits the original spirit of AoM.
The Chinese and Japanese have been pretty conservative when it comes to human unit designs.
History accuracy aside, which i agree aom doesnt care much for, theres also design and balance to keep in mind. A civ with no infantry would get Hard walled by towers with cren.
It also brings issues as to the unit roster stats it would need to be able to fend off the short comings. Personally Just the dynamic that something can be done isnt really an argument that it should be done imo, not by itself at least.
Can you over design a civ so that it has the worse weakness and release it? Sure. Can you band aid add different mechanics to make it up for that design flaw? Yes. Can you Just design an easier civ to implement that has something more relevant in its mechanic than it Just doesnt have X unit? Also Yes. If theres no incentive besides “why not” the argument that it should be done because it can be done seems to fall short to me at least.
Those were Just examples, i can add more to that count if you want. Also you putting the crossing the line Mark at 3-4-5 is entirely subjective.
Contarious and White horse cav and camels even thou they come out in Heroic age have the exact same purpose Hippeus would do. It has the same counters and the same play pattern as you would use on any speedy unit. By your own definition they do the same thing, its different stats that change certain parts.
And even among spearmen type units some you count, some you dont, like eggy spearmen and hoplite are more similar than eggy spearmen is to hirdman yet you count one and not the other.
Not really, its Just different stats or age. Nothing big. Theres nothing profoundly different in design between contarious and naginata riders imo. White horse cav also is very similar. You could make the effort of talking about its ability which no good player focuses on using.
Spears are simply something civs need early on to fend of cav if they dont have cav themselves. Norse could work without hirdman even if worse, but eggy def cant. Same for atty for katapeltes
Going by what you consider meaningful in that difference. If i give a civ spearmen in Heroic age or even mythic age then this happens
Just to clarify Egyptians are not in the count, its Atlantians, Norse, Japanese, Chinese, Aztecs.
You raise some good arguments, I do think Aztecs are refreshing in a sense of not having the standard cavalry. But again even different age makes gameplay feels different, i did felt that we got to the limit with Japanese- but like you said, the limit is subjective. I think it’s also that every new/reworked civ got a spearman without exceptions that feels off for me.
It’s not that I don’t want a cavalry counter on classic age. Just mix things up?:
Both greeks and Egyptians have cavalry counter cavalry on heroic (with camels a bit more generalists)- why not have a civ with a cavelry counter cavelry on classical age instead of spearman?
Agreed. Remove the hirdman.
They would be different, but it can be different for the worse (for the unit i mean) its hard to come up with a reason to make spearmen once you have cammels since they do the same thing but better until horus unless you are having hard time getting 1-2 midgolds to make them.
If you had myrmidon on classic age and hoplite on mythic you would not see a single zeus hoplite
If you had white horse cav or tiger cav in classic age you would not need halb
If you had cammels on classic age you arent making spearmen on heroic onwards
On release you stopped making fire archers when chu ko nu became avaialble
Because then its the best unit in classic age. In cav wars what matters most is speed. Counter cav have to be faster than regular cav otherwise they are pointless (they are just spearmen on a horse for the sake of it). And being that fast also grants them the ability to not engage with the other units they would loose to. Pure anti cav units also have better hack armor than pierce armor to deal better with cav units (like podromos for example).
The spearman unit its kinda the basic defend that you later power creep on for most scenarios
I personally think this is actually an issue with Retold in general. Now, I get it for the sake of balance, of course, and competitive play etc etc etc. But one of the big selling points of AOM was just how unique every civ was in almost every aspect, not just eco, heroes and favour. Even their military was designed around a unique approach, with Greeks being pricey, good and typical RTS, half soft and half hard counters. Eggy was weak but cheap and massable, norse were glass cannons, Atlanteans were premier troops but high price and pop. But i feel AOMR has somewhat diluted much of that uniqueness. I think the hirdmen was a bit of a pointless unit (though I do agree with the Godi). I feel all the buffs to the Eggy barracks units have diluted their early game flavour, and the Greeks no longer feel like the small, pricey but elite force they once did. Everyone’s roster is starting to look the same a little bit. From what I’m seeing of Aztecs, its a step in the right direction back toward flavour, but the jaguar riders is such a dud edition. Their flavour feels (and should be) about death (which I think they have done quite well) speed, ambushing, stealth and poison/fire/DOT, chip and erode slower armies. THAT would’ve been a unique flavour. But it feels they have just touched the surface of it, rather than just go for it.
Just my personal feelings though about uniqueness and flavour. AOM was, and should never be, AOE2. That is a brilliant game in its own right for the reason of balance and very, very subtle and nuanced civ differences. AOM was about the stark differences, utterly different peoples and their gods colliding.
On of the unique aspects of AoM used to be that most human units are not hard counters to each other, just soft counters. Many units had little to now bonus damage and just filled each role based on armour, speed and range.
Now AoMR has made the game more like AoE by increasing the bonus damage most units do. The whole trend of giving every new civ an anti cavalry hard counter in Classical Age is new since none of the original 3 civs had that. Having early counter units used to be a unique aspect of the Atlantean, now all the new civs do that.
Does AoM really need so many hard counter units? AoM still has the whole higher level counter system between Human Units, Myth Units and Heros on top.
I don’t even have to leave the house to make a spear that can seriously threaten someone.
When hiking in remote areas and for some reason i don’t have a hiking stick, I just make a quick spear from some random stick on the ground,doubles as hiking stick and self defense. Also hiking sticks are very good spears, in large hiking groups you can make a literal phalanx to fend off bears/wolves.
So yeah, anyone can make a spear.
In the topic of civs lacking a particular unit type: aoe3 tried that and the solution was to make a unit that logically fits the same role (shock infantry). A civ with no infantry cannot work unless you create some monster archer which acts as a front line. Yeah, no. Norse is a very good indication of what kind of design compromises are needed to make such a thing work. They technically don’t have archers but they still added a logical archer type unit anyway.
Why can’t a cavalry unit fill that role?
The Throwing Axeman does melee damage and therefor is good against some units that are supposed to counter Archers like Huskarls.
I do dislike that they have Archer Armour class now since that makes them just too much like an Archer.
Nobody likes this. And it’s all because of the hirdman. The Norse originally didn’t have spearmen because berserkers and throwing axemen were excellent at fighting cavalry. Now they’ve added spearmen, and they’ve had to make throwing axemen twice as useless. In AoE 3, a unit’s two tags meant it received buffs from both troop types. In AoM, that’s simply double the vulnerability.
They have tried many things and reverted or changed them when they saw the balance was off (and maybe things never even made public). There may be a lot of seemingly “interesting” ideas that that doesn’t work in the practice.
In the practice most civs that survived and thrived needed to have counters to everything in their region or otherwise they would reallistically not have survived. Civs that are exposed to something new and more powerful either adapt quickly or die (aztecs died to cavalry and gundpowder while comanches and mapuche adapated for a while; and japanese adapted well to industrial tech and thrived)
It def can, you can brute force any unit design, you can take the stats of a hoplite, put the hoplite on a horse and call it a day. But thats putting it on a horse for the sake of it. It will also bring more weakness like all units that try to double function have. One of them is being weak to Buildings. And also being weak against the very frontline they are up against, which usually has a bonus vs cav units.
In the original game units that had a bonus versus archers also had a bonus vs throwing axemen. It was a very similar dynamic deal but hidden since there were no unit tags like retold displays. All counter archers had a bonus vs throwing axemen, peltast and Slingers simply were so bad you didnt see the interaction often, but tuma did have a bonus vs them and that you did see
The problem is that the unit types are so fundamental to civ design that removing one type causes many balance issues down the line. Norse used to be pretty bad in vanilla cause they couldn’t counter flying units to the point they added an upgrade to TA to do bonus damage to flying units and then added the godi.
Similarly norse didn’t have a true counter cav unit, you needed bragi upgrades for that, another pain point. So in the end it was easier to give norse these tools then design around then not having them.
In aoe3 it’s possible to have civs lack a specific unit type cause civ design is much deeper than aom.
And you still keep lying. All the anti-archer units had lower multipliers against axe throwers than against other archers.
I said they had a bonus, not that they had the same bonus. Anti inf units also had lower multipliers vs some norse units, but they still had them. You have been showned this already.
However, there’s no other way to balance them. In the old days, Norse weren’t glass cannons; they generally took less damage from any opponent. And now we see that only Thor performs well, while Odin and Loki lose out, because the old balance failed to hold, and the design was specifically for it.
But I wanted to say that your coverage of the topic is still one-sided.
This is not true at all. OG AoT Norse was by far the worse civ in the game.
Voobly wise and player balance patches Odin got to be very good, thats true. Thor However was mostly bad and Loki was a noob Hunter, he owned low level players and after a certain level he Just didnt cut it. Some players like Gaboo were known because they were among the few that could do loki at a high level. You are free to check any tier list or top player opinion on them. Age of titans saw very little representation among pantheons. Same in others, Oranos was godly and gaia was meh.
Thor is very much better than the others, thats very true. Loki is good ok water maps but people dont like them, which fair. Freyr is decent to good imo, odin is lacking at high level, otherwise hes doing good (same as loki did ok the original game) But people should drop the Ball of their tinte rose color glasses of the old game. It was def not balanced and all 3 norse god were never close to being at similar power levels, at a high level at least which is what i guess you are refering to here
Fair i guess, which is why i clarified it to you. Most if not all units that had a bonus vs archers also did vs TA, a separate bonus but a bonus nonetheless.
