Early defence for water

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
22

As far as I can tell the general opinion of the game is that in general land is very balanced, very engaging, has lots of options, etc.

Water…less so.

Water can’t be identical to land, but I really don’t see a problem with taking a good hard look at land and seeing what can be adopted to water.

Imagine Chess. Chess has been played for 1500ish years. Presumably that is because it’s a well designed game.

Now let’s imagine in some matchups we added another four columns, we’ll call that additional part of the board water chess for no particular reason, and only pawns could play on that part of the board.

I don’t think anybody would be critical of the assessment that the gameplay on that part of the board wasn’t as good as on the rest of the board.

I think some defensive structures for water could help.

I also think more unit choice on water can help. Civ matchup could lead to exceptions, but in general for common units in imperial age, there are 13 options.

  1. Arbalest
  2. Elite Skirm
  3. HCA
  4. Hand Cannoneer
  5. Champion
  6. Halb
  7. Hussar
  8. Cavalier/Paladin
  9. Heavy Camel
  10. Ram
  11. Onager
  12. Scorpion
  13. Treb

and i didn’t even include less oftenly seen units like petards or siege towers. Didn’t even include monks. Didn’t include UUs or regional units.

that’s 169 diferent matchups include mirror. Not including possible unit comps. Just I pick a unit at random and you pick a unit at random and there are 169 possibilities.

On water if we include demo ship, fire ship, galleon, and cannon galleon, we have 16 matchups.

I’m not a game designer, but that seems like a very large disparity. I think if there were 1-3 more common water units that’d help a ton.

I know the Rome at war mod has what basically amounts to a scout cavalry boat (fast weak) boat, and a monk boat (boarding ship) boat. I’m not saying that this is necessarily the best approach, but adding a few more water units I think could really do wonders to spice up water.

the most experimental change would be to somehow make it that you can gather wood and/or stone from water. IDK how you’d do it, how you’d balance it, how it’d make any sense, but land has four resources + trade, water has food and trade. That puts water at a severe dis-advantage against land. You only want to protect water mostly to get to/protect/control land that is near the shore.

All that rambling to say I see no good reason not to try adding defenses to water.

23

I like the idea of allowing up to 5 fishing ships to garrison the docks, but villagers shouldn’t be able to garrison the docks. If an enemy ship attacks a fisherman on the shore, make the fisherman retreat inland. Also, a fully garrisoned dock shouldn’t be able to take down a feudal age ship in just 2-3 shots. Compared to TCs, Docks are cheaper and have no build limit, so they shouldn’t have such high attack power.

My two cents.

  • An arrow ship that fires arrows quickly at a shorter range than a galleon, or a boarding ship that deals melee damage at close range. Make it replace the fire ship as the anti-ship unit for every civ, and make the fire ship the UU for the Byzantines.

  • A supply ship as a new unit that cannot fight or has very low attack power, but can quickly heal friendly ships at close range.

  • Fishing ships or supply ships can (compared to villagers on land) slowly build docks and sea towers, and possibly sea walls and sea gates.

  • Once there are more types of ships, it may be necessary to split into two buildings: Dock and Naval Port. The former can train fishing ships, transport ships, and trade cogs, while the latter can train military ships and transport ships. Gillnets is in the former, and other technologies are in the latter.

24

Now this is something I haven’t heard before. It replicates monk healing on water. A new idea at least to me. Are you concerned that since villagers can repair ships that having a free alternative would cause imbalance or would the repair ship use resources just like a repairing vill?

I know the rome at war mod does this and it seems to work well.

25

My initial thought was that if you have several ships, it would be very helpful to have 1-2 supply ships mixed in. Supply ships can move with the ships on the water and heal in time, so there is no need to micro-control damaged ships to shore for repairs, which is especially useful when the number of ships is large.

I’m currently calling it “healing”, assuming it doesn’t cost resources unlike “repairing”, since training already costs resources. But it can heal slower than villagers repair if needed.

Never used nor familiar with this mod. It was inspired by one of my previous ideas.

I have previously suggested that the “Port” be a unique building for a new civilization. The Port will be very cheap compared to the generic Dock, only 2x2 in size, but can only train Fishing Ships, Transport Ships, and Trade Cogs, which makes the civ strong on water maps, as the first Fishing Ship can be obtained much faster. It does not replace the generic Dock, which the civ still need to build navies.

26

Making docks stronger has some issues.
Docks are cheap and easy to spam. They cost less then military production buildings but they have 3x the functions.
They are basically a Mill, half a Market and a full military building.
They easily fit 300 Wood worth of features into a 150 Wood building, adding half a tower/TC to the list would make them even stronger.

So maybe we should look back at the Alpha version of AoE2. Back then there were 2 naval buildings, Docks and Ports. Ports could only train military ships while the Dock could only train civilian ships.
Now the dock is the only building in the game with 2 pages.

Ironically it was the other way round in the alpha of AoE2.

So my suggestion would be to add a new building called the Shipyard:

  • Trains all military ships
  • Can garrison fishing ships, villagers and archers
  • Has an attack when units are garrisoned like a TC
  • Costs 150 Wood 50 Stone
  • 4x4 size but only with a 2x2 collision like a TC so you can drive all around it
  • Benefits from Range upgrades (so it can keep up with ships)


It would make it easier to protect the coast but it would make it harder to spam then Docks.

Also naval trade would actually work. Right now your naval trade lines usually collapse once you build a forward dock because all your Trade Cogs will immediately go there.
This makes using naval trade incredibly frustrating.

I like the name Shipyard because it sounds bigger and more important then just Dock or Port.
Also it clearly implies that it build ships while Docks or Ports could just be places for Trade Cogs to load and unload cargo.

27

Yeah, but it doesn’t seem like they’ll do it. Which is why I’m suggesting small changes.

You broke the two pieces. The first piece is garrison 5 vils. Garrisoning 5 vils will let it take down a feudal ship in 2-3 shots. That’s how I’ve balanced it. That’s pretty much the only way to balance it, if you don’t want to change how much a dock costs. When you garrison 5 vils and 5 fishing ships, that’s 10 economic units which are garrisoned, costing you 200 resources the next minute.

As I’ve explained above, I balanced it by introducing a huge economic cost. The building doesn’t cost a lot, but you need to garrison villagers. If you just garrison 5 villagers, that’ll cost you upwards of 100 resources even in the early game in 1 minute.

Look, I’d love it if this happens. Or if devs introduced more ships, water buildings, and all that stuff. But, that seems improbable at this point. That’s why I’ve recommended small scale changes which are easy to implement.

28

I think the sea is the only place where there is still the possibility for large change in AoE2.
Currently only a fraction of players actually enjoys naval gameplay in AoE2 so there is not really a big fan base that could be against changes.
And probably even a lot of those people would love to see more interesting naval gameplay.