Every update makes the game more complicated and less accessible for new players, because of unique names and units

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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The physical stance of most models is enough for visual information regarding infantry units. Cavalry units tend to be easy just because they’re cavalry and that alone gives them a clear weakness - either pikes or skirms, depending on whether the cavalry unit in question has a gun or a melee weapon.

Musketeer units have tight and upright postures with a very firm and very clear visual language going on. Skirmishers are much looser, but still holding a gun at the ready. Archers have bows, and afaik there’s no exceptions to how to kill an archer.

Overall, the names are unimportant and more of visual flair than anything - the vast majority of information you need from any unit lies in how it stands and presents itself, not in the language of the name or how it’s labelled.

I think this entire subject is a moot point, because the visual language alone should be enough for any new player to understand what type of unit they’re looking at.

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It is a moot point, yes for majority of players who are already aware of the patches and notes and stuff. But adding it is not taking away from anything, and even it benefits only 5% of players it is a good thing.

Even the historical renaming was a moot point because I could easily go into compendium, or just click a button in game to read more about the history of the units. I always knew ottoman vills are different from the dutch vills without the help of unique names.

Also we rts players are information nerds anyway :stuck_out_tongue: more information the better.

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They are all from esoc, so you can’t blame them for their attitude :grin:

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Just adding an icon of the unit’s main type in the UI, next to the name, should be enough I think.

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I think we just need some obvious icongraphy like AoE4 when you cursor over units.

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Squamiger talks about competitive we know you’re not competitive so that’s probably why you don’t understand each other. Anyway best wishes to the new players who will have to learn an infinite game haha I’ve never seen such a long and complex rts maybe it’s better that they go and play other rts

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Best wishes to the elite champion legendary pvp pros on their quest in creating a huuuuuuuuge competitive scene for a “simpler” version of AOE3, winning a $10000 prize pool and turning it into the next national esports game in Korea.
Maybe then world’s edge will consider porting that version of AOE3 as a DLC to AOE4 with your very competitive rule sets.

BTW which competitive players cannot remember unit names?

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Well, this game doesn’t even make a tournament with a $500 prize pool, this game has now failed for competitive but it never had hopes for it so talking about competitive here is like talking about anything else.
Only 1 game was competitive and this was Aoe3 vanilla where he saw real game competition having said that, Goodbye!
Did you really put a time on the discussion? Haha ridiculous

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Oh that’s news to me.

Now where do these very loud “competitive players” come from?
I watch streams. Most content creators and well-known pros I see are not like that.
And because there is no big tournament, I didn’t see those “competitive players” winning a different worldwide AOE3 championship every month either.
Where are they from then? Why are they haunting a game that never had chances to be competitive for 17 years?
Why aren’t they all winning matches after matches in some other games with biiiiiig competitive scenes? Definitely not because they CANNOT right?

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To be fair, esoc community saved the game. Whole DE was originally based on esoc patch for a reason.

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ES created the whole game from the very beginning but still abandoned it in a poor state and talked s**t about the game calling it a mistake afterwards.

The former does not make the latter a justified behavior.

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That seems a wild and exaggerated claim. And out of topic for thread.

I still feel [generic name + historical name] or vice versa, is the best middle ground for both sides of this debate. It is keeping both options in and taking nothing away. I fail to see why it would not work for both.

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you must be some troll because squamiger has put it perfectly all these shit changes just hinder new players even if they just wanna play casual because there is no consistency between civs

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New players should learn unit classes, not unit names.

And arrivedleader is a long time forum member.

If anything, AoE3 is the most asymmetric of all AoE games and it is very important for us to keep it as asymmetric as possible.

New players NEED TO LEARN UNIT CLASSES, NOT UNIT NAMES.

If you look at a unit, you dont need to know its name to tell what it does and who it counters.

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328

Show me the new players. Don’t tell me you mean the “new players” who directly jump into your small pvp circle on day 1.

I’m a casual player. I think having different options to play with for different civs for every game is much more enjoyable than playing the same few units and the same build order over and over again.

If you guys want to compete you can make your own restricted rules like they did in AOE1 and compete as much as you like undisturbed. Then you don’t need to remember anything new. You can even install “uniform name” mods like the small/cube tree mods in AOE2. Don’t try to limit the options for others who enjoy them.

If you’re looking for “cOnSiStEncY” between civs then AOE3 is not the game for you since 2005. You should look for AOE2/4 which also have started to be more and more “inconsistent” recently.

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But whats the issue with the 2 words formula?? It has been 15y on the saga and takes the best of both worlds.
We arent asking for anything crazy

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ES created the whole game from the very beginning but still abandoned it in a poor state and talked s**t about the game calling it a mistake afterwards.

you’re mistaken, he said ESOC, not ES. ESOC is a community forum that kept AoE3 alive from 2015-2019 and created the “ESOC Patch”, which was a set of balance changes that DE directly adopted when DE was initially released.

Casual players playing skirmish mode did not sustain this game, the multiplayer scene did. Multiplayer has been and is vital for the long-term success of this game, and of any RTS. The replayability of single player in RTS just doesn’t have the staying power of multiplayer, even if at any given moment there are more single players than multiplayers.

I get it, you want to make the game as complex and historically accurate as possible because you like consuming history through a computer game. That’s fine. This post isn’t meant for you, it’s addressed to devs who might care about keeping multiplayer somewhat accessible

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Three different things:
1. I think adding a bracket or an icon indicating unit roles is a good idea.
2. The “two word rule” did not exist for 15y. You just invented it yesterday. Next to your good example of “ashigaru musketeer” is sepoy, sowar, zamburak, yabusame. And ashigaru musketeer is such a bad name as ashigaru never used muskets. You also have different prowlers and runner all doing different things. If you want simpler names okay. If you think it’s because the older versions were built based on some “simple and clear” naming convention, no they weren’t.
3. What OP suggested is far beyond both two aforementioned points. Most people here against those changes do not just stop at some “two word rule”. OP is suggesting reverting the card names to “cheap something” or “something combat”. He’s also against the non-standard unit names that have been there in vanilla. He wants the different villagers that produce and function drastically different to be called the same name. And the reason is some so called “new player” cannot remember them. That reasoning does not make any sense as I’ve pointed out (and since when the pvp elites cared about new players? If you want to speak for yourself then speak for yourself. Don’t use others you never cared about as your shield). Then after this thread was first made some other people jumped in asking for most units (not just names) to be made standard for all civs and varieties reduced in civs, outlaws and mercenaries. It’s going to be much larger landslide than you expected. You should think twice before joining their team.

I know. What I mean is ES making the game does not justify some former ES member talking s**t about it.
Similarly, ESOC “saving” the game does not justify some ESOC member trying to turn the game into a dull grind fest for their own good.

Did they also buy additional copies? Or make huge sponsored tournaments with 10k viewers? Or create contents that really attract “new players”?

Oh the latter really exist. Are those people complaining here?

If you want to add some additional descriptions and instructions on the UI, I’m agreeing. Or if you are planning make a mod about it, then fine.
However Ii you want it to be completely forcibly reverted to a simpler and more boring state for everyone, then it IS meant for me. It is going ti kill the game that has kept me interested for years and I’m against that.

The multiplayer of the original AOE1, which was very imbalanced, had clumsy controls and was long abandoned, was kept accessible for decades with some community-decided ruleset (ignoring 80% of the game’s contents) played repeatedly time after time and finally paying off with a dedicated DLC and a special game rule.
You brilliant people can do better!

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What is ‘sustaining the game’? You mean ‘multiplayer community’? Yes, obviously people playing multiplayer did that, needless to say.

For ones designed with MP in mind, and earning money through MP means- sure.
You’d have to define a success of a game. For the vast majority of titles, even ones heavily focused on multiplayer, it’s equals financial success. AoE III doesn’t feature monetization, especially tied to multiplayer, which would contribute to such a thing.
It’s important for every part of the game to be well-made, popular, and well-regarded. When a game features a multiplayer mode, it’s obviously a good thing when said scene doesn’t completely die. And on PC in good games they rarely do, as long as game creators don’t deliberately aim do do so by various means.

This game, AoE III and 3DE were designed to be no less diverse and balanced when it comes to gameplay value than Age of Kings. It’s much closer to the middle of the spectrum than AoE IV or ofc AoE Online.
Sadly things didn’t go super well, ES was shut down, SP never reached its full potential for many tech/design/financial/policy reasons, but that doesn’t automatically translate into game being carried over and surviving on a single string called ‘multiplayer’. It’s more a stroy of underwhelming scenario creation tools/campaing offerings than strength of MP, which even when peaking never came close to overthrowing 2 which cemented itself in the golden age of PC RTS days.
I’ve played couple hundreds of hours of MP in the original AoE III, but even more skirmish with testing various mods and overhauls and while visiting various fan sites and forums people like that, and ones not caring about MP, always appeared to be a huge percentage.

Of course even mediocre multiplayer has the potential to vastly outlive singleplayer, that’s the nature of the beast. Again- needless to say. But it’s a fragile thing and relying on it is a gamble and a reason why countless games died and are forgotten.
In AoE III people would likely say it certainly does not, because of how lacking singleplayer offering was and for the most part- still is. But in the end a copy sold is a copy sold, and it’s a well-known fact that most people don’t seriously engage in multiplayer. And certainly not for longer periods of time, and even less in more competitive and classic forms of it, and in its core AoE 3 is a very conservative take on the formula that largely, despite all awesome additions, is the same thing as in previous installments.
Devs did a solid job but 90% of the effort was channeled into the support of that classic core- more maps, more variety in cards, native tribes, revolution etc. Things like Tycoon mode came very, very late, things like challenge score mode are a stump that is more like a proof of concept than expansion in a new direction.

For people handling the money and making all the decisions, a person that buys this game for campaigns, mods, skirmish and a person that buy this game to play with friends online in a clan, is equally valuable. And so far there’s nothing suggesting multiplayer-focused people came even close to being a majority of consumers buying a copy of this game, and all expansions.

Skins are valued, and bought, by relatively few. So when it comes to ‘supporting the game’-paying the bills, it all falls into: people buying the game, people buying the expansions. And since most are not interested and/or don’t stick with MP (that doesn’t generate the money itself) for a new player if turns into ‘value for money’. 3DE is amazing, support is amazing and devs delivered so much free content it causes headaches, but when you calculate $ per campaign, meta SP offerings, the situation is rather dire.

I’ve played thousands of skirmishes, spend many hours creating maps, and testing out mods. But especially these days people like that are a minority. Kids don’t do things like this without added layers of progression, skill trees, growing hero characters (hell, Relic did that in Dawn of Wars II years ago), some persistent bigger sandbox modes a’la ‘Galactic Conquest’ from Empire at War etc.

Grinding skirmishes, with poor AI, is for old-school RTS fans hopeless AoE3 lovers and people that have no choice because they love civs/historical setting. Grinding rank in the classic RTS competitive formula was and still is for few in the grand scheme of things and that’s a dead end in the current market. AoE IV won’t reach 10m sold copies anytime soon…

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333

Im agree with OP here, 3 fishing boats > Sushi, Cheaper stables > whatever royalhouse. Now “special cards with trickier effects” are ok like Marco Polo, Caballeros or West Indian companies. For example, I remember a match getting Pizza and not knowing what my ally did.