He was speaking of new and casual players keeping up with the huge roster of units and he is absolutely correct. I’ve been playing 17 years now and there are units that I guess the counters on.
Which “new and casual player” would ever need to memorize every single unit?
Don’t “new and casual players” every time like you guys really care about them. If you are one of the elite experienced balanced pvp players you would not even meet any one of them in your entire life. It is YOU who do not want more diverse units and think it is overwhelming.
I myself am a casual player. I think the more historical flavor and diversity the better. So you guys are absolutely incorrect.
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As long as new units have clear counters are just new looking and named musketeers, skirmishers, hussars, etc it fine. It could get confusing when they start adding weird hybrid units. The first few times I fought shotel warriors I was like what counters these guys. But now that I know halbs and goons counter them fighting shotels and chimu runners isn’t that hard and I believe coyote runners are also shock units and countered the same
Here is a thing that could make everyone happy:
In 0ad there is a bracket describing the unit role beneath the name:
Though they went for another extreme of naming every single unit with their native language.
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We could just be better about standardising the format for ingame descriptions
2 sentences
(Important unit type). (extra stuff)
Like with the base musket -
Heavy ranged infantry. Armed with a bayonet to beat cavalry.
often the sentences are just flipped around like with soldado -
Very sturdy, but slow training, Heavy Infantry armed with a musket and grenades.
could just be
Heavy ranged Infantry. Armed with a musket and grenades,Very sturdy, but slow training
8 Likes
We have symbols for each type of unit they just take awhile to learn all of them, honestly reading all the unit stats is a pain in AoE 3 and I’m pretty good at using the counter system. I tend to just hover my mouse over the stats and then it gives you a short description, much easier
Yes that’s why I find it hard to understand why people find it hard to understand the new names and appearances. One eventually needs to rely on descriptions after all.
Especially names. They are just for people who want to read about them. Experienced players I see in many games would simply refer to them using nicknames, abbreviations and even hotkeys.
And appearances have already been pretty “standardized”. In AOE2 every unit in the upgrade line has a unique pose and animation. In AOE3 no longer. Most “unique” units that replace regular units all have the same skeleton as their counterparts. This is for more efficiently mass-producing new designs without harming the clarity.
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Whilst there’s a vague default stance of most units - such as musketeers holding the musket against their shoulder, there should probably be a simple symbol/icon system when you have the cursor over an ingame unit and on their UI overlay, possibly with a ‘Weak against…’ caption
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Yes, as long as they give good unit descriptions that list what type of unit it is, and it’s label, light infantry, heavy infantry, shock, etc and what the unit is good against and what it is countered by all is well.
It’s ridiculous how AoE2 players act like the illogical and convoluted system they are used to is somehow objectively understandable.
But AoE3 does have its flaws. Shock infantry is not very intuitive or visually identifiable from some heavy infantry. Pirates are a completely different unit class from Barbary Corsairs despite being essentially interchangeable when it comes to movement, stance, weaponry, and theme. And it was a lot worse back in the day when they used the name “light infantry” for these units and the Aztec units were a lot less distinct looking.
Some of the new unit classes are also not at all intuitive. There’s zero visual difference between skirmishers and counter-skirmishers which is problematic. In my opinion they should have linked the dismounting units to the counter-skirmishers to visually reinforce the role. Then you could have the mounted version as heavy cavalry (a counter to skirms) and the dismounted version also a counter-skirmisher just in a different way. The horribly named and unintuitive Mounted Rifleman could be reworked into a Chasseur which had a historical role exactly like this.
6 Likes
This is more likely an oversight or a remnant of earlier designs. Maybe one could raise a new topic of standardizing some units.
Giving Spain a shock infantry is redundant so rodelero is not touched in TWC when the shock infantry (then called light infantry) is added. It remains a counter cavalry unit not a cavalry.
Barbary corsair is a merc version of rodelero and it has been an okay unit.
Pirates were completely useless so later in DE they are completely reworked to a shock infantry.
BTW to trace even further back in the earliest design stage, I think there was a “sword unit” line that probably served as counter infantry and was eventually merged with the halberdiers as counter cavalry.
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New players and casual players may become experienced players if they stick it out. A less confusing game could facilitate that.
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To maybe bring back the description problem, after rereading a lot of the unit description in the game, they are pretty much kinda random and unhelpful, especially for the melee units.
A lot of the description for heavy melee infantry doesnt even mention that they are heavy infantry, and if we just go off the description, its very likely that people will get confuse units such as rods and shock infantry together.
The newer the units though the better they seem to be in reflecting what the unit is tag wise, so being more standard about them is probably a big step forward
You find them confusing.
I am a casual player. I do not find them confusing. Do not represent me.
There is a very un-confusing game right next door. Welcome to competitive AOE.
2 Likes
There is a game called ‘Age of Empires IV’, that attempted to dumb down everything about age of empires to make it accessible to new players. Even the art style was done to make it easier to see. The goal was not to make a game the developers wanted to play, but rather a game easy for people to learn and play. The resulting game (AOE4) in my opinion is something I have zero interest in ever playing or watching. AOE3 is debatably less complicated to learn than AOE2. AOE2 requires memorizing a long build order and practicing it, for example in order to FF. AOE3 it is possible to just pick Otto, gather 800 food and then start spamming Jans. You don’t even have to worry about building villagers! I remember when I came back to AOE3 when DE was released, it was so easy to pickup and play using Otto, way easier than AOE2 DE.
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i’d say this, for aoe2 its much easier to learn all civs vs aoe3, aoe3 has a ton of really unique aspects going on, more than any other aoe, and thats before the deck system is taken into account, i’d say player number is where it is for that, its less accessible than aoe2, it is a great game like aoe2, with plenty going for it, but crazy complex to learn for someone new compared to aoe2 having all civs on the same tech tree and more limited, but still present uniqueness
they are capable of defending the indefensible as long as they are right… they are going to say that those counters are more intuitive for carrying out more strategies and blah blah blah… in aoe 2 I end up spamming hussar for being a trash unit…
The bad thing about playing with ottos is that later you get used to not taking out villagers…
Of course, it’s not that aoe 3 is bad, but rather that it requires more input time to learn the civs… imagine when there were 8 at launch, it was a little easier than now that there are 22 from all over the world… I’ve been over 1100 hours on the 3 DE and I’ve only mained with 4 civs…
personally i feel lucky to have started in 2005, took time to get those 8 playing well, can’t imagine learning 22 radically different factions now from scratch
also to add to my point above
accessibility is one issue, the other is lack of sp content vs aoe2, it still has quite a bit of sp content, more so than most RTS now, but not as much as aoe2 by rather wide margain, and since its sharing aoe name with it, it has the negative effect, and its a shame cause aoe3 has the best conditions of all aoes to do stellar sp content
Me too, and I think exactly the same… when they presented the 3 DE I thought they were going to put campaigns for the new civs, with the Incas they could put Manco Inca against Pizarro (1532-1536) and with the Swedes, Gustavus Adolphus against the Count of Tilly and Wallenstein in the 30 Years’ War (1631-1632)…
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Yes this is a huge loss. Every unique design of AOE3 seems to me as a potential of great sp gameplay, but that potential is wasted. If every new mechanics and design comes with more sp contents we would not have the uproar of pvp balancing and “difficulty to remember”.
However I also think there are two “symptoms” of being too familiar with a game: one is thinking everything as natural and intuitive, the other is, on the contrary, judging new contents with a well-established “experienced” perspective forgetting about how you first really learned the “old contents” when they were new to you.
It’s the case with every game: when you start playing an RTS, do you plunge into serious pvp immediately? No. You might not even try hard AI. You first play the sp scenarios and a few easy pve or casual pvp with friends, where you were just clicking around, getting some cool looking units, and right clicking. In that process you gradually learned how they work.
This applies to any game that has pvp. If I am new to a card game I do not go onto the ladder immediately. For pure pve games however I rarely see any complaints about having too many contents.
However after a few years of “experienced” gameplay one might look at every new content from a pvp point of view. But it is impossible. It is expected that you first play around with them for a while (just like every “old” content when they were new) instead of mastering them at pvp very quickly. That’s how “experienced” AOE2 players commented AOE3 when it was first released (ironically, one that we now talk about as very “accessible” when comparing to the current state).
I think it has been a mistake for RTS to be considered as mainly a pvp experience by most developers and some players. It is especially a bigger mistake now as genre like moba (which proves to be “the perfect esports form”) have far dominated the esports domain. For casual pvp however RTS takes too long and too much attention. It is now in an really awkward state of being neither competitive enough nor casual enough by today’s standards.
Starcraft and war3 were first great sp games before they became esports. That is what RTS should focus on before jumping on the esports train. In fact rarely does an RTS that starts with a esports focus succeed. On the other hand, sc2 survived long enough with co-ops (which is more like a sp experience with a friend than a competitive pvp) after moba took over esports.
Now does anyone complain Civilizations or Total War having too many unique factions?
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