With the new balance changes and the market nerf, FC UU strategies are essentially no longer viable. It feels like Microsoft is catering to a small group of top players. Hera voiced complaints about market and FC strategies, and it led to a nerf. Similarly, there was a previous nerf to crossbows following similar feedback. Why not consult the broader player base through a vote instead?
1 Like
Because broader base still isn’t good enough to catch how unbalanced certain things could be, FE has a private discord with 2k players here giving input for balance changes and obviously thry prioritize them over other feedback.
2 Likes
That was the whole point of this balance change.
1 Like
Pro players increase the publicity the game gets and are realistically the main source of advertising for the game. It kinda makes sense from a business perspective they’d cater to it to keep that publicity going.
I am not even a “pro” but low skill strats shouldn’t be viable.
3 Likes
Its a strategy game and people should be allowed to choose how they want to play.
It is like saying people should be able to choose op strats because, it is a strat game…of course this game of aoe2 is not a chill game it is a business…so it has competitive gameplay in mind…everything goes for pros and competitive 1v1 settings…same with aoe4, aom retold, so i guess aoe3 is the only one for casual fun gameplay in the series because there are no competitive tournaments for that game
1 Like
Reddit was packed with people at all levels complaining about the various FC UU strategies
No
Precisely because it is a strategy game there should be as many strategies available as possible and not a couple that are too strong to make all others unavailable
Exactly because a strategy game, there should be as few cheasy strats as possible
I can understand nerfing the few OP FC civs like portuguese and others rather than change the entire mechanics of FC. Market changes and nerfs are what i did not liked. Its too big of a change and I feel some of it will be reverted back in future. It changes the Math of the game.
1 Like
Except for 2 specific nerfs against the most annoying ones in Hussite Wagons and Organ Guns the vast majority is still viable.
If your FC UU strats aren’t viable because of this you did them wrong. At least on the ladder.
Pro scene is a bit different, but there most of them weren’t played anyways.
This is actually true… But Hera didn#t advocate to nerf the market. So… Idk if you can count that.
Hera having a huge influence on devs has a long history. Though this time I’m not to sure about that - because devs did in some parts NOT what he wanted.
Because most of the players - or actually basically all of them - don’t make suggestions based of objective analyses but rather their own perceived reality - in which in most of the cases their preferred playstyle is underpowered even and especially when they chose it because they were told it would be the best way to be successfull.
2 Likes
Having talked with Phos and having casted some of his recs, the Food price change actually seems to be a BUFF to the FC UU strats. If you have a good build order, then you click up without using the Market. And it’s mostly Wood and Gold UUs where these strats are done (although Phos has also been using Vikings for healing Berzerks). Mostly its his opponents who send lots of Vils to Gold in an attempt to click up to the Castle Age, and that now is what gets impacted by the change.
5 Likes
The reality is that for some reason there was that rumor spread that the phosphoru would work with “using the market”. I think that’s what T90 said when he first covered the strat.
But in most Phosphoru buildorders he doesn’t buys a lot of food. I often saw him only buying food once. In many cases he only sells a bit of stone for Gold.
And it’s also just not necessary for the strat. There’s actually enough free food on the maps to get up to castle age and have a decent villager count. Only if you want to add eco later the higher food price might hurt.
And it’s remarkable that despite this initial missinterpretation of the wording “using the market” was corrected from so many sources so often already that still there are made entire topics on that wrong assessment. With the inherent claim to understand the mechanics of this playstyle.
While in the reality the people doing these kind of topics only showcase their complete ignorance of the reality basing their enacted “balance” attemptions on a wrong interpretation of a single wording cause of one of the big influencers…
The two strats which are probably mostly influenced by the changes are actually:
A) Eagle Spam (But Aztecs got a buff that probably outweights the market change)
B) Saracen Style market abuse
Scout transition to knight is also popular for mid elo players. You can now skip mining and sell 200 food to get 150+ gold to age up.
Yeah. As soon as the patch revealed, someone pointed this out. The counter player buy more food than Phosphorus player to match the castle age timing.