I worked for 4 years in the gaming industry and their behavior seems pretty normal to me. I can assure you that they have a community manager who is reading all of these topics and replies and then summarizes our feedback and sends it to the producers, who really don’t have that much time to read forums in the last month before releasing the game.
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This is a great writeup. The very asymmetric civ’s economy seems like it’ll be very hard to balance, but it makes for a lot of fun at the start where people are trying to work out what good build orders are. This game has tons of potential. Hopefully the devs have time to make some solid improvements to UI/hotkey/balance basics before launch and really start off with a strong v1.0.0. It will be a work in progress for 12 months no doubt, but it immensely helps with community building if day one launch is as solid as it can be.
Did any high level players stream their play we can watch back over? Would be a good way to kill some hours while counting down the days.
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I have 4 years on these forums and I can assure you that a community manager has not placed any significant reply to feedback here.
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Let’s not pollute this topic - which is very good - with a conversation about how devs should handle feedback and responses.
Let’s wrap that up and just keep talking about the actual bugs/balance issues stated above. There’s always the possibility of starting a new thread for other topics.
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Except we have a very convenient comparison we could make to the CoH3 forums where developer interaction apparently never stops. The forum itself is even designed in a way that you are immediately exposed to the latest developer feedback where here you couldn’t find it even if you tried to do so with the advanced search feature.
As an example, they posted this just yesterday (and there are plenty more examples).
Company of Heroes 3 - UX/UI Overview - Company of Heroes 3
The AoE community would kill to get this level of insight into the development process. It’s all just very unfortunate that for AoE they feel like their 30 second tv-spot-like trailers and giving one interview to some German publication that then locks it behind a paywall is a sufficient level on interaction.
Let’s also not forget the announcement that they will do a Q&A with the community which after a few hours they replaced with a “gamescom recap”, as if we didn’t hear enough about the trebuchet.
but yes, back on topic, wonderful feedback, like most people here though I agree that they shouldn’t limit construction to one vil, especially not just to one building because that would be extremely confusing. It’s more than enough to change it so the unit will only start training after you have enough supply.
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Great post. This game definitely needs the ability to interact with multiple selected units via the UI rather than only via the main game map itself. I had a lot of fun during the beta, but I cannot believe that this basic of an RTS feature is missing so close to launch.
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Not having UI element for individual units is also pretty bad when garrisoning units. There’s currently no way to eject or shuffle units in a TC or castle I guess? You can only eject everything at once? Seems like a pretty big oversight.
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Massively agree with everything said here. Especially the command bar! Props to you guys for writing this out. Few other things I would mention is that I feel like unit responsiveness could do with a little work, if possible. The spectator interface is also quite bad, needs a production tab and units tab. Also would be nice to be able to see both player names and supply/resources simultaneously on the screen. I couldn’t find it in your post (perhaps I just missed it), but I feel like camera location hotkeys would be nice as well.
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I actually prefer not having the wireframe/command bar
I literally did not even notice it was missing till it was mentioned,
I really like the current minimalistic UI
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Wow! that is indeed proper interaction with the community in the development process. Wish we had that…
“Wireframe” is missing from AoE3 as well, so probably that’s where they took the idea from.
I’ve played Starcraft 2 since it came out and still wouldn’t want that type of limitation in a game of AoE, though I did notice getting supply blocked is close to pointless in this game and together with removing walling with buildings it kind of makes houses serve no purpose.
Thank you for taking the time to write this solid post
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Interesting, I didn’t remember it was missing from AoE3 as well. Probably that’s why I didn’t like playing it.
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Holy smokes, that is really bad for AoE3 too, haha.
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Arguably one purpose they might still serve is that you are required to defend them in order to prevent the opponent from supply blocking you so there is still that tactical element. That is, if you supply block yourself you can pop up a new house in 10 seconds but if the enemy manages to destroy 8-10 of your houses then it still hurts.
But I am conflicted about the fact you can’t use structures to block anymore. On one hand I am happy you can’t play foundation tetris to wall in your vills or wall out entire armies, it was fancy and entertaining but kinda silly. I think you should still be able to wall off with fully built structures though.
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Great post, agreed with everything.
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Very nice write up and I agree this game could take a lot of ideas from StarCraft. As a StarCraft player myself, you quickly find a lot ‘missing’ when playing other RTS games from simple match history, to very high quality of life game mechanics such as the command bar, amazing replay system and full customization of hotkeys.
I also tested HRE’s unique man-at-arms techs and found that if you research both 2-handed weapons and mace weapons, the +6 vs heavy goes to +3 vs heavy (Along with the major debuff to attack speed) which pretty much makes the unit worse off.
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Thanks for doing the mod thing, dude.
I work in software myself. I can imagine most devs don’t feel that it’s appropriate to talk out of turn without an approved line of communication.
Maybe we could escalate to the team leads, here?
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I find it a bit strange people still think horsemen are weak and need a buff. Horsemen literally are the safest and best opening for literally every civ pretty much because it gives you map control and counters longbow. Horsemen are literally insane and mobility is king in this game right now.
This doesn’t mean english are not op because they are, but that’s mostly due to the council hall and other players not making enough production to match it which is hard obviously. Council hall is just dumb, reduce it to 1 single archery range worth of production and it should be good. But Horsemen do not need any buffs please no lol.
I also still disagree 1 TC all in with archers can beat 2 TC boom. It can’t at least vs an english player. I have never lost to such a strat when I played properly. I did lose to HuT doing it but I obviously hard greeded for castle age right when he was pushing my base. If I add a stable or another range I defend pretty easy. Not sure for other civs, maybe 2 TC is easier to punish then?
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