I will say it in the beginning before any assumptions are done. I don’t like the majority of new naval changes. I will only address the fundamental things I think should change.
Docks Firing on ships
Docks are pretty cheap, quick to build and hard to destroy even with fireships. They may serve to garrison fishing ships as well as battle ships. But thats where the changes should end.
The Hulk non-sense replaced with Bireme ship
The HULK ship looks like it is fishing for suckers with its 1 range attack. It has the same animation as fisher man and not balanced properly.
Instead of Hulk, I propose a different ship called Bireme ship. Its basically a naval battering ram with high pierce armour to counter galley line with a high bonus damage against long range ship armour class and buildings. It is just as fast as galley-line. The next 2 upgrades are called Trireme and Tetrere. Their ROF is 1.5. They have same HP as fishing ships.
Demo Ships - They have low HP and high melee attack which counters the Bireme ship. Upon explosion, they reduce 2/3 the HP of a Bireme ship with the same effect/radius of explosion as a petard.
Fire ships in castle age
If fire ships are OP, introduce them in castle age as a counter to unique ships like turtle ships, long boats and caravel.
I am writing this post after the new balance changes came and this is what I infer. AOE2 went mobile and is becoming a pay to win mobile game. This is probably due to firing of most of the origianl people and having been replaced my microsoft yes men. The new civ changes are meant to sell the new DLC civs starting with montain royals which will help win against people who only have civs till dynasties of India. The keshik change and stuff are just euro-centric naval gazing. The naval re-design however is piss poor.
Water maps and play are uninteresting because it snow balls pretty quickly. The comeback potential should be there for opponent civ as well as a function of ability to spend gold and food to get back on water.
What about the HULK?
The Hulk can be given as a regional unit of the new DLC civs which will be released with new water meta changes. These civs may lack fireship or cannon galleon line. They can fish as well as fight. They are only as fast as fishing ships. They are affected by fishing rate upgrades. The carrack can remain unique tech of portugese.
I think this would be better with a few changes.
- Tie the Demo upgrades to Medium/Heavy Warships.
- Heavy Warships should also upgrade Cannon Galleon.
- Clinker Construction and Carvel Hull should be moved to Blacksmith to free up University space. (Also allows to speed up ships without having to wait for university.)
- Incendiaries should affect Demos too.
- Meso should have to research the removed Cannon Galleon tech to unlock Cannon Galleons.
Also, please bring animated ship sails and animated the oars while ships are moving.
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The Hulk unit is just not worth the rework. The current traiangle of galley - Fire galley - Demo line is better. Also Docks garrisoning fighing ships is OKAY. But Docks shooting arrows is a definite NO.
Biremes were very outdated by the time of AOE2.
Do they listen to any feedback? Anything major changed with Thalassocracy update from original plan?
Yea the hulk is a terrible unit, it looks awful and the animation doesn’t even resemble “boarding”. It just looks like they are throwing their anchors at the other ships. And by all accounts it seems it doesn’t even addres any of the problems with water anyway as unit and gameplay diversity on water is still lacking.
A while ago after watching some of the thaallasocracy games on YouTube I realised what the problem with water is and I left a comment on the video at the time. But to reiterate that point here, basically I observed that the main issue with water gameplay is that changing from one ship to another is basically trivial on water compared to on land and that is what makes games on water boring and no amount of introducing new ships is going to change that. What do I mean by this? Think about it, basically on land changing from one army composition to another is something that usually takes a fair amount of pre-planning and re-arranging of your economy and it takes time, you can’t just do it instantly. You have to research relevant unit specific armour upgrades, sometimes you need to build new buildings, if you are going from archer to knights for example you will need to build a stable, you will need to research other auxilliary techs such as ballistics for example which again require investment into a whole new building + research time and resources for the tech itself, if you want siege again you need to build a whole new building, also if you want to focus on cavalry you will need a food heavy economy which takes time to get going, if you want archers you need more gold and so on, you get the idea…
On water none of these things are as important. Firstly all the ships come from the same building so as long as you have a dock you can freely pick and choose what ships you build. All ships cost a variation of wood and gold, as long as you got wood and gold you can make whatever ship you want as well. All ship tier upgrades are linked to the same tech. You research one upgrade and all your main ships are upgraded to their next tier. You don’t have to make a decision as to which ship you upgrade so again its a non-consequential decision to upgrade your ship. Most techs are also researched in the dock itself, this is slightly changed now with some techs moving to university but still its not enough of a change to make anything interesting. There are no armor upgrades for individual ships. Things like drydock and careening again affect all ships so once again getting those techs has no consequences on unit viability on water.
As long as this is how the water game works no amount of adding different units is going to change anything substantially. We can have another 10 ships and it wouldn’t make a difference because at any point we can just change which ships to produce at a moment’s notice so water fights at the end of the day just become all about who can mass the biggest blob of ships quickest and prevent the opponent from massing his own.
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this will probably even get worse with the new water balance. right now the war galley upgrade is for all ships, but the imperial age upgrade is unique for each ship type
with the new balance there are just “medium warships” and “heavy warships”.
Additionally it was previously possible to do all these techs at the dock, but galleys required a university for Ballistics and eventually Chemistry. so there was some investment here as well. now you need a university regardless as all these upgrades are in the university.
(Also of course this is going to introduce yet another (fucking) charge attack)
I think a better idea would be to separate the upgrades for demo/fireship/galley already in castle age (or maybe even in feudal, so it takes time to unlock each ship type). This would make the upgrades more intuitive + it would keep the feeling of the ships closer to the existing water system.
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This is why Clinker Construction and Carvel Hull needs to be moved to Blacksmith. It will allow to speed up naval battles without having to invest in University.
Plus, it just makes more logical sense to have these basic metalworking upgrades at a Blacksmith than at a building where I would expect more specialized training to occur.
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This is really insightful.
I wanna push back a bit. Yeah the balance and animation are bad but I think you need something like the hulk.
No amount of making switching between units untrivial is going to matter if there’s a clearly superior option.
But yeah, I feel like a lot of the design choices were driven by UI and it should be unsurprising that it didn’t pan out super well.
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