Fix Lategame please

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
1

Man is it boring to watch skirms vs skirm mixed with halb or hussar for 6 hours. (That game was actually awesome). But, after watching a lot of games recently I noticed it gets to a certain point and instead of the player trying to get gold or anything, they just throw down 18 stables and spam hussar until the other person runs out of gold. Then it becomes a skirm vs skirm battle because he ran out of gold. Then this can go on for 2, 3, 4 hours and it is quite pointless. It is almost IMO worse than swarm host vs swarm host in Sc2 HotS back in the day and if anyone knows those days it was the worst.
Now how do you fix it? That I do not know. I hope AoE4 is more about decisive wins, such as a tech point or a push that does enough damage to end the game or can be quickly followed up with a second attack. Not these 1-2 hour long games. If I have 3-4 hours to play a day and one of those games takes up half of my time… yeah that isn’t fun or enjoyable more or less why would I want to watch it? Like in AoE3 with the dutch banks, taking those out helps cripple the civ. In AoE2de taking out TC’s and castles is just a stalling mechanism more so than a game winning factor. Because behind it I am just massing farms and stables to spam hussar and defend some but attack your base. The most sad part is the person who goes for this strategy often wins because the other person will have a bad mental state of “OH I must have threw away the game because I was winning”. That is true in a lot of the games I watch they actually are winning they are killing all the castles and tc’s, but again this guy keeps spamming and running back to just barely make enough skirm and hussar to hold while again, STALLING. They did the same thing in Sc2, and humans did it a lot in wc3. People (many people quit) didn’t want to even play humans because of that play style of massing towers. Camping in one thing and stalling is different I do understand that much.

I hope AoE4 is just a lot more smooth in game decision and winning, to me a come back isn’t spamming hussar, that is stalling until the other person gives up IMO. Like Mech in Sc2 they just camp. I just wish that this issue is addressed and changed because I leave games on ladder if it goes too long, because I don’t want to spend my play time on one 2 hour game that I will probably lose because mentally why even play such a boring game at that point.
Note: Teamgames are different because you have gold and markets. I don’t think they apply and should last however long, personally its fun to play long team games with markets up, because you can switch units, make anything you want, you aren’t stuck with skirm hussar halb…

2

2, 3, 4 or evne 6 hours for a 1v1? Almost never happens (in before someone posting the mbl vs hera 6h Arena game). So is this really an big issue? Yeah, 1v1 in late imp means almost no gold, so it will be mostly trash. I dont really see the issue with that.

3

According to AoEstats.net the average 1v1 match on Arabia (the most played map) takes about 24 minutes real time (=40min in-game).

4

I strongly disagree with pretty much everything you wrote.

First of all, you are just wrong with your claim that a game can go on for hours even when one side was crippled early. That does not happen. A game hardly ever even reaches the one hour mark. 2-3 hours? Not sure if i ever even had a game going for that long.

Second, i think you are wrong about trashfights beeing pointless. Trashfights are a lot different than the rest of the game, but they surely arn’t pointless. Its a fight over positions, but not about single units. In feudal age, you fight to pick off vills. In castle age, you fight to kill stuff. In post-imp trash fights, you fight to deny a fresh woodline, to take down an important castle, to get controll over a central hill. Its about carefully allocating your population in the crucial spots, taking them one by one, pushing the enemy off the map.

And, as a third point, i do disagree that this is boring. I understand that everyone is different here and I certainly do get why people like the more micro-intensive fighting with gold units better, but there certainly is an appeal in the pure strategy of taking as much off the map as possible.