Future civs should be like the Mali!

Competitive esports make a game boring for casual players, at least for me.
I play a game, not the viewer number of tournaments of a game. I wouldn’t trade my own gaming experience for say 10000 more viewer on twitch.

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I read that post and I actually agree the role of janissary is a weird one. It makes little sense that the janissary is a trash support unit while hand cannon (a much more primitive weapon) is a late game super unit. It looks very forced.
Though I still prefer more unique civs in general.

Its not just about tournaments, but its also about people who play the game competitively in a regular basis on the ladder and don’t wanna have to deal with a civ with a bunch of broken mechanics and units.
If you go on the ladder in AoE3 it’s a cheese fest. AoE4 right now you can win with any civ in any match up even if the match up is considered favoured to the opponent’s civ while aoe3 as much as devs did the best they could, there are several match ups that are completely one sided where a player needs to be several elo points higher to be able to win and several of the new units added totally mess up the counter system.

You are not answering my question.
Because “AOE4 is the most asymmetric AOE ever” (according to the devs), which means it is more asymmetric than AOE3, and if AOE3 is a cheese fest (according to you), AOE4 would be more of a cheese fest, and it will really suffer from it (according to you).
But it is not the case. So at least one of these assumptions is wrong.

I want to see a good mix of balance when it comes to new civs, i dont want all to be like the malians.

They can change it now and then but not overdo it in my opinion.

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I have never seen a dev or any advertisement

In an interview he even mentioned that civs would be semi-asymetrical and would all have same core units and buildings and that was important to be able to balance them

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When do you think they ever said that?

I’ve seen literally every stream about the game since before it came out and never heard them make that statement.

thats a very biased conclusion to draw, you can win with any civ vs any civ in aoe3 as well, its just a matter of playing to civs strengths and macroing properly, which applies to all aoes

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It’s hard to find good statistics on AoE3 civ winrates, but what little I have found always shows it being quite unbalanced.

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You are mixing things up.

You can definitely balance completely asymmetrical civs, as many other RTS have proven for ages (StarCraft, SupCom, C&C, AoM, Homeworld, etc.). Balance = boring is only the case when you intentionally want to achieve balance by making all things equal (the new naval mechanics are an example of that).

I agree that eSports can keep an otherwise dead game alive. The problem is when you start designing a game from the start for eSports. This is a new phenomenon and it is bad design! To me, AoE4 definitely fell for that.

Do you think the original StarCraft back in '98 or the original AoE2 were designed for eSports? Hell, that didn’t even exist back then. You could hardly get respectable internet and most multiplayer happened at LAN parties (or net cafes in Korea). Both of those games were simply great games. Designed to be timeless and appealing to both single and multiplayer. As time went by, the community kept them alive by adapting to the times, adding multiplayer as we know it today and further tweaking the balance and adding more content.

If your foundations are that of a mediocre game, no matter how eSport-y it is, it will quickly be replaced by something else.

But it can kill a game soon after launch. Remember the Overwatch boom? It’s not even in the top 50 most watched games on Twitch. When your game is designed around what’s popular now, then the next, fresh new thing will quickly replace it.

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I am going to comment on it in parts:

1 - The naval design is going to be better than the current one and in the future it will be better because they will make the ships more unique.

2 - It has been said many times (wrongly) that the fact that the civilizations are balanced, supposes a similar game between them, especially when there are nerfs (it is not correct either).

3 - The game came out incomplete, not for E-Sports. AoE4 was designed to try to satisfy both the competitive and the casual side. If it had really been designed for E-Sports exclusively, both the hotkeys and the rankeds, bugs and mods for rankeds (apart from a stronger balance, although that is complex) would have been there since day 1. The problem it had, at the time, was the lack of general content, both competitive and casual.

4 - What happened more than 20 years ago is not the same as today, it is no longer making a game exclusively for 1 player (and, with luck, for MP), you have to think about giving content while worrying about E-Sports (That represents continuous marketing). It’s difficult, but that’s the only way an RTS gets up today.

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  1. this will probably be the case, at least i hope
  2. no comment, truth
  3. also true until you mention esports first, the game did technically try to appeal to both audiences at launch, but, saying esports wasn’t the core focus is just wrong, would they be copying aoe2 and then simplify it so adamantly if esports wasn’t a focus, also art itself is esports driven, explicitely brought up countless times by art director himself, and i sorely doubt there was no esport focus behind the camera rotation choice which intentionally hides all the reflections and other visual effects to prevent ultra tryhard wanna be mlg pros from getting “distracted” by them
  4. true things aren’t 1 to 1 comparable now vs back then, but being so esports oriented is precisely why every RTS since stacraft II bombed, remember grey goo? it made the exact same mistakes as aoe4 is now, but aoe4 has big name going for it, which has saved it so far. getting multiplayer right ain’t easy, but given the average development time is almost 2x, 3x even, to what games like aoe2 and 3 had, i straight up expect a product that matches singleplayer and ai there, and beats their multiplayer, day 1, comparing day 1 between all 3 games here, not DEs
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I prefer standard civs, and that’s also true for the majority of players.

English and French are the most played civ.

What matter is diversity.

But I agree, Malians are great. I Prefer the Malian creativity than the poor designed Delhi and HRE

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