some people complain when new civs are released, that the total amount is too high (inclusive Hera). Irrespective of the fact that new civs keep the game “fresh” and exciting (yes vanilla is the best and everybody plays it, but still, player count drops for any game without new content, and a 25+ year old game is in most cases dead, due to the lack of novelty of course).
A solution would be: Combine certain civs visually into one civ in the civ selector, but give the option to select the specific civ.
Example: Chinese will be one civ to select. If you click on it, you get the Chinese. However, with a double click of sorts, you are able to select one of the “sub civs”, Jurchens, Shu, Chinese itself.
Same for Hindustani (Dravidians, Bengali…)
Teutons (Bohemians, Teutons, Vikings, future civs like Anglos, Saxons..)
The pros are: The main complaint: “New players are overwhelmed by the amount of civs” is gone.
Also, the “felt” complexity is reduced. Yes, Bengali and Dravidians are different, but they have regional units and similarities, so a new player knows “ok that is an Elephant civ”.
I don’t know what Hera says, but on the forum people complain not about the number of civs in the selector making it cluttered, but about the design civs themselves. Many of the new civs include numerous new mechanics next to each other, overcomplicated units (Bolas Rider generating gold, slowing opponents down, and dealing pass-through damage all at once – just one of these gimmicks would’ve been sufficient to make it unique).
This makes people distrust the devs’ ability to continue making decent civs, which in turn means they don’t want new civs. It’s definitely not as simple as “selector too cluttered eyes hurt”.
This would make sense if the differences between sub-civs within a group were relatively small, and the differences between groups were relatively large – basically if this “sub-civ” system had been planned originally and the civs designed around it. That could be an interesting approach for a mod or another game, but it’s not how AoE2 is designed. Grouping civs together like this would just introduce a confusing mismatch between the interface and the game design without solving any perceived problems.
If you’re going to keep doing this, could you at least spell “Angles” correctly, please?
all valid points, but I still think there is no way around such a solution, especially since one of the developers in a Towncenter mentioned that there is basically no limit (such as 70 or 100) for the amount of civs. It will just be too cluttered
I think it’s the fact the pros hate the fact they have to learn new things instead of playing the same repetitive loop they’re always stuck themselves to. Hence why Hera and likewise anyone who plays ranked constantly doesn’t like it.
Personally I’d rather they keep adding as many civs as possible as long as they’re actually Civs (looks at Wu, Shu, Wei). I’m someone who primarily plays for campaigns and making dioramas in the scenario editor, so more content is always good for me.
See Hera losing a game because he mentally blocks himself from making Battle Elephants. Pros don’t like to use elephants, so they just don’t and sometimes it costs them.
Also I believe it’s pretty many regular players tend to avoid using because afraid/difficult of common strong units like mangonels/monks/scorpions, and that has to do more with skill and micro than the civs themselves
I would say introduce the free version of aoe2. But in the free version, only Byzantines and Magyars can be played in multiplayer. The new players will not have to think which civs to choose and these two civs are very good for players to learn the game.