Been thinking about this lately, especially with the recent Cavalry Archer meta.
In theory, Towers should be a pretty good counter to cavalry archers. You can essentially deny large areas of the map to their greatest attribute, their speed. The more you constrain their movement, the less effective they become.
The core problem, I think, is that towers just can’t serve as a Town Center where it matters. Like, in theory, you could build a resource collection building and a tower instead of a town center, and have more defensive power in exchange for losing the ability to produce vills.
But you can’t actually protect all your villagers! 5 garrison capacity just isn’t enough. You need to be able to hold at least 8 for a mill.
And on top of this, it’s pretty rare for people to get the Guard Tower and Keep upgrades, so they’re clearly pretty underpowered atm.
So simple idea: What if Guard Towers and Keeps could both garrison more units? Guard Towers could maybe garrison 8? Or 10, either would be alright. 8 would fit nicely with mills, but 10 might be better.
And Keeps should be able to garrison even more still. Maybe as many as 15, to equal a town center.
I think this could make towers a lot more popular in the late game. Well, maybe not a LOT more popular, but combined with the CA meta, at least somewhat more popular. And that could, in turn, help to balance that meta.
Any new or adjusted static measure to fend off early attacks that seem to happen in 100% of games now I’m all for. Hate that you have to build military units early just to keep up with the Joneses that are trained by eSport elite players on the best ways exactly to pull off an early crushing blow and relentless attacks thereafter
I’d love to build a few towers and watch the early attack units drop like flies
Turtling strat is all but dead now thanks to several defensive and structural nerfs over the years, combined with several offensive buffs and automations
Age of Empires could maybe be renamed “Call of Empires Duty” with its ongoing drive and commitment to achieve non-stop battle action
I always found the Teutons’ bonus rather annoying, linked to a period in this game was Age of Towers. But times have changed, and I found myself thinking that the Teutons have too many bonus nowadays.
Which makes me wonder… what if you made the default space equal to 10 for everyone, but left the limit at 5 inhabitants as a bonus to attack (putting 5 or 10 villi has the same effect) for all civilisations?
Towers and Town Centers should be made a little more accurate for in early game, pre-tech upgrades
I also think maybe installed wall pieces or gates should be upgradeable to add a little tower/turret to them for a fraction of the cost of an actual tower. Its firepower can be a little less than an actual tower, but it might be an interesting addition to the game. Maybe only have this for gates since it would look weird to have a whole wall shooting