Water economy is so dominant that any map, even with a little puddles with fish in it, makes you entirely OBLIGATED to go water or hence you’ll fall behind any other player going water.
Like at this point it’s not even an option, either you go water or you lose. There’s no amount of hunt in land that could make the economy viable against water.
I think that is good that water is actually important and it’s not just there for the sake of being there. But at this point I’m not liking that it’s not an option but the only way to go: there’s water, go water or lose.
I feel like the fishing might need some little tweaking to it.
I hate the fact.
In aoe3 you didn’t have to go water even if the enemy did.
You could go all in on land instead and punish your enemy for investing on water and being defenseless on land.
I simple don’t like it, it make no sense and a player should be able to play either land or economy, with current status of game a players that avoid fishing ships will lose vs a player that goes hunt or farms, is a design flaw IMO… And no many new players realize this…
Why would you nerf that?
Fishing is a great and fun mechanic, very easy to mess it up and it rewards you for putting the extra effort to go for it, I personally love that you get to have more than one opening viable depending on the map. Why punish players that go for it just because you don’t want to do it?
It would be totally understandable to nerf it if it was only limited to a few civs like aoe3 for example but this is something that is avaliable to all civs so it’s not like one civ will have a huge advantage over the other on that regard.
It also encourages people to fight for the water and use all of the map features. Often on aoe3 water isn’t even touched because its not viable for most civs, its good that they made this mechanic much more viable.
That’s the problem. There’s NO other option. The one being punished is the player that doesn’t go water. As of right now, if you don’t go water on any map with water, you’re going to fall behind rather quickly.
I like water being viable. I don’t like water being THE ONLY VIABLE OPTION.
There are other options but they are slower and water is not auto win as the longer the game goes the less effective it is so ppl will take it early but if you don’t go for it you will have a harder time mostly on the early game. You can’t ask something to be nerfed just because you don’t like it or you can’t be bothered to go for it, while the other player is putting in the effort to do more on age1. Specially when its something equally avaliable to every civ. you gotta adapt to the map.
Due to the relationship between the French feudal ships, some players give up as long as they encounter the water map, just because they don’t want to play the French, but this will cause their navy to be destroyed by the French feudal ships.
Personally I do not think water eco needs a nerf. I know it is far more lucrative than land eco but I do believe that there are some reasons for that.
Water eco is harder to defend than land eco. You cannot build palisade/stone walls on water. You can hide your fishing ships in docks but not as effective as TC, outposts or keeps since each dock can only harbor 3 ships at most and doesn’t have any sort of defensive mechanism other than repairing aura. Water eco is very fragile and even a single Age2 military ship can devastate its entirety if it goes unchecked. So most of the time you have to rely on military ships if you want to defend it and military ships in AOE4 are quiet pricey and takes more pop space compare to land units. The extra productivity is there to compensate its cost and potential risk.
Like someone said in the upper thread, water eco is just there to speed up your progression and it falls off quickly as the game draws out longer unless you have a very secluded pond with tons of deep water fish.
Right now, due to the annoying existence of French Age2 Hulk and weird map spawn, water maps could feel very unfair to some people but once things get ironed out I assume it would be much more enjoyable then.
A small nerf sure, but water booming has always been strong and should remain so. Even in AoE 3 the water boom builds like English or Ports was really insane, plus you can get easy coin in that game.
If you don’t want to see water on the map there is a thing called “Map Selection” in lobby where you can choose which map to play. It’s not like someone is forcing you to play water or hybrid maps only.
Plus, you say there is no option when there is water on the map. First of all, of course there is no option other than going water if you are playing map such as Waring Islands or Archipelago.
Second, even if you are in a hybrid map there is an option if you want to play land only it’s just that you have to be as aggressive as you can to end the game quickly. Aside from superior productivity of water eco, there is a reason why people tend to place docks whenever they can. Basically it works like extra TC in early game. You get to produce exclusive food gathering units from completely different production line. It will cost you some Age-up time but if you can manage to maintain, it will boost your mid-game significantly cause you are basically getting faster villager production speed compare to one who doesn’t go water.
To me, what you are asking is almost equivalent to tweak the game until you can beat double TC play with single TC play even without being aggressive or proper counter strategy. There should be a compensation when someone invests resources to something and water eco is basically a high risk, high return investment. If you don’t want to invest in water while trying to beat someone who invests in water, then you have to play more aggressively than you usually do.
Try to harass your opponent’s land eco or make few military ships to destroy enemy fishing ships. Don’t let your opponent to be comfortable with safe water eco. This is an RTS game. You cannot expect to win every fight with one-note strategy or just being passive. Try to adapt and learn from your mistakes if you want be better at it.
Exactly, i 100% agree on that.
You can also punish people going for it on maps like Mongolian river by playing towers on it or sieging ir with early spearman
Then don’t ignore water, alt f4 or learn how to counter it. You can’t just ask to nerf something just because you don’t like it. Again all civs can go for it so its not an imbalanced mechanic, you have to learn to adapt to circunstsnces.
Punishing players that went through the effort to learning that build to be competitive and taking the risk and effort to do that build is not the answer.