I saw this on a YouTube comment, but tested it myself to confirm before I posted.
If you kill the Iron Boar together with Bleda, he will not respond until its meat is fully depleted. Given it has 700 meat, this would take probably at least an hour to fully deplete. The only option if you take this route is to turn on him anyway and kill him, meaning you never get the archer ambush unless you wait around for a very long time.
Do the devs actually test the changes before they finalize them? Did it ever occur to them that certain things in the game are that way for a reason, and that the original devs knew what they were doing? From the looks of it, it doesn’t seem like it.
testing is seemingly skirmish/multiplayer only
i don’t think anyone even thinks to test campaigns
edit: i did check this just to see if devs would actually fail to see it, and yes i found exactly what you described
it shouldn’t be too hard to fix but ye clearly no one bothered checking (i do think this change was firmly pointless)
I’m sure the mechanic making animals lose food when killed by a military unit didn’t exist for the Attila the Hun campaign. Furthermore, play testing the campaigns for a new update is very time consuming. They would literally have to play through all of their campaigns whenever they make a new update.This is a waist of time for them when they can just let players do it on a pup.
I’m confused. What do you think the reason for the meat-spoiling mechanic has to do with this scenario? Are you really trying to claim that the mechanic existed specifically to make one of the triggers in this scenario work?
It’s good to identify bugs like this, but that’s all it is: a bug. Report it in the bug report section and move on.
I’m explaining that every element of the original game is dependent on certain core mechanics, and taking away those core mechanics will cause things to break. The Attila and Bleda section works because military units instantly rot animals; by changing that fundamental mechanic, the scenario no longer works as intended.
So no, the mechanic doesn’t exist for the sake of the scenario (since it predates The Conquerors) but rather the other way around.
Right, I understand all that, but it still doesn’t explain your previous comment. When you said “certain things in the game are that way for a reason”, which thing and which reason did you have in mind? If the thing is the meat-spoiling mechanic and the reason is the trigger, it doesn’t make sense, but if the thing is the trigger and the reason is the meat-spoiling mechanic, it seems like unnecessary outrage over a fairly minor thing.
I was speaking generally about core balance decisions the original devs made, using the Iron Boar bug as an example of how careless the new devs are while making decisions, while thinking that they know better than the original devs. The boar bug itself is fairly minor, but symptomatic of a bigger problem.
The game is huge and bug-reporting exist for a reason, you can’t expect the devs to try absolutely every trigger in every campaign every update every few months.
You’re just complaining so loudly because you hate the change and need a good excuse to talk about it again. It’s not such a big deal as every hater makes it to be.
Ok. To me, it doesn’t seem like a good example, since it would have required an unrealistic level of care to avoid. The current devs have different design principles to the original devs (who, for example, made conscious decisions not to include auras or weapon swaps), but I don’t think that’s the same as “thinking that they know better”. And I say this as someone who prefers the original design principles!
It removes an uninteresting skill and some undesirable complexity from the game, yes. Both the skill and the complexity were completely unintended by the original devs when they introduced the meat-spoiling mechanic back in AoE1, before garrisoning was a thing.
Claiming that this mechanic shouldn’t have been changed because “the original devs knew what they were doing” when they introduced it is pretty silly – they couldn’t possibly have predicted the boar-luring gameplay we have nowadays.
That does seem like the easiest fix, but I like that it’s available as a somewhat risky food source in the scenario, plus I’ve seen it used as a food source in some (admittedly very niche) random map scripts.
In my opinion the best way to know when devs have gone too far is to use driving a car as an analogy. When driving you have many things to assist you such as a seatbelt alarm, auto turn off headlights, retractable mirrors, backup cameras, and more modern an alarm for when you go to close to the center of the rode. Now despite all of these assistances does this make driving require any less skill or substantially reduce its stress? No. As long as the person is in control of the wheel a person is going to need to use their skills. It’s the same with aoe2 de. As long as at the end of the day a person is in charge of what they are doing, tiny skills like knowing how to shoot your boar perfectly with a TC do not substantially reduce the skill of the game.
You only interact with the boar at the beginning and shooting it with the town center barely saves time. The real skill is resource management, and that is not something they’ll ever automatice.