“Streamer, why aren’t you making myth units?”
“How come you’re not building Titans?”
“All human units? Then what’s the difference between this and Age of Empires?”
etc…
It’s not that I don’t want to build them, but these units require too much economic support and currently have too low a margin for error in terms of balance. As a player, my focus is on how to win the match. But for viewers—especially new players—they want to see what sets this game apart from other RTS titles. That’s why most lobbies now are filled with rooms playing against AI: players can practice summoning mythic units, Titans, and advancing to Age 5 in AI matches.
As I’ve expressed in Steam discussions: Villagers should have higher gathering efficiency to accelerate economic growth, giving players more strategic options. At the same time, if these high-efficiency villagers get raided, the raider would gain significant rewards, making raids more meaningful. Of course, villagers’ HP should be slightly increased for balance. This would also make expanding to a second Town Center (TC) more rewarding yet riskier—stronger economy means more army, but if your opponent scouts your second TC, you’ll face heavy pressure. Building HP should also be increased to prevent structures from being destroyed too easily now that armies are larger.
Warcraft III’s economy is very simple, and players start with ample resources to enable diverse build orders and strategies. StarCraft 2 increased starting workers years ago to shorten economic downtime and encourage varied tactics. Recent RTS games also tend to simplify economics, letting players and viewers focus on military clashes. We’re clearly in a fast-paced era, and traditional RTS struggles to adapt. But AoM’s unique appeal lies in its ‘myth’ element. Yet how much ‘myth’ do you actually see in standard matches? How often do Titans or Age 5 appear in past or current tournaments? (I genuinely love your design for Age 5, though.)
Lastly, I’ll quote a common criticism Chinese players direct at Blizzard: ‘Don’t teach players how to play.’ Give players the agency to choose their own strategies.
To be honest I think even as a gamer I would have preferred an age of mythology game that really embraced its identity and allowed you to create low tier mythic units massively, that were as easy to create as humans by default. It would be cool to see an army of minotaurs, for example.
But they’ve chosen to severely limit their uses because of their undoubtedly excessive price, so I don’t think there’ll be a change in policy on their part from now on.
I agree with this, for example I would improve the Irrigation (III) and Flood Control (IV) techs so that they increase from +10% Farm gather rate to +15% and +20% respectively, in line with the Wood and Gold gathering improvements.
I also agree. For example, in AOE3, units killed by a player reward 10% of their cost in XP, destroyed buildings reward even more XP, and then that experience is used to gain Shipments. In AOM, killed units could reward 10% of their cost, and destroyed buildings could reward 20% of their cost (it would be a similar effect to Chiyou’s “Spoils of War” tech from the Chinese).
For everyone, I have a question about this: What do you think would be the best solution?
-Reduce the Food/Wood/Gold cost of mythical units
-Reduce the Favor cost of mythical units
-Reduce both costs
-Anything else?
Age of Mythology is a spinn off of Age of Empires and not a Blizzard game.
Age of Mythology is already the most fast pase game in the series with the strongest economy by far. (AoE3 has higher numbers but all units including Villagers cost like 2x as much).
If you could spam Myth units then human units would be practically useless. It would just be Heroes vs. Myth units all the time.
I personally think Myth units are cool because they are stronger and mostly bigger then human units. If they would just fight other myth units they would lose their uniqueness. If every unit is Minotaur size then a Minotaur doesn’t look that big and scary anymore, does it?
If you want to see something else then competitive 1v1 is maybe not the right place.
I don’t mind this in theory, but I also don’t know if it’s really needed. Once I’ve got farms up and running, I rarely feel like I need to be gathering faster.
Yikes. No! It works in aoe3 because it’s specifically an extra resource for shipments. Giving everyone resources for winning fights would just snowball and completely change the identity of the game.
My opinion is that we don’t actually need this. I like it how it is, to be honest, with myth units being viable in smallish numbers and packing a big punch, but not overwhelming. If they overwhelm, then heroes also become much stronger, at the expense of human units.
But if you did want to do it, favour is the big limiter. Increase favour gather rates across the board by about 20% and maybe decrease favour cost of MUs by 10%.
Myth units have their place, plenty of strats with lots of myth units, and imo the strongest strategies will mix in myth units effectively.
Of course you won’t get far going mass myth unit blindly then facing a whole bunch of hero’s who wreck your army.
Retold has done reasonably well giving myth units decent power, but on the flip side hero’s are very strong and you get punished if you either ignore to make heros or fail to protect your MU from heros.
That, imo is the fine balance between mu being too op and just getting smashed by heros.
Right, but for the Norse it’s their way of gaining Favour, which works similarly to XP in aoe3. The suggestion I was replying to was that it should give the same resources it cost to build the unit. Which I definitely do not agree with.
Of course it shouldn’t. There is a reason why no RTS has that feature.
WC3 does generate XP for your heroes when you kill units so that is similar to Norse Favour or AoE3 XP.
But that is something a game or at last a civ has to be designed for form the start.
Though technically AoM has build in support for kill rewards now thanks to Fafnir. Nice tool for custom game modes.