See, this is exactly what i meant: You talk like all thats needed were a few palisades, and people who struggle are just “lower mid elo”. But Inca trushes are hard to hold. Not OP, but hard. Want prove? They are used all the way to the top level. We saw an Inca trush in the final of 2v2 world cup. If only Viper had known he needed to use palisades! You should start coaching him.
Again, the arrogance in this thread is amazing.
There’s no point in arguing with them. You can try explain all you want, you can quote pros, you can show them inca rush winning games at 2k5+ level, you can show them Salicum being 2k1 when playing only inca rush and falling 1k7 when playing meta civs. They’ll never stop telling you it’s an easy strat to counter because they did it once against someone who cannot keep his tc producing villagers costantly
is a strategy being viable on all levels a problem though? If you remove this, something else will eventually take its place, people start crying about that new thing, and threads like these will go on forever regardless
I’d say that it’s indeed probably not easy compared to dealing with a more standard feudal rush. It’s very difficult if you’re not used to the playstyle. In my experience, the difficulty will just depend on experience. Some people really thrive in messy games, and some people really get thrown off by messy games. I think it’s kind of an interesting dimension once you start playing the same pool of people over and over and get to learn what they’re good at or not good at. If you know someone thrives in messy games, you probably don’t want to tower rush them, but if you know that someone is more easily put off by a messy game, trushing them is a good way to ‘counter’ the player itself.
I personally like messy games a lot, so I absolutely don’t mind getting tower rushed.
not really a problem. but theres probably a reason why some strat work only on lower elo while other strats work also on higher elo and people can distinctly tell the difference. even if they can’t, they can somewhat feel it and understand why it work, because it is either too good or some other factors involved. though I am all for tower rush, incas villager trust is at that point right now, too strong.
I wonder what will take it’s place? tower rush with weaker villagers?
I don’t know, people will find something to complain about 
AoE4 isn’t even out yet for example, and it’s already getting torn apart 11
they gotta get their voice heard, I mean look at the state of this game riddle with bugs and getting worse each patch. besides, complaining on AOE4 is one thing, but this is not AOE4, this is AOE2 with incas nerf and what they brought forth is with proper reasoning and logic. to call it complain would be to disrespect their statement, if you really feel nerf is not good you need to bring forth your own reasoning.
My reasoning was given earlier in the thread: Incas don’t have a high playrate, so it’s not like everyone’s running around tower rushing everyone else. Second argument was that if you look at the stats, the civ doesn’t have an extraordinarily high win rate, although admittedly the civ has a good win rate though. The win rate the civ has looks to be within sane boundaries. So there doesn’t seem to be any balance reasons for nerfing them.
fallacy logic imo, though I can see from results and statistic point of view, people would tie play rate with what the civs got because ultimately thats just how everything is, you’d use and take advantage of something if it has value.
not having a high play rate has little to do with incas + vill trush being broken. that falls more on the developer’s fault for a civ design if it doesn’t have enough play rate, and reasoning along the lines of play rate does not denounce their reasoning on it being broken.
May be true, but if it was clearly as OP as some people make it out to be, it’d be at least a bit more popular than it is now. Your point is certainly valid, there’s more to pick rates than this, some civs are popular for reasons unrelated to balance (or at least not 100% driven by balance). But still, the civ doesn’t have win rates that look like an outlier relative to other civs.
They added a lot of “one age earlier” gimmicks with the LotW civs. It feels like the donjon is in feudal age only so that there is a civ that can get their UU one age before everyone else. Otherwise they made both the unit and the building not that strong and very expensive to ensure you can’t make donjons to make more serjeants to make more donjons ect… in feudal age. Even the planned buffs won’t make it possible. That 25 stone discount merely makes it so that you don’t need to mine stone to be able to repair your donjon or TC. Otherwise you still need 75 stone to be able to get a TC (as opposed to 25 for a standard civ) and 150 for the next donjon (as opposed to 50 for the next tower)
Feudal age serjeants having 2 melee armour instead of one probs won’t help change that either since they come too late to fight men at arms, are worse than spears to fight scouts and still die miserably to fletching archers.
So if anything the lenghts they went so that the Sicilian donjon rush wouldn’t be a serious strat shows that they don’t want tower focused civs in feudal.
I understand the pick rate is one part of it and certainly affects by what incas has to offer. though it isn’t over the top broken, it is still powerful. I think if incas was a new civ like the DLC people would cry broken all over it, in this case incas has been around for a long time and I get more of a vibe that people are arguing because they dont wish to adapt to the change.
I actually like the distinct buff for incas vills making them unique, maybe they can buff scout and maa overall in general instead, though people will probably hate me for saying this lmao. something like +1 bonus damage to vill with maa or scout-line while keeping the current damage? or just +1 melee damage overall.
I don’t mind changes. Always welcome new civs, new mechanics and what not. I disagree with inca nerf simply because there isn’t any balance related reason for it. The second thing is that tower rushing isn’t the only thing the bonus was useful for (even if it’s the most famous thing about it).
It was actually a very nice bonus for noobs/new players, because on lower levels early feudal raids often result in GG. Incas were a pretty nice noob civ, as clicking 4 villagers to attack a scout is a lot easier than learning to quickwall. So you could use this civ as a transition period before learning some better techniques. For example, I have some friends who are on very low elos ~1000-1500 and this civ was more or less the easiest way to keep them interested in the game rather than just ragequit it altogether.
it does have balance related reason. they should have just up maa & longsowrds attack by +1 to solve issue, that will give people more reason to try for infantry, and breaks palisade faster.
Walls have already been nerfed to oblivion though, and even in the upcoming patch, the Cuman TB is hit with a nerf lol. The problem is that tower rushes were the best way to deal with wallers, but then they also nerfed towers, and then we’re back at complaints about walls 
in a rts game I prefer more action, at the same time I also wish to see more imperial age battle as well which is opposite of one another. maybe they should just overall nerf buildings in general and buff military similar to starcraft. fast paced, game can end early but can also go mass macro.
I am not sure. AoE2 and starcraft are quite different by design, even if they do share the RTS genre. This is already the realm of personal preferences, but from my experience with helping noob friends learn the game, people from other games generally tend to get very frustrated by games ending too quickly.
And by lengths you mean “very distinctly serving up the new civs underpowered due to all their very, very unique mechanics.” You can’t just say “The Donjon currently bad, so clearly didn’t want Donjon play.” The civs were undertuned on release. If they did want donjon play, they’d start by buffing it. I’m not saying you’re wrong, maybe they actually don’t care at all about the potential for a Donjon rush early, but you’re evaluating by starting at a brand new strat with a winrate approaching 40%.
The fact that they’re buffing Donjons lends credence to the assertion that they wanted some of that style as part of the gameplay, regardless of whether those specific changes would be enough to foster it. Maybe build time reduction is really intended as a defensive mechanism, and they’ve simply forgot that the Spanish had a lesser effect and made towers look pretty good as a result. I’m not going to give that little credit to the devs. That just seems foolish.
When the discussion turns into “you’re wrong” ; “prove me you’re right” ; “I am right” ; “show me pro players doing it” ; “but X famous person said not” you know it’s pointless.
When people are more busy trying to prove each other wrong because they want to be right rather than try to make points, to put forward arguments and scenarios, to try to help other people understand the game better, you know this has become one of those unconstructive discussions you see all too often on the internet and in real life ;).
My disagreement here comes from the fact that there are two different Age of Empires 2 in one game.
There is the competitive game where there are late game battles very frequently but where beeing somewhat aggressive early as well as beeing good at defending against early aggression is important.
And there is the city-builder game (which I love but I also like the competitve game) where you take your time and use buildings as your primary tools. Kind of a tower-defense game of sorts.
And both of those are great but they are different since by essence the city-builder is not competitve. It is about chilling and taking your time. A ranked ladder would defeat its purpose entirely. You could introduce a seperate ranked ladder where you have 30 minutes of peace time and where the map is cut in half and you can’t access the other half until the timer is over.
But honestly the early game aggression is part of the dna of competitve age of empires. People giving up as soon as one or two things go wrong is an issue in every game.
I never said it was. I said its arrogant to say that only noobs struggle with the inca trush when viper loses games to it.