Increase ranked maps to 300 populaton

200 population is to low and not fun to play anymore.
Due to low spec computer, the game begin with 75 populaton, then to 200 population. It’s 20 years now, time to increase pop to 300 or even higher. It will make the game more fun to play, more fun to watch.
The dev just rebalance the game for more population, i think 300 is acceptable.
In the game we need more than 100 pops villagers and more, 300 is better, 150 villagers, 150 military units. I hope the devs agree with me.
English is not my native language, sorry.

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The game balance has been designed for 200 pop. Change the population to 300 and a lot of things break at a competitive level.

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Just rebalance the game, increase map size.

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I disagree. 200 is totally fine.

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Rebalancing the game for different pop size is definitely something you can just decide like that.

It took 20 years to figure out strategy, adjust unit stats and civilization bonuses to arrive at this state of balance. Suddenly changing settings to 300 pop would completely throw balance out the window and it would take many years to get back to a decent level of balance.

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I see zero examples in this thread supporting your argument @TriRem. Can you name some examples why a 300 pop cap would unbalance the game so much?

Also the game was designed around 75 pop. 200 came with the HD edition in 2013 as far as I know. I don’t know if they had to make many adjustments but as far as I can tell, the pop increase worked quite well.

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I agree with fliger5.

Nah 300 would suck, too much going on for no reason.

200 pop was there from the start in 1999 it has always been the competitive standard.

As for how the balance would break, it’s quite simple. Ranged units scale exponentially while melee units scale linearly. Past a certain breaking point, even counter units don’t work properly.

As a basic example, 20 paladins can easily take down 20 longbows. However, 80 paladins can’t kill 80 longbows. Basic example of how numbers affect balance.

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Once you improve at the game you understand why 200 is more than enough. I used to share your opinion in the early casual days. Now it doesn’t happen all that often that games go to 200 pop.

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To be fair, 75 Population is what Ensemble originally intended for Age of Kings, but this is more because that is what Ensemble figured that would be the optimal amount of units that computers could handle at the time. But the average computer in 2000-01 could handle games well above 75 Population, even online. As soon as The Conquerors came out, 200 basically became the standard and both the expansion and the 1.0c Patch were balanced around that.

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I think Fogotten Empires can easily balance the game around 1 year, so it is not a difficult problem

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300 hundred population x8 would be a lag fest, unplayable for this game, even using the 500 or 1k pop in voobly lags a lot, the only way to support higher pop is by using more cores of a CPU, but making the game multi threading seems beyond the whole project of the DE.

So there you go a hardware limitation due the old source code, now in terms of playing the game competitive, it wouldn’t be fun at all, probably as casual it could, but if you are fast enough you just want to finish the game faster not waiting hours to finish one game to enjoy large army battles.

There are other game styles that might suit you, play death match or turbo random, CBA idk

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Just make unranked lobbies and play with 300 or 500 pop. I never play with anything less. Bigger armies = more fun, and with only 200 pop, it’s too easy for the losing side to drag the game out endlessly because the winners can’t build a large enough army to completely cover the map and clean house.

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Isn’t balancing villagers to military part of the game? I don’t see how upping the population would change that.

Also you should know that upping the population is an advantage to stronger players, not weaker players.

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hello guys. i recently published a game which is already having lots of performance issues specially in late game and people are keep reporting about their game crashes and massive fps drops, and the 4v4 games are mostly unplayable after a certain pop, which is mainly because my game is built on an old engine which can use only one core of player’s CPU, also i am trying to balance every aspect of the game over 20 years and im finally reaching to a stable point. currently i have MANY MANY MANY important things to work on, from performance to map pool to balance changes and unranked lobbies and on
oh whats that? you want me to increase the pop limit by 100 for ranked games altho we are barely handling the current mentioned problems? sure! that sounds like a good idea! let me add 10 more civs to the game too, cause that would make our work easier aswell! actually now that im thinking about it, its super easy, barely an inconvenience

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If there were enough players who wanted this it would happen. Personally I think all ranked games should have maximum population because the 200 range and scaling archery is just another phase as your pop grows so if somebody is better than you at 200 pop they’re probably still going to beat you with 500 pop. But I get it’d be a big change for our 20 year 200/Arabia players. If we’re lucky we’ll get a fringe category of 500 pop ranking board in the future.

250 should be a reasonable amount. vil/military unit ratio is balanced, as you can squeeze out just a bit more fun without ruining the balance.

But i think 300 is better, 200 to 300, not so much, right?

200 is fine. This game is all about decision making. More than 200 pops would take away to much tactical depth. If you want to play with more than 200 pop, so go play unranked.

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