Intuitive Decline - Hard to Learn, Hard To Master

It took me many hours of playing this game before i learned that Delhi gets more gold than other Civs when they capture a sacred site. This is only becouse someone told me as i have not learned or played delhi.

Aside from this, It took a little time to understand things like how Javelineers are anti-ranged specialist.

However, Knights templar has many many mechanics which are not apparent unless you already know what they are. Such as pilgrims and how they scale, regen/attack bonus near sacred sites, and axe throwing infantry which does melee damage from a ranged position.

If we take a look at three things which are not intuitive already -

#1 French knights 2 shot villagers with charge.
#2 Delhi gets extra gold from sacred sites
#3 Mongol Tier 3 landmark gives damage+regen bonus

If you go and play a team game, it is easy to see that players even at platinum level do not understand these things and will lose to them becouse of simple lack of wisdom. These things COULD have visual cues instead of a little “yellow glow”. We know that MOBAS thrive off complexity and being hard to learn, but many of the skill based buffs in MOBAS can be identified by unique visual ques - imagine if in a MOBA game, you only have a “yellow glow” to know if something is altered on every single hero? I dont think it would work there.

It will be interesting to see how this impacts the enjoment of the game.

A lot of RTS folk dislike taking inspiration from MOBAs, for whatever reason.

However, at the same thing, coming up with a unified UX for all of these abilities is a job in of itself (before it could even be implemented).

And on top of that, you’re meant to learn the game before diving into Ranked. The game has a variety of training materials (and content creators covering it), even if the Art of Wars are in sore need of updates.

If anything, the Art of War scenarios should be updated. I liked the Malian and Ottoman ones, but we should have them for every main civ (and maybe variants too). I really think this would help with onboarding a lot.

I ask every survey for them to expand Art of War to include one for each faction. It would be so nice and it is really odd how we have a tab for civs under art of war and then it just has those 2.

2 Likes