This is a very good point and I am not surprised people in here will say a big “No” to it because they just get used to it, and they are very likely to say No to everything.
They make the Boar and Deer more far away than before, they make the Rihno, elephants have more attack speed.
What’s the point it is?
Why do we need to make dark age that complicated and difficult for the new joiner to study the BO?
I am totally support this thread as I dont think these “boar” arrangements are really necessary.
Even from aesthetic standpoint, the boars and deer add a tone to the Dark Age that I would not want replaced. You are building your economy from a relative scratch, and the movement from hunt to farms plays a role in this feel. You are taming a wild land, and building a city.
Is now recommending we slow the game down thus wasting even more minutes.
Not to mention increasing food and or rate for sheep would require rebalancing tatars and britons.
Not to mention removing hunt would require rebalancing mongols and goths.
Do you realize how much you would slow the game down without hunt and no other changes? First of all you’d basically be forced to farm in dark age. Which means more wood is needed for farms which means more workers on wood which means you’re going to be much slower getting to feudal.
I agree not changing anything else while still removing boars isn’t a good idea, after second thought.
It wasn’t my idea of choice either, which you forgot to mention. My main idea, as written in first place in the post you quoted, is to adapt by implementing the necessary changes.
As said earlier multiple times, those changes are pretty simple.
More food on sheep, starting the game with more food, lowering the cost of feudal age. Name it, you’ll get it.
Starting with more villagers can also be an easy fix and actually might be a pretty good one. The whole early game revolves around getting food to make more villagers, and then to afford feudal. Starting with more villagers, like 6 or 7, will speed up the process while removing the cost of the extra ones you get compared to current start. This way, boars can easily be removed without slowing down dark age.
Rebalancing the few civ bonuses that are affected is just details. Details can be taken care of after the structural design choices have been made.
No? Okay, I’ll use the “It’s more interesting” argument then.
Uhh. What? Not only do boars not die to one or two arrows, practically no creature does. Hunters have to track a shot prey for a long time as it’s driven away by fear, and it dies from it’s wound much later as a result of bleeding out. The arrow doesn’t kill, the loss of blood does, and that takes a long time.
The most unrealistic part about the hunt in AOE is actually how little the deer run away from the hunters upon being shot. You might think the boar attacking the hunter is unrealistic, but it depends heavily on the circumstances (and the efficacy of the shot). A boar with enough meat on the bones to make a deer look like small pickings? You best believe it’s going to attempt to kill you.
It’s almost like I said your position was boring already… oh wait.
All I see in this thread is disliking a (literally) age-old mechanic which is an integral part of the early phases of the game, mainly because OP has an inane dislike for the dark ages and would rather play Empire wars instead of hunt boars. To that I say, go play Empire wars, and stop trying to change a game for no other reason than your personal opinion.
I think you’re simplifying ‘boar hunt’ to just certain maps. Having the boars in the game provides more variety and strategy accross all of the aoe2 maps and civs, not just arabia and generic no eco civs
Some examples:
Yucatan you get extra hunt so can create different strategies
Socotra you get 1 elephant but it’s a big deal if you can steal your opponents.
Mongols hunt bonus allows them to get faster scout rush
So if you were to suggest something what would it be?
If you’re suggesting removing boar hunting from aoe2 completely I think aoe2 will be the poorer for it.
I fear that really you could say this about most of the early game, 6 on sheep, 3/4 on wood, go lure boar, house. Why not just start with all those things in place? Or you know… play empire wars? better yet DM, how I miss DM
EDIT: one thing I notice is that boar luring is the only thing that is actually ‘hard’, since you don’t seem to have the same problem with deer/sheep/wood/berries. So maybe the best solution for you would be to just have the boar act like deer or sheep?
An opinion backed up by actual arguments. You can agree with them, or disagree. Just as you have a right to an opinion, so do others. You are free to write your opinion/arguments in here. Doesn’t mean you should try to deny others that right by attacking them personally instead of attacking the arguments.
You realise that nobody from this topic is actually changing the game here?
We are just discussing ideas.
The only people who have power changing this game are the devs, and don’t worry they are perfectly able to think for themselves and decide whether an idea is good or not according to what they plan for the game.
Having no boar to hunt can be seen as boring for some people. I can understand that.
For me, and I’m sure there are other people who share that point of view, it’s having to do boar hunting every single game that’s boring. What I enjoy in AoE2 is the strategy choices, macro management, micro management, multi tasking. Empire wars doesn’t fix it for me because it starts way too far into the game (as I already explained multiple times), which removes a bunch of the strategy choices.
Basically what I would aim at if I was dev is a simplified early game that remove repetitive actions that don’t have any impact on strategy and are just time fillers in the early game.
Would you agree that if there was 4 boars to hunt on Arabia and feudal was more expensive, that would add a lot of those early game repetitive actions? That every player will have to do no matter what, almost in the same order and time?
My point is that 2 Boars is just as much wasted repetitive actions as 4 boars would be.
I do agree it adds some kind of “diversity”, but that’s good when you have the chill casual gameplay in mind, not for competitive play.
Heck, if I had only casual gameplay in mind, I’d add milk, cheese making, olive trees, and whatver other variety you can add in the early game at the cost of over-complexification.
Sorry but this is my last response to you.
It’s not for the sake of change or just because I don’t like it. I have given exhaustive arguments explaining my idea.
I play an rts and don’t like repetitive actions. Literally boar luring isn’t even that repetitive. You do it normally twice a game. Even taking sheep is more repetitive then that.
Furthermore to say rhey don’t have an impact is flat false. You have to time it with your sheep so you don’t waste those. Pre or post loom. Do you try to lame an opponents boar?
Which are hilarious.
Thry are repetitive. In a game all about repetitive tasks
Meanwhile you recommend buffing sheep. Which are more repetitive then a task you perform twice with boars.
I would not agree, I think if feudal was more expensive and there were 4 boars you’d see an awful lot more early aggression, drushes and boar lames and the like. At the moment 3 militia will get to the enemy not too long before they hit fedual, it’d be great if fedual was a bit later and militia became more viable. Lots of strategy of how much to invest and lots more messiness.
I feel like this is the epitomy of your ‘simple to learn, difficult to master’ point at the start of the thread. In competitive play boar luring is on the ‘difficult to master’ side, ignoring boar completely or taking 6 vills to kill it is on the ‘simple to learn’ side.
I’m very confused by your statments.
You want to be a competitive aoe2 player… but you want it to be homogenised. To take out the competitiveness. On this reasoning why have any point in scouting for sheep? It’s boring and wastes time and doesn’t add to your strategy. You always want your sheep.
You want it to be simple for people to learn… agree that it is good in Chill casual gameplay… and ignore that low elo players don’t need to take boar and that doing so doesn’t really impact the outcome of the game.
Also it’d be nice if you could address whether you want it removed from Arabia specifically or all maps and modes. Cause that’s a huge difference.
I really think you just want the boars to do 0 dmg, basically just turn them into sheep I think you’d be happy. Do you think that would solve it for you?
Personally, I like boar hunting. The Dark Age is mostly about gathering resources, and luring and killing boars has more interesting gameplay than other types of resource collection, since it involves a bit of micro, and usually some multitasking. I wouldn’t want to have to do it later in the game, but there’s usually not much else going on in the Dark Age and having some element of the gameplay that demands your attention is a good thing. So I think the fact that it “complexifies” the early game is a pro rather than a con.
As for the OP’s other cons, they apply even more heavily to other types of resource collection. If boar hunting is a mechanical repetitive task that wastes time, then surely building houses, placing a lumber camp next to some trees, and arranging your sheep under your Town Centre are as well?
I’ve played a lot of Starcraft 1 & 2 and I think they’re great games. But one of the reasons I prefer AoE2 is the greater diversity in the resource system – not only because there are four resources rather than two, but because there are several different ways of acquiring (some of) those resources. If anything, I’d like more ways to get wood and stone.
Of course, if you really don’t want to hunt boars, it’s relatively easy to make a custom random map script without them. Just take whichever official map script you like and remove the lines that mention “lurables”. (You could also add more sheep/berries, or even change the amount of food per sheep, although this is harder.)
I just want to bring one argument against boar hunt: It makes buildorders necessary. You need to start with buildorders that restrict your early game options unnecessary. I think the game could be improved with more early game agression potential instead of boar luring.
I mean currently in dark age there isn’t really much gameplay interaction, but the boars actually make the early game openers standarized and distinct.
I think without the boar lure the early game could be much diverse, leading to possibly many feudal age army comps instead of clear rushing builds that usually only feature 1 or sometimes 2 different unit types.
But ofc this shouldn’t lead to make the early game more “lazy” - in the exchange of taking away the boars there should be something other to pay attention to. Eg the need of taking map control early or more agression potential in the dark age.
But TBH I don’t think we should change the whole early game just for the little hope to get more diversity into the game. Probably the lack of early game diversity actually leads to a higher mid and late game diversity… Wouldn’t exclude this.
My phrase ‘simple to learn, difficult to master’ is something that has to apply to the game as a whole, not to isolated things in the game obviously.
In other words, it’s meant to apply to mastery of AoE2 aka getting good at the game and reaching high
elos, not to the isolated boar luring action, which wouldn’t make any sense.
If you think taking out boar luring takes out the competitiveness of AoE2, I guess I don’t need to go further into that topic.
When I say “learn the game” I mean someone who’s going straight for ladder 1v1 and who cares about improving.
At some point choices in game design have to be made. Either they design it for competitive gameplay, or they care more about casual gameplay, in which case I don’t mind things like added diversity. As I said I wouldn’t even mind Milking cows and making cheese in the early game, and gathering olives and making olive oil.
But then you can’t expect people to take the game seriously in terms of competitiveness, it’ll just be a good casual game and that’s it. Which is fine as well. Just depends what devs want the game to be.
All maps that have boars. And all of these will have to compensate by adding the necessary amount of food from another source, mainly sheep. You can easy add more food on a single sheep in the editor for one single map.
For example, there are many ways to do it. And all herdables should be closer to TC to avoid unbalances in sheep placement.
I would also have the game start with more villagers to speed up the early game process, say 6 instead of 3 for example. That’s 150 extra food right there (actualle more if you count the mining time) which means you’ll need less extra food on herdables.
Let’s suppose starting with 3 extra villagers can be summed up to a gain of 250 food.
Now let’s take the Arabia game start as an example of easy modifications :
2 Boars equal 700 food
700 - 250 = 450
So if you want to keep similar build orders, you need to add around 450 food on sheep. There are 8 sheep, so just adding 50 food per sheep on Arabia would be enough to replace boars.
And you can do this simple math adjustment for each map depending on how many boars there are, if any.
Moreover, all sheep will spawn closer to TC to avoid unbalances between both players.
There you go, that’d be a simpler and more balanced game start, more suited to a competitive game.
Obviously, it won’t be as interesting for casual players.
So, the main point I gather from this interesting discussion so far, is that there are 2 major sides to this debate.
The first side is designing the game towards competitive gameplay, in which case a simplified and more balanced early game is better in the long term.
The second side is designing the game towards casual gameplay, in which case more diversity and unbalances make the game more fun and more roleplay, to immerse yourself in the middle ages, so it is more interesting for casual players.
Literally boar luring isn’t even that repetitive. You do it normally twice a game. Even taking sheep is more repetitive then that.