Boar lure might not be the most interesting/skill intensive task itself, but it’s a task you have to perform while doing a lot of other things (scouting, luring deers, produce villagers, mircomanage eco efficiently, analyze the map and produce a strategy), and it’s a task that has to be performed well in order to play a clean dark age.
While all those tasks are fairly easy by themselves, they become very hard to do properly if you need to split the attention between all of those tasks. Only top notch players have the multitasking to do all this properly, you can definitely separate 2,5k from 2k based only on their dark age.
Remove boar luring (with relative easier scouting and less overall attention needed), and everything else gets easier in dark age, removing an important tool to set apart stronger and weaker players
Interesting point and it does makes sense in a way.
However, I personally have a different point of view on this.
Sure the dark age is skillfull, and boar luring while doing other stuff like pushing deer or making buildings at the same time requires some multi-tasking and skill. However, this skill and multi tasking don’t have any strategical depth added to it, which is on of the points I based my reasoning one from the start.
On the other hand, everything else that comes after in the game, not only require multi tasking and precision, but also have the factor of strategical choice added to it, so in my view is way more interesting. So speeding very early game won’t change the skill ceiling of AoE2 at all.
Sure, but if you simplify early game you’ll tell a 2.5k from a 2k from whatever comes after. It doesn’t change anything to the skill ceiling of AoE 2.
I think I just have the opposite opinion to you about what is casual and what is competitive.
To me;
Ignoring boars or taking them where they stand with 6+vills is casual.
Luring a boar to your TC at the correct time is competitive.
Why do I think this? Because if you can’t do it, you’re at a disadvantage. You’re going to be less able to compete. I know that I only started boar luring when I started to take things more seriously.
So I have no idea why you keep comparing luring boars to diversity and milking cows and collecting honey etc. If those things were in the game and they created an advantage to those who can use them… then guess what they would add to the competitiveness of the game also.
With regards to this, the game as a whole is made by the sum of it’s parts. So no I disagree completely. For example, using archers is simple to learn, difficult to master. You can just patrol them in, or you can micro them to avoid ballistics even. But according to you it’s just one isolated thing, so it doesn’t count or something. No, it’s the sum of all the isolated things that matters. Boars are a very small part of it, but it’s a part of the ‘difficult to master’ side. For new players they can ignore it completely, just like they can ignore archer micro.
I mean, the corollary in this point is that the Khmer don’t have a bonus, they have a mechanic that OP believes should be the standard and that the chore of placing any collection buildings and/or managing resources in a clean manner is taking away from the real skilled gameplay at the highest level.
Would still be devoid of Strategical depth though. We coud make the whole first 20 min of the game about getting ressource with skillfull chores like luring boars, pushing dears. Would it be competitive? Yeah in your sense of the term. Interesting game? Nope.
But then it wouldn’t be a RTS (Real Time Strategy) game, but a SRG (Skillfull Ressource Gathering) game.
So, in my opinion, just as 20 min of Boar luring would be a waste of time if each and every game started like that, 3min of boar luring also is, just not as much but same idea.
They won’t remove boar luring from the aoe2, it’s too integral, thinking otherwise is deluding yourself.
At best they’ll they give us more boar with less food and maybe lower dmg, making being lamed less punishing on a player, but also more reliable to do, making it less RNG dependent.
This whole thread is not really about strategical depth it’s ‘I don’t like boars, do exactly what I want, not what my own ideas actually add up to’
I told my wife about this thread, and this quote in particular
She laughed and said
“isn’t that exactly what build orders are though?! Mechanical repetitive, do every time like clockwork.”
And you know what she’s damn right. If you want to be competitive you should learn build orders (or be the viper I guess).
If you don’t like mechanical repetitive things then you don’t like build orders and probably competitive aoe2 isn’t for you. In short, you just don’t like boar luring, and that’s ok. But either stick to what your arguments add up to and go play empire wars, or admit that you just don’t like luring boar.
I showed my 10 year old nephew that quote. He laughed and said :
“do these people understand the word “strategy”? When I do build orders in stacraft, I choose if I build an early military building for agression, go for fast tech, or go for fast expand and more macro. I don’t spend 5 min trying to skillfully gather minerals or gas. In AoE2, I have to spend 10min of early game macro chores before strategical choices barely start to enter the game.”
So go play SC or empire wars. By your own reasoning you should also have a problem with micro sheep so you only take one, or micro lumberjacks to have 2 each side of lumbercamp, or pushing deer instead of milling them . It’s not just boar that are your problem, but you claim it is.
In Coh you have to capture and hold points to get resources, no gathering units at all, should we do that in aoe2 instead?
Let me start with pointing out that you are saying dark age is too repetitive, yet you want to remove a thing you can do and play around with, making it more shallow, you are saying build orders are repetitive even though thats the exact definition of build order: optimized way to play dark age. It will always be repetitive for set strategy, because it is numerically closest to ideal, you complain about repetitivness of dark age and “10 mins” of doing nothing yet you disregarded EW as starting too late or whatever that was. And last of all your giving example of critique of the game said by 10 year old boy is just never a valid point no matter how good SC player he might be. Especially when you and him thinks that dark age has no strategy, you decide your strategy based on civ matchup and scouting, you should not say i will do this or that strat based on loading screen. If you do then you got still lot to learn. Dark age needs more skillbased stuff if you absolutely had to do changes to it, not taking away boars because you just use the same build order for most games without thinking about your gameplan
You say the same thing as Leshanni, and I think you guys have a misconception of what “build orders” actually mean in a RTS.
If everyone is doing the same thing for the first 10 min (like in AoE2) without any strategical variation, those are not “build orders”. Build orders in RTS imply that you choose in what order you do stuff, which creates variation of build orders and variation in strategy.
Build orders are not repetitive from one game to the next (unless you do the same build order every game, which is actually the issue with AoE2 start, but I guess conservative AoE2 players are creatures of habit) because you can change your build order for another one, for example going for agressive rush opening instead of macro opening or tech opening.
In AoE 2, up until the point when you’ve hunted the 2nd boar, 95% of all players will have done exactly the same thing. The build order in the sense of a RTS actually starts AFTER the early game chores have been achieved. (for example, the barracks timing, the feudal up timing, and so on).
Everything before that being identical for each player in every game, those are just repetitive actions that precede the actual build order, and are not the “definition of a build order”.
Might want to read carefully before replying beside the point at the speed of light :D. Not the first time you do this actually.
As I said in the post above, build orders vary after you’ve hunted the 2ndr boar. That’s when you choose if you go for early barrack or early feudal or late feudal into FC, and once feudal you choose Archery range or Stable or Forge/Market. Yeah, those are actual build orders in the sense of a RTS.
But everything before the 2nd boar is identical 95% of the time, so these are just repetitive actions that precede the actual choice of build order. Which is the original point.
I just clicked on two random build orders on AoEbuilds.com and they have different boar timings. It’s also very funny that you obsess over the comparison with Starcraft, a game with almost no eco management whatsoever. It’s like even more repetitive than AoE2 but you don’t notice it because you can just forget about if sooner.
Which isn’t post 10 minutes. Despite your claim. And still also false. Sometimes you go less workers on wood or more workers on wood. Depends on the map and build. Some builds have different boar times. So maybe you should think about what you’re talking about.
