Keeps should have a bigger resilience against attacks (since their setup takes longer/more vulnerable through setup, less stone is available, and it takes stone to repair them). Once a keep is built, it should withstand a great force of attacks
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The lower stone can be quite a problem when combined with the inability to kill off opponents that was introduced a while back. Covering every landmark in a Chinese base can require a significant number of keeps to prevent the entire base from being instantly rebuilt the moment you look away. In a recent game I played, 100 stone was costing close to 500 gold at the market, such is the demand for buying stone. So a keep in the late game can easily cost 4k gold, you can be looking at needing 20k gold to cover a single opponent’s base. It’s making games drag on for a long time after the point at which it’s 100% clear which team is going to win. And even having paid so much and got the keeps up, as you say they’re pretty easy to take down, and then they rebuild the landmark it was covering, and it’s whack-a-mole trying to actually finish the game off despite having hugely more units than the opposing team.
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I like the idea but when it comes to keeps it can quickly become very OP if done incorrectly so I’m trying to figure out what way they could possibly go here.
I agree that keeps currently feel a bit unuseful and need some change in some ways to make them feel more worth the stone spent, now when there is less stone on the map as a whole.
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You don’t have to make changes just because aoe2 is like this
Played enough Aoe 2 to understand what you mean but i still think these keeps in Aoe 4 should be stronger in some kind of way.
Castles in AoE4 have high attack damage and have homing arrows. Pretty strong it is already without upgrades.
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And things like HRE with relics and a cannon have better range than almost all siege except trebs. So much more dangerous than aoe2
I don’t think we need to see more keeps, maybe just make them cheaper to repair.
And instead punish the actual problem, rebuilding LMs and/or improving SS victories
Keeps:
- It being built too fast → impossible to deny(cause vils always build).
- they relatively cheap (while stone available). 1 treb is almost the same cost, or upgrade almost the same price.
- no mechanics combining with Keeps (hills or trebs attack stronger from hill)
Which leads to a few problems:
- they weak, you do not need to repair, just build a new one.
- you can spam all map with keeps. Make wall with keeps.
- you do not care about the keeps, but your map somehow ends up with a lot of keeps. just because they cost like 1 treb.
[suggestion]
- make it more expensive, It should not cost like 1 treb
- make it a little stronger, somehow, that Keeps would really protect a path or some area. Make placement of keeps meaningful on the map.
Some ideas: 30 space for vils + bonus armor for vils around → you can place keep in your base to protect vils from raids.
Some would not understand, why I describe it as cheap and useless, but annoying and everyone builds it.
They weak against siege, but infantry can not go through keeps.
You place 5 keeps via whole map, add some walls… and game stops being about map control. You perfectly control you half if the map. No sneaky attacks…
But to kill Keep, you have to build 2-3 bombards + army to protect bombards, it took time and make game slow. Even if opponent will ignore it. and rebuild Keep fuerther. You spend x2/x3 resources for building, which were constructed in 10 seconds.
…
Keeps just weird.
I think you solve another problem with wrong building.
If you truly killed the base. Towers with upgrades is enough.
But it would helpful if you can place bombard tower in one click, without “returning” to upgrade.
you do not need to repeat the same thing every threat cause you resentful with aoe2
(noone mentioned aoe2 above ur comment KEKW wtf)
Especially the keep should be harder to break in my opinion. Higher armor or life would already be something.
You answered your own statement.
While stone is available. Stone runs out fairly quickly. Gold doesn’t. And theres way more wood than stone on the map.
Stone for keeps also directly competes with TCs and castle upgrades, so forces a specific choice
So they aren’t the same cost when you consider the actual practicalities of it.
I think I understand. They are less meaningful than castles in aoe2 for example. They could probably do with a slight adjustment to make keeps and specifically towers more meaningful later on. But less spammy.
The problem though is the game is already tending towards the slow side, as in matches take very long(it’s slower than aoe2, which is a slow RTS) and making keeps more difficult to kill, slows the game down even more.
Maybe the nerf to TCs will speed it up(easier to punish booming), and then there’s room to make keeps more defensive?
tbh, i really despise keeps and people pushing by spamming keeps.
But at the same time, Keeps are rather “weak” as in, units can ignore and run straight pass them without taking to much damage (especially armored ones).
Keeps seems to function best alongside armies fighting under them, rather than standalone.
And to have them functioning as Standaalone, you end up pairing them with multiple keeps which just looks really dumb in my opinion.
Personally i would like to see a LIMITATION on keeps.
Say, max 5~10 keeps depending on map size / amount of players in team.
Landmark keeps does not count.
But at the same time make keeps (including landmark keeps) Much much stronger.
Thus able to deny passage without inflicting heavy damage on a “cavalry sniping blob” that just ignores the keep and runs past and destroyes everything in the backline. Without taking heavy damage.
You may argue and say that this is why we have walls. While walls certainly do their job. They dont once a hole a breached.
And you might argue that, just build another backwall then.
Well games are dynamic, the battlefields moves back and forth, sometimes you simply can’t afford building a backwall as building / fixing foreward defenses and walls take priority. And Sometimes you simply just out of space to build a backwall.
This is where i think the role of keeps should be: Significantly weaken any army that decides to “ignore” a keep and try to run pass it.
While they might run pass it, they would be weakened enough that base defenses in form of TC, Towers and spearmen/archers can deal with them with relative ease.
At the same time, due to limiation on keeps, you wont have keeps pressing against your landmark TC as some sort of obsessive girlfriend trying to shove your face with chocolate.
Another thing that needs to be done is that Range units AI should automatically prioritise villagers who are building.
This would eliviate the immense pressiure and almost unstoppable construction of keeps in your face.
I have proposed to give population cost to keep, or if they limit the villagers to 120 that will indirectly cause less “keep” in the game
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With pup changes where Abba and French can’t trade for stone, we will see less keeps and towers with cannon emplacement
I don’t think we need to see more keep spam… I’ve played games (mostly against china) that were a completely keep spam. It’s tedious to play against keep spam strategy.
4 Likes
maybe it could be solved by already having basic springalds, forcing the enemy to create trebuchets instead of cannons, this is the only thing that comes to mind, also because maybe having the oil already unlocked would be too op, I think one thing that is missing is to have siege machines like 1 mangano, inside the castles, but probably this would make them too strong, but thinking that the mangano have been made weaker, maybe having one in place, it would be nice, but maybe it should do less damage than normal, but for the Chinese, it would be unhealthy, because the construction of the castles take very little and since they do not have mangano, but probably they would be obliged to have nest of bea, which would make them really strong.
after these considerations, I think the only thing that could help the castles, would be to put only a springald, to the complete construction, everything else seems to me too strong and would definitely break the game
Maybe increase the base cost , build time and hp, but include a spring
Example:
Cost from 800 to 1000.(+20%)
Hp from 5000 to 5500. (+10%) With +10 siege armour(from 0)
Build time from 120 to 140sec.
So the spring is built into the cost. Reduces spam but improves functionality.
If they still aren’t good enough, retain the ability to equip a 2nd spring
Obviously this buff will apply to LMs as well
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Yeah like a first basic springald and then you can add a second one. Like the HRE had two for some time last year.
Would increase the offensive ability also against ram but would not do too much AOE damage.
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