Classic civs are added before HD edition. Civs that are added in HD are called HD civs. And civs that are added in DE are called DE civs. At this rate we need to divide DE into two groups - Base De civs that are now part of the base game, and DE DLC civs that you need to purchase.
3 Likes
that’s a reasonable way to define “classic civs”, the way I use it, it refers to all pre-DE civs.
Classic is civis in the og game not HD.HD is just a modpack people paid for.
3 Likes
Completely unnecessary. Doing a rework to make water more playable is the right direction but its not possible without doing a massive amount of changes. More than 1 water related building, another eco/builder ship that can fight back against weak ships like a vill does, 2 more ships from the other building starting from castle age and being stronger in some sense, sea towers, water based stone like oyster for gold.
Maybe now they are. But back when the units were priced right, the civ was quite good. The only civ worth the money. Other two are still weak despite getting a dozen buffs.
It can be both. Unimpactful in small fights but impactful in bigger ones. “Like aoe2” is a long gone thing. Every DLC since 2000 has brought a massive number of new units, techs and changes. Beyond a certain point, its extremely difficult to bring new unique units using pure base stats/bonus damage manipulation. It’d only lead to redundant units like shotel warriors. I guess its much better to differentiate with a mechanic that gives the new unit a niche advantage in some situations over generic variant.
1 Like
I meant that they are the worst game design wise, i think gujara are still fairly strong, just cancer.
that would still be fine, imo. eg any kind of splash bonus is irrelevant in small fights, but important in big fights. still a valid bonus.
I don’t think so. the DLC during HD’s lifetime didn’t bring massive changes in the same way DE civs do. very few if any introduced completely new mechanics like seemlingly every DE dlc does.
imo that would be the place to stop adding new civs.
however there is still plenty of design space available. We don’t have an infantry unit that specializes in taking down buildings, we don’t have archers with bonus vs siege, we don’t have CA with bonus vs infantry, we don’t have an archer unit with bonus damage vs unique units, we don’t have a half pop archer unit, there are still so many units that can be made without any new mechanics needing to be introduced.
Hell, i’d even prefer if they reused some of the less atrocious bonuses from the DE civs:
we could have a CA that becomes an archer/infantry unit when it dies, we could have a cavalry unit that strips armor, etc.
how are shotels, of all units, redundant? I can’t think of another fast glass cannon infantry. they are very unique without any a new unit having been introduced for them.
1 Like
It’s still not a classic civ… classic civs would be those of AoK-TC…
2 Likes
Only Magyars remain from FE mod as of now unchanged.
1 Like
A Balkan DLC looming in the distance: “For now”…
3 Likes
They have an excellent design - very strong counter units but nothing generic. Decent early game eco benefit and almost negligibile for the mid game but the military bonus compensates for it. In reality its weak because counter units need to be in higher numbers and the base price on their units were increased making it difficult to afford such numbers.
AOC was an expansion. Not needing houses, monks with 2x hp, fast moving monks were all mechanics new to the game in the year 2000.
If you paid for DE, you were already ok with Obsidian arrows, Feitoria, Ballista tree cuts, half pop units, feudal 2nd tc, armor ignoring effect etc. Doing pure stat variations isn’t always good and can lead to redundancies like Shotels. At this point its absolutely impossible to create 3-4 new unique/regional units every DLC which are just a statistical variant of existing one. We did see Hei guang cavalry like that but its not possible to always do that. And there’s no need to do that either. Even the base game had trample damage, the weird hybrid melee+pierce projectiles of chukonu, regeneration and so on which are not pure statistical variations.
They introduced some of the most broken or useless techs that ever existed in the game like Obsidian arrows, boiling oil, madrasah, orthodoxy. Those are far more harmful to the game since they gave a huge advantage or handicap to a civ than any mechanic. And btw there are no “rules”, its just your personal bias. Chukonu could have simply had 13 base damage, Cataphracts could have just received additional +10 vs infantry or something but they didn’t. Even the OG devs wanted to create a niche where some unique units are more effective than usual. Probably since it was a long time ago, you were able to accept multiple projectiles and trample damage but unable to tolerate armor ignoring and charge effects at present.
Pretty sure a lot of people would have considered the half pop and tree cutting units as non-aoe2 mechanics as well. The auto-farm-reseed, auto-farm placement, range mod, auto-scout, Feitoria all of these were strongly opposed when they were introduced. The game moved on with no issues and people have just adopted to most of these mechanics.
You can’t give CA bonus damage vs buildings. Giving them to foot archers itself created the obsidian arrow nightmare for years. Its much worse giving that to CA. Somebody will just run, break your tcs, kill vills and run away. Extra bonus damage vs infantry is almost useless. CA are already very effective vs infantry and except two or three civs, no other civ uses infantry units vs CA. Apart from being anti-goth and inca, there’ll be nothing beneficial about this unit. If its tweaked to be weaker against other generic units as a compensation that’ll make the unit weaker overall. And this is the harmful thing about pure statistical variants.
Lol. How’s the zombie effect not a mechanic 11. And btw you can’t do half pop ranged units - that will be overpowered but you could do CA that costs 1.5 pop and takes longer to produce but very effective. Ideally Mangudai should be turned into a 1.5 pop space unit for how ridiculously strong it is.
The thing is these are mechanics - just the ones you’re comfortable with. At this point it might still be possible but extremely difficult to create new units that are unique, functionally useful but not broken, fit a civ design and free from any mechanic. You can always create posts about such ideas when you get them. Many civ bonuses, unique units for new DLCs were taken off from balance suggestions or uu rework for existing civs in discussion threads.
1 Like
Both of these were in AoE1, and units that can destroy trees have always been in AoE2.
(Not interested in getting involved in your argument, just correcting some errors.)
3 Likes
this will always be a matter of taste. imo any civ that has magic shields should be removed from the game.
not needing houses: yeah, kind of. could have easily been implemented as “TCs provide +200 pop”.
monks with 2x hp, not a new mechanic. units having more hp due to civ bonuses was already a thing (eg frank cav)
faster moving monk. ditto, celt infantry
most of these, and most the the HD expansions only applied existing mechanics to other units.
this is not the same as introducing a whole range of new game concepts like the DE expansions: auras, armor shredding, relics giving attack bonuses, arrow dodging, charge attacks, poison damage, etc, etc, etc
Obsidian arrows is not in any way a new mechanic, it’s just bonus damage
Feitorias were annoying, thankfully we basically never saw them in land games
What could possibly be wrong about ballista tree cuts? Onagers and Trebs can both cut trees as well
Half pop units were a newly introduced mechanic, but it felt like part of aoe2
feudal 2nd TC was completely OP and the entire community asked to have it removed
armor ignoring is the least offensive of the gimmicks, but should have been a warning for what was to come.
How in the world is the Shotel redundant? What other high attack, low resiliance fast infantry exists? Hell, what other unit like that in general exists?
There are still so many units that could be created.
trample damage is a statistical variation, it’s a type of area of effect damage which lots of units had since AoK
the melee-pierce projectiles of chukonu are probably a bug-turned-feature, they could have achieved the same effect with bonus damage
regeneration is the only thing where you have a point. And it’s the only civ out of 18 that has anything like that. with modern civs, each new civ often has 2 or 3 newly introduced mechanics.
and if you didn’t like that, you could switch back to the original data set. HD gave you options, DE forces you to play with any change the devs come up with.
Even if that were true, why force all of this on all the players? Even if my dislike for these things were irrational, why force me to play with these?
tree cutting units have been in aoe2 since aok, so what are you talking about?
i don’t think anyone was seriously offended by the half-pop units, as that felt like another way to change the cost of a unit.
these are all DE?
these are all QoL updates, not game mechanics. that’s a different topic. Feitoria are the only exception, and they were nerfed heavily because everyone hated them.
could easily be fixed by keeping the bonus fairly low and/or limiting the bonus to pallisades and standard buildings.
Saracens still have an archer bonus vs buildings, and nobody thinks it’s broken. The issue with Obsidian arrows wasn’t that there was a bonus, but the size of that bonus. + one of the 3K civs has an anti-building archer.
yeah, fair enough. that would probably be kinda useless.
I made a longer list with different options in another post, there are still so many possibilities.
it is a new mechanic, but i’d rather have a few new mechanics which get used by different units, than being inundated by new mechanics with every DLC.
the konnik zombie mechanic, yes. the other examples no.
if that were true, then it’s a sign to stop adding civs.
I found this annoying as well. Overall the announcement comes across as a bit too self-congratulatory about how medieval it is (while specifically avoiding civs that could have had more a more medieval emphasis, including campaigns), how much they listened to the community, how much they researched, how fitting the civilizations are, etc, in a way that seems intended to disqualify all criticism. Not the biggest deal, and much better than the 3K reveal, but given their civ/campaign choices, they should have just said it takes place during the Age of Discovery or Early Modern period. I will say the FAQ was a good move though. DLC looks a little gimmick-heavy so far, but otherwise okay, and the new graphics (architecture and extras) are fantastic.
This would be an odd criticism because the addition of the Tupí necessitates a hitherto unknown level of “we have to give them XYZ for gameplay reasons even though it’s not a close match historically.” Obviously Castles, Universities, etc, but even units like slingers aren’t a good fit. Perhaps more importantly, this objection is pre-empted by the choice to base the regional flavor on Andean units and architecture. “Champi” is already a Quechua name for the Tupí scout unit, and their architecture is already based on Inca architecture…so I would find it 0% weird for them to have a Quechua name for their regional building that already presents as Inca in terms of visual and (likely) historical inspiration.
The current name “settlement” does a poor job of implying the function of the building and makes no attempt whatsoever to justify why only South American civilizations know how to build “settlements.” The first problem is solved if we call it a storehouse, and both problems are solved if we call it a Qulqa (specific Incasphere/Quechua storehouse). Like the Caravanserai, it had different names in different regions or languages (funduq, wikala), but the naming convention is set by its most iconic and prolific users. Also there’s the irony that while everyone built “settlements,” they made this an exclusive South American building in a period that was notable for Europeans going out of their way to build settlements there. It’s less on the nose than if they had called these buildings “colonies,” but I still find it very ironic.
4 Likes
yeah sounds good. Although i can already hear casters pronouncing it as “Gulag” 11
2 Likes
I actually hadn’t even heard of the Tupí before so I didn’t know any of this. Also, if their motivation was to avoid complaints about the name, why call it “settlement”, a name that is easy to complain about even without any knowledge of South American languages?!
One objection to this is that it doesn’t communicate the function of the building to those who aren’t familiar with that word already… But maybe that’s not a problem – the game is full of units (if not buildings) in a similar position.
Casters often seem to pronounce things in ways I don’t expect – e.g. Byzantines, Teutons, Cumans, Janissaries.
Regardiung this, the civs themselves are medieval in the sense that they were around since before European contact and therefore technically in the “medieval” period but the campaigns specifically are set in the post-contact period which is outside the medieval era.
Overall I have always been against adding more American civs because there is too much in thir design that is pure fantasy. The entire blacksmith techs, the european looking units with weapons the Americans never had access to pre-contact with Europeans, the entirety of the siege workshop, the inclusion of “castles”, their entire naval roster.
Interetingly after the release of the 3 kingdoms dlc which I overall hate for all the obvious reasons, I was somewhat optimistic that at least any future American civs might get more regional flavouring in their design since the 3k civs all got traction trebs and were missing the actual counterweight trebuchet and even got unique siege ships. This showed that the devs were willing to toy with the idea of major breaks from universal civ design features such as trebuchets for the sake of “historic accuracy”. This in my opinion was the only redeeming quality of the 3k dlc. But now it looks like that the devs are taking a more conservative and “safe” approach with these American civs and pretty much keeping all the jarring ahistoric elements of their design unchanged. So now this is even more glaringly frustrating since we have 3 old world civs that at least have regional alternative to trebuchets and yet we will end up with 6 American civs which have no business having anything even resembling a traction trebuchet who will still have access to it! All this just creates even more inconsistencies in the design philosophies of the different civs where certain civs just feel like they are from a different game or an unofficial mod. This is such a shame because the release of this dlc was the best opportunity to also introduce more regional skins and more uniqueness to the American civs and redesign a lot of their anachronistic elements but if this release comes without those changes I doubt we will ever see anything like that being implemented.
2 Likes
Mule Carts already kimd of fail at being obvious in what they are used for
However I feel like current settlements are lackimg on things showing their resource drop site function.
Idk how you can make it more obvious, but to me it isnt a particularly good building at making you see the resources.
1 Like
That’s not bug, that’s a feature!
1 Like
Before the teaser images appeared, I thought they might give them a captured cannon as Trebuchet replacement, also influenced by the announcement that the American civs will be given Cannon Galleons as part of the naval rework. Cannons operated by Native Americans, like the Captured Mortar or Light Cannon in AoE3. But I was wrong.
Still, I’m curious what the new siege ship looks like.
TBH cannons might be more historically accurate for natives than trebs (assuming that Imperial age would always represent post-European contact)
1 Like
Can’t wait to see Mapuche and Tupi trebs in action. Next will be Mississippians and Polynesians!