Lets talk about walls

I’ve played AOE 1,2,3 AO Mythology and beyond.

I personally think walls need to made more realistic. For an ancient style AOE here are my suggestions.

1.) Walls should be MUCH stronger but MUCH more expensive. In ancient times stone walls were very expensive and laborious to make, but provided excellent defense. Their high cost means walls will have to placed more strategically. Same strength increase should apply to defense towers , as well. (or increase build limit from aoe 3). Defense towers are useless when under a strong attack.

2.) I think there should be multiple types of walls for different costs. Enough covering entire maps with layers upon layers of stone walls, have a cheap wood wall option, and more expensive stronger options.

3.) Mountable YES! It would be awesome if they can be mountable, so units can travel along them, shoot from them, defend them etc… In addition, mountable walls create a whole new realm of new units like siege towers, ladders, etc…

4.) More wall options. In addition to gates add things like turrets and stairs (for mountable walls)

what do you think?

I agree on three of these points. Especially for a Middle Age Setting. Defense would make more sense than just placing some troops at a gate and building a few useless towers. Mountable walls would allow for siege towers and ladders for offense and more defensive strategy for the defense. Perhaps when garrisoned in walls, troops gain attack and are harder to hit/have more health. But of course you can only garrison units in walls that have range and are on foot. An they could have Middle Age defenses like boiling oil or rocks, etc… just a thought.

Maybe not have walls too expensive because then no one would find use for them-- they would only ever be able to create a few strips of walls here and there; with how little walls are used in AoE2 due to resource cut offs when building them, a large increase in price would drive demand down.

As long as walls don’t have clipping issue I am okay.

I would like to see the wall improve with the intelligence during construction and sometime wished there were construction templates for the type of wall you want to design instead of having to specific each segment or correct segments that the AI got messed on.

Mountable walls…YES! I can’t believe we -still- don’t have many RTS games with this. I remember seeing some early Age of Empires 3 shots showing such off, only to discover later that it was only a campaign thing.

Cost wise, I’m not sure they should be super expensive considering how many units of walls you’ll need to place. Honestly I thought the cost was fine in AOK. Likewise, I did like the fact that we had both wooden walls and the stone ones.

In fact, if AOE 4 goes up to the world war era’s, what would be awesome to have is the ability to build trenches as well.

Building these expensive walls seems like such a loss of time and resources since units could crumble them so easily. Wouldn’t it be cool if units could station themselves on top of walls? I seen this done in stronghold and the settlers franchise.

Stone walls sounds harder to construct than wooden walls. I heard the Iroquois built walls around their longhouses and settlements.

Wouldn’t manning walls be a strange way to waste your population?

Well if the game took place in the middle ages, walls could add range and give your units some protection at least till the walls get demolished.
Other ages not so much… Otherwise I say trenches would be decent enough protection unless somebody is using grenades. in prehistorical setting, walls being able to have units on it would be so much better than having no walls at all. On a modern age putting units on walls would be pointless. Since I still do not have a clue what age this game is taking place, I am left guessing.

Do keep in mind that there is a precarious balance between defense and offense though. In aoe2, as an example, walls and towers are cost effective ways to protect small areas of the map for a while, castles, combined with mobile forces, allow aggressive expansion of the protected area. Trebuchets and cannons lower the value of defences and stone is typically the first resource to run out putting an end to defensive play styles. Because the game needs to end at some point. There are a lot of cool things that can be done with walls, but depending on what the game will be like not all of them would serve the game world best. More expensive but stronger walls for instance, not sure about that. That could mean they’re not an affordable early game option, meaning players have to defend with units, and then when they have enough resources to start a proper war they get the option to just wall in and stay at their base instead. It’s just one possible outcome, but still.

I do like the walls in Stronghold though…

You know what, I think there might actually be some cool new things to do with defenses. It doesn’t have to be a full on Stronghold game while also still being Age of Empires, but it would be nice to have some col options. Maybe mountable walls, maybe two different strengths of tower or just several different tower weapons, maybe some form of gatehouses that help a bit in defending even if they are kept open by accident. Maybe the ability to do landscaping, to dig slowing moats or raise small elevations, maybe military units that can help erect certain defenses. The Roman legions did march out carrying poles for their camp’s palisades after all. Some form of combat engineer could work well for this task too, like an anti-petard, a pro-castle drop unit. If done well, I’d be willing to sacrifice the castle as a single building for some extra options somewhat like that. (Although I love the unique unit function of the aoe2 castles.) I don’t want it all, the game needs to stay playable, but a few cool new features.

Fortresses become customizable: some towers, some walls, maybe a unit production building or a resource gathering point. Defenses can be better tailored to their environment, the castle on a cliff doesn’t need the same amount of hitpoints on all sides. The castle manned by archers could choose to invest less in towers and more in walls, and regret it when forced to switch to cavalry. A more involved system of defensive buildings using only smaller building blocks probably makes it a little harder to drop a really strong fort on top of someone offensively without having to actually gamecode-wise ban dropping a fort too close to the other guy’s town center, but it still does allow for some offensive defenses and for scrambling a position together with limited workers and resources. Defense becomes more micro intensive, but that’s kind of fair compared to how offensive players also need to keep an eye on everything they’re doing.

Plus think of all the hours you could spend in the mission editor making your dream fort or recreating a historical position. It might even offer options for a new maptype/gamemode, like an incomplete Arena type map, where you have some semblance of protection but to really benefit need to finish them and keep them up to date.

I think if they put their AoE in Relic’s hands was because they made futuristic and contemporaneous RTS.

It all depends on the game era, modern days wars and ‘empires’ doesn’t have real physical walls unless in some rare cases, WW had more trenches than anything else, those where the WW ‘walls’, there is even other kinds of ‘walls’ like mined fields. But if it’s about the old times, agree with the make it stronger and expensive, but make it more dynamic, eg. allowing some kind of unities pass it even tho it isn’t complete destroyed, or even allowing some strategic defense on them.

You talk about this walls.
This walls system in skirmish, or multiplayer is not useful.
And, WW. This unworkable.

@arapiCOMMANDER isn’t abot you and me want for AoE, can be nice have kind of AoE for history periods like Total war series.

And you shouldnt do wall hoping with garrisoned troups (mangonel, khmer villagers…)