Currently even a single ram can easily break walls, doesn’t even allow time for units to arrive or burn down the ram, or out repair the wall in most cases making stone walls often useless. Players who has the APM to send a single ram to all stone walls on the sides basically have a big advantage, the defensive player who made the investment to wall the sides to focus on the center fight ultimately has the highest APM cost responding to rams, repairing and trying to reconnect the walls.
My suggestion is to make gates weaker, and walls stronger both wood and stone walls. making gates points of attack and defense. also this was historically the case, breaking stone walls with rams was historically impossible, they were used to break the gates.
This change will make walling viable worthy investment and also gates not impregnatable for the attacker. if the defending player has to make few gates on the sides, it also allows few points of attacks.
In team games also this will prevent players from easily breaching the walls with a single ram to let in mass cav/mangudai not allowing time to defend the breach.
I think it’s a good suggestion. Walls are impassable for attacker and defender, so someone trying to use less gates to have fewer weakpoints would also make the wall an obstacle for themself.
exactly! If the attacker wants to breach the walls, they will need to bring the big guns and it will take time so the defender can try to repair and hold while they bring their troops to the breach.
This can also bring Stone wall towers back to the game as they were designed to be used. Players will start using them along side the gates to add more defense since the gates are the weakest point.
Right now there’s no way to decide where to put stone wall towers since any point in the walls can be the attack point and therefore no way to predict where the towers would be effective to be placed. Attacker can simply attack a different place in the wall and breach easily if the stone wall towers are placed…
What I like about this one is that it reminds me of a certain mechanic in Total War Kingdom 2 and Attila Total War, where you also had to destroy Gates with battering rams; and to destroy walls you need to use catapults, trebushets or cannons.
As extra ideas:
Double the HP of walls, leaving the HP of gates the same.
Give Boiling Water or torches to Stone Towers against siege or nearby units. This would make Stone Towers vital to defend gates from battering rams and give them a new use. Boiling Oil upgrades the attack to oil, increasing the damage of the same towers.
Extra attack could be given to the battering ram against gates. Now that there are many subtypes, many things can be done.
I completely agree that rams feel too effective against stone walls right now. It often doesn’t give the defender enough time to react, making walling feel like a weak investment. Your idea of making gates the main weak point while strengthening walls makes a lot of sense, both historically and gameplay-wise.
One possible addition could be adjusting how walls take damage—maybe stone walls could take reduced damage from rams unless there’s already a breach nearby, so attackers have to focus their efforts rather than just sending a single ram to random spots. Another idea is making siege towers more relevant, encouraging attackers to climb over walls rather than just breaking through.
In team games, I totally get how frustrating it can be when a single ram opens a massive hole for cavalry to flood in. Maybe defenders could get a small repair speed boost when a breach happens, or wall-mounted units could deal more damage to siege weapons to help buy time.
Overall, I think your suggestion would make walling more meaningful without making defenses overpowered.
and also,why can non siege units burn down wall towers but cant burn down the wall itself,it makes no sense i proposed that to be changed from early stress test.
Cool, I’ll just wall off random areas with my Villagers and not build a gate until the resources are depleted. Maybe also build a nice house for my Nest of Bees during combat.
This is a terrible idea. But I would definitely be in favor of making the Gates weaker than they are now.
I agree. As long as walls get torn down by a single ram, there is no point in building siege towers or even sending units on top of walls. Rendering a unit and a mechanic obsolete
Walls and towers seem like they’re made of cardboard or chalk in AoE4… in terms of their strength, their look, their construction speed, and the mediocre sound made when constructing. They lack weight/heft and any feeling of being made of stone or whatever rock or rock mixture they’re supposed to be made of
Sounds like the game is broken or could be improved then in other areas, if the argument against it is that entering and exiting your base will require more wall deletions and re-creations of all things
In the past folks complained about walls slowing down games especially with multiple layers of walls which are hard to penetrate. Resulting in boring games with little interaction. In turn the devs nerfed walls multiple times and over multiple patches. Now a single ram is enough to easily break walls.
I personally dislike nerfing something to the point of it feeling like a waste to even build. It robs the game of strategic depth. There should be no clear best/worst strategy. There should be a plethora of different, viable strategies, all with their own strengths and weaknesses.
Currently building palisade or stone walls in Age II and siege towers generally feels like a waste of resources. Nowadays you seldom or never see units on top of walls. Which further restricts strategy.
For this one case however, I think I may have a decent solution:
Make Gates buff adjacent stone wall segments. This encourages defensive players to build Gates. With walls containing gates and being sturdier, offensive players finally have a use case for siege towers (due to gates being mandatory for units to climb down the walls). Walls that don’t contain a gate in them can still be easily breached by a ram or two.
This would add strategic depth for both defensive and aggressive players. The defender has to contemplate where best to place their gate(s). The attacker will also get more freedom in choosing the angle of attack – do I siege down a remote segment of a wall using rams, trebuchet, etc or do I attack near a gate with siege towers.