I can try to explain this besides the small sample size.
Some civs like Russians have really good matchups and really bad matchups. When they are picked they are usually used as a counter to another civ, and never actively picked, which accounts for high win but low pick.
Some other all-round economic civs are safer choices so they have high pick but not necessarily high win rate.
Only high pick high win can be considered op.
1 Like
Okay let me revise: the long-time stable playerbase are mosy old players.
I can hardly imagine younger people nowadays would pick up old school RTS. I do not see any example. Maybe there are but very rare.
Do they document AoEO civ winrates anywhere?
I think the civ designs are interesting in both of those games, itâs mainly other things that kept me from playing them more.
Itâs clear they are placing a high priority on competitive viability with AoE4.
Every civ added complicates that. Thatâs why I completely discount any comparison people make about asymmetry to games like Starcraft or C&C that have 2-3 matchups when AoE4 started with 28 (and now has 45).
1 Like
Doesnât have to be younger people, can be other interested old RTS dogs that want to have a crack at games they didnât play or only played very little. Some newcomers that were aided by the better tutorial and learning experience to lower the steep learning curve as well and get further into the game.
There are also those who get inspired to try it out and stick as there are more streams, more content to follow and look into.
But I will leave it at that.
I could probably get those because we have server data, but I dont think they are published. We also have a small community, so we tend to balance AoEO from our guts rather than through math, at least as I understand it. I do not play competitively enough to pay super close attention to the AoEO balance changes.
I can definitely confirm that from an anecdotal standpoint, the community does not tend to have any strong opinions that any one civ is out of balance one way or the other. We believe we have super good balance, and I dont recall anyone really arguing otherwise.
I donât understand what youâre saying. All brand-new games have a spike at launch, and this dips afterwards. This doesnât happen as much for re-releases because they tend to have established fans (like you said). New games donât have that buffer. It can still happen though, depending on the type of game (for example, Mass Effect Legendary Edition - as it has no MP component, itâs only the SP content, and as such, exhausts a certain amount of replayability over time).
Are you saying that Age IV will only be a success if it recoups all of the players that tried it at launch? That doesnât seem like a standard any video game will live up to (except the occasional re-release or remaster of an old game).
I have no idea how this relates to asymmetry in civ design and being more AoE III-like or more AoE II-like. Did you quote the right post? Are you referring to something I said to Andy? Like he said, I do write a lot.
2 Likes
Iâm going to try to summarize my thoughts on the latest comments, which seem to have gone everywhere:
- AoE3 was (and still is) a technical masterpiece. One of the best RTS of modern times. Lots of things played against it, such as coming out during a RTS renaissance with too many great competitors, placing itself in a relatively unloved time period and experimenting with too many new things (as admitted by the devs).
- I do not think AoE4 will be seen in the same light as AoE3 in the future. Itâs a different, way more commercial product with significantly less soul to it. AoE4 will be the SupCom 2 of the franchise.
- AoE4 definitely has big issues retaining players. Weâve seen it after launch, then after the price reduction and even after its free weekend. Numbers always drop. People are willing to test it, but think of it as boring and move on to something else. Whoever denies this is blind.
- I donât want 50 mostly symmetric civs. I donât want only 3 completely asymmetric civs either. AoE4 should find its balance. Malians are a good balance, I can understand and ignore the identical European siege. Ottomans are not fine. They are a 90% copy of already existing civs.
- Those saying that itâs impossible to balance a game with 10+ very asymmetrical civs. There will be a day when an RTS does it and you will all look back and regret it was not AoE. Anything can be done. Look at Flight Sim 2020 basically replicating the whole world, something that was thought impossible only a few years ago. But sure, for as long as people live in denial, it wonât happen.
- This one really irks me: The competitive player base is only a small fraction of the whole player base. If civs are perfectly balanced but boring, you will only have ~10% of competitive players around to support the game. Those wanting spectacle, fun, biome diversity, cool easter eggs, etc., will leave quickly. The Great Bombard may be balanced (or not) but my god is it a boring until to use!
9 Likes
the concurrent player number =/= sale figures, which is the thing that matters to microsoft at the end, because youâll never have every single player online at the same time, thats just how it works, just to clarify why, imo, argueing about concurrent player count is dumb at the end of the day, similar to folks obsessed with balance to the point of forgetting about effects of player skill in attempt to make it seem the gameâs unbalanced. keep in mind all aoe games, including mythology and 4, are success in terms of sales, the free dlc wouldnât be happening if there was no audience there to try it out, free dlc isnât uncommon these days, most games have it day 1 even.
Now on civs, i absolutely agree aoe4 taking its own path is the way to go, the level of assymetry the devs view as enough to keep the game intact balance wise, ensemble found its way in both symetrical design (aoe2) and assymetrical design (aom and aoe3). you may not agree with some of the solutions used by any of the games, i wonât agree with others, but that doesnât mean any of them are inherently bad. while its fine to draw inspiration from legacy games in terms of certain design elements, the devs have to avoid directly copy pasting any of the mechanics, its a new game after all, it should include fresh new elements, regardless of the dev behind
And then we arrive to a concept most ultra competitive players are unfamiliar with imo, fun, you cannot have perfect balance and fun at once, if everything is too balanced the game stops being fun, if its not enough balanced it results in competitive players unsatisfaction. but then what is more important to aoe, perfect balance and lack of fun, or slight imbalance but more fun as a result, the legacy games went for the second route, but aoe4 with its, imo missguided, approach decided to go for the first route, may not sound that sagnificant, but first route only pleases a tiny fraction of loud, and often, elitist individual players that only see competitive as the way to play the game, while the other still pleases the them well enough given theyâre in minority and gives more casual players something to enjoy.
Itâs maintaining a significantly higher playerbase than AoE III: DE, released less than a year apart. Whoever denies this is similarly blind 
I mean, câmon. âboringâ is a value judgement. Itâs not objective. People arenât blind just because they have a different opinion to you. You should be more tolerant of other positions.
As you can see above though - and I agree with you - is that people use these figures to put Age IV down, but then say other Age games are fantastic success stories. And by and large they are. Even base AoE III rates really positively on Steam (which, again, flawed metric, but at least a consistent one). We only have a limited number of metrics to make sense of a gameâs success. None of them are going to be perfect, and arguing about it is generally dumb, but theyâre still useful.
I agree that thereâs tension between competitive and non-competitive players. However it cuts both ways. The most uncaring of casual players disregard the need for good balance, and the top-end competitive players would prefer something balanced rather than something fun.
Both are true.
You think Age IV went the wrong way? Fair enough. I think they went the right way, and Iâm not even a competitive player (faaaaaar from it). I respect that weâre not all going to have the same answer. But the question isnât over what has been done, itâs over what the developers do next. Like, Iâm happy that Malians have impressed even consistent critics of the game, even if the Ottomans haveât so much. But I donât think the developers need to go all-in on any specific demographic. So what if the Ottomans arenât everyoneâs cup of tea? Supporting a game like Age IV, assuming support keeps going, is all about testing the waters to see what works.
I mean, if games were one-and-done like people seem to think they used to be, Iâd love to know if anyone is still playing the unpatched, zero-expansions base game of AoE II (Classic). Some folks undoubtably are, but I canât imagine many.
1 Like
Why the Malians cant slaughter the cows? Another weird feature they should have made it like the mongols pasture and the russian high trade house.
i think you slightly missread one part, no arguening here, just small clarification, civs direction is fine, its own path as it should be, the overfocus on esports and hardcore competitive however i do have problems with, no shortage of them, as it puts too much resources into objective minority of players, as stated, devs have to hit that magical middle ground, which is obviously a hard task for anyone to achieve, not impossible, but it takes a while and is never trully perfect, in any game
1 Like
I think many of us here consider AoE2 to be a game from 1999 and AoE3 to be a game from 2005, regardless of when their respective definitive editions came out. It is funny that we live at a time that the release date of a game is a moving target and debatable. But I can see how that is a fact Iâve taken for granted.
But I definitely see AoE3âs numbers and consider them very stellar for a game that is 17-years-old.
From my perspective, the DE versions still feel like time capsules with a new coat of paint. I donât really expect them to be up to todayâs standards, and I donât expect them to ever bring in the kinds of numbers a newly released game would bring in.
I canât speak for the developers, but I would expect them to have expected AoE4 to perform far better than it has. (Again, I understand we may never have enough info on this forum to even agree on how to measure success, especially since unit sales are a very different statistic than active players on Steam).
3 Likes
wait, youâre a moderator who doesnât play age of empires?
1 Like
My all-time favorite AoE is AoE3, but Iâve long since accepted defeat as an unpopular AoE (because itâs too complex and not competitive) and I donât see a solution.
The 2 million copies was in 2 years (2005-2007) and the vast majority of them were in the first game without expansions, from there, it declined to the point that ES was dissolved.
AoEO another failure, not even PCeleste has grown players count (maybe 20-30 players more).
Thatâs not to say that you canât grab whatâs most appealing about each game based on player feedback, but they must not make the same mistakes.
AoE cannot have completely asymmetric civs, except 10-20% of civs (people go on and on asking for civs and AoE is forced to give them) nor should it follow the AoE2 line of civs. The middle ground is ideal.
2 Likes
These days, I play Age of Empires basically every day. I just donât happen to play every single game these days, though I have played them all since I started back in 1998. Presently I play Age of Empires Online.
4 Likes
I will disagree with the campaign, it was boring, campaign wise, age 2 is better, age2 had a lot of casual player base BTW part of the is the amount of single player and casual multiplayer modes.
1 Like
Also many people forget that age of empires lll was competing other RTS, like war lll and Dawn of War, those games were extremely popular by 2005-2006, today age IV has barely any competition, coh2 is a older game that will be replace by coh3 and next year will have games like tempest rising and HW3, next year is the real test for age of empires.
1 Like
Yo creo que varios jugadores de aoe 3 somos concientes que la guerra de popularidad se perdio hace mucho tiempo, pero lo que minimo buscamos algunos es que el aoe 3 tenga el respeto y el reconocimiento que se merece, cosa que las comunidades del aoe 2 y 4 no le dan y ni siquiera le han dado la mĂĄs minima oportunidad, yo mismo siendo un jugador aserrimo del 3 le he dado oportunidad al IV y al 2 y les juego pero no me atraen como el 3 (por razones como la edad media, que luego de tanta, peli, juegos, series y novelas me aburrio a mĂĄs no poder, se sienten mĂĄs simples al no tener un sistema rejugable como el sistema de cartas, y sus civs se me hacen demasiados similares (sobre todo en el 2 el 4 por lo menos lo esta intentando)
Do you think the game would still be as popular as it is, without it? Would it have the bug fixes the DE has? The art? The enhanced features and content?
Similar to comparing something like the original Mass Effect to the version in the Legendary Edition, there are differences that people would pay for. That would keep them playing.
That said, I appreciate this is just your take on it. I still donât know what you think qualifies as a success for Age IV, or what you think that looks like. If the game moved in a completely different way to what you wanted, but steadily gained players over time . . . would that be enough? Because in my opinion the game is gaining. Through a bunch of factors, from price changes, to general content improvements, and so on. But Iâm really interested in hearing, even from any critic, where the mark is. How popular is popular enough to be good enough (not saying this is the ceiling, just an acceptable baseline for success).
I wrote an entire post analyzing what are the components of the peaks for each game and you let it slip with âall games peak at launchâ. Fine. Typical G##bM##t.
My point is DE is not equivalent to new games.
The maximal number of players a DE can attract is the returning old players, and some players who tried it one back then and want to give another try. That is the 20k player for AOE3DE and approximately the same scale (corrected to 40k) for AOE2DE.
A true new release should attract a lot of new players who never tried the series before. That is the 70k at the launch of AOE4.
2 Likes