A lot of people are complaining about dark age being boring. How 'bout we get SKIRMISHERS in dark age? It’ll be really dicey and add a lot more to the game?
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No. The dark age is fine leave the way it is. You are meant to have primitive technology at this point in the game. If you want cool units play some sort of scenario where you can train units in dark age.
Having an archery range in the dark age just help someone like the Mayans do an unstoppable archer rush then. Not to mention it totally messes up the game’'s balance.
There are a lot of things I would find fun in the game. I would love to have war elephants with bombard cannons on their back and have 1200 HP. But I know, that would mess up the game balance.
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With speed of hhussar? 11
I dont think it would be impossible to balance something like that.just make them fire slow like a cannon galleon or something like that.
I’d rather see light cavalry in feudal than any other units in dark age.
The balance of a drush is that it can be walled out and is predictable with its movements, if you add skirms or scouts to the mix it’s an entire army.
Also a second building is way too expensive in dark age.
So no.
It would have to be a new unit created from the town center; it would provide the building for it while not adding to other strategies while still creating dark age units at the expense of villager creation time.
The whole point of the dark age is that it’s (usually) the shortest age in the game, and that you’re incentivized to go either feudal or castle asap precisely to get more units.
Perhaps a transport type of unit, similar to the siege tower but with no attack ability - or a horse to be ridden by villagers - able to garrison up to 2 villagers or 2 men at arms probably - this would bring variable attack / scouting / forward vill strategies - or seek resources/transport to said resources at a distance - etc strategies.
Absolutely not worth over creating vills
Nah that sounds horrible. Would be an immensely huge buff for fc builds as you can fend off opponents aggression with maa archers by just sitting behind your walls and go safe to castle age by making few skirms. Also would distort balance for many other reasons. Like with cumans you build 3 ranges on your way to feudal 11
I think you just can’t forcingly make dark age more appealing after 20 years. The game was never designed around dark age warfare. Nevertheless we have already quite often drush-fc, which features some kind of dark age agression so it isn’t completely useless, also in terms of military.
The important part of the dark age is to set your economy and scouting up for the midgame. The few decisions you make, or maybe also small mistakes, decide what role you have in the game, how the game plays out. We see it a lot in EW that skips dark age, that both players have basically the same role (which is intentionally to be as agressive as possible). That leads to repetitive gameplay where single mistakes can decide the outcome very quickly because if both players try to take the same role the one who gets the first advantage can often quite easily snowball to a victory.
That’s why the dark age is so important even without much military interaction, it determines your role in the game and then allows for an interaction between the different roles taken by the players. And as each of these roles usually has fallback strategies, smaller mistakes often aren’t as much punished as if both players are forced into the same role. This allows for way more diverse and interesting gameplay, and the dark age plays a very important part in this even if it is comparably “boring”.
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They could simply do the opposite and make DA shorter . ie faster to age up either through lower price, actual speed or easier access to faster initial food.
Basically what aoe4 did.
But it’s too big of a shift for the old vets, so won’t happen… they couldn’t even accept HC needed a buff or Franks needed a nerf… how could they comprehend that dark age is boring…
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Feudal tends to be the shortest age actually I think. Dark age has an average up time of somewhere between 10 and 12 minutes for most players, while Feudal age ups at somewhere between 16 and 22 normally. Just pointing out that Dark age is normally longer.
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I can see both sides of this one. Dark Age combat is really one-dimensional, much like the old Feudal naval combat that was fixed with the Fire Galley and Demo Raft. The Dark Age scout already exists in a balanced (slow and weak) form, so I don’t see any harm in allowing its production . This could help in games without a starting scout, like nomad, while being very difficult to get villager kills.
However, cost is going to be a big problem. Even if you could build a Dark Age stable or archery range that’s 175 wood on top of the barracks cost. I don’t think it would be a good idea to produce skirmishers or scouts at the barracks. Then there’s the cost of units themselves, how many 80 food scouts would anyone realistically make and delay their Feudal time?
Dark Age combat is dull, but that’s why Empire Wars exists, might not be worth changing anything.
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Imagine Mongols/Liths that can build a stable on the way up 11
Then it being added to the barracks or mill would be another way.
A mountable/garrison-able horse coming from the mill would probably be preferable.
Yay even more new mechanics that are likely to be clunky. Sounds like fun. Nope.
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Just test it in a scenario. Then I’m not sure you would be so likely to suggest something like this.
Also, the question mark at the end of this makes it seem like you really aren’t sure. If you aren’t sure, yes it will be a dicey change. No it will not add a lot of good stuff to the game. In fact, the idea is dicey enough that the community will probably go for quite a bit of pushback. Just saying.
But we also speak about dark age being redundant in strategy cause you really are forced to go feudal. Imagine you at least have more than one unit and tech in that age to make dark age more than just repeating the same things over and over.
I’ve been having this discussion on mother thread about boars . The dark ages slows things down to allow you to create strategy. Empire wars removes the dark age and as someone else pointed out it basically forces both players to become the aggressor.
So while it might not have the micro battles of feudal ages or castle age it is very important for setting up strategies.
A 50sec difference in feudal time can lead to huge difference in how things play out. Or one player just walling and trying to FC under feudal pressure, these things are not possible without the dark age strategy.
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