My List of Nitpicks and Minor Complains from 2021

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
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Over the course of the last I began a habit of playing with a notepad by my side to take notes during gameplay of those small, tiny, issues that aren’t worthy of making a whole topic upon each one, but should be addressed at some point. Without further ado, here’s my list:

BALANCE

  • Livestock Pens should be cheaper than Markets.
  • Scouts should be able to use the auto-scout feature.
  • USA TEAM Lewis and Clark’s Expedition card is a little too good. It reveals the exact location of every resource, treasure and all enemy units and buildings at Age I and to top it all of, it still gives 100XP to everyone on your team. It’s not game breaking or anything, but it doesn’t need to be this useful this early in the game.
  • USA Coffee Mill Grinders cards should also apply to Camel Gatling Guns.
  • Haudenosaunee ‘TEAM Scout Infantry’ card should also give some scouts, merge it with ‘TEAM 2 Native Scouts’ card.
  • Generals should at least bea physically near the place where they place their flags. Right now, you can place a flag anywhere in the map as long as it not close to a starting TC and you have LOS, it doesn’t matter if the General is nearby or at the other end of the map. Not a major thing, I just find it kinda odd.
  • Chinese Hand Mortars are useless.
  • Dutch envoys are still useless, give them a ‘Diplomatic Immunity’ ability, where they can walk past enemy units without being attacked for a period of time(as if it is in a treaty) or something.
  • The Germans should start with 200 wood. It’s way too easy to get housed in the early game as Germany, they need an option to access a second house faster.
  • The Germans need more XP in maps without trade, maybe a better church(?).
  • German Settler Wagons and regular Settlers should be on the same count. You can currently have 99 settlers + 20 Settler Wagons simultaneously in the late game, which is ridiculous. The total number should be 99, so at best the Germans can have 20 Settler Wagons and 79 regular Setters.
  • Portugal’s Town Center spam can get ridiculous. Portugal’s main unique feature is that it gets a free Covered Wagon everytime it ages up. So far so good. However, through their Home City, they can get up to 5 more Town Centers, reaching a possible maximum of 12! Why? When are you ever going to need that many TCs? Why these cards even exist for Portugal? It’s kinda fun to cheese it against the AI with an infinite voluntários da pátria spam, but c’mon… Just keep the Donatarios cards and remove the other 2 extra Covered Wagons cards.

BUGS/GLITCHES

  • Non-Western civs can’t destroy dead players foundations. After you activate spies, you can see the foundations of buildings that your enemies planned, but never got to start. If you’re playing as any European or American civ, you can just destroy them, but not as any Native American, Asian or African civ. This can get annoying in situations where a dead player’s Trading Post foundation blocks you from building one yourself.
  • That Tribal Market glitch that causes mines to be stuck at 1 for ever and not being removed from the map once completed.
  • Saving a skirmish game and then loading it later and finishing it doesn’t award any XP to the Home City.
  • Can’t use auto-scout feature on more than 1 unit at the same time. Not sure if a glitch or intended, but on civs that have 2 or more Heroes, only one can auto-scout at a time. The others will get a “red button” as if they are scouting, but clearly aren’t.

AESTHETIC

  • USA troops final upgrade should be ‘Federal’ instead of ‘Imperial’.
  • Aztecs Home City customizations are way too expensive, it costs over 100 points to research everything. It’s too excessive, most other civs only charge around 50 to get everything.

AI

  • AI will often completely ignore treasures and resources right at their doorstep.(This has been improved over the last few patches.)
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They should in genral change Portugal its a boring civ that feels not like Portugal lol.

They could atleast make the towncenter into a feitoria. Like a fortified towncenter with a higher Hp and maybe a little higher defense and a market in it. (just a crazy idea lol)

( just read the part the mention portuguese outposts)

To be honest for me is Portugal the civ in this game the nation that I dont like most. What is funny.

@ KarlosBR96 from to Carlos XD most of ur Ideas I can agree.

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  • Livestock Pens should be cheaper, I agree. I feel there is too much to invest to make use of this building, but can be wrong
  • Why do you think the envoy is useless ? It can spot invisible units and explore the map for 0 population, which is nice already. If the dutch need a buff for this unit, we could decrease the cost or training time, but I do not have any problem with it
  • Why do you think Hand Mortar is weak ? It is pretty good at its two main objective: beating bildings and artillery. 4 Mortars have a similar cumuled damage (30dps/120d vs 27dps/160d) to culverins for the same range (34) and a similar price (200F, 360W vs 100W, 400G, which is fair as long as there is wood to chop, since Food is harvested faster); 5 Mortars deal 100dps/400d to buildings against 50dps/200d for a falconet for a 20% / 25% price increase (250F, 450G vs 100W, 400G) and a higher range (34 vs 26), which is very good. Hand Mortar are just useless against anything but buildings/ships/artillery, but it is fine, chinese have other good options against infantry, but then again, culverins are useless against anything but ships/artillery. I like the Hand Mortar and feel that they are good enough for what they bring to the chinese army.
  • I think german early game is fine and they do not need +200 wood. They get a +2SW card which is worth 4 villagers, which should compensate for shortcommings at the start
  • I do not think German need faster XP, because they are more designed to have fewer shipments. If German were under powered (I think they are fine), I would rather buff some of their cards.
  • I didnt play a lot against Germans, but 99 villagers + 20 SW feels too much. So I would also suppose that 99 should be the limit of both alltogether.
  • How do you compute the number of Portuguese TCs? Portuguese can have up to 1 TC per age (max 4 TCS also in age 5), get +2 TCS with Donatarios in Age 3, +1 with the covered Wagon in age 3, and either +1 or +2 with the +2 covered wagons in age 4, need to check. This amounts to 8 or 9. What did I miss ? Anyways, I think even having up to 12 TCs is “fine” as you do not need to take all cards, you can choose the one you like the most. Donarios may be interesting on Water maps, if you are age 3 any want more TCs around water. You ay not want to wait for age 4, and may have limited number of cards to use, you you may rather take only Donarios and not Donarios+1CoveredWagon… And there are many other “more useless” cards that nobody uses.
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I like playing Portugal and do not find them boring, but I heart a lot that they are not fitting to history. I wouldn’t mind bigger changes as long as they keep the feature “+1 TC per age”, which I find very nice and special.

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The feitoria could be an Unique trading post for Portugal, that functions like a mini-TC or something… Anyway, hopefully we get a round of revisions on the original vanilla civs in the future.

In the Imperial Age you can send the +1TC and +2TCs card a second time, reaching the total of 12. I know it’s a very specific situation that never would happen in a ‘serious’ game, it just strikes me as odd as to how that is even possible.

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I think this has been around for a long time.

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Cannot agree more.

Actually useful to anti artillery, especially the keshiks are weak.

I have an idea for it. It can become a unbeatable hero, up to 1, having the short LoS.
Similar to a hot air balloon, it cannot attack, accept damage and construct, able to move and scout only.

Perhaps add a new card named Zollverein, which means German Customs Union.
Ships 1 Market wagon. XP can be bought and sale at Market.
You can buy XP several times with coins in the early game to obtain the shipments faster.
Look powerful but the price may increase high quickly so it would still be balance.

.
I stated some ideas here, including the envoy change and Zollverein.

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Livestock pens should absopositively NOT cost less, the turtle meta is already too much to bear.

But I would add to the list of bugs complaints is HERDING, repeatedly I shoot a herd and it goes the opposite direction.

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Livestock Pens should be cheaper, yeah. I think 175 or even 150 wood would make them a lot more viable in most games, though most Europeans civs don’t really need buffs.

Autoscout would be a nice feature for scout units, yeah.

Lewis and Clark could be reworked, yeah. In my patch, I have it as TEAM +15 Hero LOS. I think that’s a more niche but reasonable shipment.

Coffee Mill guns shouldn’t affect Gatling Camels. We don’t need a mobile raider unit with infinite ROF.

I’d just remove the Inspiring Flag at this point. It’s such a gimmicky and confusing mechanic that doesn’t add much to the game. At best, it’s a worse version of the Haud explorer’s aura. Generals need a rework so it actually feels like they’re leading armies (similar to how the TWC war chiefs are crucial aspects of their armies). I wouldn’t go for buffing unit stats, but something else that doesn’t make them feel like a Euro explorer with buffed HP and gimmicks.

Hand Mortars are fine. I might buff up their speed a bit (unless DE’s changed this, projectile velocity is tied to movement speed, so +0.5 speed should help with this). Keep in mind that they’re spammable 1 pop artillery, so they shouldn’t be too strong individually.

An Envoy combat shipment would be nice. If we want gimmicks, we could give them a shipment that has an aura that prevents ALL units from fighting near them (like +100 ROF or something), but that’s incredibly toxic and memey.

Disagree with 200 wood. They were incredibly powerful with a 200 wood start on TAD, so having a fixed coin start is crucial for their balance, if we want to keep their civ bonus.

We just need more XP options in general. I think letting all civs build an age 1 church like Otto and Hausa can would be a good start and help encourage options on non-TP maps. I’d like to see native Trading Posts have some other ways to provide passive income or something, though I’m not sure that giving them a straight up XP trickle would be healthy.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone complain about Germany’s ultra lategame. Yes, you could have 140 vill pop, but that only leaves you with 60 military pop, and they don’t have particularly population efficient units, so it’s not really a problem.

Ports can’t send vill shipments and they require a lot of food to maximize their civ bonus, so I don’t really thing this is an issue. I would like to ultimately see a rework to Ports, since having their identity be focused around extra range skirm-goon comps isn’t healthy.

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I do not think livestock needs to be improved in the early game because the starting livestocks are few and mostly consumed pretty early. There is no spare resource for a livestock pen (despite very few maps) not to mention buying new sheep.
The true problem with livestock is that it is too micro-intensive and needs constant attention—not good for late game either. And there are always better late-game economic options for Europeans.
On the other hand making them additional easy income on top of 2 factories is going to be very strong, because most civs that have better livestock are designed with the consideration that they do not have 2 factories (not Mexico but it is already an odd one).

As supportive of improving livestock generally as I am, I don’t really know what is a good approach in practice. Perhaps like many other weird units and mechanics in DE, you need to get out of your way (leaving the well-established playstyle) and heavily invest xp or resource into it to make it viable.

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I totally forgot that in age 5 you can resene Wagon shipments. Thanks!

Actually keshik have higher dps than ruyters against cavalry (higher fire rate like a cav archer). And they have a lot of cards like momgolians scourges and old hans reform yo drastically improve their strength. (I think they only benefit from old hans reforms since DE)

They just suck against artillery. Which makes a good combination with meteors or hand mortars.

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Agree completely, it’s by far the worst mechanic of the colonial civs.

I think a good way to fix it would be to tie the ability to Forts. Generals could be given the ability to garrison in a Fort (indicated visually by a raised flag) and the Fort could then emanate the current bonuses of inspiring flags. That would make it much more defensive, and also destructible instead of an invincible flag that can be dropped pretty much anywhere.

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Livestock pens should be cheaper…definitely! Cheaper than market? meh 100 wood seems a fair price to me. I also think that cows should be available by default in fortress age…The ranching card has too low tempo to be of practical use outside of treaty games, not only does it have no immediate benefit you have to wait for the cows to fatten.

Envoys are not useless but compared to their closest equivalent the Inca chasqui they really fall behind a lot. I think that instead of being the only dutch unit that can build native embassies they should be able to make trading posts while dutch settlers should lose the ability to make trading posts (as they have banks instead), that way you’ll always have a reason to make envoys.

As for germany…I don’t think the settler limit is a problem. I do think they need extra housing early on but a good way to fix that is make the german TC provide more housing.

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The cow card could also send some cows to be more useful.

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