My message to the devs

After todays video i wanted to convey my opinion as they said this is the best way to comunicate with them.

Fisrt of all i love the game and i am having a lot of fun playing it, there are some things i wish could be addressed like bugs (like post game stats ) and features (color selecting was one until recently) but i understand that those aren’t priorities and are coming eventually.

The thing that is prioritized and should be, is game balance. Of course it is very hard and there are a lot of conflicting opinions in this forum and with your original idea of each civ, so proceed as you would.

The one thing i would ask you or encourage you to do is to do more significant buffs for civs, even if the changes have to be reverted soon after. The thing is i would like to see every civ being more appealing because right now most of the player base just plays English or French and sadly civs like Delhi aren’t used much even if they are strong.

For example the HRE prelate change did wonders to the HRE pick rate and many people learned to enjoy using them. The changes to China in the pup are also very significant and unexpected, and while i disagree with the general balance implications i do applaud that you are willing to experiment that much with the civ.

In conclusion go wild with the buffs/changes (at least in the next pup) and hopefully people will find what makes the others civs fun to play.

4 Likes

I’d rather let them stick with their design & philosophy for each civilization and try to make them as authentic and balanced as possible, but with this also comes the price of you can’t be good against every scenario and that’s okay.

The second they start buff all of the civilizations to be the same on every level is the day we lose asymmetric civilizations. I know you didn’t specifically say that this should be done, but be mindful of what you wish for because it might turn out this way and I believe this would damage AoEIV a lot if done incorrectly by the developers.

How to find that balance will most likely never be 100% accomplished and it’ll take time but eventually they will hopefully get there with all of the civilizations without removing the asymmetric design of the civilizations.

That being said I really feel they are starting to get there where AoEIV should be at release in terms of balance and with season 2 on it’s way it’s going to be a lot of fun in the new ranked seasons.

1 Like

It is normal that the civilizations with less depth (English and French) are the ones that are used the most, especially at low levels. In any RTS there are always civilizations more difficult to use than others and that will not change.

Regarding asymmetry: I see well that there is some asymmetry between civilizations, just as I see well that each civilization has options at each moment of the game so that they are competitive.

The problem is that by the way an AoE is designed (they ask for more and more civilizations without end), they can’t be very asymmetric or it would be almost impossible to balance.

And many weapon’s model needs to be fixed, like pikeman from all nations even mongols are using gisarme, I don’t know whether or not they are planing to give japanese pikeman with gisarme. Also, knight from Abbasid are using european lance. Mistakes like these are really ridiculous.

I agree with you, i specifically avoided telling the devs how to balance each civ. The point i wanted to make is to make more significant changes as experiments to figure out what makes a civ more appealing.

For example Abbasid generally get one small change every patch, the first one in the pup was Mill influence range increased +1, which is almost nothing, then in the june 14th patch they got Golden Age Tier 1 bonus changed to +15% gather rate which made me interested in trying them. Maybe 15% is too much or maybe is fine i don’t know, but many DLCs in various games get the treatment of being unbalanced at release to get people to at least try them and then get balanced while hopefully preserving their identity and role.
Obviously that is to sell more DLC and is not exactly the same case but at least in the PUP environment is reasonalbe to experiment.

Then again about balance and asymmetry, i don’t excpect every civ to be in any shape or form equal to each other, not in performance nor pick rate.

Umm you call butchering of civ to worst state it has ever been as willing to experiment? Anyone who has played the game would see how much it will affect the civ and how much the buffs are going to compensate the lack of power vacuum it leaves the civ?

Don’t get me wrong. I have nothing against reworks or nerfs but if there is one civilization that relies so heavily on 2-3 units to be competitive and good and those units get deleted from the existence it just makes the civ bad. China has never been the rank1 civ. Its always been late game civ and strong or strongest in turtle type of maps but slowly and steadily developers have removed that strength without giving anything back. Then there is civ like delhi that hardly uses siege which again benefits most from this nerf because elephants are going to be even stronger when their main counter is as good as it didn’t exist. So yeah

For example the loss of 2 tile range from bombards is insane and the buff to compensate it is just pure trash. Little bit attack speed from 20% to 30%? if I recall correctly is hardly any form of compensation more like spit to face. It takes longer siege to travel that 2 tiles than what the attack speed buff compensates.

Moving that 2 tiles takes close to 2 seconds for bombard to move and that extra 10% to compensate that time bombard would have to shoot several times.

Top of that devs are not making any sense with their statements. First they nerffed the attackspeed tech for rus/china because it was too strong then they nerf the range because its too strong and give attack speed back?!?!?!?!

If that wasn’t enough then they don’t want china to build 9k hp walls because it creates passive playstyle so better remove all wall bonuses and then proceed to say “we don’t want china to be passive” . Alright? In return “hey here is new buff for your ranged units that stand on wall +25% extra dmg”. So now china is supposed to camp on top of wall while walling whole map and idling inside base?!?!

1 Like

Well, first of all the changes were made in the PUP and they were literally asking for feedback.

Second i explicitly said (AND you quoted me) “i disagree with the general balance implications”, which means that i do not agree with what the changes accomplish, instead if the changes did compensate and made the civ more viable i would be satisfied and i would have stated that. The point is that instead of doing minuscule changes that would accomplish almost nothing we got some big changes, for better or worse i do appreciate it. This time the changes are apparently for worse, but they could be for the better next time.

Third, this post is not about how to change China. There are a lot of posts for that and i participate there too.

1 Like

And this is issue. This same thing was said when some changes went live months ago. “but hey they gonna fix it in next patch or after that” but in the end nothing happened. Its not good way to think that “maybe in near future things change” its too late then. More they mess up things more ppl get fed up and quit or take a break which is chain reaction which just leads to less and less players and essentially season 2 being around the corner and them ending the pup is quite clear indicator that changes are set in stone and no matter what we said didn’t matter, because if they were to do dramatic changes to pup it would’ve been pushed to testing too, but it wasn’t.

Ofc they could just make the changes straight to live version or do a delay but this also causes many issues and can be as catastrophic

Hey! I think you did an awesome post here! The forum really needs more of these.
It is both an word of encouragement but also a heed of warning.

Without dabbling to much into Drama of balancing this and that, as you mentioned. We have many many such threads on those things we can debate about.

but I completely agree with your Original Post, and couldn’t have said it better myself.

1 Like

Civ rotation?
one week OP english, next week - China… etc.

this also should go to reddit. Most dev activity is there