I think the weaker players have a chance to win, they just have to unite against the strongest opponent, so they can prevent him from snowballing out of control.
I was in a match where I couldn’t find any military camps, but when the map started shrinking everyone rushed to the middle, leaving tons of military buildings at my disposal. I did not win, but I managed to get in the third place.
This gamemode requires a little bit of macro (spamming units out of buildings) and army control in order to be competent, also dont waste armies fighting the weaker players when both of you could gang up against stronger opponents (unless you’re the top player).
Map randomness does matter a lot in gameplay. Map is center based. You can easily predict how everything is designed in current map. Small trade workshop and some military base are located at outer circle. In the center you have castle. There is very little varieties in it. Current mode favors skilled players mostly but Battle Royale in general gives room to the player of all ranges. But it’s true that skilled players will have the advantage always.
Random zoning would eliminate the possibility of camping. You can’t just wall in and stay in one place forever.
Randomness gives wide variety of choices. Right now it’s more or less like a scenario editor game where you can find everything at almost same spot. But for that map needs to be larger of course.
Well gamedevs brought Battle Royale that game mode in due to the trend ofcourse. So you have to live with high player numbers. Whether you like it or not.
Battle Royale game mode in very popular nowadays due to high number of players ofcourse. I will say if you can’t add what a proper Battle Royale game mode does in general then why call it Battle Royale? Is it any different than 8 player FFA King Of The Hill? King Of The Hill feels much better because it doesn’t eliminate the macro management side of the game.
I’ll leave you upto you then. I am more or less involved in modding scene. I know a things or two with the game mechanics. Sharing some stuffs may go against the forums policy. So I’ll stop about this.
Besides wiki articles doesn’t add up. It doesn’t directly says anything about how engine is really made.
Edit:
You aren’t too far off tho. HD was supposed to be the real remake of 1999 version. But for the time Microsoft didn’t take AOE2 seriously.
It was weird to me how they don’t know about the HD engine
Usually, most game wikis show it
But IIRC I remember the reason HD version doesn’t have 4K sprites is that the original source code and models were lost, hence them using another engine using the sprites
I doubt about engine differs, the wiki screenshot you quoted doesn’t mention anything concrete about it.
also you’d probably need to define whats “different” about the engines because they work very much alike. graphic or missing sprite from original models which I doubt, isnt enough make it a different engine.
Battle royal is quite interesting. Played my first game today and luckily won. It was a pure land map.
I think its essential to have a good cost spread of good units. For example hussar +cav archer uses gold wood food effectively while paladin plus cav archer uses too much gold.
Trash units aren’t very viable in this mode in my opinion. They just get flattened. Countering is losing, you need a strong deathball instead.
Picked magyars to spawn cav archer for gold and wood and use the food for cheaper hussar and UU. Excess stone and wood gets sold to mix in a few more paladins.
This combo completely recked anything except mass scorpions, but siege Workshops are rare and slow and with my greater mobility I could dance around until the last fight which I won due to bigger saved up army mass.
Monks help alot in battle royal to heal cavalry units.
Just imagine getting Portuguese in battle royal. Instant GG in my opinion. Just too weak units.
Cav archers are amazing early game to gets lots of bases and avoid losses.
Indians and Saracen with camel + cav archer might also work out great but too gold heavy so not effective Ressource spread.
Other than magyars also turks or tartar could work.
Tartar could abuse the hill bonus for the final fight for the center hill. Just put your stack of cav archers with extra armkr and extra hill bonus on top.
Lastly I imagine persians are great with paladin plus trash bows and Elefants For the final battle but without good cav archers you risk losing units early one since you can’t hit and run enemys.
I gave BR a chance, played 3 games, almost won the last one. But as it stands I dont think it’s my cup of tea maybe having the map shrink with a different random final area would make it more interesting, and keep the meta fresh.
