When watching the tournament yesterday for the Japanese release it was pretty much the same story as most tournaments I watch. Spending favor to buy a myth unit was extremely rare and when it was done the person typically bought less than 2-3 for the whole game. When they were used 90% of the time it was to raid villagers as myth units are so hard countered in an actual fight that any unit without mobility will be avoided.
In the clip below Rapl talks about Susanoo. He says that he would be quite strong in the extreme late game because of god power recasts but has nothing else. Not because the myth unit buffs are weak, but simply because myth units as a concept are just so easily hard countered that they aren’t worth building after the enemy has a couple of heroes. And looking at all the games from the tournament I don’t see anything indicating that he is wrong about that.
I find it disappointing that all these extremely interesting well designed units are the least used units in the game if you want to do well, and their effectiveness boils down to if they are faster than the heroes that need to kill them or not. I am mostly trying to present the problem rather than the solution but just to get ideas going I think the multiplier reductions for myth unit damage into heroes and the high hp compared to human damage of myth units leads to the counters being too extreme.
In the counter triangle the only unit that can’t be mass produced is the myth unit due to extreme favor restrictions. Therefore with this extremely high counter numbers when a good number of myth units get created it is very easily countered by a much smaller number of heroes with no restriction on number. Then the myth units are killed off quickly, the enemy heroes are killed off, and there is no way to reproduce myth units to then counter the human units on the field as all the favor was already spent. If it was more viable for myth units to kill a smaller number of heroes similar to how infantry with a numbers advantage will beat archers, and also more viable for human units to be able to kill a myth unit the counters would be less extreme providing some time for counterplay.
Alternatively increases in favor gain and god power costs across the board, or reductions in favor costs across the board to allow enough quantity to provide more flexibility in bringing them back once the heroes are dealt with could be an option. Realistically I don’t know the best answer though and am just trying to present some ideas. I just know the current state of the game where they are used to constantly run away from engagements to try and fight undefended villagers, and not being good enough to be relied upon is quite sad. Shennong is not a myth unit god because there is no reason to pick nuba and zhurong in the current game state. He succeeds as a dao swordsmen god. Susanoo hasn’t found a viable human unit path yet so he just doesn’t succeed at all. I think the inability to make a myth unit focused god competitively viable is largely due to the state of the myth unit hero dynamic as a whole, and less to do with their individual balance.
I would like to add, all this from the lense of high level gameplay: its tricky the MU gameplay because theres 4 scenarios when they are usable:
If they a fast myth unit its raids a lot and if theres no fast heroes for the enemy civ they can quickly become a snowball as the game goes like anubites, yazi, valk, sphinx to name a few.
They are a very tank unit that basically walls your opponent off = stone giants or colossus in the old game.
They fly and can poke and retreat with ease (azure dragon).
They are massed so fast they become an issue to civs with limited hero pool or bad attack type (Automaton vs china or sometimes greek) .
The issue overall is MU are so strong that heroes have to become strong themselves to be able to adress them otherwise many of them simply outright win the fights with little to no contest. Any meta where a civ could deal with a certain MU became very oppresive very quickly, like sphinx Rush + axemen va norse.
Another way to deal with the issue IMO is to tone things down. MU deals less damage to normal units and in turn heroes dont have to be so strong to counter them as fast as posible before loosing the game. If a MU was worth 2-3 human units and not 8-10 in raw value it would be easier to balance without so many Hard countering needed.
I usually don’t speak on behalf of balance since I’m not that good of a player. But I just wanted to add I also feel like that heroes counter myth units way too hard.
Previously someone in this forum said something along that the game is named age of MYTHOLOGY yet the mythology gets killed in 2 hits.
I don’t know any solution to this. I might be even wrong. Maybe myth units are fine. The current design has a very competitive balance which balances myth units otherwise they would be destroying everything. But I think we can afford to sacrifice some competitiveness in order to make the game more fun to play.
Your absoluteley right, Although I would also add (as a norse main) ranged myth units can sometimes be super oppressive (toxote+manticore) especially if you don’t have accses to Godi. Taking that combo down with hersir and raiding cavalry is so painfully hard.
TLDR; I also think myth units get countered way too hard.
Thats not something that exist IMO. Since at the level people play Just for the fun of it you are actively ignoring what would be Best because you want to play in X o Y fashion and at that point balance doesnt matter at all. When competitive or winning becomes something people care about they arent going to sacrifice many games for a unit thats underperfoming.
I think what he means by sacrificing some competitiveness for fun is that their current method of making myth units mostly non viable is a perfectly valid form of balancing, its just not a very fun method of balancing. Whereas any rework to see more myth units is likely going to first cause more balance issues before it gets ironed out.
It’s like Halo 2 back in the day when people wanted to do perfectly symmetrical battle rifle only lobbies as the most fair test of skill. Technically it was the most balanced it could be as it was perfectly symmetrical, it was just super boring.
I have mixed feelings about this. While it can feel lame to have a unit you just built go down in a split second to a hero, I do prefer that myth units serve more of a supportive role if in the army or as raiders elsewise, which they kind of do at the moment. You do have to babby sit them otherwise they go down quick to heroes, but if you do, they can bring immense value. I see it the same as any other hard counter in the game, like let’s say ulfsark is your favourite unit, you just can’t build them into axemen or hypaspist.
It’s tricky, maybe an option would be to make (spammable) heroes soft-counters instead of hard counters, but then you’d need to get rid of the free myth unit at a minimum I think. As already mentioned, you could tone down myth units, but that also feels kind of lame, I DO want my hydra taking on 5+ hoplites.
The problem is that doesn’t work anymore in the modern day.
People do read social media, reddit, forums, etc. and if they see a lot of threads saying “X OP” then they will think that X is OP and that it will impact their gameplay, even if it has 0 impact on their skill level.
It’s human nature to find excuses for why you lost. Finding a post about how “X OP” becomes a good excuse for why you lost, even if it was a totally different reason.
So even if most people aren’t good at the game, they will likely watch content from people that are good and then form opinions based on that.
Yea the tonning it down hurs the flavor aspect of it. A dragon should buen an army. The hidra tanking and getting stronger its all Cool and fun. But that all stops when you are the one facing it and have no means to stop it.
But yea, even if bringing down the numbers solved the issue i doubt it would be a route they take because of this.
I also like the idea of myth units being more of a Support aspect, but that heavily restricts the variety in design and function.
That is true but also there will always be people who hop on the game without reading anything. And they will be large enough to create a more casual player base. But yes the gaming community has changed a lot and has been more difficult to predict.
That is true but the thing is: It is fair if every one has it. comparing DotA to league is the best way to explain it. saying in league that a hero will get released that can silence the entire map with just push of a button for 9 seconds would sound absurd. But that’s fair in DotA cause every one has these kind of stuff.
The problem with such design is that the game might turn into an imba state where every thing is so brokenly powerful that nothing is under control, it becomes pure chaos. AoM is far away from that imba state that’s why I think we can go a little bit crazy on myth units without making the game “unplayable”
Aom is asymetrical. Theres more than 1 one to deal with something and it leads to civs having unique weakness.
If you are looking at this from the lense of casual play sure. You can make fragile units that one Hit others and it would not be much of an issue since players poorly micro them, send them to their death, etc.
The issue is as soon as skill comes into play that fabled idea crashes. Take centaur or yazi for example. At low levels they are bad. People loose them left and right. You take your eyes off them for a couple of seconds in a Fight and they are gone. However once good people use them properly and you face them you get to see how absurd them become.
The biggest hurdle to MU balance in this game is the greek civ. And that is because they cannot mass heroes easily. So any myth unit is automatically balanced around the greek civ only having 4 heroes.
Another thing is that siege weapons are so good in retold, you don’t really need myth units to take out buildings anymore.
So I’d start off with the completely unintuitive step of buffing greek heroes. Maybe make them not cost pop so you can delete+recreate them wherever needed.
Then you can look into making myth units stronger.
Overall the china and Japan myth units are kinda meh.
I am not talking about asymmetry I am talking about every one being powerful but powerful in different ways. What I was suggesting is that maybe we can get away with making myth units too overpowered since AoM is already very skill based game. If every civ has powerful myth units then there should be no balance issue.
Well if we decide to buff myth units we will buff ones who aren’t seeing any use at the moment not the ones who are already powerful and have their usage.
Yes I agree. But if we buff “only” myth units the skill side of things will not effected to the point that the game becomes a random mess. Also we are not saying that we should make them invincible. We are saying that the way heroes counter them is way too hard to justify making them since making heroes is too easy compared to making myth units.
BTW I am ok with current state of balance. I just wanted to say even in the eyes of me (who is a semi casual pleb) myth units get countered way too hard. and if a pro(TheRapl) also says this then there really might be something wrong here.
Personally I don’t play greek a lot but from playing against them there heroes are actually very annoying to me. They tank a lot and do a huge damage to myth units. Once I was playing zeus and I faced a guy who was spamming minotaurs I lost the first fight but when He started attacking again I won it easily and he couldn’t do anything about it.
But I think I have heard a lot of people say greek heroes need buffs. I don’t know would be happy to see if every one shared their experiences. Although I will add I love the current hero system for greeks and I wish they don’t change them.
Theres only so many aspects you can buff about it until it either simply is no longer counter able or becomes a better centaur because it got faster.
Only if they are powerful in the same way thou. And even then you still have differences in things like favor generation and economy and unique techs that affect that.
My point is buffing all doesnt seem like a good option from a balancing stand point. But it for sure is more fun to clave whole armies with a couple units, its feels powerful and it feels good.
Those New ones Will become this ones. Its not that you buff this, is that good myth units become this.
It kinda has become that way any time a myth unit can be spammed and works well.
I honestly think greek heroes are already pretty crazy so would like to see another approach. What they did do recently is buff the myth multipliers of their myth units, meaning a viable counter to myth units would be to just make a bunch of their own, but this leads to two problems. The first is that greek favor generation is terrible so they simply aren’t capable of massing many myth units. The second issue is that the few they can get are easily dispatched by enemy heroes so nobody even thinks to make a myth unit to deal with another factions myth units. If the system were reworked to make massing myth units more viable it would probably help greeks the most since they wouldn’t be so reliant on heroes to do that job.
I agree that myth units usage is currently fairly limited, the most prominent use cases are mobile myth units for raiding and certain tanky myth units (very often with some sort of crowd control or splash damage abilities) which can find value in direct engagement despite heroes bonking them. And I too think that the way to fix it is to tone down myth unit effectiveness vs non-heroes, and tone down heroes against myth units.
For myth units, two approaches I can think of are:
Just directly lowering their stats, and area of effect damage abilities would need to be looked at, too;
Partially integrating them into cav > infantry > archer triangle, aka give them “cavalry”, “ranged”, etc. tag (depending on particular myth unit). It may end up being very weird, but in a way it makes sense - for example Valk is technically a cavalry, even if its a myth unit, it only makes sense if she gets slight bonus damage from spearmen and the like.
For heroes - simply lowering their anti-myth unit multiplayer across the board should do the trick. Myth units can still deal half damage to them, so heroes would still have a lot of value in the fight by tanking myth units damage (unless the latter are manually microed to attack other units constantly).
This would also help wtih the Greek issue, with them having a hard time against early myth unit mass strats. If you aren’t as reliant on heroes to counter those, it’s suddenly not nearly as bad.
They have fine early favor rates in the context of classical age but no way to scale it for large numbers of late game myth units. And early they have no problems with myth units as their heroes destroy them, it is late game where mass myth units can even be a problem for them.
What keeps people from making more is the cost more then anything. Make them cost less Food,Wood or Coin and reduce favor cost on the more favor costing ones and you will see more being made.
First they gather favor fine in all stages of the game. They are no china or late game norse but they arent struggling either. Specially for their ability to gain favor on demand if they need it which is very versatile
Vault favor cost on recast was increased in part due to how easy it is to bank 200 favor and then 300 and keep the vaults coming.
It is true greeks have an issue vs mass myth units. Most of them are early on when you can overwhelm their 2 heroes.
