I don’t understand nerfing the Celt Militia. Took the only fun civ to play in the dark age out. Now there’s not a single civ that’s exciting to use in the dark age, unless your counting goths super spam.
Keep the Civ’s fun and diverse. You’ll never achieve perfect balance in 1v1 Arabia and I hope that isn’t the goal of the devs.
Feudal age MAA isn’t fun or exciting imo. Really took the memes and identity away from a civ that already doesn’t have the most diverse tech tree. Siege all in is all they get now. RIP to the memes.
I think it could be neat if they gave regular Castle age Woad raiders a small buff to compensate ( like +1 dmg).
They have 1 less damage than Longswords and they’re fairly food expensive and require a Castle to produce.
I know they’re a lot more mobile but I think their big strength lies in the Elite upgrade, which gives them +5 damage. With this change the Elite would be +4 damage, so there would be less of a gap.
Very few people would enjoy a super messy game or super crazy dark age rush. Tower rush is nerfed because it is so hard to deal with using feudal units. Ending a game super early in dark age id argue is much less fun than ending a game in castle age or imperial age.
Devs choose to provide a bit fairer dark age, and I think it is a good move. Wonder if Lithuanian food bonus would get nerfed at some point in the future for the same reason.
They ruined the Goths dark age as well. Might as well just play every game from Feudal Age, but nobody queues up for Empire Wars :\
After a certain point, everyone’s Dark age is pretty much the same. Why not just take the first 10 minutes out of the sim-city microing (or do people actually enjoy that?)
Dark age would be incredibly important even if there were no dark age military options.
How early you click up, what you click up with, how you’ve set your economy up for feudal determines how effective your early military will be or how strong your midgame economy can get.
Dark age, stripped of any aggressive potential, will still be the most important age in AOE 2.
I also dislike the Celt militia nerf and the Goth loom nerf.
It was fun to have civs with an unusual Dark Age, and taking that away makes the first minutes of the game less exciting.
I advocate for reverting these changes.
Given the naturally low usage rate (new civ), not many people would fully exploit that extra food advantage outside of that 3 min militia rush. I suspect this would be nerfed in some form as well, like being staggered or change to another bonus if 3min militia rush becomes too popular.
The devs barely listen to some pros on balance changes, besides that point; I don’t think they’d change Celts based on someone crying wolf. It was a pretty insane bonus in the current meta.
It’s really hard to keep the uniqueness & balance with so many civilizations. One thing they could try is making it progressively such as “+x% in Dark Age” and “+15% from Feudal Age”, just like they did with Goths (“Infantry cost -20% in Dark, -25% in Feudal, -30% in Castle…”) and other bonuses.