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Arabia is an extremely popular map so any changes were bound to result in a flood of community feedback. But ultimately I think the big mistake was changing too much all at once.
Consider these three changes:
- The players’ starting forests generate further away.
- The front of each player’s base is more open making it more vulnerable to attacks.
- The third gold pile for each player is generated further away.
Just one of those changes would have caused top tier players to reconsider going full walls. And all of them are values which could have been adjusted to a lesser extent. Hopefully they’ll consider smaller changes to sensitive mechanics like the Arabia map gen in the future.
I’m very appreciative of the work the devs have done to create and improve on one of my favorite games and I’m sure there will be more balance updates to Arabia in the near future to address community feedback.
It’s a tricky balance to make both walls and open play viable. I think the pendulum has swung too far from the wall side to open play, but I think the ideal is somewhere between the old and new versions and I’m confident they’ll get there.
3 Likes
What’s the question here? Meta was being walled at min 12 no matter if people played drush, maa or scouts. Full feudal means you create tons of army in feudal age and either dont click to castle at all or do it after min 25 or so. Havent seen or played a game in ages where someone hasnt been up to castle by min 20.
New Arabia gen seems disaster for sure much limited strategies. Im taking a long break from game due to TG being too repetitive with civs and alt f4 crashing issues hoping that next time I come back in a year or so these issues. Looks like they sloppily tried to buff fuedal aggression and need FC but could have just needed walls instead now the game is gonna be crazy repetitive with only aggro strats viable and everybody gonna be picking civs that either destroy early or op civs like Chinese to wall easier
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This is the most brutal change in my eyes. After some 4v4s yesterday me and my friends had to rewatch some games to see which 3rd gold pile belongs to who. They literally spaw in the middle between two players, no matter if friend or enemy. It feels like there are only 2 real gold piles left per player.
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lmao so people are mad now because they cant wall at minute 5 and arabia requires skills other than walling
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what skill is that exactly, following an exact build order you saw on youtube to get scout cavalry at 19 population, putting them into box formation and running them around your opponents base. Hardly a skillful or original idea to be honest, and that’s all the map will be the, people playing the horsie civs, sounds like great fun…
2 Likes
Maybe is time to start playing different maps
I will go to improve the Map selection (more maps and more bans and don’t change the pool every two weeks)
That isn’t the problem the game is a strategy game the higher the number of viable strategies is good for the game. the biggest problem is civs that depend on certain strategies are much weaker and the game is going to be so repetitive with only early attacks happening and no variety every strategy should be viable to some degree even FC strats even though they are cheesy should work a % of the time now these strats seem like they will be useless and civs that depend on them are therefore useless. There will be some cancer plays with civs that destroy early on or every player that would normally wall consistently will just go Chinese and still full wall and then we will have a real boring situation on gameplay it was the same problem when Arabia was an easier map to close In the early DE days and everybody FC all the pros and non casuals got bored so much
I just don’t understand why they have to change arabia for that.
They could have just added more agressive maps to the ranked map pool and see how it is taken.
Looks like the “I just play my build order and have to win with my rush” - Lobby is so agressive with demanding, that the devs get tricked into thinking they would be representative for the playerbase.
There is so much more to the game just the initial buildorder into raiding strat. Why do we even have that depth of the game if it’s just becoming “rush into raid, ■■■■ you unit comp and strategy!” more and more? I thought AOE2 is an RTS.
And this even after empire wars was added… I hoped this would finally end these silly demands for more “action” but destroying the strategy part of the game slowly.
6 Likes
I was thinking maybe the Devs saw some of us complain that fuedal aggression too weak and FC style strats too strong and just changed the map to try fix this because no one asked for more open Arabia I was happy enough with the last version if Arabia maybe a few more hills and variation like maybe not always 3 forests but 3-5 and at different distances not always the same but last ara was decent. All we needed to balance fuedal aggro and FC was weaker walls or repair nerf
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Haven’t played the new Arabia yet but seeing all this whining about walls and FC not being viable anymore definitely gets me excited for it lol
Some people actually want gameplay from Dark Age all the way to Imp, not just wall up and skip half the game.
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I think the main driver was that Arabia is one of the few maps which allows for open or walled play. It’s popular because both strategies are viable with their own risks and rewards. But the meta eventually settled on walling as the optimal strat for Arabia and that annoyed some people. Now I personally think it has gone too far in the opposite direction and I hope the devs find a middle ground in the future.
3 Likes
Walling is a key part of the game. It just doesn’t work without that. You can’t push without being walled usually cause then the opponent just raids you to death. (Unless you are miles ahead)
It’s not possible to remove walling from the game without completely destroying strategy.
Or we need other tools to get vision to spot incoming raids in their development. That was a proposal here already. That could replace the need of walling under certain circumstances.
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I think players will have to get in a new mindset that walling is no longer a thing you do with 5 vils early feudal to rush them up and you’re done. It’s now a thing that you must patiently wait to complete over the entirety of feudal age while you depend on a small feudal army for protection instead.
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It’s way to early to state that. We will only know that in the weeks to come when the meta settle down again.
I WISH. The problem with the latter arabia is that it’s suppose to be a open aggressive map not a wall up and boom map. We barely played arabia on 1v1s on the latter Arabia.
I hope we do not. The map is great now.
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It always was a very balanced map where different playstyles could crash and a lot of strategies worked. Which lead to that players just learned their arabia buildorders to get quite easily to 1300-1500 elo or whatever and then got stuck because they didn’t learned the strat part of the game. And then complain of getting stuck. They should finally learn that aoe2 is a strategy game. Yes you can thrive to comparably high elo with just getting the basics, but you need to learn that it’s still a strategy game and those basics JUST HELP to execute the different strategies. They are a necessary tool, but the game is so much more.
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Dude, you can still play defensive, just have to train units for that, no just spam palisades…
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WTF are you even talking about?
Both me and cloyne discussed some time ago how feudal agression could be buffed a bit without destroying balance. There were many interesting concepts how this could be achieved. Including making maa dealing more damage vs walls or make castle age research a bit longer…
Many great ideas were posted there, each of them would have been much better than that arabia redesign.
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Some people don’t understand how limiting this map change is but when they play more they will understand. My view of the game isn’t black and white the strategy for Arabia is completely butchered Its sad cos I haven’t played in a month and didn’t expect the game situation to get worse from where I left it hoping they can fix alt f4 crashes and add more variation to Arabia in the near future. Now on Arabia people will be forced to play aggro and it will be a lot more sweaty repetitive games. Even the die hard Arabia fans will get bored of this. I love these open maps personally like crater but Arabia is meant to be the map every strategy works on within reason
3 Likes