You are right of course. Yesterday I read some comments on aoezone and man that was toxic. Most people there don’t give a sh!t about singleplayers and those are cartainly not the players I defended with my post earlier. What I wanted to say is that I hope that the devs find a way to care about both communities at the same time.
For me the decision to release a expansion with new civs and new campaigns is the best I could imagine and I hope that this is just the beginning.
yep
this is extremely hilarious. An option that only works for the player who activates is an impairment LMAO. And speceifically Forgotten Empires sent a memo confirming that was the reasong to remove that skin. source: Soldeo maybe
As expected from someone with a superiority complex, your suggestion is not even feasible. If Player 1 has A skin for halberdiers and Player 2 has B skin for halberdiers in a Spanish mirror match, the game still doesn’t support separate skins. So whose skin will get displayed in the tournament match? Find out in the next whine of XuanZue. /11
Easy to answer.
We bring in a Necromancer, and ask the spirit of Queen Isabella whom, from amongst the players, is her little pogchamp.
Same “yep” for your opinions. Not everyone has an eagle eye like you have. Skin is bad for distinguishing units.
Onto other points, SP community is like silent majority. They don’t bother or have time to b**ch around. They open the game, play, enjoy, and leave. DLC of AOE2 is an absolute bargain compared with almost any mobile game inapp purchases. When money is down the line, ethical is at best secondary priority. That’s just how it is.
New content is terrific, and commitment to aoe2de even more so. But unique techs that are going to end up OP some times but useless at all other times are poor design. Dbuen is right in saying many of the bonuses and unique techs were pulled directly from aoe3. The fact those features exist in aoe3 does not mean they should exist in aoe2. I’m very excited for new content, but worried for the direction the new civs are going for: more gimmicky, more extremely situational, and more “OP 1% of the time, useless 99% of the time.” That’s poor design.
Make the unique techs less gimmicky, like not one-time and difficult to balance, and original (not inspired by aoe3) and a lot more of the playerbase will be as excited as you are for the new dlc.
with this nipicking example seems like you will confuse the halberd with some conquistador or missionary, if that’s the case don’t buy the dlc. you can play as usual.
so don’t buy the sprite dlc and play as always have you played?
the same can’t be said with this dlc where there will be huge changes fopr the MP scene even for those who don’t buy it.
Which makes me wonder, where are all the complaints regarding African kingdoms, rise of the rajah expansions? Those changes MP drastically as well. Maybe they are free so people are more tolerable? Fascinating.
I don’t have to because there is no existing dlc about your suggestion. Do you even read before attacking again? My question was whose skin will get displayed when in a tournament match. Lol
Everything you said here is how I feel. I hope they reconsider the design direction they want for the game.
This is not to say one-time, all-in technologies are bad. But a civ with only one-time, all-in technologies may not really be a good idea.
In AOE3 you have several shipments that switch one-resource to another, and they are rarely used besides some very specific strategies. However, you can choose not to use them.
You also have revolutions and revolution-like shipments. The fact that they massively buffed the economic potentials for revolution in DE kind of proves that the original mechanism is not really a good design. However, you can choose not to use them.
However, in AOE2, each civ only has two unique technologies. If all you’ve got are all-in ones, then the gameplay of that civ would become kind of bizzarre. Or you can choose never to click on them, then you have a civ that has no UT while everyone else gets 2.
Don’t forget that in AOE3 there are quite a lot of useless shipments, but eventually each side gets 25 shipments after all because you can choose not to include them in your deck. But you cannot choose not to include some UTs in your roster for AOE2.
That’s why I don’t really think having two UTs as one-time all-ins works well in AOE2.
Very well said. All four unique techs being one-time is bad. It’s even worse when these one-time techs are relatively massive in their effect size when compared to existing aoe2 techs. They may be tame by aoe3 standards, but aoe3 and aoe2 are different games.
I think the new techs can be fixed by turning them from one-time only to more continuous or perpetual. A few good ideas I’ve seen on the forums and reddit:
Burgundian Vineyards: instead of turning all your food into less gold (at any ratio), why not make it so that either the base price for selling specifically food at the market is higher (30, compared to 17 for civs with guilds), or farmers slowly generate gold as well as food? Say, the effect size of one relic for every 30 farmers? If it’s OP, we can reduce the effect size or the farm selling rate. If it’s not OP, we can increase it. These can be much easier to balance by changing the rate at which farmers generate gold and not having to worry about when the player chooses to get the tech, unlike the current burgundian vineyards. It’s a solid bonus too in my opinion.
Flemish Revolution: Instead of a one-time tech that turns all your villagers into flemish pikemen, which I consider more of a hindrance than a bonus tbh, why not make the tech enable you to upgrade certain villagers to flemish pikemen at a cost of x wood/gold per villager? The upgraded villagers can’t be turned back, but you don’t have to sacrifice your entire eco to get that done. The tech is no longer so suicidal and can be used in more situations, like when you’re being raided and want to upgrade some villagers to save the rest. It can be balanced by changing the cost for upgrading villagers, and again, you don’t need to take into consideration when you have to research the tech as much. That’s more in line with aoe2.
Scutage: I’m at a loss for this one. I don’t even know what they were trying to go for. Stronger Paper money? Less strong Burgundian Vineyards? If they wanted a team effect, how about make this tech replace the gold cost of trade carts for the team to slightly more wood, like kamandaran or forced levy? Would not be as swing-y but still team-focused, and not depend on when you research it as much.
first crusade: I think this one is fine and could work with some balances. It’s not as fundamentally flawed as the rest, so it could make for interesting games.
These are just examples of what the techs could look like if they weren’t massive one-time shocks.
I’ve seen a rework which I liked here.
I don’t like one-time UT/boni either but that’s kinda the nature of some boni/UTs too. Britons Shepard bonus is useless in a normal RM match after Dark Age.
I see no issue though with taking some boni from other similar games, but that’s my opinion and you might have another one on that regard. Cumans and Liths kinda got both AOM boni. Khmer an AOE3 one too.
Britons shepherd bonus is useless after dark age, but it’s not OP in dark age!!! That’s what I’m saying. These unique techs are either useless, or OP. Burgundian vineyards are useless when you value food more than gold, but OP in the late game when you do because your opponent can’t respond to that sudden shock of gold way above the gold they have. Changing the cost of the tech or the ratio of food to gold converted will only change how late into the game the OP effect kicks in, not how powerful the effect size is. Changing how fast Britons gather food from sheep does change how strong that bonus is in dark age. That’s why these techs won’t work and will be so hard to balance. They need a re-work and to remove the one-time use mechanic.
I also like a lot of the reworks there. Serjeants being able to be created at tcs should also be accompanied with some change to the donjon, since donjon can already create serjeants apparently. I think if donjons can’t create serjeants but can be created by them, and if First Crusade allows serjeants to be created at tcs that would be an ideal and interesting new mechanic. Donjons would be differentiated from kreposts, and can serve more as a sort of tower that a military unit can construct. First crusade won’t scale in its effect size with how many tcs you have as much, and won’t be one-time.
There is no indication that Serjeants can be normally created at TCs, only that there is a one time spawn of them with the UT.
We know. We are proposing how to fix the ridiculous one-time spawn from the tcs into one more workable with aoe2’s current mechanics. One-time techs are in general a bad idea for aoe2, as I’ve outlined above. Instead of serjeants spawning once at a tc, why not allow serjeants to be created at tcs after you research the tech?
It is the strongest of the new UTs, but also an easy fix. Make it progressively more expensive, the more TCs the player has.
For example: if a player has 1 TC, it cost 500 Gold, if he has 2, it costs 1000, if he has 3, it costs 2000.
A bit like how Spies works, but even more prohibitive, as to not just reward over-booming.
Spies is only affordable when the opponent already has few Vills, and you are just chasing around a griefer.
In the same way, the new UT should give less value to a player that is already winning, than to one that really neds some troops right now.
But why do that when you can have serjeants created at tcs instead? Just don’t have the tech be a one-time shock and it’ll be a hell of a lot easier to balance if you find that it is too strong or not strong enough. Scaling the cost of the tech for additional tcs is only going to make the balance more difficult. You have to also account for how strong the bonus is for how many tcs you have, and decide how to adjust the cost of the tech too. Your suggestion adds more parameters to a unique tech that’s already difficult to balance because it has too many parameters.
There’s no reason why unique techs should be one-time use, scale with a separate game mechanic, AND have a massive payoff. Unless you’re just bored with the 35 civs and endless opportunities the game provides and want something radically different without caring about how it can be balanced.
Because they are already created at Castles and Donjons, and TCs are already the most valuable buildings as it is, since they are the centers of your economy and protect your Villagers from raids.
Giving TCs the means to also be military buildings, seems way over the top to me, specially when it is a gold unit.
If it was the Burgundians with their Flemish Militia-Pikeman, that sounds just like a fancy Pike, I could see it not being that strong, but the Serjeant looks more like a Champion that can build Towers, so I think being trained out of TCs will make it a much hated unit by the community.
Also would entirely replace the need for more than one Castle.