I strongly disagree. I think the devs are getting cute with every civ having to have completely new bonuses and mechanics, and stretching the game too far in one direction. Not every new civ needs to play completely differently, or you end up with aoe3, which, while an OK game, cannot compare with aoe2 for ranked matches popularity.
If you look at the DE civs, it’s the most unique things that have all been broken in some way: Cumans 2TC is broken on certain maps, Leitis is utterly broken against civs without good ranged options (Bulgarians, Slavs), Lithuanians get an absurdly early drush and are unplayable if they get 4 relics… The worst part being that some of these things cannot be repaired with a quick cost adjustment (how do you slightly adjust “ignores armour”?). Meanwhile, the relatively more vanilla new civ (Tatars) found its way into the “OK civs” tier and is not utterly broken.
What would have been so wrong with the new civs just having their own new tech tree, normal bonuses like faster trade, faster working workshops, or free/cheap blacksmith upgrades? People will still play the campaigns, give them a go, incorporate them into their play style, figure out good ways to play with them.
The problem is, what would one consider still to be an AOE2 civ or not.
I think the new civs we’re getting with LOTW still feel like AOE2, though are a bit more out of the box than the other civs.
I wouldn’t mind getting more “boring” boni like free armour upgrades, free vills each age up or a free key technology.
I don’t mind either getting more radical stuff like smaller farms, mobile dropoff sites, earlier army key techs etc.
If they are too sameish, people will complain, if they are too different, people will complain too. It’s kinda hard to please both sides while still offering something new and interesting.
I agree with you, the unique techs of the news civs are basically one time immediate boosts to eco/military strength, that depending on how these mechanics are balanced can result in:
These one time boosts are strong enough to succeed in changing the course of the game, which is pretty bad because in AoE2 leads are built snowballing little advantages through decision making, eco management and military control. Instead, having the chance to get a lead in the game thanks to resouces/troops spawned due to simply kicking a tech button, would be uncompetitive, unchallenging to play and unfun to play against, due to the little amount of skill and strategy involved in the process.
These UT, due to high cost or little effects. are gonna be bad, falling into oblivion like the other “one time boost” techs already in the game (paper money and cuman mercenaries).
Overall, I don’t think the new civs are terribly designed, but this concentration of one time boosting techs really bothers me, I think they should be heavily redesigned.
Yeah most definitely. One-time boosts means difficulty to balance them. I’m calling it now: if these techs stay the way they are currently structured (one-time, large effect, scale with an existing in-game mechanic), they’re going to be OP in the situations in which they are used, which won’t be many situations. They’ll be either OP or completely useless and never picked up in a game. Nerfing their costs and stats just makes them useless more often and OP less frequently, rather than less strong in the situations they will be OP and more strong in the situations they are useless that would be the case with continuous techs. Change the base mechanics, make them continuous and not one-time use, and don’t make them scale with something else the player has in the game. They’ll be much easier to balance then.
This is still taking ideas from AoM/AoE III, and this probably counts as making them scale with something else the player has in the game, but what if the unique techs added different production modes to their affected buildings you could toggle back and forth with a cool down? This way they’re a continuous use that can add how long it takes to toggle between modes into their balance. Examples:
o Burgundian Vineyards: Available at a Mill, Vineyard Farmers gather gold instead of food at a slower rate than gathering food.
o Flemish Revolution: Revolution Town Centers train Flemish Militia instead of Villagers, which cost gold instead of food.
o First Crusade: Crusade Town Centers automatically train 1 Serjeant for free every x seconds instead of Villagers, whenever the Sicilian player controls less than x number of Serjeants made from any source (Castles, Donjons, conversions, Town Centers.)
o Scutage: Available at a Market, a Scutage Market gives teammates a percentage gold discount on all of their units, but increases the unit gold cost of the Scutage player by a percentage times the number of teammates. Scutage Markets do not have a stacking effect.
I think these are a bit better, since they don’t have the one-time effect, and are easier to balance than the proposed unique techs, but some of them still sound either very situational (first crusade) or more detrimental than an actual bonus (scutage, flemish revolution). On what the new updates should be, I’m sure the devs have a loooot more experience and expertise in designing unique techs and can create interesting and balanceable ones if they just know the community does not want one-time, scaleable unique techs. That being said I appreciate replacement ideas from the community. I myself was thinking more along the lines of:
burgundian vineyards: farmers generate food as well as gold (similar to your proposed change, but it’s not a toggle and farmers generate both). The gold amount generated can be adjusted depending on whether it’s found to be more powerful than intended, but I think it would be a nice small castle-age eco bonus if 25-30 farmers generated as much gold as one relic, though that rate can be increased or decreased. That’s the important part; it can be balanced.
Flemish Revolution: Villagers can be upgraded to flemish pikemen at a cast of 20/25/30 gold per villager. The way I imagine this could work is you select 10 villagers, and in the bottom left corner for the villager menu there’s a button for “upgrade to flemish pikemen” that would cost 20*10 = 200 gold, and those villagers will then be flemish pikemen. This would be useful if you’re being raided and need a quick defense or deterrent, and can be balanced by changing the cost of the upgrade.
First Crusade: Serjeants can be created at town centers. Similar to your idea, but not for free or automatic instead of villagers (what if you need serjeants immediately, but don’t want more once those serjeants die? That would be very annoying). I would accompany this change with donjons being more of a tower serjeants can create but that can’t create serjeants itself, giving it more of a unique identity than the krepost. You can balance this by adjusting how fast town centers can train serjeants.
Scutage: Either a tech that replaces the gold cost of trade carts with an increased wood cost for you and your team (can balance that by changing the extra wood a trade cart costs) or something entirely different, like something having to do with their unique unit (regular old stat buff) since the concept is so specific. Your solution to scutage I’m afraid is just too complicated, since a player, mid-game, would have to think about too many things (military production of allies, military production of myself, strength of my units compared to the strength of my allies’ units, how much gold allies have access to vs myself, etc…) to determine whether it’s useful and that’s not realistic in an aoe2 game.