Make it so that if you cancel an outpost (and perhaps a keep) while it is being built you loose 100% (or 50%) of the resource cost.
Since outposts are generally supposed to be defensive structures the decision to make them at your base should be pro active not reactive. So you will be far less likely to cancel an outpost at your own base.
I think this change like this would help greatly in one common scenario.
Player 1 builds an outpost near Player 2’s gold vein very early in the game. Player 2 pulls vills to stop the outpost from being built in such a strong location. Player 2 cancels the outpost and loses nothing, mean while player 1 has lost mining time.
Repeating this process is too powerful for player 1. Outposts should be powerful defensive structures, not necessarily something that ends games in 5 minutes.
I do think there is a place in AoE IV for early aggression that involves outposts but those outposts should have to be placed further away to safely start the aggression.
I realize this solution isn’t perfect, for example now the game will have 1 or 2 buildings that are very different from the other buildings in the game. Which isn’t very intuitive for new players. But maybe something like this is necessary. Let me know what you think, take care.
2 Likes
Lost nothing? So you count player 2 villager pull as lost mining time and not player 1? Player 1 lost a lot more mining time than player 2 so this sentence doesn’t make any sense.
Lets say it takes 30 seconds to walk across the map. Thats 40 resources lost. (not taking into consideration building time). Defender pulls 2 villagers and cancel happens after 20seconds. Defender lost less resources and puts workers back to gold. Meanwhile aggressor is still having 2 villagers on map, constantly losing mining time.
You see the point? Top of that TR requires wood which means aggressor is investing on wood and not gold / food which results later age up and other tech. This is defenders advantage.
Mongol TR was completely different story because of bounty system.
I faced yesterday my first BBQ rush for several months. I purely stared when chinese build the BBQ and did nothing. I told my teammate in 2v2 not to bother with the BBQ and go attack. My ally went back to base. We lost the game because ally was too passive and didn’t do anything to HRE who got free reign while I was constantly harassing both with lancers. Forgot to mention my ally was french and never sent knights to HRE base.
Also I have stopped doing any reaction to any form of TR etc. I want to face TR its fresh air to same boring ■■■■ that happens in every game which is cavalry. Yet TR never works against me and is not making me get excited when I beat it