I know there was no change to siege this patch but its still a major issue in team game. just mass siege still.
People don’t even make units after age 4 just mass siege or lose.
Only good thing now I can go back to China and mass better siege i guess. O well
P.S Was there a stealth fix for Drop Hack? Didnt get any drop hack on me all day… Was it fixed?
The only thing about quickmatch that was changed was its search time as it tries to find better suited opponents for your skill level in more than 5 minutes, around 10. Can’t say more than this I’ve yet to play the game today and see for myself about this.
I have to 2nd OP. Even 2on2 games are still dominated by keeps, springalds, bombards, culverines and bombards. Beyond a certain point there is no utility for anything like cavalry or infantry. They simply get blown to pieces by the overwhelming firepower of siege. And siege and anti siege are just blowing each other to pieces. Typically the one with most siege win; or the team with Chinese or Rus since they have the better siege. Springalds can literally outgun culverines as anti siege which is insane. The 4on4 world is even more embedded in the turmoil of maps swarming with pure siege. This has to go, it is no freaking fun at all.
yep.
Just as you said here. No point making reg units past imperial in team game. Siege can hold on its own without a front line after this. Just make sure you bring villagers to heal and some anti unit siege like the new and improved NOB
Just pure mass bombards and NOB do it for me as China. no other units matter. Mix in trash units like spearmen if you must but they just get in the way
Do you think introducing friendly fire would limit the amount of siege or at least change the way people use it
It would only change the way it’s used. If it remains super effective, like now, there’s little reason to lessen your reliance on it.
Meat shield would have to be used with some more thought around mangonels, but I assume cannon balls and Springald bolts wouldn’t be blowing through crowds of your units in case you were standing them in front of your siege, so we’d still be enjoying age of siege fest beyond 30 minutes.
With respect to mangonels and nest of bees I think if Relic aren’t willing to enable friendly fire they’re going to have to adjust the mangonels’ damage output. Without friendly fire the mangonel is a hard counter to both front and backline footsoldiers. You can use a spread formation, but your frontline collapses into a tight formation once it engages with theirs. Even in a spread formation a few mangonels will devastate the ranged backline.
Their damage output, due to their AoE, feels wildly out of kilter with other units in the game. Making them more vulnerable won’t help, they are already vulnerable, but their strength means destroying them quickly is absolutely vital. If you have an infantry heavy army, something natural to several civilizations, and you fail to deal with their mangonels within a few seconds of a battle starting you will lose. It’s far easier to avoid the issue and mass the one unit that is simultaneously: the least vulnerable to mangonels, the best at destroying mangonels, the best all round regular unit in the game. And that’s the knight/lancer.
The late game meta in AoEIV isn’t fun.
To dominate 2v2 3v3 or 4v4 you have to first dominate 1v1, otherwise you will publish your theme all your life: “the siege is still an issue”
Gitgud is such a tired response to discussions about game design and game balance.
It’s not a question of ‘dominating’ – it’s a question of enjoyment. The late game meta is tedious in this game because despite the huge range of units available to you there are so few worth building. The variety of units and strategies peaks relatively early in the game and then coalesces towards a situation where everyone is forced into doing more or less the same thing. A ton of siege, a ton of knights. We should all want to see people feeling encouraged to use a wide variety of units in their armies, and we should all want to see people trying out different unit compositions from one another.
1v1 is different. Pressure is earlier, and more constant, and games regularly end long before a post imperial scenario.
the low elo should not be a reference of the game, if they still do not manage the resources correctly, obviously the game will end in less time, on the aoeword page you can confirm that if you play imperial in 1v1 in high elo, dedicate yourself more to improving the game
I don’t even know what you’re trying to say with this? All that graph illustrates is that 1v1 games tend to be much shorter than team games.
Well I’ll teach you to read, the graph shows that in 1v1 high elo you win after 45 minutes
You’re being quite abbrasive. Look at the X axis labelling. The vast majority of those games end before the thirty minute mark. I’m not saying that 1v1s never go long. But they very rarely do.
the graph is clear, I won’t waste time, bye bye 
I have been playing a lot of 1v1s and a lot of team games with friends too since the patch came out with a lot of these games going to late game and its way better now.
After playing that many games i think siege is actually in a good spot right now.
The reason being is that siege moves very slow, they are actually dying pretty quickly to cav and its also very easy to take advantage of the lack of mobility of siege now by just ignoring their army if you cant fight and make they move around while you raid and attack other areas with a quicker army and even catching siege out of position.
I am a player that always goes for a big mass of cavalry in the middle stages of the game and late game and i find it very easy and satisfying to snipe siege units with cavalry, you can quickly run in with cav snipe siege units and retreat if things get bad, even infantry can easily punish siege units that are out of position, and a big mass of cavalry can definitely punish players that over rely on siege as cav dont melt in late game as they used to.
Completely lazy way to stop any intelligent discussion about balance.
The goal is to rely less on just siege and more on varied armies. Right now there is less incentive to go for varied armies if you create a ton of siege.
The devs know this and they’ll work on it. Thanks for nothing for trying to hush up people for bringing up the issue.
Increase siege population from 3 to 4, except springald, trebuchets, and ram. Would be minimal impact in the mid-game but will absolutely punish mass siege users by eating up a lot more of their population when you enter post-imp.
Bombards and mangroils at 5 pop
I’m not surprised that you say you always go for a mass of cavalry (presumably you actually mean a mass of knights/lancers because I’ve seen no evidence that light cavalry is viable late).
For me this is part of the issue though, it’s quite dull that everyone, regardless of situation or civilisation, is encouraged to mass one type of unit in the late game. I’ve frequently played against people who literally build nothing but knights and siege, and it’s definitely a ‘if you can’t beat them, join them’ thing. It’s borderline impossible to efficiently counter because the counter to knights is so heavily oppressed by mangonels. You could try to mass a mixture of spearmen, crossbowmen and springalds — an army that on paper perfectly counters the knight/mangonel combination. But in practice that army is super squishy, and if you fail to wipe out the mangonel almost instantly you’ll be absolutely obliterated. As you say the ability of cavalry to use mobility to simply run around slower foot soldiers is very profound too.
I do think that siege is in a better spot post nerf, but it’s also exacerbated an over reliance on knights that leads to very predictable late game unit compositions. There shouldn’t be huge swathes of units that become redundant late on.
I agree with you on that knoghts+mangonels is a pretty insane comp rn. But idk what change they could make to the mangonel. Maybe they could reduce mangonel ridiculous area damage so that 2 mangonels wont delete a whole army in a single shot.
