Please do something about laming

Age of Empires II: DE II - Discussion
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Laming is a spreading cancer everywhere, from tournament to ranked match to casual lobby. What make it annoying is not the laming act itself, but it the fact that it is almost impossible to stop.

In Voobly if you are paying attention you can stop a lame by blocking the boar (edit: or the scout). It is very difficult to do that in DE now. Make it an low risk high return act so everyone is doing it.

Please do something to return it to the balanced “high risk, high return” as it was in the original version.

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Last time i got lamed it was my ally, stealing my sheeps 11

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Yeah, definitely get lamed more often by allies than by enemies.

For some reason people don’t lame as much as they should in 1v1. It’s kind of weird to have it be a core game mechanic yet the community, for the most part, just tacitly agrees not to do it.

I do agree with OP though. The DE lame buff needs to be reverted.

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You can block the boar (tho a bit harder than in AoC), the problem is you can’t block enemy units. You used to be able to block a scout so it would take damage from the boar but now that’s near impossible. Same goes for laming vills, it used to be common to see pros try to block a vill but sadly that’s not possible now either.

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yes it is not possible to block boar with your scout now, it’s like boar never loses agro. It is possible in HD to block your boar so it returns to the original spot. Not here.

By the way this is a simple solution to adress this issue.

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I was always thinking about increasing the attack bonus of boar against scout from 4 to 8 or even 10. In that case your scout can kill it very easily and losing a scout early is way worse than having an extra boar. Also I like the previous voobly pathfinding where you can block boar,scout,villagers everything.

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I came up the following idea after the hidden cup, when “Saladin” demolished “Kotyan Khan” in hidden cup 3 with his boar lames.

TLDR: What if boar aggro needs to be refreshed by letting boar hit the scout or by hitting a boar during the lame?

I think one of the problem regarding to board laming is persistent the boar aggro is. You could try to block for boar and create a gap between boar and the lamer, but boar just wont give up if enemy is in it’s line of sight. It’s just difficult to stop the lame when enemy goes for it.

On the other hand, I’m not a fan of removing laming all together, because it is a crowd pleaser in tournament scene and laming itself is a skill which requires player to balance between scout micro and running the economy at home: A skill which is integral part of the game.

So I’ve been wondering what would happen if the boar aggro would have to be refreshed if you want to lame it all across the map. Let’s say that if a scout hits the boar one time, the boar will follow the scout only for short amount of time, after it will give up, regardless of the line of sight. Only combat with the boar would refresh the aggro, so the laming scout would have to either hit the boar again or let the boar hit the scout again.

I haven’t thought about the numbers yer, but let’s say that you need to refresh the aggro once in order to lame it from enemy’s forward to your own forward.

This way, blocking the boar becomes more effective way to stop the lame, because boar would eventually give up, even if the enemy scout stays close to the boar.

But there there is an other option too: a greedy player could also try to snipe the enemy scout if the enemy is too fixated to laming.

Even if the defender didn’t notice the lame, the lamer would still have to pay closer attention to the boar and maintaining the aggro compared to current situation.

Lamer might also want to bring villagers forward to help with the lame. For example, first the scout would lame the boar for the half way of the map, and then send a villager forward to finish the lure. If this becomes a thing though, then greedy enemy could try to snipe this villager if he knows what lamer is up to.

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I agree that laming is pretty unstoppable at the moment, but I don’t think your suggestion would fix it.
A boar does 10 damage to a scout (45 hp) and 11 to an eagle (50 hp). Since you need to get two hits on a boar to aggro it, the scout usually takes two hits from the boar too. This would result in a scout being left with 25 hp and an eagle with 28 hp. With your proposal of refreshing the aggro by hitting the boar once, you have to time it exactly right in order for the boar to get 1 hit, if you’re off it can get 2. Therefore the scout/eagle would have 15/17 or 5/6 hp remaining. Thus if you let the boar get 2 hits at the refresh (or at any other point) your scout/eagle is 2 hits from being killed by the enemy’s scout. I think this is too much risk compared to reward, if your enemy notices the lame and kills your scout, you lack scouting info and get no reward from the boar.

Secondly, the proposal of a refresh after a “short time” would be hard to get right, since you may have to go the long way around. In high level games such as this and this players spent longer laming the boars than usual, which as you said is a huge crowd pleaser.

The risk vs reward aspect is balanced, and increasing the risk doesn’t decrease the reward if the player can’t block. The devs need to look at ways to block enemy units like you could on Voobly to solve this.

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maybe we’ll have to learn to wall off our pigs

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In my suggestion, you could refresh the aggro by letting the boar hit your scout once, so scout doesn’t neet to attack the boar to refresh the aggro.

I also was orginally thinking that if this suggestion was in place, the scouts would need to hit the boar only once to start the aggro. I thought I wrote it in the post too, but I guess I forget to write it out.

I also kinda forget that you needed two hits to the boar in the original game too. After remembering that, I’m not sure should this behaviour to be changed after all. Maybe easier blocking would still be the better fix after all.

But still, I’m not quite sure which I want to see more: long boar lures or dead scouts. :slight_smile:

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Ah that makes more sense, since you would then only receive 1 hit from the boar. But I think this would be hard to code since in the past aggro was always defined by the scout hitting the boar (I know nothing about coding though). I think if they made blocking work again, the problem would be solved, it was fairly balanced on Voobly for years so I think they should go to the solution they know works.

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Bring up this topic for those discussion to be visible (and because I was lamed hard today :grin: )

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