Please DONOT Use ESOC Patch in All AOE III DE

Although EP is the best balance patch of this game, it still has many shortcoming such as nationalities have become more and more similar to each other. So I hope that you can have some balance idea of your own but not use EP in all this game.

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Can you give some examples?
I personally liked it. Sure, the balance is all about colonial musket rushes, but â– â– â– â– , it always was like that.

I do agree that some things could be changed - but really specific changes, like a card too strong to be on an certain age - but removing ESOC? Too much. All the feedback gathering process and the applying of balance would take months…

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@AverageWolf2485 @HerianB
Patch ESOC aims solely and exclusively at balancing civilizations in 1v1 games. It does not aim to balance the units individually or to balance team games, although there are a few times that have changed in this regard. The change policy is minimal.

If I had to choose between the original game and the ESOC Patch, I would choose ESOC, but that doesn’t mean that I like it or agree with everything.

My opinion is that the starting point for balancing can be the ESOC Patch but it should in no way be restricted to it.
I really, really hope, to see many changes, alterations, even the design of civilizations, the design of units, I want news. With each new change that is made, all players go there to test, play and interact and react here on the forum, saying whether they liked it or not.
If the privileges do not change, it soon becomes monotone and many may stop playing for lack of news, or because a change has been made that this player hated and he knows it will never be undone. There is no perfect balance, no matter what is done.
It really has a lot of content to be reformulated, starting with several cards that can be modified, deleted or new ones can be created. Many people want to see the Spahi unit be trained in the stable, and why not test it? There is no OP unit if the appropriate cost and population are applied, see the Indian elephant Manhout, which has insane statistics but is far from being the best cavalry because it costs a lot and occupies a lot of pop.
Likewise why not make Urumi trainable in the Indian barracks? Why not make it possible to build another saloon and / or upgradeable mercenaries? Japanese samurai in both ESOC and the original game is just a joke, so why not make Hatamoto samurai available? The Soligen Steel card that is at age 4 of the Doppelsoldner is so bad that its effect makes the unit worse than without it, so the effect could be changed. Hospitals are something that with 1800 hours of gameplay I never saw anyone do in a ranked match.

The development team cannot be a coward and be afraid of change, otherwise the game will be monotonous and without players sooner than can be expected. Age of Empires IV is coming and will embrace all dissatisfied or bored audiences.

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Thank you for talking about the ESOC patch. Since i always dodge team games like i dodge the cross itself, i have no idea on how the patch works there.

I do agree that the ESOC patch is not enough, but i feel the dev team really is afraid to touch the game and change the balance. Using this patch is great step to show they are getting out of their comfort zone - and it did made the game more enjoyable (at least for me) - but is it enough? No, it is not.

But I don’t expect new cards, civs, units or even mercs. I am afraid, as i didn’t saw promises of virtually nothing but good graphics and reworked servers - and that may be due to the bad marketing work for the game(it’s like they are doing it due to obligation, not passion) or simply because it’s too soon. but 'tis too early to say.

Unlike aoe2, aoe3 was a dead game for a really long time - i stopped playing it by the reason you mentioned. The prospect of a dinamic balance work and better servers drafted me to the definitive edition, but i fear of being let down, as i mentioned before. In this case, the simple use of a fan made patch attracts my attention like flies are attracted to… stuff…

Side note: I don’t know if you participated in the DE beta. If you did, you problably know what i’m speaking of. If not, well carry on citizen.

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but it never was? if anything before AOE2HD aoe 3 was larger.

anyways about the overall patch, well there are some good ideas in the ESOC patch but it also lags in a lot of places, the game shouldnt be definitively balanced from 1 vs 1 cause nobody plays that. also some units get rather odd changes:

to take cassadors as an example they get 50% worse fire rate for about 50% more dmg, this is the most nonsensical change ive seen and i know it is to encourage kitting with cassadors more but it just feels really forced.

melee infantry gets no changes, despite the fact almost no one uses them (i dont want it to become melee spam the game but a little more halbs, pikemen and rodeleros wouldn’t hurt).

the patch overall seems like it lags a holistic view, it is fine if you wanna run 1 vs 1 tournies but its not a good patch to impose on 90% of the player base who couldn’t care less about 1 vs 1, surely there must be a way to make a balance patch that hits a larger audience without hurting the 1 v 1 scene.

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Huh, pretty sure that’s how most people play online.

This is actually just a revert to how Cassadors were originally designed in vanilla AoE3.

Halbs, Rodeleros and Doppelsoldners are all buffed on EP.

I think it’s definitely wrong that 90% of the playerbase doesn’t care about 1v1. Nevermind that, ESOC Patch already does attempt to balance for team games as well, and they’re considered to be in a good balance state, I believe.

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