So, i’ve played a game today, and a guy reeeeally tried to steal my sheep, mooving his scout with them like 1 minute. I’ve resigned, because i think lamming Sheep is really annoying and a dickmove. But I’would like your opinion about stealing the other player sheep, or killing them with thw scout
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The way I see it, if it’s in the game, it’s fair game. I always thought it was odd to see Pros in tournaments when they would sometimes send enemy sheep they discovered back to their enemy, but apart from that they would try to gain any advantage over their opponent. I mean, does this “sportsmanship” extend to every aspect of the game? Can you imagine if your opponent insisted “Thou must not slay the peasants, but only my men of war!,” or if you delayed attacking the enemy’s archers with your archers until you had moved off a hill so that you wouldn’t have an “unfair advantage?” As they say, “All is fair in love and war [and AoE2]”, and fighting with the gloves off is the best way to become skillful. Now, there’s nothing wrong with having some rules of engagement if everyone agrees upon them (hence the option to have a time limited treaty), but beyond that, I wouldn’t ever go around expecting your opponents to not take advantage of opportunities.
For the record, I rarely go for laming/walling in enemy resources/stuff like that, but it’s more for practical considerations than because I’m such an impeccable gentleman. If such a thing is an essential part of my strategy, I’ll do it with gusto.
I don’t see any issue with it, same goes for using your army/walls early on to cut off enemy resources basically anything to get an edge… I mean I’ve sent setters to deliberately move herds away from enemy tc then wall them off… silly but effective xD
In one of my games, I manage to steal 1 boar and 2 sheeps of the enemy player. My enemy manage to steal 2 of my sheeps. It was at Black, Unexplored map- Arabia. At the end, I lost that game. Boar and sheeps are just Food. There are other resources you may take too… The best buildings cost stone.The best units cost gold.
Imo it’s fair, even though it can be frustrating to find out that you are two sheep short and must adapt your strategy accordingly.
Worst offender for this is boar stealing, and I once got someone to rage quit by walling off his 2 boars on a 4v4 BF match where my base was very close to his.
It’s a skill.
Figuring out where your opponent is quickly and finding their extra food sources before they do is easier to say than to do, and they are trading scouting of their own area to see more of yours.
It’s a significant advantage, for sure, but it’s not going to ruin an adaptive player’s start. Not to mention there’s a fair bit of counterplay to any sort of laming option, usually.
Not fair for the first 5-8min in game but if you still haven’t gathered your sheep by then, stealing is ok.
The thing is that it should be ok to do but it impacts too much the game which it shouldn’t do because the spawn is random. So they can spawn so far that it can take several minutes to find them while the enemy might happen to have their spawn so close that he can go to steal the opponent’s.
Only straggler laming should be banned.
We call it laming for good reasons:
-Lamers gain a big advantage in the game only because they got lucky to find their resources early enough and they got lucky again finding your resources earlier than you.
-Laming requires a non-related game skill. You could be a 2K player and you can still be lamed for much worse players than you.
For me, it’s like a back door in the game. Imagine you can press a button at the first 5 minutes of any game. That button makes you automatically win 50% of the games. Is it fair? Yes, both players could use the button. Will you play fun and competitive games? Absolutely not.
What?
There’s been pro level games where BOTH boars were lamed. Those games are typically decided by single mistakes; their gameplay is perfect otherwise. According to your logic, the game was already over with the first boar lame.
The lamed player won that match.
It’s also VERY easy to prevent being lamed. Take your boar at 6 villagers. They’re typically very easy to find, and it’s FAR harder for your opponent to take boar before you do. If they can get it without losing their scout, HECK yeah they should get the food.
I’ve never pulled off a boar lame. It’s fairly micro intensive.
Sheep are easy to take back. Kill the scout. They move too slow.
Any half decent player can lure a boar. I’ve seen players laming boars from 1100 rating and even below. Laming is not easy to prevent at all. In fact, it’s almost imposible to stop. In NAC3, the last and biggest tournament this year, players decided to go for a set of rules against laming because of how powerful and game-breaking that strategy is. Maybe you are not experienced enough in the game to realice it but pro players did.
I should’ve clarified - I’ve never pulled off a boar lame, but I haven’t really tried. I focus my gameplay on a perfect feudal time or FC. I know I could but with my APM and current multitasking ability I’d risk delaying myself by a few seconds and it hasn’t been worth the risk in ranked for me as of yet.
The only reason that laming was banned from NAC3 was because Boar luring was allowed in 1 hit in DE. Boar laming has always been a part of the game for pros. They lame all the time. Especially MbL. The single hit issue has since been patched - scouts take 2 hits now. Villagers still only take 1. You lose a TON of scout HP if you lame, and you can prevent it by taking your boar early.
If you’re playing against a known lamer, you take boar early. If you get lamed unexpectedly, just lame them back. It’s easy to counter, you just need to have a plan of action for when it happens and be prepared for that outcome.
Another example of big a tournament not allowing boar laming. This is for Hidden Cup 3, so boar laming is patched already and requieres two hits like before. Still, organizers and players agree that laming is unstoppable and leads to bad quality games.
That was due to the recent melee pathing update, and also the patch designed to fix “host” advantage. Boars used to be able to be blocked - that text specifically states that there’s an inability to block the boar.
The same patch that fixed boar laming by adding a hit also made it very hard to block the boar. It’ll be fixed soon.
I would say that it is “okay”. However if you’re just trying to practice and get caught off-guard it can in fact be quite frustrating !
Maybe it would be cool to have an option in-game to enable/disable sheep laming, in case you’re a newbie or trying to practice your game rather than do an all-out anything goes battle.
Sure both sheepkilling and boar stealing is lame. But it is a part of the game. Otherwise the gamedesign would be otherwise. Example is that only villagers can kill wild animals and that could be applied to boars and sheep aswell.
The Problem with this is that its skill depending. I can see that argument “laming is a skill” for 1k Players, but for example I play at 1600 1v1 ELo and every single player with a rating of 1400+ can basicly pull that of. The big factor in laming at this level isnt the micro, but the luck to find the resources before your opponent, which is only luck based.
As a conclusion maybe at lower levels its a skill, but this mechanic really ruins Games at 1400+ elo level games, because the only “skill” required is to be a lucky guy finding the Boar/ Sheep before your opponent, the laming itself (micro) then is as natural as queuing Vils or breathing.
Which is also pretty sad because the higher the elo the more competitive a game should normaly be, and RNG in a Game makes it less competitive.
I have a way more firm stance against vill fights in Nomad than agaisnt laming.
*In tournaments I think laming should be banned though. I dont have interested in watching a game end minute 5.
First of all that is absolutely not true, even when you get lucky to find the opponent’s boar there is still plenty of counterplay. The enemy could have killed your scout, attacked a vill to force loom early, stolen your own boar/sheep, lured deer. I won’t deny there are occasions where you get unfair map generation and can’t avoid getting hard lamed, but there are other instances of RNG involvement in the game which I don’t see you complain about (eg. conversions), and I suspect people over-focus on laming because it happens early in the game and is a clear “disruptive” move, despite other things (like civ matchup) affecting the game as much.
I’ve also seen games ruined in 1 sec due to one “lucky” mangonel shot (where, if I use your wording, the only “skill” was to shoot while the opponent wasn’t paying attention).
Nobody expects the better player to win 100% of the matches. That is one of the reason why tournaments are always Bo3, more often Bo5 / Bo7.
Not true either. Poker is one example of very RNG-based, competitive game.
The RNG factor is what make AoE2 great
It is one of the core qualities that this game has
