About the balance problems that because of same population both for elephants and pikemans for example, I will mention one think. The Indians with unique unit one of the strongest units in the game, the elephant archers, counts as week civilization, because it is an expensive unit that you can not cap. I don’t think that anyone thinks that Indians is the strongest civ in AoE2DE. So yes, sometimes just a cost change is enough to ‘fix’ the balance.
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Elephant Archers in AOE 2 de are too slow 
. Persian War Elephants are good but they lack Hersey But AOE 3 elephants are good in HP and speed both but it costs 7 to 6 pop space for different types.
In every game they make elephant units op but latter scr*** them up for balance.
Making them expensive in population cost is not so historic accurate. Indian kingdoms used to have lot of elephants. Like Cholas had 60thousand elephants in their military.
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It was a lobby setting not a player setting.
Having more stable FPS is of course still an advantage but that’s true for basically every game.
Poll summery
We got 91 votes after 5 days now. I don’t think much will change from now.
Half of the people want to play with more than 200 population but half of those only with about 100 more population.
So having a bit more population seems to be very popular. I’d assume if the developers would have made 300 population the standard it would probably have won this survey.
I guess most people that voted for 200 did so because
- it’s the standard limit the game is designed for
- it’s the standard in AoE2 now and always has been in AoE3.
I’m not really surprised by the result. I expected a few more votes for 200 and I assume in reality more lobbies will be at 200 or max population (what ever that number will be) than something inbetween.
I’m also not surprised that barely anyone voted for less than 200.
I do hope the Developers added a population limit option to the game lobby, or else they will make more than 50% of the players sad/angry.
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historical accuracy is not interesting for balancing units with resources.
Also, yes they are slow, but thats not why the y loose. If they were slow but strong and cheap, you could easily wall up behind them and form a wall of death so to say. But it seems these 3 factors (speed, Power, Cost) are balanced rather well, or towards a rather weak UU 
Its slow, but still a tanky archer. Practically, the best you could hope for a slow unit. And I guess it is and realistic. An Elephant with a ‘camp’ above him, is sure a very slow unit and in reality. 
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Continuing the discussion from [Poll] Population Limit:
Oh okay . I don’t play AoEDE do I didn’t know .
They are quite good in team games but that’s mostly because of their Imp Camel .
Is’nt micro a skill to learn ? Why should the game be fair to those who can’t pull it off ?
In a late game situation when trade is possible , War Elephants would be a total nightmare as Population Efficiency begins to matter more than Cost Efficiency . The Persian player will make tons of elephants and wreck you to death unless you have Mamleukes . So yeah , not totally useless
AoEDE removed the setting, it was only part of the original AoE.
Oh okay . I don’t play AoE so I didn’t know .
Exactly, there are civs that have advantage in the early game and civs that have advantage in the late game. The balance has to be:
- This gab of wins/looses not to be very big between early-middle-late game.
- The overall gap wins/looses for each civ not to be very big.
Obviously the second parameter can vary a lot between specific civs statistics. For sure there will be civs with bonuses than other civs. Example an archer civ has bonuses vs an infantry civ and disadvantage vs a cavalry civ. For the middle user for example, a cavarly civ is more easy to go because the natural counter (pikemans) can be handled easily with archers. In my opinion, this is the reason Frances have the better overall statistics than every other civ in AoE2DE (I think it is near 57% wins/losses). This is the overall statistic. There are civs that France have 65% win ration for middle users.
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That’s point. But some times AI just annoys with micro specialy in campaigns when you are unable to train troops.
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The one which will be used in ranked.
There are many ways and systems they can use to balance population. I think the AOE3 system really got it right. And not just for competitive modes but for all 1v1, team, TR, FFA. A mahout there not only cost 7 pop (without card) but also around 700 resources. So in a competitive game, making them is a huge cost so not too many will be made so that they are not too OP similarly like aoe2 there is a huge cost that prevents too many from being made. A couple wont do you much good but once you have 5-7 in a army to really wipe the enemy clean, almost no amount of kiting can save an army if not prepared right.
But there is also different types of games like TR game and FFA, and I hope those thrive in AOE4, but if they include those with 1 pop unit counts then ends of TR will be laming, and not just for too many elephants but cannons and other things as well. In Aoe3 I can have a million resources and still fight in respective strengths to other civs because of that limiting factor, making it fun and counterable… unless that pikeman has a X20 multiplier VS cavalry I see problems with that system in AOE4. POP caps just seem like a good safeguard to making civs more balanced
now also to ask what does more than 200 pop really give us? I am not too sure about AOE2, but it seems there is a balance needed of 50/50 for military and economy. So to grow a millitary that much bigger means there needs to be either faster gather rates that may be hard to tweak ( see how small handicaps can make ecos go wild), or super large sprawling eco that is really just more to deal with than necessary. where a smaller population creates so much more variance as well. For instance in TR and FFA games, sometimes it can be a tactic to delete down vills for more leverage of military strength… this can pay off if you start getting amazing kill ratios, but at a point, the amount of micro needed makes it too hard to use large armies as effectively, so to ask for more pop is also asking to dumb the mechanics down to make it more accessible for all. The more units you have the more autonomous AI like they need to be. So in a higher pop scenario making 300 plus it would not make sense to delete down at all since units would drain ecos too quickly, and it would just be too much to control efficiently.
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I wouldnt like Units having different pop space apart from maybe ocassionally the UU with 1/2 one 
Also no unit build caps as in age 3.
Both of these made the game less fun.
Anyways I don’t think they will change the actual 200 pop limit no matter our concerns. I’m pretty sure that they didn’t add crew in Siege weapons either and they probably won’t despite the fact that was something requested A LOT by the community.
They listen to us like they always say, i believe that. But they don’t care at all. The arrows size and buildings scale issue were fixed because was easy to do and the arrows scale problem was fixed even before the fan preview vídeo.
So don’t expect they change pop limit, wait for mods in early 2022 for that to happen.
I’m afraid you are right.
And if we look at how bad the mod implementation is in the other games it’s probably not a real option.
Imagine you have to tell everyone you want to play with (potentially 7 people) to go to the very buggy mod website to install the mod before even being able to join the lobby.
And that’s just because the developers don’t want to add a few lines of code for a feature that half of the players want to use.
And it’s not like we can give them feedback to the game because they still haven’t started the beta.
When the beta starts there will be much much more complaints about things that they can change/fix before release.
A beta for a reduced amount of players. I hope they remove the NDA so testers can upload their gameplay and we all can see more of the game and give more feedback. Specially before release. Maybe if there is a lot of complains and things to change, they can delay the release to improve the game.
But i’m just dreaming hahaha xD
They wouldn’t allow it. But there’s too much hype for this game so there’s possibility that some beta testers may spill the beans and leak the game details.
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limitations are good for a strategy game, the more rules and limitations the pieces of the game has the more careful and strategic one has to be with those resources. Think chess, the greatest strategy game, has very few pieces, and lots of movement restrictions. AOE2 had the use of stone to cap castle and tower spamming. AOE 3 had wood and it was plentiful. 100 fort/tower strategy would ruin game. So building caps have really all been part of the game. AOE3 just focused a little more emphasis on players fighting person to person, army to army more than army to city. For a medieval game defenses should have much more impact.
AOE3 is tons of fun, sorry you had some bad experiences but a dragoon costing 2 pop and a war wagon costing 3 made sense when the ecos will eventually get to hoarding res that would other wise just make a army of war wagons unstoppable. That would have been way less fun… or units would have to be so scaled down as to not really stand out from each other as much losing that asymmetric balance.
Also note Devs…
I will be very reluctant to buy if they still do not add siege operators. It will have to look like flawless everywhere else… and I hope it is.
I forgot that AoE2 assigns every unit just 1 pop space. Going back to pre-2002 design feels like a regression. But we all know the QoL improvements of AoM, AoE3, and AoEO are of no moment when it comes to AoE4. We mustn’t startle those AoE2 players. Hopefully one of them will come around and set us straight that the reason AoE2 sold so many copies was obviously because every unit has just 1 pop space.
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yep, it made sense in age 3. but was it really necessary? I think personally that balancing by pop space is not a good approach.
It is my personal view that each unit shall be balanced by their stats and costs alone. If the player is able to gather the resources needed to build an army of 200 Elephants, they shall have that. This also makes more sense of accomplishment happen imo as you can get every goal you reach.
Unlike age 3 where lets say you want to play max out cannons and not only is there a pop cap (which may on its own even work) but also a general unit limitation. Its becaus ethe unit is too strong, but wasnt balanced accordingly - in my opinion.
A well designed game can utilize pop as a 5th resource. but it should never pose artificial limitations upon the player, no max buildings of 1 type, no max unit counts.
However a game may also be very well designed with 1 pop space each and, coming from age 2, I think the 4 resorces we have are enough, we dont need pop as a 5th one 