AoM is not Age of Empires. The idea of making alliances with natives is an AoE3 idea. A good idea for AoM might be being able to share/coopt another pantheons mythology (maybe they are the “natives” in the particular region you are playing in and the Settlements you claim might allow you to have some of this “pantheons” mythology idk) perhaps as this is a thing that has happened in history but as I said thats an AoE3 idea and this is a separate game so it needs to well thought through to be in line with what this game is about. Settlements also give additional population which incentivises you to go out and claim them to deny resource But I get trying to sell this to the AoE audience thats for sure. Better resource distribution would be better as the Settlement system makes this game unique.
A higher base pop limit would be what I’d go for yes. And the idea of a mode without the Settlement mechanic is interesting for sure but how do you design that in game? Maybe you have a god power that allows you place settlements or something?
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TC’s are too important to be locked behind random place on a map. Not to mention they are important part for enabling different strategies…
Make TC free and replace settlements with AOE3 style Native Trading posts. Which would help a lot with diversity and allow very obscure myths to be part of the game, without creating full civs…
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I completely agree with you and I think that saying “they are different games” is a terrible counterargument. You never once implied that it was the same game, you just proposed an idea, from one game that could be adapted to a different game and have a positive impact on diversity of playstyle, inclusion of content for sub-civs that didn’t make the cut to be full civs and a great idea overall.
Let’s compare TCs between AoE games:
- AoE1 TCs don’t provide garrison and can’t fight. They only provide 4 population.
- AoE2 TCs are limited by costing Stone, the most limiting resource. They only provide 5 population. They have a low range and don’t benefit from range upgrades.
- AoE3 TCs have a low limit and are not very strong compared to the powerful siege in the game.
AoM TC:
- Offer 15 and later 20 population
- Don’t cost Stone
- Provide the opportunity to trade with yourself
- Have the same range as a Tower
- Don’t have a build limit
- Trickles Favour for Atlantians
- Allows the training of Mercenaries for Chinese
- Trains some hero unit for all but the Norse civilisation (train a normal Infantry instead)
Therefor AoM Town Centres are way to powerful to be allowed to be freely constructed anywhere.
The “Castle” building of each civilisation costs Favour and has a build limit while offering less HP, even before Fortified Town Centre is researched.
Why are you ignoring aoe4?
Also changing it would require balance changes anyway.
- population can be simply reduced.
- cost can adjusted
- AOE4 has two types of TCs as the first is stronger and others are squishier. We can have same here, including different cost between the first and others.
- ehm actually AOM has built limit due to settlements count on the map, but AOE4 doesn’t
- trade can still be allowed with only main TC and reworked settlements
- unique units and production options are not problem to be split among existing buildings or add to new building. They are also least concerning as TCs primary purpose is villager production.
- Atlantean favor is problematic only if you pretend that separating settlements and TCs is same as removing settlements. Settlements as map objective will exist, it will just no longer be a TC (and favor gathering is worth topic of it own)
But why would you want to do all those things?
Just so you can have your villager production building at any location?
Did you really play enough AoM to understand why it’s different?
For example AoM villagers train faster then any other AoE game while having a limit of 80. You don’t need as much TCs to max out.
And there are other things like the Settlements forcing you to get map control.
But why would you want to do all those things?
And there are other things like the Settlements forcing you to get map control.
For same reason as doing any change, some things are just not good design. Design is about iteration and if it has flaws it should be updated and iterated on. Settlements were iterated on to make them equally/more engaging and interesting in AoE3 and they work much better.
Like one of the first thing you should always ask Is it really that interesting to capture settlement that is just another TC? Does it encourage more strategies ? Or does it effectively reduces viable strategies ? there is lot more you could ask, like what kind of players are playing this game and does it work fine for their preferred playstyle ?
So short answer to that for me is that it’s boring and knowing we can do better, we should do better.
Just so you can have your villager production building at any location?
It’s not only villager production. It’s extremely ignorant to say something like that. Villager production is most important part of the all AGE games. Otherwise there would be lot more then extremely rare cases where stopping villager production is good idea. Even if you are pop-capped continuing the production is better then stopping as you are bound to lose them to raids.
It’s so important that leaving it locked behind map objectives is good way to kills diversity in strategies and ability to make comeback from even small mistake that costs you part of your economy. In same way hard limits on how many villagers/buildings/units you can have is not good design if you want to enable strategies and experimentation. It makes sense if your main objective is to reduce game length as you are narrating how is game played via the limits.
For example AoM villagers train faster then any other AoE game while having a limit of 80. You don’t need as much TCs to max out.
That might be a good point, but effect of faster production is primarily faster game as you can start massing units faster. 80 vills is ~18 minutes for single TC.
In the end you do not have to agree with me. I can articulate my opinion as anyone else here no matter how ridiculous it is. It’s not like this discussion matters, these mechanical changes are probably already decided on based on their handpicked group of community members that helps them with feedback…
I’m not in favour of completely redesigning TC but they could make free TC placement an optional toggle in the lobby for those people that want it that way.
Give the TCs outside of Settlements -10 population and -50% HP or something like that to still make Settlements useful.
I am not against settlements, I am against them be the reason you are pop capped.
Everybody should have a pop cap of 200 that you can fill with houses or a mix of settlements and houses.
I don’t agree with that.
I think population is to punishingly low atm but I still like the idea that you need map control to get more population.
Getting 100/300 population without Settlements is a bit low.
But there are some alternatives to that issue.
What if the Fortress (also limited to 10) would give 10 population too.
A lot more expensive then a house but it could get you to 200/300 without any Settlement.
You’d still need 5 Settlements for 300 population.
And 300 population is effectively 200 because almost all military units cost 2+ population.
In the late game it slowly kills your chances for a comeback.
Like I said previously, a small rebalance could be made so you’re not too much penalized pop wise. Another option would be to add one or two new techs like Fortified Town Center (more expensive of course) to allow you to gain more pop. This way, you wouldn’t be too disadvantaged and the settlement system would stay untouched.
There has to be a limit to comeback potential.
Gold can be gained infinitely by trading, farms last forever and all methods of collecting favour are also infinite.
In AOE2 you have exponentially growing Stone costs and a slow gold trickle that will force games to end.
Conquering a Settlement is a permanent advantage over the other player and is therefor a step towards ending a match.
If the more pop is attached the the TC then the importance of Settlements grows and the gap between players too.
If there was another way to get another 50-100 pop that is expensive but independent of map control that could help closing the gap between players.
That’s why I suggested to add 5-10 population to the Fortress buildings.
They are already limited to 10 and cost a lot or resources. Castles in AoE2 already do the same, they provide even more population then TCs.
Incentivising players to build more defensive structures might stall the game though.
Of course, and that should be given by eco drain and using the counter system microing better than your opponent , not pop cap conditioned by map control (unless you are directly destroying houses).
I’m against completely decoupling max population and Settlements.
Maybe rewrite the system to actually increase max population instead of limiting other buildings that provide population.
Idea:
- Population limit is 200
- Town Centres provide 15/20 population
- Town Centres increase the max population limit by 10
- Houses are unlimited
Now the control of a Settlement is with half as much as before but a TC still provides the same amount of population.
We could also allow players to go beyond 300 population if they control more then 10 Settlements because that should very rarely happen anyway.
Higher pop modes could be fun. I think it would make AoM less of like a micro game and more macro oriented like AoE’s messy spam fights where you spammed like 60 halbs and knew they would probably die anyway. If it’s not built into the game easily then players are too dumb to make it usually; there might be like 1 out of 5000 good scenario makers that put a map out there too.
In AoM it would be sort of a big deal to just spam a lot of hoplites or main units and then lose them. But also that is sort of a good thing, as repeated losing costs the player unlike AoE2 where you could just spam stuff (even tho I think for marketing/fun with lower IQs, that is the way to go). It was still pretty dumb but they view things like ‘building an onager’ as like a pro level move as a result. It’s good to give low IQs the incentive of like a prospective thing that a 10 yr old could do pretty reliably but then they think it’s like some ‘special tactic’.
The low pop game has sort of limited it in a lot of ways where I feel the resource system would be limiting it anyway, even if the population was able to get higher (like around ~300), who has like 5000 resources to spend on that many units right away? It would fill out but only if you are able to collect resources and villager caps are not changed.
I was coming up with ideas of making losing a Settlement less punishing and not about just generally increasing the population.
To be honest as iconic it is to build a settlement on specific places on the map, I feel this removes freedom and strategies from the player by not letting him place a TC wherever he wants.
Also, remove the villager limitation as this also makes no sense in today’s RTS genre. I feel like both these things really effects the game in a negatively way.
@Fyrapan90
Actually it’s the opposite, removing settlements and allowing free TCs in a game like AoM would result in boomy and boring games almost everytime, anyone will just build TC right near his second goldmine or hunt spot given how strong TCs are in this game and what they provide.
Usually the most fun games are the ones in which people get bad second TC or bad starting goldmine, so you can raid or rush more effectively.
How would your suggest effect the game in a positive way? Lol.
There’s a reason as to why no other RTS game (that I can think off) has copied this system in regards to how the settlements work in AoM. It’s too much of a RNG for it to be fair as fairness goes in any RTS game.
First, you need to be lucky on how the map spawns, secondly you need to be lucky that you get a good settlement spawn, close to valuable resources. In other words you prefer a game to basically be over thanks to bad map seed, and settlement spawn locations as well as restricting player choice & strategies?
AoM Retold need to be filled with quality of life improvements, and this in my opinion is one of many it needs in order to have a good future long-term & to invite more players into this franchise which it deserves because it’s a great game and has a great potential to be better in the future.
AoM Retold can still be different from any other AoE game, it has the mythological setting, with godpowers, myth units, heroes etc, but the settlement is not one that in my opinion makes the game “better” so to speak, rather the opposite.