I know, we’re old and don’t like change. People hated the change to killing sheep with TC. People hated the change that made Horse Collar affect farms that were completed five seconds before Horse Collar finished. But check out this video with 600k views (at 1:10):
A player thinks that it doesn’t make sense for a villager to be hit by a flat-moving projectile despite being behind a wall or building!
Any experienced AoE2 player should know that there is one unit whose projectiles are blocked by buildings: the Fire Ship. This is, sadly, never sufficiently exploited on maps like Cup, the map from Hidden Cup on which Hera went paladins as Celts.
The first video shows a misleading example: villager does not have a ranged attack. It’s unrealistic to get hit behind a wall, but also unrealistic to shoot from behind a wall, while not getting hit. Not only realism, but also gameplay: 100% blocking would be too overpowered. A failure to shoot, similar to being within minimum range, if attacker or target is behind a building would complicate pathing etc. Like a unit with walls on three sides, that lures attackers into range of a castle.
Nod to realism, affects gameplay, but not too overpowered: 30% of all projectiles calculated to hit, behave as though they are a miss for purposes of being blocked by other units and buildings. Arrows would still have arcs, buildings that are too short would not block, but that 30% could be blocked by buildings, or by units when shooting into a formation.
- Good idea
- Bad idea
- I don’t care
Six months ago, T90 posted this:
He said in the description, “I’m not sure if this is intended but it sure will make a HUGE DIFFERENCE in Treb wars if this behavior persists!”
It did not really catch on. Players tried it, most rarely bother to do it even though it works. (Putting the trebuchet inside of gates also works, but based on T90’s results with the wall being at a different elevation, having a gate in front might be worse than a wall since the gate is higher; I can’t test this myself.) Sora Kuma did use it once in his match against DauT in TTL5:
discussed by T90 and Ornlu at 53:40, used by Sora Kuma at 54:32. But DauT did not bother to use it when his trebuchet was being attacked at 54:45 or 56:30, even though DauT knows about the trick.
We sort of have a third example as well: fortification arrows being blocked by all units. Red Phosphoru, and occasionally other players, have used siege towers or rams to protect other units using this.
So: it would not be completely against what we already have in the game. I think the main reason it isn’t implemented is that my suggestion is for a partial chance for something to happen. 100% chance for buildings and walls to block only enemy projectiles: imbalanced. 100% chance to block both enemy projectiles and friendly projectiles (so you could hide next to a wall, and not get shot by a unit on the other side of the wall, maybe not letting them shoot at all): balanced and realistic, but hard to program and if units fired only to hit the wall, maybe kind of dumb.
30% chance for only enemy projectiles to hit a building: seems to be a good balance between gameplay and realism. But you also wonder: why buildings, and not trees? And if arrows can hit trees (without damaging them), why shouldn’t arrows hit friendly buildings too? Why should archers firing at each other over a woodline be different from a fight where two stone wall units were built next to the woodline and archers from one side are standing behind that wall? The only reasonable conclusion is that the 30% of projectiles which are blockable by enemy buildings and units, would also be blocked by trees.
Gameplay consequences: in large groups, there’s often a lot of overkill. If a group of 20 ranged units moved between two houses, other ranged units shooting at them would hit the houses 30% of the time, but a lot of those arrows would be overkill anyway. It would provide a benefit, but not 1/0.7 = 143% survivability. (Compare to the 1/0.75 = 133% survivability from being uphill.)
In small numbers, it would be more significant. It would give a defender’s advantage to ranged units attacking from behind walls or buildings. Of course, an attacker could make walls as well close to the enemy base, but no one does this to protect units (even slow units like monks) from melee units currently so they probably wouldn’t do it to give ranged units 30% block.
Most archers (except Composite Bowmen) have high trajectories, which could sometimes bypass walls, just as they pass over Hussite Wagons which block half of the damage of projectiles. But scorpions have a flat trajectory. If a scorpion fires at a building, the projectile stops when it hits the building, and the same behavior could apply when a ‘blockable’ scorpion projectile hits an enemy building, or a tree (without damaging the tree).
It seems like mangonel micro would be less fun if walls gave an advantage. So, rather than worrying about whether “if mangonel is modded to have miss chance, does it hit friendly buildings that are in the way?”, we could just say that projectiles with blast radius would not be affected by this new mechanic. (This even includes mangonel secondary projectiles, with their recently-added 0.01 blast radius.)