@TheBritish said:
You can get bigger army by having less Villagers. Its called Strategy. This isnt Sim city or Farmville.
Completely agree here. When I play C&C it’s all about the biggest army usually wins. With AOE you have to focus more on finding the right balance.
200 units are already a lot of moving pieces. I’m not sure what having 500 would be like, but I’m not sure it would feel like AoE. I suppose the Devs can decide to blow out that limit, but it seems like it’d be risky.
I say go even bigger! 10,000 units to make a real warfare!
sorry,i’m excited
I think 200 is fine. It’s already a fairly high limit to work with. Getting over that pop limit will actually complicate and slow game play down. I’ve been playing this game since way back in the late 90’s so I feel it’s a well balanced number. Also, villagers absolutely need to be counted in the population. Imagine a large force of “non-population counted” villagers joining an attacking force. 
The best solution would be an option at the match settings. It would go 100 200 300 so on. And for mad people (like me) 500000! Joking. maybe 1000 would be a nice limit though. Depends on the game’s meta. I really liked for aoe3 to have 500 pop limit though.
The current population system seems to be working just fine, as long as it’s tweakable. I imagine the reason it was reduced to low numbers initially was to prevent the lag, but now that technology has vastly advanced it’s less tiring for CPUs to handle lots of troops on the field.
Making it adjustable to 500 gives everyone options. I usually play anywhere between 200 and 350. I’d rather have the option to play at 500 and not play it than not have it at all cause I think 200 is magic.
While making it adjustable would be nice for some good fun like in command and conquer where there was no pop limit, the essence of AoE is in that 200 pop limit. It makes the player make critical decisions between economy and military that determine the outcome of the game. So for competitive, stick to 200 and make it known that that is normal pop and then allow more if players want.
need to increase to at least 500
@“Andy P” said:
200 units are already a lot of moving pieces. I’m not sure what having 500 would be like, but I’m not sure it would feel like AoE. I suppose the Devs can decide to blow out that limit, but it seems like it’d be risky.
I suppose you should watch some streams, because those population levels are acheived frequently in AoE
I’d be happy to watch. Any good examples?
Starcraft 2 had the population limit set to 200. With that being said it does not bother me that much if they including population limits. In the command and conquer series, they had no population limit unless you were using the super units. In Empire Earth II, the population limits varied depending on what setting you put in the game. (X per territory)
Having it fixed for 200 for good would have downsides in late game, like what if I had 40 villagers, 160 units but didn’t have enough population for ships. what if somebody went crazy with the villagers and lost because their army was smaller in size? Who would go Calvary if they take double the population when you could only get 80 of them out when somebody could go double the base infantry? (insert filler units here.)
I think you should look at the game before adding caps on it.