Hello, new here and somewhat of a novice. I’ve been playing AoEII DE for a bit and usually play as the Teutons. I’ve lost tons of matches and have never complained about a civilization being overpowered until now. My last couple matches have been against the Portuguese (1v1). In the first match, I circumvented my opponent’s defenses with a small Teutonic Knight force, broke into his base and killed the overwhelming majority of his villagers, his town centers, most of his houses, and some other buildings.
Despite this, there was basically no lull in his production of units to keep attacking me. And these were expensive units like bombard cannons and organ guns. He also continued building bombard towers literally everywhere. I had captured all 5 relics so he wasn’t getting any gold from relics. The match was a stalemate, lasting over 90 minutes, until I finally gave up. When I was able to view the board after resigning, he hadn’t rebuilt any town centers, and had basically no villagers gathering resources.
I know the Feitoria provides a stream of gold to a player but again, this was a 1v1 so he wasn’t receiving anything from trading with allies, he had 0 relics, and he had no villagers gathering gold or any other resource for an extended period of time, and yet, he was able to keep producing a steady stream of bombard cannons and organ guns and build literally hundreds of bombard towers. How is this fair?
Of course, it’s not fair when they can create resources out of thin air.
Your best bet is trying to win the game before gold and stone are depleted.
90 min in 1V1 ? Maybe the game was not enough aggressive ? 90 min with 5 relics is also a good amount of gold. Maybe the opponent just played better than you ?
Hi and welcome here.
Portuguese feels like a tough matchup as Teutons for sure: accurate (fast projectile) gunpowder melt infantry and siege.
The feitoria resources generstion is 96 food+ 42 wood + 60 gold + 18 stone per minute, whichvis ewuivalent to something like 4 farmers, 1.5 lumberjacks, 2.5 gold miners, and 1 stone miner for the cost off 350 gold, 300 stone and 20 population.
As Teutons, you can get similar amount of gold from 10 lumberjacks and selling at the market (17 gold for 100w). If you own all 5 relics, then you have the gold generation of 2.5 Feitorias.
The feitoria stone generation is enough for 1 tower every 7 minutes starting 17 minutes after the Feitoria is build (to pay off the 300 stone cost). Assuming the opponent built 3 feitoria at 30 minutes and you had a 15 minutes stalemate, 3 feitoria generated stone for 12 towers from minute 45 to minute 75. A lot, but not that crazy either.
So in the end, the feitoria resourve generation is not that OP in maps with enough wood and space foe farming (eg. on non island maps).
That being said, I agree with you that the building feels problematic and it would be nice to have it reworked, or even removed as Portuguese do not need it (except mission 4 of the Portuguese campaign) given their amazing tech tree and strong military bonuses. This should not be a priority though.
Edit: fixed the Feitoria cost.
Feitorias aren’t as overpowered as they used to be. Many players assume that the steady trickle of resources makes them extremely strong, but since the rework, the tradeoff between population space and resource gain is no longer as effective.
You’re limited in how large an army you can field, while your opponent can field more. This puts you at a disadvantage in direct combat. Your only real advantage is the potential to win through attrition by slowly draining their resources. However, skilled opponents are aware of this and will adjust their strategy to prevent it.
In team-matches, this leads to the Portuguese player being targeted as their vulnerability during fast imp much like a turk would during their fast imp.
Feitorias are less pop-effective as 20 villagers gathering resources. The impact of specifically gold and stone being generated from thin air is mostly relevant in very long games when regular resources are depleted.
Which are statistically rare.
Ever since the Gold and Wood generation rates have been switched Feitoria have actually become viable on land maps, but less powerful on water maps like Island.
Still, they are a lot less powerful than you would initially assume.
Even with no Gold and Stone left on the map and at bottom out market prices (14 Gold per 100 Food / Wood) one Feitoria only puts you like 0.75 Gold Miners and 0.75 Stone Miners ahead of your opponent.
When you build a Feitoria, it takes about 12 minutes just to get even in terms of Gold and about 17 minutes to get even in terms of Stone.
edit:
I was actually too generous towards the Feitoria as I assumed you do not train as many Villagers as your opponent. However if you only build Feitorias when Gold and Stone is about the mine out you have trained as many Villagers as your opponent, and have to delete Villagers to make room for Feitorias. In those circumstances it takes around 20 minutes for a Feitoria just to get equal in terms of Gold again.
They are not if you build them at the correct time.
These 20 villagers will need multiple Town Centers, TC working time, 1,000 food, farms for that food, more space, extra APM, and more military spending to protect them. Feitorias remove these requirements and put the opponent on a timer.
The feitoria is only in the imperial age so chances are you already have at least 3 TCs and a well-boomed economy by this point. And costing 650 gold & stone combined, one can argue it’s not cheaper than 1000 food for 20 villagers. Especially if you delete some to make some room…
I think Portuguese are more targeted in FFA than in team games. In N vs. N team games, it is normal to target whoever booms or Fast Imp, but it is not related to Portuguese. In Team games, Portuguese have much less use of the Feitoria because of trade.
Yes, in 1v1 closed maps such as Arena, fast imperial into Feitorias is viable, because as you say they generate “villager equivalent” faster than TC production.
But they are not as effective as you say: they are like 9 villagers for the price of 650 resources, which is not that far off the 450 food required to produce them from Town centers. And opponents are not on a simple timer, because after reaching max population, the Portuguese player must decide whether he wants to: (1) slowly delete Feitorias and replace them with villagers, or (2) aim at the ultra late game and be on the back foot due to lacking the equivalent of 11 villager per Feitorias, and hope to hold ground while the opponent takes the natural resources and try to kill him.
True, but even if it has very low importance, it would be nice if no civ felt ridiculously unfair at any level. In this sense, Portuguese Feitorias and Goth infantry spam at low elo could be somewhat problematic.
That’s a different strategy / use case of Feitorias.
In that case you use them to strengthen a Fast Imperial timing attack. However in that case building Feitorias puts you on a timer, as when Gold and Stone is still available every Feitoria eventually puts you behind by over 10 Villagers.
Your game might be a bit slow paced but the problem you’ve mentioned is kinda relevant even at highest elo levels. Feitorias need some rework to decay the rate of resource generation or apply logarithmic scaling to get lesser benefits from multiple feitorias.
Feitoria should be capped like cuman town centers
Max 1 in castle age, max 2 total in imperial age
In return the Pop cost is lowered to 10.
The goal is to make feitoria into a real economic bonus, that you want to use every game, instead of a pop inefficient building, that allows you to just feitoria boom, for going villagers or replace as many vills as needed like 100 villagers when resources run out or after a raid
No other civ can do this. Feitoria isn’t broken, but the flexibility none else has, is unfair sometimes, if we limit the buidable amount, we can contain the extreme edge cases, like 5 feitorias in the corner.
Infinite resources is not an issue, relics exist. Balance is possible
5 Feitorias comes with a pretty heavy drawback: -100 pop space. As someone who’s played with 5+ feitorias, I can say that there isn’t a lot of pop space for military (especially since you still need some villagers - for construction and balancing resource collection). You can mitigate the pop space restriction with stone fortifications, but that’s pretty stone-heavy. And resource collection is relatively slow (trading equal res becomes a losing trade for you). And your opponent can chip away at your based until space becomes a concern (until gold mines run out is a pretty long clock after all, so they don’t need to rush to get rid of your feitorias)
How were you trading units? How often were you fighting? What unit comp were you using to trade against the port siege comp?
To be blunt, this situation sounds like it should have been a steady win for teutons. If you had all relics as teutons, then the eco advantage of ports would be minimal, given that teutons have possibly the most efficient farms and guilds.
On a strategic level, Crenelated tueton castles beat out range everything ports have bar trebs. Even their bombards have to fire from in castle range. Given that castles beat BBT by a wide margin, a slow push of teuton castles supported with your own bombards and occasional paladin squad should steadily wear ports down.
Infinite res doesnt matter if they deplete faster than they can be replenished.
Didn’t notice the Relic part. 2 Relics produce more Gold than 3 Feitorias. So with 5 Relics the Teuton player should have had way more resources.
Most likely the Portuguese player had like 20,000 Gold in the bank they could slowly use up.