Public Update Preview - January Update

Age of Empires III: DE III - Discussion
237

I would prefer that grant an artillery cast wagon.

I think it could also reduce the cost of artillery improvements in the industrial age. In the past I think this card improved falconets and mortars for free.
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A nerf to the humbaraci (ulufelis) is also necessary. It seems to me that it has too much life.

Personally, I would reduce the resistance points, in exchange for a little more siege tolerance. This way it would still be strong against artillery, but easier to defeat by light infantry and cavalry.

1 Like
239

yeah
10w pillar
10w segment
ok yeah thats too much
at least 10w segement 1 wood pillar
agree with @Jonasnee8581 too cause if you make a extra pillar;d wall you gonna pay even more up to 50% more
earlier testing didnt note that much of a wood drain but testing it now i see it.
ok, this is probably too much.10w for 1 pillar is too much

2 Likes
240

But the fact is that it is something deliberate, that it is strong against artillery. By reducing the unit’s resistance points it would no longer be broken.

241

2DE’s expansion Dynasties of India adds Tamil, Bengali and Guzerati voice lines. Those could have been ported to 3DE as well.

Wouldn’t be enough variety, but it would be a beginning.

1 Like
243

I don’t build walls and don’t play PVP, but personally I’ve always hated how slowly wood gathers in this game ever since I started actually playing lol

Yeah, resource shipments are also a thing, but they require experience which doesn’t build up super quickly either.

244

I think the walls should replace part of their wood price with coins once the bastion upgrade is done.
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245

For what it’s worth, my 2 cents:

General
-Hero cosmetics unlock being fixed!!! Hallelujah!
-more jingles and better skins are always excellent!
-adding 3 seconds to artillery boarding time is a nice change. Makes escapes and hit-and-run with artillery more difficult, which it should be
-A controversial opinion, but I love the wall changes here. An increase to 10w and 30% build time increase is warranted. Walls have always been too cost effective. I personally would like to see additional hits making pillarless walls useless, since a 66% cost increase will incentivize pillarless walls
-Galleons are now their own armor class. I don’t see an issue here. It’s akin to when AOE2 finally changed camels to have a unique armor instead of being ships
-Dervish have always seen particularly powerful as nats, so a nerf is probably warranted
-Advanced artillery send 1 mortar. LOVE IT. It’s always been a turtle-cracking card, it just makes it better. Yes, from a value perspective it’s pretty high for age 3, but most of the promotions it grants are pretty niche (who researches both heavy horse guns AND field guns?)

Civs:
-Aztecs: Eh… No me gusta. Arrow knights shouldn’t get a speed boost or a good multiplier vs cav. They’re artillery equivalents. They should be slow and vulnerable to hand cav. If a buff is needed, it should be an adjustment to some multipliers, reversing some changes from last patch
-Brits: nice bit of flavor. Shouldn’t change anything.
-Chinese: Mostly feels like a fix for something missed last patch. No real impact
-Dutch: Good nerfs that fix the issues introduced last patch. I still want a unique skin for the ankobias though
-Ethiopians: Generally good changes. The number of team 3 vil cards is getting concerning though. If not already mutually exclusive, they need to be ASAP.
-French/Germans: minor cosmetic fixes. Good deal
-Iro/Haud: Nice small adjustments. Excellent
-Hausa: small change making fodio tactics less crucial. Nice change
-Inca: Oof. Big hits here. Probably too big. The huraccas bug is also REALY worrying
-Italians: honestly I thought Roman tactics already did this. Good change
-Lakota/Sioux: Too much culture war flaming going on in the comments and I’m not going to engage. From a game perspective, pretty insignificant.
-Japanese: 47 ronin change nerf is good. The samurai mortar change is questionable. I will need to test it in the pup to see how it behaves. If the range is short and the DMG vs buildings isn’t a huge increase, then it’s NBD. If not…
-Maltese: Sizable buffs. not sure how I feel here. I think 2% was a good balance. The 1 falc 1 mortar card is probably too strong. That’s an Age 4 unit. We shall see.
-Memexico: Lot of nerfs, but mostly niche. The salties nerf is the biggest one. The speed reduction might make them pretty weak. The rev changes are all well suited
-Otto: sigh. Another patch, another missed opportunity to correct the core balance issues with the civ. The Azap is adjusted but not nerfed. The imam is now where it was 2 patches ago but with an extra 100c. A straight buff, albeit a niche usage
-Ports: big fixes are good
-Russians/Swedes: extra units on rarely used cards. No issues here
-USA.: good change here. Just makes the Philadelphia church card a little less strong.
-Revs: I don’t know enough to comment

Extras:
-Campaign fixes are always excellent :ok_hand:t3: Although it sounds like the de Gama battle issue isn’t actually fixed

Maps:
-under no condition should Deccan EVER be in the rotation. It’s a fun map but it is NOT standard. This change must be reversed. Horn isn’t great either, but Deccan is extremely problematic. What should be done is reskin Deccan as a new African map, minus the extra res crates, and then and the new map to the rotation.

All-around, a nice patch. I love all the general fixes and the vast majority of civ changes. Just a few worries with arrow knights, samurai, Inca, Malta, and Deccan. For future wants, further punishment for pillarless walling and properly nerfing the Ottoman units (namely the abuse gun) would be good.

4 Likes
247

Jacking up the price is only going to increase the payoff for making pillarless walls so this seems counterproductive. There are just too many conflicting issues for there to be an easy fix. If pillars are too cheap or quick to build relative to walls, people might spam them for line of sight and to disrupt pathing (especially against the AI). If both walls and pillars are expensive then people delete pillars, or just don’t make walls at all in the early game. If walls are too cheap and quick to build then people spam a dozen layers of them in the late game and treaty.

The focus needs to be on blunting the most cancerous aspects like deleting pillars and spamming a dozen layers. Fix pillarless walls by making it so deleting any pillars weakens adjacent walls, and maybe have segment length factor into the cost. Fix wall spamming with a reasonable cost and build time and by increasing their build footprint so they can’t be layered one on top of another.

3 Likes
249

Good point with the lone pillars, 1w cost pillars with quick build time seems like it’d just have everyone spam them all over the map for vision and to interrupt enemy attack moves.

For my 2 cents the best solution is to just remove pillars from the game altogether, make walls cost 8-12 wood with the same hp as with pillars now,. If you want weak walls and strong walls, just make 2 types instead like in earlier games.

As for balance in general, I feel like pretty much all civs that like playing defensive with walls to get through the early game are suffering in the ladder winrates at the moment besides.

1 Like
250

I think the best solution would be merging the models together if that’s possible.

The pillars would overlap between adjacent walls. It would force you to use the pillars (which seems to be a demand of part of the community, though I don’t really care), and it would disallow pillar spamming.

The cost would go up slightly and we wouldn’t have to deal with vills struggling to get to that pillar that apparently they can only build from outside the wall despite being right next to it.

This would, I’d imagine, take some time to implement. But in the longer term would seem to fix the problem if it doesn’t introduce a hundred unforeseen issues.

Otherwise, pillarless walling has already been nerfed, I don’t see it’s existence as an issue. I think the only charge left to do is as follows: revert wall base hp to 1500 and change the debuff to -30% hp off of their current stats if no pillars are near enough. That would actually make pillarless walls weaker in the late game. As is, after bastion you can pillarless wall to your hearts content as it’s still only -500 hp and you save 50% of the wood.

1 Like
252

I think walls and wall hp should ne reverted back to the pre-november state and put the cost to I’d say probably 7 or 8 wood per section. Start over, see how that plays out. Deal with pillarless exploits later, trying to balance cost and pillarless “fixes” at the same time just too many variables and its not working.

6 Likes
253

Honestly, the whole wall system in aoe3 has always been a bit of a whiff.

In RE it was an issue but cav boxes, lakota seige, daiymo etc were bigger issues. But even my casual butt had to deal with aztec wall laming in team lobbies quite a bit. It just wasn’t optimal. fast forward to DE where almost any civ can base sit on most maps for 15 minutes then vomit uber units, suddenly that existing flawed system becomes a major issue.

To me, the core mechanic is the biggest issue or barrier (pun?). In aoe2, SC1/2, aoe4, C&C, WC3, DoW, and CoH walling is either minimal and easily exploited by later tier units, or very expensive to tech into. This leads to people often making bases integrating other stuff, and the game often is a high risk battle of repair vills, counter units vs opponent army trying to sustain the wall juuuuust long enough to counter properly.

In aoe3? make a wall, forget. siege units have to #### the wall until long range artillery, and thanks to culvs in age3 mortars are the only cost effective way to siege walls. that’s in a usual game, 15+ minutes. Aoe3 is fast paced and making the game minimum 5 minutes more of passive gameplay just…just sucks the momnetum out. then the walls scale so wall at 5 minute just as good as wall built with all upgrades. no desperate battle of repair vill micro and ranged/counter ranged. hell the walls give so much LoS culvs can fend off any attempt easily. It basically calls a cease fire more often than not. However, the strong rushes early on of say russia or haude also need these walls to live. But even then , its just the defender usually sitting in TC counting down a shipment hoping they can take a good fight. So walls as is reward passive gameplay in a real time game. its just wonky. Its needed part of the game, but not the high point of aoe3 for certain.

1 Like
256

arent pillars 2 or did they change that?
also effected by gaslights
its not huge but it certainly makes culv on culv that much more difficult for the attacker

258

Something like this would be the most satisfying approach. It gets rid of the absurdity of short segments costing the same but only covering half the length. Long segments would still be cheaper in terms of build time, but they’d also leave a bigger gap when broken through.

Even with a greatly reduced payoff, pillars would still be largely redundant so I would still keep the mechanic of pillars reinforcing walls. Trying to screw around and delete every second pillar to save 2 wood would for sure not be worth it. The effect could be toned down a little to something like 1200 base health and a +25% bonus from pillars to give the full 1500.

2 Likes
259

I love gaslighting XD

5 Likes
260

Honestly, there are only 2 ways to do this:

  1. Create a cheap, low HP, no upgrade walls, similar to palisade in aoe2. The big HP walls get more cost.
  2. Keep nerfing the wall costs and leave just the “high quality” walls in.

The problem here is that walls in aoe3 are ridiculously cheap to setup and ridiculously cheap to maintain and defend. Literally no other high profile RTS has walls that are so easy to setup. The problem here is that villagers aren’t needed to repair them. In all other Age of * games, you need to send villagers over to repair the walls. And in aoe2 and 4, you need stone, which is the rarest resource to find. You cannot effectively spam stone walls in either of them. In AoM, the prevalence of myth units makes walls less scary.

In aoe3, walls have the following perks:

  1. Extremely cheap.
  2. Doesn’t require villagers to repair
  3. High amount of HP, with multiple high value upgrades available (bastion, imp buildings)
  4. Difficult to attack: you need expensive cannons, or low range siege units, which brings on to the next point.
  5. Trivially easy to defend: culverins, musketeers, xbows, you need a far less investment to defend than to attack.

IMHO, walls need to be nerfed further in cost.
If rushes are a problem, perhaps we can look at buffing TCs or outputs (outposts are relatively weak defensive structures) instead of relaying on walls. Perhaps outpost could also scale damage as TCs do with villagers ###### ##############
I personally never needed walls to survive an early rush. I can wall off using houses, barracks, etc

1 Like
262

Rushes and timeing / batch system are far more devsatating and this wall nerf will highlight this to an extent.

263

This is why I’ll keep pushing the 2-wall type of AOE2/4 - there is a need for cheap, quick to build walls that can quickly be constructed to ‘plug a gap’ but ultimately are weak, with far more expensive and stronger (as wll as longer to construct) Stone Walls.

1 Like
264

In my opinion, Malta age3 card should be changed from 1 mortar + 1 falc to 1 mortar + 1 culverin or even maybe 2 culverin. It makes more sense because they are a defensive civ and are often trying to defend against an early 2 Falc FF.

266

Honestly I’d be for dropping the healing bonus Malta and replacing that with enabling culvs in the fort.