What’s boring is that you don’t even try to adress different opinions anymore, you just keep going as if army fights were truely extinct. Which means that for the players who have had army fights in all their recent games/ spectated games that had army fighting (read: almost everyone) your argument makes no sense.
And yes he is right to mention that in the immense majority of RTS raiding is good because you treat raiding as some sort of perversion, but turns out no one else agrees on that.
I didn’t said this. Stop claiming that.
I just stated that I too often have basically raid trades in my games and I also saw some pro games with the same thing happening. And this is a very bad development in the current meta, that people more and more just pass their army and go directly for the opponent eco instead of fighting it out.
That’s the clearest indicator that raiding is currently to strong in the strategic balance of the game.
Ofc you should opt for raid if the opponent has no army (it’s actually necessary then cause he then usually has way better eco), but just passing the opponent army to go for raiding instead is just too much. I can understand it for the first rush that you want to get some eco damage in, but not in the midgame if both players make a 1 TC all-in. Then the battle should clearly about getting the military advantage and map control first.
I don’t claim that raiding is all dominating atm already. But it is too strong in the strategic balance of the game. We need more diversity. And instead of trying to fix that devs actually continue to nerf walls and indirectly nerf counters, too. The two strats that are supposed to be counterstrats to raiding.
And I am really concerned that the game will become even more stale and repetitive because of that. I can understand they want to increase the pace of the game, but they need to see that this can’t be at the expense of strategic diversity.
Your games + some pro games isn’t really the “clearest indicator”. Why would your games count more than mine or some of other players, and why some of these pro games would count more than some other pro games?
You mean the strat where people often make a siege workshop? Mangonels aren’t really a thing you can ignore. And that’s called a push, not a raid.
Well good thing neither that is sure.
Only the first half of this sentence is true (yes I read your other topic and almost completely disagreed with it)
That’s the thing about open maps. You try to get an eco advantage and you take the means necessary for that. Sure you could argue the late game hussar raiding based gameplay became a bit too dominant in recent times but other than that killing vils has always been what players did to get ahead (not just with cav, same for xbows). So if you want a somewhat different gameplay play arena or so. It’s a map where you don’t win by raids but decision making about stuff like unit compositions or push timings.
Can’t you read?
I said that I think raiding is an important part of the strategic diversity of the game.
But it’s only a part of it. At least it should be.
I mean when coustiliers where too strong we also didn’t always won with or lost with them, we just felt that the unit was just a bit too strong, so we demanded a nerf.
And that’s what I’m talking about in this thread, but this time it’s about the strategic balance that raids have become to predominant in gameplay and deciding games compared to the other strategic choices you can opt for.
Heck if it is the best to kill vills with your archers while under heavy skirm fire there is something fishy in the balance between counterunitplay and raiding.
Nerfing raids would not increase strategy it would increase RNG. Imagine you roll a full archer civ like britons and the opponent has strong skirms, right now you can play around that by avoiding engagements and attacking eco. With your changes there’d be no point making archers at all. So you end up with an archer civ but you can’t make archers. Raiding is a cora part of strategy and on top of that, balance. Your changes would break many civ matchups, make certain units too strong (halbs/siege) or too weak (hussars), and across the board would require a whole redesign which is not suitable for a 20-year old game. If you want a strategy game, AoE2 is the right choice, but if you want to see realistic medieval battles, it’s not. You have the (excellent) Total War series for that for example.
I think the point is more that the archer civ will make archers, then use them to attack villagers and do eco damage. If the opponent makes skirms they still cannot sufficiently protect vills from archers running around the base sniping villagers, and even if they do finish off the archers then the skirm player will be playing at a disadvantage after losing vills, and making a food based unit that is useless for counterattacks to the Briton’s economy.
If the opponent instead skips the skirmishers and makes their own archers then they could fight a losing battle against the briton archers in an open field or their own economy. But they’d be better off avoiding the fight and going to the enemy eco to attempt similar or greater damage. I think this is the problem OP is describing.
A similar situation occurs with Scouts. Spears aren’t going to keep all the villagers alive against the more mobile attacking unit, best case the keep the losses low. But if losses occur its a disadvantage for the rest of the game, and those spears cannot effectively counterattack eco to even the odds. In this case it’s obvious that the spear player would want to go military vs military, but the scout player is going to dodge that fight and go for villagers. Instead of spears, the defender is better off just making scouts and counterattacking their economy.
I’m not sure what the solution is here, but I do see the issue described. IMO the MAA rush is the only one that feels appropriate here. Villagers can somewhat escape from swordsmen, and making archers to clear them up is a truly effective counter. MAA raids can severely damage the economy if the defender is not paying attention, but if they respond well to it then the damage is very slight.
I agree some of your points and suggestions. One thing I regret for the game is Tower cannot justify its cost after castle age, and Hussar raiding is too powerful in late game.
Too dominant of Hussar in late game make Mangonel/Scorpion basically useless in open map late game, and civ lacking good hussar or halbs with bonus underwhelming in late game.
I also agree that imp Hussar can get slight nerfed. Maybe it can be done in indirect way of some units can be buffed against hussar. Give Champion (and 2HS) bonus damage against scout line to make them decisively win against them. They aren’t counter Hussar considering their gold cost in late game. Maybe it can be more drastic, but adding separate armor class for scout make them more bonus damage from spearman-line than before. (Similar to how elephant get more bonus damage from pike/halb than knight)
That also can be a solution, but make Tower in castle/Imperial age viable is first step to make some defensive structure other than castle also good choice to improve diversity. Garrison space of Guard Tower/Keep can be buffed to 10, Teutons can get 15 garrison space to make them valuable to place as defend villagers from raiding.
Also Arrowslits were nerfed so heavily, it can be buffed again to give Tower +4 attack regardless of the upgrade stage of Tower (+2/4/6 for each stage when African kingdom, and now +1/2/3, I think flat +4 damage can be middle ground). It can make civ access to guard tower (not keep) and arrowsilts can consider their Tower as viable option of defense in imp.
I’ve in rhe past suggested giving eagle armor to scouts (and potentially trash in general). This would make champs exceedingly strong vs trash units.
What would happen if some of the stone cost of towers was simply shifted to wood? That would make keeps much more affordable in the late game, without buffing towers in Feudal or early Castle Age (when wood is needed for buildings and farms). Maybe something like 50 stone + 150 wood? Building defensive towers would hurt the early economy, but at least it wouldn’t have as much impact on the total number or castles and town centers you can build in a game.
Let me rephrase it, you are a big noob and often get raided and lose, you find it boring, you want the game to be like arena so that you can play simcity
Enjoy Korean, Japanese and even Britons covering the map in keeps for basically nothing and without hampering their ability to field army and especially trebs and castles. Actually I doubt it would be healthy even without bonuses, since keeps are basically military that takes no pop space any civ with guard tower+ bracer would likely benefit from tower spam.
Maybe? But an ungarrisoned tower does very little, and still falls over at the sight of rams, trebs, or even infantry. My price suggestion would allow 13 keeps to be built instead of 1 castle, and 1950 wood would be consumed in the process. Idk if these are ideal numbers, but there must be some imaginable stone cost where keeps would be useful in the late game without becoming overpowered. That number seems to be below 125, but hard to say if it’s 100, 75, 50.
Anyway, I’m not really pushing for the idea, just a hypothetical to understand the consequences.
I like this suggestion (eagle armor to scouts), but it would require some rebalancing, like decreasing damage of milicia line from 4/6/9/12/13 to 4/5/6/7/10, and removing the champion line to 10 to 15 civs (currently: 8 civs have no champions, 17 civs have no arbalests). The civs with champion would be for example AZT, INC, CEL, TEU, VIK, GOT, BYZ, ITA, MAL, SAR, TUR, BER, SLA, CHI, JAP, BUR.
Not sure whether this would be balanced then.
I fully agree that keep are generally useless, compared to BBT. The problem is that towers are well balanced in feudal age and on water maps (all ages). I only make keep on water maps with fire arrows.
I think the cost should stay the same, but we should maybe increase the damage of towers from 5/7/8 to 5/7/9 and arrowlits from 1/2/3 to 1/2/4, then nerf the fire damage from 125% to 100%. The towers should fall easily to rams/trebs. If you have them in your base you should be dead anyways. No reason to buff them as an offensive building. BBT and castles are the offensive buildings you want late game (or japanese keeps), not keeps. Not every civ should be grated an offensive building.
Like an Light armor class
I disagree. Early wall if you’re so afraid of.
Then we would have another slow moving infantry chasing scouts… But this time a unit that actually costs gold. Don’t see that improving the situation.
Another Idea we had some while ago I just remember, was to make a special tech that reduces the occupied pop space of the Militia, Spears and Skirmishers (and possibly even archers) a bit. This way it would be easier (as long as you have a healthy eco) to spam halbs against hussar raids.
The original Idea behind this proposal was that in the lategame situations the low pop efficiency of the mentioned units becomes a problem. If you try to fight 50 franks Paladin (+150 vills) you need to have about 80 halbs (+120 vills) at least. Otherwise the Paladins, even with respect to their high gold cost, just grind away your eco and you can’t sustain the producction at some point anymore. But the intended counter mechanics don’t apply anymore because if you need to sacrifice a lot of eco for the counters to have competitive numbers. So the idea of “cost effective” trades is somewhat rigged as you simply can’t have the same eco as the franks player. If you had, you would simply die to Paladins as they would constantly get better trades against your halbs.
The same is also for cav archers + scouts vs skirms + halbs. As the cav archer player usually already has a comparably low lategame eco and the trash comp is even less pop efficient, the player with the counter unit compe would need to sacrifice even more eco to get favorable trades. Here it is way more complicated as it highly depends on the micro skills of the cav archer player how much more units you would need to get favorable trades, but in the current metaplay, the cav archers are usually seen as basically uncounterable once they have reached their “critical mass”. (You also must repsect that the cav archer players usually idles a lot of your eco with his mobility and raiding potential, so the effective eco discrepancy is even bigger than the sheer vill difference.)
I think this could also work in the lategame, to just add a (or two) tech that reduces the occupied housing space of low value units a bit, so they don’t suffer as much from their low pop efficiency.
But this wouldn’t change a thing about the strategic disbalance in the midgame when one player tries to push the opponent and the opponent just opts for raiding instead of fighting of the army, cause a sigle raid can give so much more value than grinding through an enemy base. (Don’t get me wrong, there are a lot of scenarios where this is the only chance for a comeback, so I don’t want to nerf raiding to an extend it doesn’t allows a comeback anymore, but I want it to be less powerful, so it isn’t the vastly dominating strategy anymore, that can be chosen in basically every situation: “Don’t know what to do? Just raid the opponent.” I think thats a bit too easy.
At least give better tools to punish the opponent if he is just going for raids all the time like with better working counters to push the raids out. Currently the only real tool that “works” against that strat are indeed walls (and houses), as you don’t have military at home if you try to win the match with pushing the opponent to protect the eco. With better counters you possibly have the chance to make a transition if you manage to spot the incoming raid play in time.
Yeah, that’s how people currently try to safe it. And you see the result. The all-in raiding players constantly complain about “walls OP”, just because it’s the basically only tool left that preserves some kind of strategic balance. But imo it would be way better for the game if there instead were just better working counters for a more “proactive counterplay” instead of just turtling behind walls, which is often the only option if you want to push the opponent. You have basically no choice currently, as you know how devastating counterraids can be.
And as counters currently suck, you just know that the transition is usually not worth it. You can’t get the numbers you need in the time you would need to and trickling counter units is basically just feeding the opponent. And I think it only needs a bit of push for the counter units so they pose higher threat to the raiders. Then people could get revarded for not walling up but instead trying to spot the “danger” of a raid play and counter it with the intended “counters” instead of hiding behind walls as much as currenly.
And if this is accomplished I would totally support Walls becoming more expensive (But also have accordingly higher HP) so they are a higher general investment, but also a bit more efficient in their purpose to buy time. This way the strategic balance of walls in lower elos would basically stay as it is, but with the high pace at higher elo games, people will be more tempted to opt for the mentioned “proactive powerplay” with units instead.
mostly agree. but neither changes should come in before imperial age. in imp there could be a tech that makes vils or palisades a bit stronger
Yep, we are not supposed to chase cavalry with infantry and expectvto catch up… We have the defensive stance, if it works as intended, a few pikemen in the base should help defending.
So like age of empires 1. For milicia, we could maybe consider, for the other I am strongly againt it.
Yeah, but if the paladin player manage to have the eco to keep producing, he deserves the advantage. The game is designed for gold units to beat or at least hold on even to their counter late game. Trash units should be used either to stall at low cost, or to fight when there is no gold on the map.
So yeah, paladin civs and civs with pop efficient units have a strong late game when resources are plentiful.
Yeah, I also have multi tasking and tunnel vision problems. It is hard to wall your base and keep some units there while pushing and keeping map vision with outposts or units. And it is not so efficient as it weaken your main army against potentially the full army if the enemy.
I may be wrong, but i currently think it is fine to reward someone who knows how to sneak military for a raid while defending, and to punish the player who don’t know how to push properly and keep map control. Even though it means that a player who can defend & sneak well may always win against someone who cannot at “same skill level” fir other abilities…
11 it just shows that us player are way too subjective, if half of the player base think walls are OP and the half think it is too weak…
11 Yeah it’s mainly the question if you just hate walls or not. It’s actually not a question if the tool is “too strong” “too fast” or whatever, it’s about your attitude and mental setting.
Besides the stats for arabia actually show since years that the agressive openers are vastly superior to defensive openers with walls, people still complain about “Walls OP” every time they can’t push through the defensive approach and punish it with raids.
But that’s actually what walls are supposed to do, to stop raids from coming in. It’s like you complain about mangonels killing archer balls cause that’s exactly how strategic balance in the game works.
It would be different it the counters, especially in the early game, would be better in pushing back the raiding units, then there would be no need to wall - instead scouting the opponent and going for the right counter choices should give more value than walling.
That’s why I also proposed in the other Thread to make the counter unit choices more different, so you have to decide at some point what counter unit or greed you want to go. Atm there is this kind of “nothing” build that allows you to deviate in whatever strategic direction you want to go, but it would be better if defensively minded players would to have to decide at some point in dark age where they wanna go and make a specific build if they wanna go skirms, halbs, walls, fc, tower defence or whatever. If you chose to play defensive you should need to scout and react “preemtively”.
One Idea was to make skirms 40 W / 20 F and spears 20 W / 40 F, so you need a different eco setup for them. It’s still way less different than archer/scouts, but you would need to decide at some point what to go for, before clicking up to feudal. In the exchange the Counters could get some little buff so they are better in doing “their job”.