This has been one of my least favorite parts of the game since release. Every game comes down to a selection of half the civs, at best. I know there are quite a few people who are not picking civs, like myself, and that’s awesome. It just makes the game so stale to play yet another game against the same civs, especially on maps like Steppe, Arena and Team Islands. I know I haven’t played as much in the past month as a result. It’s just not as much fun.
At least make it so that we can see if our opponent has picked a civ or gone random prior to the game starting, so that we can pick a comparable civ for the map. Not that it does anything to mitigate how boring it is to play yet another one of the same matchups, but at least it would be some effort toward it.
5 Likes
Show IF opponent picks civ, and then give the option to skip opponent.
Random civ players should not be forced to play vs civ pickers.
Random civ should not be discouraged.
This topic is discussing the mental game that went on in the AOE II HD lobby when a player would pick a Civ or pick random. I feel like the psychological game that went into that aspect was interesting and I’d agree that it is lost now. If you picked Britons your opponent may pick Byzantine to counter you or if you pick Goths your opponent may choose Japanese. Now we can’t see what choice our opponent makes until it’s too late. However, given the way the matchmaking system is designed I can only see another pool being created for those who choose civs and one for random as a solution. I don’t see that as an option for now because there simply isn’t enough players to support filling both matchmaking pools. As a result everyone who wants to pick a Civ they’re more comfortable with is going to have an advantage.
Just give an option the tick “random mirror” during civ choice and if all players have it ticked you play a random mirror, otherwise you play with your picked civs.
I think that would be a very good and easy solution.
2 Likes
Well this mostly comes down to the maps, what civ is better on steppe than Mongols? What civ is better on water than Italians? What civ is better on nomad than Persians?
The problem lies in the non thought through map pool and how long we already have it.
Furthermore there are so called one trick ponys, those players play the same (few) civ over and over and over again, like Hoang. You can’t take that away from players. It is their style. Let them play however they want to.
With the March update we will most likely get up to 30 HC3 maps, so the variaty of civs played will be much higher.
And diving the player base as some here say is beyond stupid. We don’t use the awful lobby ranked system anymore, there is no need to force it back. Dividing the player base, when there are so few players, in any way would let the matchmaking time sky rocket and in the end there would be even less players overall.
The only solution for this whole problem would be to ban mirror and random from ranked games. Just like mobas, fps and other did.
Its a minor issue tbh and your idea is a good one, I think its easy to implement and should satisfy the people who are unhappy with how things are currently.