What is everyone opinions about the Relics mechanics and balance…?
I think most people find interesting how Relics are not static and give different bonuses for game variance, but the difference in power of them is big. The most glaring thing is how some Relics can be… useless, sometimes literally, for a player in a given game.
Let’s compare with the direct counterpart from AoE2:
Relics give 0.5 gold/s (30 gold per minute).
The Age of Mythology equivalent is Ankh of Ra: (ok, the literal equivalent is Ring of the Nibelung, but you got the idea)
Ankh of Ra give 0.05 favor/s (3 favor per minute).
The Aoe2 Relic give you a fully upgraded village mining gold for free, while the AoM one give you half a Greek villager or 5 free Hersirs or 75% of a monument or close to a Hero Oracle full vision.
So, while all Aoe2 give gold, what about all AoM relics giving a very small favor trickle like it? You got a Relic and put into a temple to please the gods, getting favor for them makes sense mechanic wise.
What this would help? There would be no more useless Relics anymore, so even your extra Wall HP relic would be worth transporting to your temple and no Relic will be ignored.
So what would be the rate to not be useless but still usefull to always capture the Relics…? 0.01 (0.6 per minute) or 0.02 (1.2 per minute)…?
What you think about current Relic balance and situation?
Currently some Relics are very situational and some give you bonuses that are only useful in short parts of the game.
Like having 2 respawning Lions is nice in very early fights but becomes completely irrelevant in the late game.
So I think adding a small favour trickle to all relics would be a nice addition.
I also think there should never be a civilisation designed around getting favour from relics because that would be way to unreliable and it would also max out their production in Classical Age.
If a favour trickle would ruin the early game balance maybe it could be locked behind a Heroic or Mythical Age technology.
If I were designing a game, I would intentionally make the relics like this. You want people to feel like they’re getting a useful bonus to pick them up. It gives you something to encourage early exploration and a bit of risk-taking and early skirmishing when hunting for them in the first two ages. This keeps that part of the game from becoming too stale and boring.
But you can’t make the bonuses too strong because that would end up making that early scramble for relics potentially game-breaking. Imagine, for a second, if one of those relics was worth 2 villagers’ production on a resource. It’s way too strong and would give a huge advantage in age 2. The same if you gave +25% hp to all military units or something equally crazy like that. You’d have a game where you either won the fight for that relic or you lose the game, and that’s not fun. The bonuses simply can’t be allowed to be that strong.
You can see how God Powers become gamebreaking when the devs release God Powers from one limited use.
If they make Relics gamebreaking, only three things will happen:
Rush like no tomorrow
Everybody chases down Relics at the beginning of the game
All temples are under threat. No doubt every experienced player will build long range siege weapons to take down temples in early games. A temple is a very easy target compared with a Wonder.
What made me feel bad was when a streamer was scouting the early game and found a Relic, hovered over it to read and said: “Canopic Jar of Imsety? I could care less” (+25% infantry train speed) and ignored the Relic.
That feels so bad when a player think a mechanic of the game is not even worth interacting. And it’s something players should be fighting for, like Age2 Relics.
No doubt. It would be a very bad design.
What the rate that all Relics could have that you think it’s worth it and not unbalanced? Maybe a rate that scale by Age? (like 0.01/s per age)
You mean their effect? It surely is a way to better balance some of them. Maybe a cheap Tech to be obvious to the player the Relic is getting stronger.
But this alone would not fix that some Relics can be ignored by being useless.
They where doing a cavalry rush, so I don’t blame him for ignoring infantry train speed. Even if he start training infantry later, it will be in a situation he have multiple barracks anyway.
Another issue is that some Relics give discounts on technologies or Age up so they become completely worthless as soon as all those technologies are researched.
Not worth capturing those from your enemy in Mythical Age anymore.
Making the scale by age means they would logically already have that effect in Classical Age which might through off balance.
Like what number would you choose for them to stay relevant but also not be too OP.
How many Mythical Age Relics should be equal to one Monument?
That could be a cool idea for some relics at last.
Like spawn 1 Lion per Age or something to make it not completely useless in Mythical Age.
Oh yeah, these ones become literally useless. Favor trickle means every Relic is worth to capture or steal.
How many minutes Classical age last? Do you think the impact is so high? We have to remember we already have a relic that give favor tickle.
0.005/s per age. So in Mythical age you have a 0.02/s (1.2 favor per minute) favor trickle.
A monument generate 6.6 favor per minute. By the above number in Mythical you need 5.5 relics to match it. I think the rate of 5 relics to one monument is good, because it means the player gathering all the Relics in a match basically.
Thinking about it.
0.01 favour would be as much as one Hersir /Godi which is a very low rate.
So 0.01 per Age would he 0.04 in Mythical Age
37% of one monument. You’d need 6 relics to even match a single monument.
I don’t think having 24 additional Hersir worth of favour would be considered much for most people in Mythical Age.
I think if it was half of that people would not care at all.