One of the things I’ve always loved about the age of empires series is the post-game graphs. They tell so much about what happened during the game, and they provide a lot of insight into what went wrong or right during a game. But they’re not perfect, and I think that aoe3’s graphs could use an overhaul.
I’m going to go through each graph to discuss the issues and potential solutions:
All Unit Count / All Population
Unit Count in aoe3 doesn’t represent multi-pop units like cav and cannons, and Population doesn’t represent 0-pop units like natives. Neither type represents units that are pop/count-light or pop/count-heavy per cost, like Uhlans or cossacks. Essentially, we have 2 graphs that are both trying to do the same thing, and each one is failing. The solution is to replace both with 1 graph that actually works. This probably should be All Unit Value, adding up the resource values of all units.
Villager Count / Villager Population
Since there are no 0-pop vills, there is no reason to ever use Villager Count over Villager Population, and it should just be removed. Villager population is fine, but again, Villager Unit Value also represents CDB.
Military Unit Count / Military Population
Same as above. Should replace both with Military Unit Value
Buildings
Buildings is kind of a bad chart. I’ve only ever used it to get a vague idea of how many shrines I’ve burned down in a game. In most cases it’s useless because houses make it so noisy, and you can’t differentiate them from important buildings like TC’s. Building Value would allow you to visualize the larger, more important buildings like TC’s and banks being constructed or destroyed.
Trading Posts
This graph is fine, but I’d maybe put it closer to the bottom.
All Resources Gathered
All Resources Gathered is perhaps the most widely-viewed graph, and there’s nothing wrong with it per se, but it’s not always totally honest due to the inclusion of free resources.
For example, if a Brit player sends 700w and makes 5 manor houses, while a Lakota player sends 5 vills, the Brits will show +700 resources gathered over the Lakota, making their economy appear stronger throughout the game by 700 res, when they essentially shipped the same thing (details aside). On the other hand, one Inca player might send 300w while another sends exotic hardwoods, and this is real trade-off that we would want to see in the chart.
Because there are many ways to get “free resources” in aoe3, and they can be an essential component of some economies, they can’t simply be excluded, but perhaps a new graph can be created that does exclude them.
Food / Wood / Coin / Export Total
Not a lot to say about these. They have the same flaw as All Res Gathered, but since they’re less widely-viewed, it wouldn’t make sense to branch off each chart to exclude free resources.
Shipments Total / XP Total
These are good charts. It would actually be cool if we could see them on the same plot. Shipments could be a dotted line on the XP Total for example.
Treasures
Sure, fine
Score / Economic Score / Military Score
Score has its own issues, but the charts are fine.
Ages
This one can go. Age shows on every graph already.
Idle Villagers
Posted about this before, but the idle villager graph is very bad and very noisy. A MUCH better graph would be a cumulative Idle Villager Seconds
Ceremony Guardians
I don’t think we need this graph too badly, but I suppose there are cases when you might want to see if your opponent was using War Ceremony or something.
Ceremony Guardian Seconds
If Shipments and XP can be put on the same graph, it would be nice to do the same with Ceremony Guardians and Ceremony Guardian Seconds.
If the devs can manage to cut down some of the excess graphs, perhaps we could add some new ones? Maybe Free Resources or Free Units? I can think of a couple more like:
Economic Return on Investment --calculated with All Resource Gathered / Cumulative Economic Score (by cumulative, I mean exclude losses in score)
and Military Return on Investment - this would be calculated with total value of all military units trained / Cumulative Economic Score.
Overall, I think post-game analysis could definitely be better than it is right now.