Aoe3 used to have a variety of strategies, but in DE, the strategies are all beaten by one which is turtle fast age and send shadowtech units.
Usa fast age and send uhlans /magyar hussars/marines with age 4 stats
Otto FI and send nizam, spahi.
Italy FI and age 4 skirm…and papal units
Hausa/ethiopian shadowtech natives, artilleries.
Even the traditional civs are getting more and more these stuff, Spanish has soldados, brit pikes,
Shadowtech units are ruining the game. If I want to compete I have to pick a civ that can match opponent in terms of shadowtech units. It is simply too expensive to do all upgrades without falling behind.
There is a pretty fun build with it though. You spend a long while in age one, then basically go quickly up to age 4 and send rangers from the church tech and guard pikes from the HC and proceed to destroy stuff. It’s kinda lame though.
There are a few cards like this like landwehr and ordenanca that operate similarly but id say they are also more fun than op.
Base sitting remains meta tho. Wish theyd get back to map control being meaningful and less “sit on hands until uber pop overcomes lack of skill” but clearly from nerfing walls to nerfing cards devs want to return game state to more dynamic. Hard to balance pop and defensive with cointer system map and aggresion.
Brits don’t get upgraded pikes until age 4 but I agree the fast age3 → age 4 unit push strat combined with all of the weird other gimmicks is killing the game now
Just had a Malta player literally building a garrison…during a fight and using unit pathing behind the buildings they could build to destroy my army
Also the amount of desert maps in the pool 200% favors rushing civs. If you are brit there will be 8 jans or ashingaru muskets surrounding your base immediately and you can’t fight your way out to get more food without falling behind their eco
Not quite. Although they have shadow technology, you have to invest shipping and resources to be able to use them. Indirectly you are investing in improving them.
The same could be said for other similar strategies.
i was referring specifically to guard shadowtech. since mortars, etc. still need that howitzer upgrade even in age 4
I suppose that isn’t obvious since everything else on the list shadows to imperial
The Italian FI isn’t viable for over 6 months now, the best strat for Ethiopia is to rush right now and everything Ottoman touches is broken no need for turtle FI. It generally seems like you haven’t played the game for a year since the turtle meta shifted away since then.
I understand the sentiment and agree. I think the devs saw an increase in playerbase and enjoyment with more lategame play. (Hence why treaty has popularity). I think theyve pushed the design to focus on that side of the game a bit more and wished to cull the rush meta.
While in theory this can work out great they have thrown off a lot of civs that have traditionally excelled at rush strategies. This has caused the game to focus more on economy/tempo civs because their natural counter (rush) has been nerfed too much.
This is the exact reason the Ethiopia rush is so strong right now and people whine about it. Because it is one of the few rushes that can shut down the average meta.
This hasn’t happened though not even a bit because all the turtle civs like dutch, malta, italy and ports remain bottom of the win rates and they always have been pretty much yet rush/aggressive civs remain top like aztec, lakota, haud, otto etc.