We should think about scaling up the technology costs to match the new pop limits. The game was designed for games with 50 - 100 pop aside, we lose a lot of the game’s flavor if we don’t jack up the cost of advancing and buying techs in games with 500 pop.
Or we should at least allow players to decide what the modifier should be before each game.
Well…it’s not like units cost any less with higher pops. The scale of the game changes, but all the balance is intact. I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think it will be an issue - if the tech costs change, then all other unit and building costs have to change to balance that, too. It might just be better to leave it as it is.
Big games hit the post-iron age too fast. This cuts out most of the battles between ages. Having higher tech costs will allow for bigger battles before the iron age. Don’t change any other costs, this is about big battles.
@RWNorthPole said:
Well…it’s not like units cost any less with higher pops. The scale of the game changes, but all the balance is intact. I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think it will be an issue - if the tech costs change, then all other unit and building costs have to change to balance that, too. It might just be better to leave it as it is.
The difference between creating troops and upgrading troops is different.
IE: Do you want to make more Long Swordsman’s or do you want to upgrade them to Legions. With low pop you upgrade them later (if at all), but with high pop you upgrade them much earlier.
With huge maps it would be nice to see longer bronze and tool age fights.
stone age ->Tool age should be the same 500 food cost, but other than that it would be great to be able to increase the cost of upgrades and increase the Bronze/iron age upgrades further more.
AoE2 was originally designed for 75 pop and the balance is still fine now that it has been increased to 200 even though the technologies and aging up has not been made any more expensive. There’s no reason to think AoE1 balance would be broken by it either.
@RWNorthPole said:
Well…it’s not like units cost any less with higher pops. The scale of the game changes, but all the balance is intact. I get what you’re saying, but I don’t think it will be an issue - if the tech costs change, then all other unit and building costs have to change to balance that, too. It might just be better to leave it as it is.
The balance can actually change pretty drastically when you play with a higher pop limit. Even in aoe1, if you play with 50pop, the different unit types are a lot more balanced compared to if you play with 200 like you can in ror mp.
I’m not sure yet if technology costs should be scaled. But OP has a point that since we have a higher pop limit technology investements becomes a much less interesting choice. This is because we can have many more villagers so our income become much much greater - this has no effect on units since we are also required to buy more units when poplimit is higher, but we don’t have to buy more technologies; making their cost trivial compared to our income. The overall effect is that choosing what technologies to invest in is a much less dramatic choice than originally intended.