I’ve been playing AOE 2 forever, since the original released till now. And it seems to me, all the small changes have been made to make it easier for players to do these cheesy castle drop, tc drop, tower rush tactics.
Now disclaimer here. Firstly, every RTS game got some cheesy tactics involved. And I’m not against it at all. But what I notice in AOE de’s recent changes is that they make these tactics a lot easier to pull off.
Example, making castle fire do that much damage to stone walls. We all know what happens when you keep firing arrows at a stone wall in real life. See you on the other side, after a thousand years maybe.
Then building have negative armor against physical attack.
Then probably the most egregious of all is the fact that Persians can rebuild their TC with more HP, thus encouraging the ####### And I’ve seen this tactic working against players with 1200 ELO. The guy who is doing the Persian douche Elo can be as low as 900. It doesn’t take much skills to pull off this lame tactic.
So in my experience, it is such a common tactic to get castle dropped on in maps like Arena, especially at the 1000-1300 ELO range. In almost every game, there will some sort of shenanigan like that.
So my point is, why encourage such low level play to be so strong? The tactic’s effectiveness should be on level with the player’s skill level. Dropping a TC or castle on someone hardly takes any skill.
If you want to rush, the game should make it so that you need to be good and fast enough to get siege units fast and bust through walls. But dropping a castle or tc to break through stone walls…?
In summary, yes I understand there’s some cheese element to all RTS, and I’m not saying to remove it completely. I’m saying what we currently have in AOE 2 DE feels a bit over powered for cheese. It does not encourage standard game play, which IMO, again MY OPINION, is much more fun than doing cheese.
TC drops got nerfed: teutons no longer have their death-star bonus
tower rushes got nerfed extremely hard: incas no longer have extra armour on their vils in fuedal age, towers have less health, cost more, koreans no longer build towers faster
villagers deal more damage to stone defenses (so you can just kill a tower that’s dropped on you)
no more corner hopping with towers on arena
no hill damage in tower v tower fights
(some) buildings only have negative armour to melee damage, not pierce damage. so towers, castles and TCs aren’t affected by this
I’m talking about how easy it is to actually win a game by cheesing. It takes maybe a day to learn how to do this. Compare that to beating a player who have played this game a lot more and learned the fundamentals, like macro, unit counters, etc etc. They can spend thousands of hours and still lose to these easy to learn, easy to pull off cheap tactic. I’ve experienced this myself and seen it happened to my allies, whom were around 1200 elo. I wasn’t talking about teuton. I was talking about Persian TCs. But Im glad to know teuton’s whatever broken mech was nerfed too, or rather, made balanced.
That is my point.
Lastly, if someone wants to make the point of, “if it’s soo good, why don’t you do it yourself?” That’s a terrible suggestion. Yes, let’s create something that is imbalanced and abuse it instead of balancing it…
There are normal stone wall and fortified wall. I think the wall in your example is fortified wall which looks like castle wall in real life. The normal stone wall is just short wall for house yard. That’s why it can be destroyed with arrow fire.
Most of the buildings before castle age are built with wood so they could be destroyed with bare hands.
I also think Persian TC & dock hp should be nerfed a little bit. Currently there is no way to win TC fight when Persian TC is up.
You need mangonel , petard or castle when you want to break stone wall in castle age, Peta requires a castle so people need to build a castle anyway. It is better to build it forward so it can get you more map control. Building the first mangonel cost you 495 resources that is not cost effective compare to a castle with UU.
TC drop isn’t effective at all , it is RNG depends on map generation. He will be in disadvantage if you don’t have forward resources that he can take away from you.
Castle drop is effective on arena because you went for boom otherwise you should be able to deny it or counter drop him.
There are normal stone wall and fortified wall. I think the wall in your example is fortified wall which looks like castle wall in real life. The normal stone wall is just short wall for house yard. That’s why it can be destroyed with arrow fire.
I think you may have misunderstood what I said there about stone wall. The point is, in real life, can you break a stone wall by firing arrows at it?
Most of the buildings before castle age are built with wood so they could be destroyed with bare hands.
A cabin is made of wood. Some of these cabins are made of logs that are about 12 inch thick. I hope you got hands of steel to be punching through those. 11
And finally, yes I agree that the game should require you to have magonels, petard, rams, siege units basically to effectively break through walls and castles. But that’s not the case. Right now, castle arrow fire, and even towers, and vils can break through walls a bit too fast. It doesn’t make sense. My point is, they’re encouraging this type of game play. Such a low skill set…and IMO, low quality of play.
Well yea, I can see why Arabia is popular. It make sense. Problem is, in rank, we don’t always get Arabia. We often get maps like Arena, Nomad, which are notorious for castle drops.
Buffing all these things you mentioned like stone walls and buildings will just drag every game out until post imperial. So literally every game would be a very predictable mega boom race to fast imperial and whoever can make trebuchets or bombard cannons inside their base first would automatically win.
Remember that the player doing the forward castle is sacrificing a lot of economy to do the castle. i.e. 10 villagers collecting stone, then sending a dozen villagers across the map to build it, leaving themselves zero stone and not enough wood to make more TCs. Also if you have any kind of military units on the field and deny their Daut castle, the game is over, since they’ll be down 650 stone, minus all their forward villagers killed. Meanwhile you full boom untouched behind walls. Defending against a forward castle is not difficult if you just don’t panic, delete forward farms, wall behind and boom to imperial before your opponent. You can even deny it without any military with a tower behind your wall if you spot him early enough, especially if he doesn’t send enough villagers forward. Even if the castle goes up, literally all you have to do is survive to imperial and opponent is dead. Every tactic you mentioned has the same weakness. Terrible economy at home, vulnerable forward villagers who could have been at home collected wood, food or gold and no stone or wood for more town centres when you hit castle age.
So yes, forward castle is kind of “cheesy”, but learning it (and how to defend it) is such an essential part of the game that it really doesn’t matter if it helps noobs beat 1200 players. If that’s true, then it’s actually a good thing. It forces 1200 players to learn how to defend it and it gives noobs a confidence boost and some nice enjoyment of the game to encourage them to keep playing. Nerfing forward castles and buffing defences will just turn the game into an unnecessarily long, predictable boring vanilla meta of turtle boom into one huge post imperial fight every game.
Not necessarily true about every game ending in imp. If the opponent goes for an all in castle attack with siege, you’ll be dead. Cause my idea is to have siege units still kill castle and walls fast.
But common now… are we really going to defend game plays like Persian douche/tc drop?
It could be easily balanced by just delaying the extra HP on your town centres until feudal age, so this would make it impossible to d00sh in dark age.
I think arrow can break some kinds of stonewall surround house yard. This kind of wall can be built in feudal age when people are not getting used to stone materials. This is why it is squishy.
House in dark age with negative armor. it is built by 1 villager with 2 and a half bundles of log. The logs from 1 tree can be used for 4 such houses. They can’t be 12 inch thick.
Here is the problem, battering ram get countered hard by mangonel and it can be stopped by another layer of wall, so ram is out. The first mangonel cost 495 that is not much cheaper than a castle, and your opponent can build a defensive castle to stop you. In this case, your opponent unlocked his UU but you don’t. This is why people always build castle first, and the best spot for castle is on opponent’s face. Probably the castle should cost 1000 stone in order to prevent people from using it too much.
The extra HP been part of Persians civ identity since the original game in 1999. You should know this if you’ve been playing the game since the beginning. Does this mean we should never change AoK civs at all? Of course not, in fact Persians have just had a huge update. But I don’t think forward aggressive TCs in castle age etc. is a bad thing. From a resource perspective, it’s not that much different from a Krepost. So if they just delay the extra HP until feudal or castle age, I think it would be enough to balance it.
One of the reasons why d00shing became a thing with Persians was because of their boring tech tree. But now that they’ve had a huge update, they don’t need to d00sh, because they have a lot more strategic options open to them. So I think we will see it a lot less from now on.
Are you really trying to think of a logical reason why stone walls are easily destroyed by arrows? It’s stone, hell even palisades are not going be destroyed realistically by arrow shots. It’s entirely gameplay mechanics of the game dictate that everything takes at least one damage from an attack or more in the case of castles during unrealistic damage to stone walls. Which I repeat. IS UNREALISTIC.
I think you need to know the power of crossbow and longbow before talking about the walls.
Palisades wall is like your yard fence without metal pole in the ground. it will be wreck by arrows for sure. The stone wall in feudal age is not castle wall, it is low wall built with small stone bricks, it can stop foot archer , but castle arrow can be something else. I think the castle arrows should be fired by ballista or large crossbow mounted on the wall so they should be able to destroy unfortified wall.
Not all stone walls are that strong though. Here in the UK for example, the north of England and most of Scotland is full of very old dry stone walls and are only held together with friction (no cement between the stones). They definitely would not withstand a few volleys of arrows from a castle.
Well, if I am honest, this doesn’t seem that big of a deal. Having more viable strategies on Arena is great.
Ultimately stone walls stop them from building castle too close to your TC, and then you can just wall them off with markets and houses. If they invest into rams AND a castle, then you should be miles ahead. Just fast imp and build a castle+treb at proper distance.
Castle/Tower fire doing bonus damage against Stone fortifications can easily be explained away by smaller cannon fire in addition to arrows.
The game is an abstraction, not a realistic medieval battle simulator. The units and buildings are all concepts. The walls in Dark Age are just rudimentary walls if not mounds, thus things like Villagers or arrow fire being able to take them down. Feudal age Stone Walls are also rudimentary stone walls, you can pick them apart by hand, but it’ll take some time for your own Archers to pick apart the enemy from behind the walls.
What recent changes? If anything, DE’s recent changes have done everything you’ve said but opposite. Towers have been nerfed, walls have been nerfed. So on.
I think you need to stop living in fantasy land before you talk about the power of crossbows or longbows. Comparing palisade to a garden fence is ridiculous. Palisades were tough enough to keep people out, you think an arrow is going to do much else than stick into it like it would a sturdy tree?
If a castle is shooting ballistae bolts, which it’s not. They’re arrows in game like any other that just hit harder. Some castles had small mounted siege equipment but that’s not what we’re talking about. They fire arrows.
I’m very familiar with drystone walls, I live in the green and pleasant land. I’ve climbed over them, if the weight of an adult male does not shift them, an arrow is not going demolish it or even a few hundred.
I’m not sure if either of you are familiar with the portable walls known as, shields. Very handy I hear can block arrows quiet well.
Mockery aside. As I said this is a gameplay discussion not a debate on how many real arrows it would take, to destroy a stonewall. Which in game look like proper castle walls not even dinky drystone ones, that you can jump over.
Have you actually fired an arrow from a bow? I have. And let me tell you, there’s no way in hell that an arrow would do anything to a stone wall, even that ancient looking stonewall that’s supposedly put together by friction, or gravity. But let’s be completely honest here, people back in the day had some idea of chemistry and made crude but effective simple concrete. Those walls are not going down by arrow fire, not in a thousand years.
You sort of contradicted yourself there. If rams are countered by mangonels, but mangonels are too expensive, then countering rams isn’t that effective.
If you think rams are not effective at busting through walls, then make mangonels and pitards.
I like to point out things that are absurd. Imagine a world where arrow fires destroy stonewall, it’s like okay… While we’re at it, why don’t we make castles with movable parts which allows you to run around the map with your castle, as fast as a scout. Sounds like a good idea to me ;))
Everyone and their mother would be racing to be building castle at that point.
Case and point, if they make a strategy that is too easy to use but quite effective, people will use it too often. I.E, castle drop in Arena and Persian TC drops in nomad.
