A lot of fun! The final mission was pretty tough I wont lie, once every one is in Imp you just have to bunker down and try to find ways to increase renown. Thanks for the upload
I had a lot of fun with this one, but I do have a few thoughts on balancing.
Scenario One: The opening attack was a bit rough, but after that the rest of the mission was a bit easy. Personally I think the first attack could be reduced a little. I made it through, though, so it’s not like it’s not doable. The bigger problem is that once the AI exhausts its starting army it begins sending units to attack the player the instant they’re trained instead of massing them so defending against them becomes trivial. I also think green pretty much stopped attacking at that point.
Scenario Three: I have mixed feelings on this. I think part of it is a mismatch between ideal playstyle and what’s recommended in the hints. The enemy naval attacks were absolutely brutal and until you hit 1000 renown you really have no choice but to hunker down and rely on towers instead of navy. You spend that portion of the scenario fighting an uphill battle against Imperial Age navies using Castle Age ships and Japanese Yasama towers are far better at holding the enemy off.
Another problem is that the hints tell you to prioritize the islands to the west which are less heavily defended…but there’s no real payoff to doing so. You can take those islands, sure, but you’re still getting mobbed by yellow and gray from those directions even if you do. I found that it’s way better to simply rush red’s base to the east, buying yourself one direction with no attacks and securing a spot with a trading post. Every other trading post on the map is behind multiple enemy islands and close to pirate bases that are way harder to deal with.
And a lot of the optional objectives are functionally useless because you’re mostly pinned down on your starting island for much of the scenario. By the time you can rescue that chieftain or even notice the monastery you probably don’t need the rewards. There’s a bug that allows the monks to retrieve a relic themselves before you encounter them, causing the objective to complete the instant you do, but I didn’t even find them until I was already in the process of wiping out yellow’s last couple of bases.
There’s also a repeatable tech for more villagers that could be very exploitable and undermine the premise of the level if you notice it early. I didn’t, but it would have trivialized I lot of the scenario if I had.
It’s hard for me to say what the fix is here. I think one option would be to change the way trade routes work and shift enemy naval attacks towards them. For instance, make it so that when you set up a trading post it spawns ships that move for your home island and they must reach it for you to get resources, then have the enemy navy patrol those routes instead of attacking the player directly. That forces the player to actually fight navy with navy instead of turtling. It would help if the first trade route is easier to establish (but not defend) and the player is more dependent on it in the early game in order to push them further in that direction. Conversely, that route should probably only be vulnerable to attacks from red, and red should be restricted to Castle Age ships to give the player a fighting chance.
Another thing that would help would be to make enemy base islands much harder to defeat but make the enemy stick closer to them in return to allow for easier exploration and discovery of secondary objectives. It’s very easy to miss those because the enemy navy is so aggressive that it’s hard to venture out. Emphasize exploration in the hints, too, if possible.
I’d also suggest adding renown costs to certain trading post techs, particularly the one that increases villager and fishing ship cap. Maybe have that cost go up every time you buy that tech. Makes the player really have to consider the trade offs of delaying Imperial Age for additional villagers. And eventually it would become important to stop investing in it and start expanding your trade routes for resources.