When playing the open beta, it did seem to me like units do not get snared when being attacked by a melee unit.
Aoe3 had this feature and it greatly punished using armies made of purely ranged units offensively.
Aoe4 does not seem to have this feature, or did I miss something?
This mechanism actually punishes out of position armies and mismicroed armies in aoe3 BIG TIME and encourages the use of fast melee units like cav to counter light ranged units.
I see a lot of people complaining about bowmen being OP in aoe4 due to always hitting their target.
The snare actually would balance them out entirely.
Also in raids the snare makes it a lot more punishing for the enemy when you got good multitasking and manage to raid while the enemy is busy somewhere else.
Most vills won’t be able to run, as they get slowed by cav beating them up.
Furthermore the snare feature greatly improves the effectiveness of melee type units, as they don’t block each other too much.
Once you are able to encircle a group of units with your own, the enemy units will be slowed enough for each of your units to continuously score hits on them.
If the snare doesn’t exists, the friendly units just try to chase the enemies while only once in a while being able to hit them and keep blocking each other hard.
Plus archers are hard to balance in a scenario where you can just keep hit and running the enemy cav while only taking very little damage.
You see that problem a lot in aoe2, where small groups of crossbows ■■■■ on early age3 knights which are supposed to ■■■■ back on them.
Introducing the snare feature greatly pushes the turning point towards smaller amounts of cavalry facing bow/Xbow mass groups.
With the snare feature in the game, micro management becomes a lot more impactful, fights more interesting and people overestimating with their light ranged units get punished.
Also it forces you to actually use pikes very early on to block charging cav away from your bows and hence keeps the longbows in age2 off snowballing.
Sorry but snare mechanics are not fun at all to play against or with it, you have actually so many punishing mechanics, no need to add another one, and I didn’t talk about players who gonna play more turtle because of this.
Interesting. Please explain why.
I personally have always enjoyed the snare mechanics.
Especially when catching cav in a smart way and slaughtering them with pikes.
Sorry about the 2nd part, I don’t understand what you are trying to express.
Because it kills hope players have when hit by units because you can’t escape in these kinds of mechanics who lead to more frustration. mechanics, where you have no escape system, is never a good thing in RTS
Back in 2005, I remember playing in AOE3 we were 15 kids coming from AOM, played 6, 12 months competitively, and players from my group starting to leave one by one because of these mechanics who killed fun to raid with cavalry
I agree with sheevaa1, the snare mechanics was a major reason I personally didn’t find competitive aoe3 fun to play. Opinions differ of course, but to me it always felt frustrating and un-immersive. I want my units to run for their lives if I tell them to, not having to clumsily unselect that one poor dude who is hit by a saber, before they actually get going.
Other games managed to balance ranged units without snare so I hope aoe4 doesn’t need it either.
Yeah, thats the infuriating micro part in there I think… having to deselect a single unit to get rid of the effect for the rest of the group. That should happen automatically (snare effect only on individuals, automatically taking them out of the movement-speed-balancing of its group).
Other than that its a great mechanic to balance melee units against archer blobs without having to do weird stuff with bonus damage values.
Please no, snare is so incredibly annoying in AoE3. If it is on a unit by unit basis then sure I am on board. But snaring one unit causing the whole group to slow down is annoying and also doesn’t make any logical sense.
Snare is really not a good idea, it’s actually one of the reasons why aoe3 didn’t do so well compared to the previous games.
It’s really annoying when you have your whole army slowed down because of one guy being attacked.